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EXCERPTS
They are trained professionals and can see you coming. The wide-eyed stare, a stack of pamphlets in hand and a "Baby on Board" sign suctioned to the back window of the family wagon are the usual giveaways.
It's another Sydney parent walking up the painted multi-coloured steps to a Sydney childcare centre desperate to get a place for their child.
My search began shortly after my son was conceived and six months after he was born, my figures so far are six suburbs, 22 centres and 22 knockbacks.
There was also countless phone calls and an unknown amount of money to join waiting lists that at some centres extended beyond 2008.
These are the sort of statistics Treasury in Canberra would have you believe are fantasy.
But when was the last time the tatty-sleeveless-jumper-wearing bureaucrats who make these claims ever stepped out of their offices in Canberra and saw what was happening in the real world.
A report released last week by the Treasury Department claimed parents who complained they couldn't find childcare were just fussy.
The report states those reporting difficulties only accounted for 20 per cent of parents (from an unspecified area) and reported shortage of places in urban areas "may also be a function of consumer choice". Crisis? what crisis, it concluded.
Are you kidding? My and my wife's search for a place took in childcare centres of both public and private from Petersham in the west to Coogee in the east and Manly in the north.
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I have never met Ian Davidoff, who works for the Treasury Department's social policy division and edited the report, and he refused to return my calls but I'd love to know if he has a child or at least spoke to anyone who did.
Liberal MP Bronwyn Bishop was right to dismiss the report. She spent 18 months investigating the childcare sector for a House of Representatives committee and found since 2002 an 8 per cent rise in the number of parents unable to find care.
Her research, I would suggest, has more validity than Davidoff's 15-page child-like dribble.
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- reprinted from the Daily Telegraph