Excerpts

There’s a headline from satirical newspaper The Betoota Advocate that’s been doing the rounds: “Family Glad Youngest Kid Finally Out Of Daycare And Into Elite Private School So They Can Start Saving.”

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Broke if you do, broke if you don’t is the unfortunate catchphrase for many households with children under five. Until recently, however, that didn’t apply to everyone in the sector.

While families were haemorrhaging money and educators were leaving the profession they loved because they couldn’t pay their rent, many large for-profit providers were doing very well. 

The ACCC found large corporate providers were generating higher profit margins than their not-for-profit counterparts – funded substantially by taxpayers and exhausted families alike, to the tune of $20 billion a year between subsidies and fees. The trick, in too many instances? Keep fees high, wages low and let the public money do the rest.

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When G8 announced the closure of forty childcare centres last week, the headlines focused on the corporate story: a big player retreating from a squeezed market. Behind every one of those closures is a family scrambling for care, a child losing familiar educators, educators looking for new jobs and a community losing an essential service.

How did we get here? We built an essential service around market logic instead of children’s needs.

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The Government has already taken meaningful steps towards building an early childhood education and care system. A 15 per cent wage increase for educators. Three days of subsidised care guaranteed. The abolition of the punitive Activity Test that was hammering single mothers and First Nations families. A suite of measures to improve safety and standards. These were hard-won and important. They are not enough.

G8’s forty closures are a market correction. What we need is a policy correction. These are not the same thing and only one of them is designed to put children first.