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More than a century ago, a group of Sydney matrons grew concerned about washerwomen who would bring their infants to work. When the washerwomen came to the homes of these matrons to do the laundry, they would plump their babies into baskets of washing. The babies would snooze while their mothers soaped and wrung and pegged and mangled.
The matrons resolved to establish a more appropriate form of care and so the Sydney Day Nurseries Association developed. The first day nursery in Sydney opened in 1905. There are similar stories from some other capital cities.
Securing some form of work-life balance has always been a challenge for working women. You would be forgiven for assuming that this struggle is something new - it was John Howard who characterised it as a "barbecue stopper".
What's new, of course, is that this is now the subject of public debate from time to time, along with a lot of Government expenditure, and there is real demand for women's labour to help maintain the economy.
When a spokesperson for SDN Children's Services, the modern incarnation of the association, called this week for the Federal Government to do more to help expand the not-for-profit child-care sector, it did not make headlines.
Not compared with the headlines about the collapse of Australian ownership of ABC Learning Centres - a business now owned by the Singapore Government's investment vehicle and a couple of American merchant banks.
As little as 10 years ago, the not-for-profit sector dominated the provision of child care, along with a number of small, independently owned for-profit centres and centres run by local governments.
The first government boost for child care for the children of working mothers came during World War II, when preschools were commandeered and turned into creches to free women to work in factories for the war effort.
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War's end stopped that, although the next move of married women into the workforce in large numbers in the early 1950s promoted the growth of extensive private for-profit child care.
By the 1960s there was agitation for change, and a subsidy system for services pretty much along the lines of those at the charitable day nurseries - with a strong emphasis on teaching for the three-year-olds, and high-quality buildings and equipment.
Through the 1960s and '70s, government support of child care consisted of capital for buildings, as well as grants to support the employment of qualified early childhood staff and fee relief. There was a strong philosophical commitment among women's organisations to "community ownership".
But once Government subsidy policies changed, at first under Labor, to simple fee-relief alone, then under John Howard to tax rebates, the door opened to large-scale commercial expansion and corporatisation. Small local associations of working parents committed to a high level of professional staff could not compete. Local governments found unbridled expansion of for-profit centres similarly undercutting and shutting down their centres.
The total money involved now, subsidies and tax rebates together, comes close to two-thirds of federal expenditures on primary schools - perhaps as much as $3 billion a year. For all the money spent, it still has not produced a system which guarantees affordable, accessible good quality child care which satisfies the needs of parents.
Now might be just the time for a re-appraisal, to put effort into expanding the linking of child care to schools systems, and other not-for-profit systems.
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- reprinted from The Sydney Morning Herald