Extract from The Guardian
The new childcare bill is so complex and bureaucratic it’s hard to know what’s going on. But researchers are warning the funding model could lead to disaster
‘Anyone still insisting that early childhood education consists of “wiping noses” clearly lacks comprehension around the basic process of literacy.’ Photograph: Sam Mooy/AAP
Contact author
Friday 24 March 2017 12.26 AEDT
This week federal parliament debated a childcare funding bill. They were obliged to do something: on Sunday, Australians learned that with 1.2 million children in childcare “Australia’s childcare costs have risen at five times the rate of inflation over the course of a year”.
Families have a tendency of taking out their financial tension at the ballot box, so Malcolm Turnbull and the Liberal-National Coalition have acted in their predictable way: exploiting that which is politically necessary to achieve what is abominable. The Coalition originally attached a childcare funding increase to an “omnibus” savings bill that recycled the broad-based, punitive cuts of Abbott’s infamous 2014 budget. This week they compromised to merely freeze the family tax benefit, leaving cuts to paid parental leave, the abolition of the energy supplement for new recipients, cuts to pensions of migrants, and the proposed four-week wait for unemployment benefits, on hold.
On Thursday night, something like a government childcare bill passed the Senate with the support of the Nick Xenophon Team, One Nation, Derryn Hinch and David Leyonhjelm. For those unable to process what the actual changes mean, you’re not alone: childcare policy has become so labyrinthine and the compromises are so confusing it’s hard not to believe it’s deliberate. Advocates such as Eva Cox have been decrying the “too complex, overly bureaucratic” nature of Coalition childcare policy as “counterproductive” for years.
Early learning campaigners such as Lisa Bryant are concerned proposed new activity tests - demanding parents must prove participation in work or study to receive assistance - will “reduce hours of subsidised care” and create uncertainty for parents in unstable, casual jobs or complex circumstances. New billing systems encourage providers “to further casualise the already underpaid childcare workforce”. How underpaid? Early childhood educators are paid less than dog groomers and up to a third less than someone who teaches primary students instead.
It’s a heady time to be a corporate childcare provider, if not a worker, family or, you know, child. What’s getting lost is the question of whether the current infrastructure of “childcare” (what should be “early learning”) in Australia even meets family needs, let alone educational best practice or long-term social good outcomes.
The answer is no – on all fronts.
“There are some standalone centres that really care,” says Red Ruby Scarlet, an early childhood teacher-researcher who also advocates for the campaign group Social Justice in Early Childhood. “But policy has shifted and changed, nipped and tucked, and made it harder and harder” for centres and providers to present themselves as places of early learning, rather than cheaper, less-expert facilitators of “childcare”.
“Market forces took over,” says Scarlet of the shift, “when education was privatised it became about fees and accessibility.”
It wasn’t always this way. Deborah Brennan’s excellent history The Politics of Australian Childcaretells the story of an idealistic 19th century movement for child education and social opportunity whose transformative achievements over decades conveniently dovetailed with a 1970s labour shortage that heralded the entry of more women into the workforce. In 1972, the Liberal-Country party government introduced the Child Care Act to fund community childcare non-profits.
Then Gough Whitlam was elected, and an entire year of free preschool education was promised to every child, and an agenda of early learning for the social good dominated Australia’s golden age of early childhood education that the subsequent Fraser government did not dismantle.
Little Vanessa Badham – three years old in 1978 and living in the Canberra suburb of Chifley, her dad working at the new dog track, her mum trying, and failing, to avoid ingratiation into the local suburban craft scene – was one of its beneficiaries. I was the only kid at preschool whose dad didn’t work for a government department, but the sandpit, the toy cupboards, story time and a joyously unlimited supply of plasticine knew no discrimination. My mum still hangs on her wall a ceramic handprint of mine made at that kindergarten 39 years ago, such was the quality and sophistication of activity offered there.
Anyone still insisting that early childhood education consists of “wiping noses” clearly lacks comprehension around the basic process of literacy: thanks to that little preschool in Canberra, I could read before I went to school. It has got me a long way.
Lisa Bryant gently explained a point lost by senators David Leyonhjelm and Pauline Hanson in a January Fairfax piece. “By the time a baby is around nine months old, their brains are at their peak of being receptive to language,”she wrote. “Interaction with a loving caregiver or caregivers ... [is] the very basic building block of the brains these baby humans will use throughout their lives.”
This is mainstream opinion. Writing in the Guardian, Oxford professor Edward Melhuish was overt in his pleas for Australian early learning to be free and universal.
The government’s bills are both symptoms and traditions of the neoliberal attitude to early learning first embraced, alas, in the Hawke-Keating era. With a recession driving women back into the workforce, in 1989 Labor adopted a soft-voucher system of individualised family funding to encourage childcare private enterprise to meet an expanding demand for centres and services the then government didn’t believe it could afford.
It’s the foundational framework for what we have now – a childcare situation that Victoria University’s Mitchell Institute compared this week with the “disastrous” VET policy that has funded private colleges at the expense of the quality and accessibility of Tafe. With “public subsidies flowing to private providers, rising fees and under-resourced regulatory bodies,” the researchers wrote in the Mandarin, “We are in danger of repeating the same mistakes.”
The question has to be asked: just what is Australia receiving for the Coalition’s direction of more money to the same problem? Underpaid early childhood educators are still locked in cycles of bruising industrial battles. Children are still on the receiving end of denuded and unequal services. A Nick Xenophon Team amendment retained some targeted funding for Indigenous, remote and disadvantaged communities, but a Labor/Greens amendment to increase 12 hours of subsidised care to 15 hours for low-income families was lost.
Women are still – still – obliged to engage a “juggle struggle” around structural sexism, inflexible work and the unpredictable realities of parenthood. And the potential of broad-based education outcomes are still not the priority of a policy that’s more about workplace participation and productivity than long-term social good. Why do parents have to be working for their children to be offered a best-practice education?
Let’s not be mistaken that this is some kind of gift to families, so much as it’s a government-funded market guarantee to private profit and a pale bribe to women who work. The state remains obliged, of course, to pick up the pieces of any collapse when corporate providers, like ABC Learning, fall over.
The real congratulations due to Malcolm Turnbull here are not for another policy non-solution, but provision of yet more evidence of how comprehensively market economics fail every community – except, of course, the hallowed ranks of corporate opportunists and profiteers.
Families have a tendency of taking out their financial tension at the ballot box, so Malcolm Turnbull and the Liberal-National Coalition have acted in their predictable way: exploiting that which is politically necessary to achieve what is abominable. The Coalition originally attached a childcare funding increase to an “omnibus” savings bill that recycled the broad-based, punitive cuts of Abbott’s infamous 2014 budget. This week they compromised to merely freeze the family tax benefit, leaving cuts to paid parental leave, the abolition of the energy supplement for new recipients, cuts to pensions of migrants, and the proposed four-week wait for unemployment benefits, on hold.
On Thursday night, something like a government childcare bill passed the Senate with the support of the Nick Xenophon Team, One Nation, Derryn Hinch and David Leyonhjelm. For those unable to process what the actual changes mean, you’re not alone: childcare policy has become so labyrinthine and the compromises are so confusing it’s hard not to believe it’s deliberate. Advocates such as Eva Cox have been decrying the “too complex, overly bureaucratic” nature of Coalition childcare policy as “counterproductive” for years.
Early learning campaigners such as Lisa Bryant are concerned proposed new activity tests - demanding parents must prove participation in work or study to receive assistance - will “reduce hours of subsidised care” and create uncertainty for parents in unstable, casual jobs or complex circumstances. New billing systems encourage providers “to further casualise the already underpaid childcare workforce”. How underpaid? Early childhood educators are paid less than dog groomers and up to a third less than someone who teaches primary students instead.
It’s a heady time to be a corporate childcare provider, if not a worker, family or, you know, child. What’s getting lost is the question of whether the current infrastructure of “childcare” (what should be “early learning”) in Australia even meets family needs, let alone educational best practice or long-term social good outcomes.
“There are some standalone centres that really care,” says Red Ruby Scarlet, an early childhood teacher-researcher who also advocates for the campaign group Social Justice in Early Childhood. “But policy has shifted and changed, nipped and tucked, and made it harder and harder” for centres and providers to present themselves as places of early learning, rather than cheaper, less-expert facilitators of “childcare”.
“Market forces took over,” says Scarlet of the shift, “when education was privatised it became about fees and accessibility.”
It wasn’t always this way. Deborah Brennan’s excellent history The Politics of Australian Childcaretells the story of an idealistic 19th century movement for child education and social opportunity whose transformative achievements over decades conveniently dovetailed with a 1970s labour shortage that heralded the entry of more women into the workforce. In 1972, the Liberal-Country party government introduced the Child Care Act to fund community childcare non-profits.
Then Gough Whitlam was elected, and an entire year of free preschool education was promised to every child, and an agenda of early learning for the social good dominated Australia’s golden age of early childhood education that the subsequent Fraser government did not dismantle.
Little Vanessa Badham – three years old in 1978 and living in the Canberra suburb of Chifley, her dad working at the new dog track, her mum trying, and failing, to avoid ingratiation into the local suburban craft scene – was one of its beneficiaries. I was the only kid at preschool whose dad didn’t work for a government department, but the sandpit, the toy cupboards, story time and a joyously unlimited supply of plasticine knew no discrimination. My mum still hangs on her wall a ceramic handprint of mine made at that kindergarten 39 years ago, such was the quality and sophistication of activity offered there.
Anyone still insisting that early childhood education consists of “wiping noses” clearly lacks comprehension around the basic process of literacy: thanks to that little preschool in Canberra, I could read before I went to school. It has got me a long way.
Lisa Bryant gently explained a point lost by senators David Leyonhjelm and Pauline Hanson in a January Fairfax piece. “By the time a baby is around nine months old, their brains are at their peak of being receptive to language,”she wrote. “Interaction with a loving caregiver or caregivers ... [is] the very basic building block of the brains these baby humans will use throughout their lives.”
This is mainstream opinion. Writing in the Guardian, Oxford professor Edward Melhuish was overt in his pleas for Australian early learning to be free and universal.
The government’s bills are both symptoms and traditions of the neoliberal attitude to early learning first embraced, alas, in the Hawke-Keating era. With a recession driving women back into the workforce, in 1989 Labor adopted a soft-voucher system of individualised family funding to encourage childcare private enterprise to meet an expanding demand for centres and services the then government didn’t believe it could afford.
It’s the foundational framework for what we have now – a childcare situation that Victoria University’s Mitchell Institute compared this week with the “disastrous” VET policy that has funded private colleges at the expense of the quality and accessibility of Tafe. With “public subsidies flowing to private providers, rising fees and under-resourced regulatory bodies,” the researchers wrote in the Mandarin, “We are in danger of repeating the same mistakes.”
The question has to be asked: just what is Australia receiving for the Coalition’s direction of more money to the same problem? Underpaid early childhood educators are still locked in cycles of bruising industrial battles. Children are still on the receiving end of denuded and unequal services. A Nick Xenophon Team amendment retained some targeted funding for Indigenous, remote and disadvantaged communities, but a Labor/Greens amendment to increase 12 hours of subsidised care to 15 hours for low-income families was lost.
Women are still – still – obliged to engage a “juggle struggle” around structural sexism, inflexible work and the unpredictable realities of parenthood. And the potential of broad-based education outcomes are still not the priority of a policy that’s more about workplace participation and productivity than long-term social good. Why do parents have to be working for their children to be offered a best-practice education?
Let’s not be mistaken that this is some kind of gift to families, so much as it’s a government-funded market guarantee to private profit and a pale bribe to women who work. The state remains obliged, of course, to pick up the pieces of any collapse when corporate providers, like ABC Learning, fall over.
The real congratulations due to Malcolm Turnbull here are not for another policy non-solution, but provision of yet more evidence of how comprehensively market economics fail every community – except, of course, the hallowed ranks of corporate opportunists and profiteers.
No comments:
Post a Comment