EXCERPTS
It's one of the most frustrating tasks facing any working parent: getting your kid a spot in childcare.
Parents are forking out application fees of up to $100 each to put their children’s names down at multiple centres in inner city areas — with many being waitlisted at birth.
But not everyone has to wait in line, with Australia’s childcare market increasingly becoming a tale of two cities.
Lawyers, accountants and financial advisers working in buildings owned by Australia’s biggest office landlord are being ushered into the VIP express lane when they apply for a spot with Guardian Early Learning Group.
It’s part of a new deal between the childcare provider and Dexus Property Group, which manages 1.8 million square metres of office space across 57 buildings across the country.
In an Australian first, the partnership gives Dexus tenants’ employees priority access to Guardian’s 90 centres, allowing them to skip the queue.
Executive general manager Deborah Coakley said the idea had arisen from conversations with corporate clients in capital cities.
“We asked them ‘what are the business pains you have?’ And it was the ability for people to return to work productively and gain access to childcare,” Ms Coakley said.
A month in she said, the initiative had been embraced by workers and was running smoothly.
“We’ve had a large number of placements already made and number of applications growing week on week,” she said.
A single application fee is paid, instead of multiple waitlist fees, and parents are charged the same rate as for any other child (about $120 a day).
‘Bittersweet circumstance’
The Parenthood executive director Jo Briskey said the news of corporate childcare programs like the Dexus partnership was “bittersweet” against the backdrop of ordinary parents’ struggle. It comes as the Turnbull Government’s promised childcare reforms have stalled in Parliament.
While she welcomed employer initiatives to create family-friendly workplaces, and help women maintain their careers, “it is very hard in the context of the crisis that we have here in Australia at the moment in terms of the affordability and accessibility of childcare across the board,” Ms Briskey told news.com.au.
“We’ve been waiting too long for the government to do something about the crisis that we’re facing at the moment of affordability and accessibility of childcare, especially in major cities like Sydney and Melbourne. It’s a bit of a bittersweet circumstances.”
Families learned earlier this month that they will have to wait at least another year for the new streamlined childcare support, with parts of the government’s $40 billion families package deferred until July 2018.
The reforms include a single, means-tested subsidy that will cost $23 billion and be awarded based on an hourly fee capped at $110 a day, with families on less than $65,000 receiving up to 85 per cent of the cost of care.
Treasurer Scott Morrison told blamed the delay to the child care reforms — which were a major plank of the 2015 budget’s families package — to the Senate not passing changes to the family tax benefit.
But Ms Briskey rejected “the absurd notion that the only way the government can afford its childcare reform package is by getting significant cuts to family payments through the Parliament”, arguing that the government had already made the necessary savings to bankroll the scheme.
“We have been waiting for years for reform,” she said, urging the government to “just get on with it”.
-reprinted from News.com.au