Media Release by The Hon Larry Anthony MP

Extra funding to upgrade community child care centres

Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, Larry Anthony today announced Australian Government funding of around $8 million to help community-based child care centres upgrade their facilities.

“This funding will allow hundreds of community child care centres around Australia to continue to provide high quality child care to families and help them to address urgent health, safety and licensing issues.

“Funding has been granted to all eligible applicants to enable them to make renovations and repairs to buildings and playgrounds.

“Successful services will be given grants for projects of under $30,000 and successful services in remote, high cost areas will receive grants under $70,000.”

All submissions were assessed against a criteria that stipulated:

  • project funds are intended for immediate use to carry out urgent work to meet health, safety or licensing standards; and,
  • project costs cannot be met from within a service’s budget.

“Community based child care services are some of Australia’s oldest child care providers. They provide services on a not-for-profit basis and may not have access to capital in the same way as commercially based child care services.

“I am pleased that the Australian Government has made available this funding to help them improve the facilities they offer children and families using their care.

“The number of families using child care continues to grow due to the generous Government assistance provided through Child Care Benefit. We are currently directing $2,000 to families using approved child care through the Child Care Benefit payment and this latest increase will be even more help for Australian families

“This boost comes on top of the $19.2 billion More Help for Australian Families package that will deliver the largest amount of assistance for families ever put in place by an Australian Government.

“The Australian Government’s commitment to child care will reach almost $8.5 billion over the next four years. This announcement today is even more good news for families using community-based long day care services,” Mr Anthony said.