The Prime Minister has pledged to scrap the activity test that dictates access to childcare subsidies if it wins the next election. Families earning less than 530,000 dollars a year will be guaranteed access to at least three days of subsidised care.
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00:00It's no secret that the government's been under quite a bit of political pressure now
00:05and there's no better palate cleanser than announcing a policy that affects not just
00:10one smiling baby but the estimated one million little people who access childcare in Australia.
00:16The government's announced that it's scrapping the activity test.
00:19This was a limit put in place in 2018 whereby parents had to do a certain amount of work
00:24or volunteering or looking for work to qualify for the childcare subsidy and as a parent
00:29myself childcare's basically unaffordable without the subsidy so that's meant a lot
00:33of families, particularly those from low income backgrounds and from Indigenous backgrounds
00:38have been missing out.
00:39At a cost of about half a billion dollars now the government says that if it's re-elected
00:44it will scrap the activity test.
00:47It's worth noting education advocates have been calling for them to do this the entire
00:50time they're in office and they could have done and as well as that the government is
00:54announcing a billion dollar fund to combat so-called childcare deserts.
00:59That's places in outer suburban and regional areas where parents have a lot of difficulty
01:03accessing care and this policy is designed to increase the take up of new centres in
01:09these areas with the government stumping up some of the cost of building a new centre.
01:13Because early education makes the biggest difference for our littlest Australians.
01:20Every expert tells us how significant those first five years of life are for brain development
01:27and every parent knows children at that age are growing and changing and taking it all
01:33in every day.
01:35So education advocates for a long time have said that we need to stop thinking about childcare
01:39as a place just to drop off the kids so that we can work and earn money, that it's about
01:43much more important things than that.
01:45It's about setting up children for the rest of their schooling journey, it's about them
01:49socialising about interacting with their peers and that studies have shown that high
01:54quality care can really impact the trajectory of the rest of a young person's life.
02:00So what we're starting to see is a push from parental privilege to a right for young people
02:05to access this sort of service.