TRANSCRIPT
Living in a town of fewer than a thousand people, Jade McCoy-Bevan and her husband Ben knew getting their son Alfie into childcare could be difficult.
At 15 weeks pregnant she already started looking at enrolment, putting Alfie onto seven different lists.
Ms McCoy-Bevan says 12 months later, there was still no care available for Alfie.
'I did follow up repeatedly with childcare centres, told them my story and the position I was in, and one centre was really honest with me and actually said 'your son is about number 430 on our wait list. He will not get care at this centre before he goes to primary school. We looked at casual care, we looked at home daycare, we looked at centre-based care, we looked at au-pairs even, which has a lot of hoops to jump through and there's even a shortage of them. So we were stuck until two weeks ago, there was a centre that called and said, 'you're extremely lucky, there's a family that's moved to Canberra, we'd love to offer you a spot for two days a week'.’
All up, she took 9 months of unpaid leave to look after Alfie, while she waited for him to be granted a place in the new year.
During that time, Ms McCoy-Bevan would commute nearly an hour to her sister's place, where she could look after him too.
But she has two special needs children herself, which Ms McCoy-Bevan says has been a dysfunctional situation for all the kids involved.
'I guess the ripple effect it's had on other women in my life, like my sister having to decline work, my mum's had to permanently cancel a shift to have him on a Thursday when my sister does work. My mum is also a single income earner in an incredibly difficult rental market. That's left my husband and I, and we use all of our supports just to work.'
A draft report now makes the case for universal childcare for children up to five years old.
Professor Deborah Brennan is an associate commissioner with the Productivity Commission, which was tasked by the federal government to look into the benefits of universal childcare.
'So the Productivity Commission is suggesting that there are two kinds of benefits: there are benefits for children themselves, and those are particularly strong for children from disadvantaged circumstances, so helping children be prepared for school, getting them used to socialising with other children, dealing with adults outside of the family, all of these things help children to be ready to learn and be happy at school. There are longer term benefits for children as well, research suggests, and of course, if parents are able to engage in paid employment, if that's their choice, that brings resources into the family and it's also good for the economy.'
The report recommends up to 30 hours, or three days a week, of quality early childhood education and care, raising the Child Care Subsidy from 90 to 100 percent for families on incomes up to 80 thousand dollars.
That comes at a price tag of two and a half billion dollars a year.
It also proposes an independent Early Childhood Education and Care Commission to monitor governments' progress towards universal childcare.
Professor Brennan says that comes with a caveat.
'Critically, we're noting that until issues around the early childhood education and care workforce are resolved, we won't be able to do any of these extensions or expansions of the system.'
The Productivity Commission also noted the further children are from metro areas, the more difficult it is to receive care.
For remote Indigenous communities, that problem is even more acute.
The Minister for Early Childhood Education, Anne Aly, says she's welcoming the draft report's findings.
'It is entitled 'a pathway to universal early childhood education and care' which is what we charge the Productivity Commission with looking at. What the report does, is it confirms a lot of what we know about what we need to be doing to get to that pathway of universal early childhood education and care, but it also tells us that we've got a lot more work to do.'
For little Alfie and families like his, the final report can't come too soon, with the government saying it will look into the commission's final recommendations.
