Mister Speaker,
I wish to ask the Minister representing the Minister for Education and Training why his proposed childcare funding bills leave almost 40 per cent of the families accessing child care worse off and also how he plans to target those children most in need of early childhood intervention programs.
I have some experience in this area. I have worked as a paediatrician, specialising in seeing children with developmental disabilities for over 30 years. In my own electorate of Macarthur, we have a large number of children with developmental needs. We have a large Indigenous population, a large number of single-parent families, a large number of children living below the poverty line, a large number of families suffering from chronic illness and a large number of families with learning difficulties and entrenched educational failure.
Many of the families that I have seen through my work as a paediatrician present to me quite late and they have to wait in the present system for over a year for formal developmental assessment and often have difficulty accessing recurrent funding and engaging with preschools, therapists and other interventional agencies. There is a huge need, and it appears to me that these bills do not target the children most in need with sufficient priority.
There is overwhelming evidence that intervention in the first thousand days of life makes the largest gains in developmental outcomes for these children. However, the government's bills will reduce the ability for these children to access quality child care and do not appear to recognise the needs of the most disadvantaged children. The government is to be applauded, I think, for some of its measures with language intervention in preschools, but the most disadvantaged children often have multisystem requirements. They require lots of therapies and they do not appear to be adequately targeted. I have seen many families with multigenerational educational failure and poverty, and these families need to be targeted for intervention when the children are young—under three years of age. The only way out of this cycle for these children is with education and early intervention.
Mr Hunt, what is this government doing to break the cycle of multigenerational educational failure? Why is there such a delay in implementing the funding? Why do we have to wait until July 2018 to start the funding? Why is there such a complicated plan for intervention? What plans are there to better integrate preschool to school transition for these children and their families with learning difficulties and complex needs? Many families I see are of low income; many of them also see their access to preschool halved. Why is that? Why do we have to wait so long for these children to access care? We know that, if they can get preschool intervention from the age of two or three onwards, their outcomes will be much better.
The Minister for Social Services has trumpeted his reforms to reduce spending, but the money would be much better spent and would give much more value to our society if preschool placement could be made available to children at risk. If we can improve their educational outcomes, their families will also benefit and our social security spending will be much less. Our aim should be for all children to receive quality child care and that in particular means that everyone should have access. In my experience as a paediatrician astute preschool teachers are the best people to identify the children most at risk of poor developmental outcomes. So we need to get early intervention and early preschool placement for the children most at risk. It is vitally important that this assessment happens before the child is three if the intervention is to be of most benefit.
Many studies have shown that, if we improve developmental outcomes for the children in high risk families, then the whole family will benefit in terms of income, stable housing and a stable family environment. In the 21st century, surely, we can do better to provide quality early childhood support to all of our children, but in particular to those most at risk. This is about equality and access. Education begins at birth. We owe our children the best early childhood education that we can give them. They are our future.
