See text below.
EXCERPTS
Parents of up to 30,000 children could be without childcare from the start of next year after receivers for ABC Learning Centres yesterday published a list of 386 centres whose future is in doubt.
Receiver Chris Honey said that 656 of ABC's 1042 childcare centres would definitely open next year, but 386 centres - about 10 per cent of the market - were under review and he hoped to announce their fate within a week.
The main union covering childcare workers, the Liquor Hospitality and Miscellaneous Union, claimed that the publication of the list amounted to a "death sentence" for the 386 centres as parents of children at those centres would instantly start looking for alternatives.
"This runs the risk of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy if parents and workers begin to look for other options," said LHMU national secretary Louise Tarrant.
Dominique Stewart, who has two children at one of the 386 centres on the list, said she would face huge difficulties if the ABC facility at Prahran in Melbourne's inner southeast did not reopen after the Christmas break.
"Everything's taken up around here and for four-year-old kinder you need to be booked in a year in advance," said Ms Stewart, mother of Lily, 4, and Sam, four months.
…
Ms Stewart is a nurse and works four days a week, while her partner's job as a film producer requires him to regularly travel away from home.
"I pretty much rely on ABC for the back-up childcare," she said
Ms Stewart said the staff at the centre were also on tenterhooks.
"They don't know what's going on either. They could be out of work as of January."
ABC went into voluntary administration earlier this month with debts of more than $1billion, and since then the federal Government has provided $22million to keep the centres open until December 31.
Ms Tarrant said that while the possible closure of nearly one-tenth of Australia's childcare centres was a worry for the childcare industry, it had potentially devastating effects for the broader economy.
"If you have the parents of 30,000 children who are due to go back to work on January 2 after their break and they don't have childcare, then a lot of them are going to stay at home and look after their children," she said. "That's going to affect a lot of working families and will also lead to problems in the workplace as well."
Many of the centres under review are in small regional towns or on the edge of capital cities.
Mr Honey stressed that "just because a centre remains under review, it does not mean that that centre will close".
- reprinted from The Australian