Yahoo Finance Australian women are done waiting. It’s time for a budget that invests in care
What a difference seven months can make. After facing the wrath of thousands of “credible women” following last October’s federal budget, which infamously assigned a third of 1% of its spending to women’s economic security, the Morrison government is now at pains to emphasise that the 2021 budget, to be handed down on Tuesday, will deliver for women.
Quite the shift in rhetoric, after its ham-fisted attempts to defend the indefensible last year, with claims that “women drive on roads” by ministers Anne Ruston and Michaelia Cash, and that “nothing in the budget is gendered” from the prime minister’s office (which was kind of the point).
Related: Coalition to offer $1.7bn childcare budget boost to encourage return of female workforce
Whether the government will actually deliver for women, though, depends very much on the hard numbers that will be revealed in the budget papers on Tuesday night. So far, the signs are that reality may not match the rhetoric.
The government made much fanfare about its childcare package in one of the typical pre-budget announcements last week, but many advocates and experts view the offering, which is valued at just over a quarter of the Labor party policy announced in its budget reply last year, as a day late and a buck short.
There’s nothing for families with only one child in preschool care, and nothing for working parents with school-aged children, for whom the costs of after-school and holiday care can be crippling. While the lifting of the rebate cap will benefit high-income families, the package fails to deal with the lack of access to early childhood education for children from the most disadvantaged backgrounds, which was restricted with the government’s previous changes in 2018 that imposed an activity test on parents, meaning that subsidies are not available for children whose parents are not in work or education. In reality, only around a quarter of the more than one million families who use early childhood education and care services will see any benefit at all – and even those will wait until July 2022 before the changes kick in.
More critically, the package simply puts more money into a broken system – it does not, as the ALP plan does, move us towards universal early childhood education and care, nor does it do anything to regulate fees, meaning that any savings to eligible families are likely to be eaten up by rising costs within a couple of years – as happened last time the government increased the subsidy, just three years ago.
Perhaps most disappointingly, and dangerously, the government does not appear to have given any real thought to the workforce issues that plague early childhood education and care (ECEC), and all other forms of care work.
As ECEC expert and advocate Lisa Bryant warned last week that Australian childcare centres are struggling to recruit enough staff. Because staffing ratios are set in law, fewer staff means fewer children receiving care and education. The government knows that the sector will need more than 30,000 new workers within the next three years, but apparently has no plans to address the significant policy failures, including criminally low wages and highly insecure employment, that are seeing workers flee the sector in unprecedented numbers at the same time as demand for places is rising.
A similar level of apathy can be seen in the mooted response to the royal commission into aged care quality and safety. After more strong rhetoric upon the release of the royal commission’s report in March, in which the prime minister, Scott Morrison, agreed that “the basic paradigm needs to change”, we are told to expect just $10bn over four years will be assigned to aged care in this budget – around a quarter of the minimum needed to restore the funding cut from the sector over the last 25 years, according to the commissioners.
This relatively paltry funding boost is unlikely to support the introduction of minimum staffing ratios, including the presence of a registered nurse on each shift, as experts agree is essential in order to improve the quality of care. And again, there is no mention of appropriate regulatory reform to curb profit-gouging by private operators or ensure that quality and safety standards are upheld. Throwing more money at the system absent much-needed regulatory reform won’t produce improvements in care, and is unlikely to result in higher wages or better conditions for staff, or even in more palatable food for residents.
The evidence is that, despite months of coordinated, intensive advocacy from feminist economists and policy analysts, the government still does not really grasp the challenge and opportunity of investing in women. Even in the face of compelling economic modelling to demonstrate the significant return to be realised through funding the social infrastructure of essential care services in the same way we do traditional “hard infrastructure”, policymakers apparently still regard spending on care as a cost rather than an investment.
Playing catch-up with the electorate, never mind the opposition, is no doubt an uncomfortable position for the government to be in ahead of a likely election early next year. Doubtless the prime minister and treasurer will be hoping the measures they include in Tuesday’s budget will mollify the “credible women” who have been relentlessly keeping focus on the government’s lack of gender awareness since the debacle that was the 2020 budget.
But here’s a tip: actions speak louder than words, and we’re done waiting. It’s time for the government to put its money where its spin is, and make a real investment in a care-led recovery, for the benefit of all Australians.
• Emma Dawson is executive director of Per Capita
