Given that every parent’s worst nightmare is entrusting a child to someone who turns out to be a monster, the past few weeks have been dire for the standing of centre-based childcare.
Something is gravely wrong with our heavily regulated and hugely expensive formal childcare system if someone can survive within it for years, work at more than 20 centres, pass all the Working with Children safety checks, yet be charged with multiple counts of rape of babies as young as five months. And yet that’s the reality for some 2000 families in Melbourne having to go through the agony of testing their infants for sexually transmitted disease.
But modern Australia being the heavily bureaucratised, Big-Brother-knows-best society that we’ve become, the response will almost certainly be yet more regulation and ever higher costs as opposed to practical measures to give childcare operators, and the parents they serve, more confidence that they’re not unwittingly betraying their beloved children.
Such as a national database of childcare workers that can be checked against a national register of sex offenders that’s accessible to every childcare employer. Such as suspending the Working with Children accreditation of anyone under police investigation for child abuse because, right now, there are accused predators still working in centres because of this loophole.
And yes I acknowledge the foundation legal principle of innocent until proven guilty, but who wants to tell the parents when the unthinkable has happened, that principle trumped the protection of their baby?
I would go further and debate the creation of a new offence of industrial child abuse, akin to the industrial manslaughter legislation favoured by Labor governments, that would make centre operators criminally liable for sexual abuse found to have been committed on their premises.
At least that would make centre management think long and hard about the staff they employ and be hyper-vigilant about anyone with the remotest possibility of turning out to be a predator.
On Wednesday the Albanese government introduced legislation to strip funding from centres that don’t maintain safety standards. But given that the power to strip funding already exists and the government won’t detail potential triggers, this looks more like window-dressing especially given we’ve seen very little action from the states that share a large proportion of the blame for harm here.
Given how important our children are to our future, the least the Prime Minister might have done was call an emergency national cabinet, but clearly six days in China took priority in his diary.
Beyond parents and family members, taxpayers have a huge stake here. There are now some 9000 childcare centres in Australia, attended by about a million children, each of whom could receive up to $30,000 a year in subsidy, with $16bn in total currently paid out in federal subsidies from taxpayers. That such a heavily regulated system can still be infiltrated by predators is a national disgrace.
And then there are the deeper questions that this crisis of confidence should pose, such as exactly what is the childcare system for: early childhood education or childminding so more parents, mothers especially, can enter the workforce? And if it’s some combination of both, is largely centre-based care the optimal institutional arrangement? And is centre-based care really the first choice of parents who might well prefer informal care by relatives or even nannies; or indeed, prefer full-time parenting to part-time work, were they not compelled by financial necessity to have two incomes to pay their bills?
It’s fair enough that the imminent legislation focuses on better protection for children in childcare, but what’s really needed is a thorough reconsideration of the whole system that addresses the tension between childcare quality and childcare affordability, and examines the alternative forms of childcare that many parents could well prefer if they had more choice.
The Albanese government is moving down the “path to universal early childhood education and care”, the title of a Productivity Commission report released in September last year.
This pointed out that nearly half of one-year-olds are in some form of childcare and about 90 per cent of four-year-olds are in some form of education or care. The Productivity Commission claimed that a universal access system of childcare would deliver “substantial benefits for children, their families and the broader community”.
It recommended a significant increase in subsidies for low-income families at the cost of an additional $5bn annually. The Productivity Commission report takes it for granted that centre-based care is best, presumably because institutional care, with unionised staff, is the Albanese government ideal.
Yet institutional care is hardly the overwhelming choice of parents, on the rare occasions that policymakers actually listen to them. In a survey undertaken for the Centre for Independent Studies (admittedly in 2019 but not much is likely to have changed) only half the mothers surveyed nominated institutional long daycare as their preferred option, even though that was what the vast majority of them were using.
Grandparents or other relatives were nominated by 25 per cent of working mothers. Significantly, “warmth of caregiving”, location and cost were by far working mothers’ key priorities, not the educational qualifications of staff, so it seems that caring for kids rather than teaching them is parents’ priority, at least for the under-fives; and 66 per cent of mothers agreed that they would prefer to use government subsidies for informal care.
So far, heavily subsidised childcare has certainly helped to get more mothers into the workforce but it has hardly raised national productivity; it certainly has not helped birthrates that are now at historic lows, well below replacement level; and it’s not doing anything for the mental health of children.
In the decade to 2021, rates of psychological distress among 15 to 24-year-olds doubled. Much of this is likely to be a result of online bullying, climate Armageddon and social media-induced harm. But some could be the impact of losing maternal care too soon.
As US social psychologist Erica Komisar points out, ages zero to three is the “critical period of brain development where children need attachment security as a foundation for future mental health”. She says the “least healthy option for children is institutional daycare, which … elevates stress hormone levels and leads to aggression, behavioural problems and anxiety in children when they get to school age”.
How many of the 66 per cent of mothers in the paid workforce with children under five are really choosing the workforce over time at home with their children? It’s not as if their caring responsibilities are diminished just because they’re also contributing to the family budget.
Given that the Albanese government’s legislated objective is to make available to all infants and young children a three-day-a-week guarantee of childcare subsidy, starting from next year, why not pay it directly to parents rather than to the childcare centre?
That would give parents genuine choice about the type of childcare they use for their children, including in-home care and the ability of a parent to delay their return to work.
Of course, revising institutional arrangements to produce better (and perhaps more popular) outcomes is hard work and inevitably offends the vested interests with a commercial stake in the status quo. But it’s exactly what an opposition that’s hungry for government and, even more important, eager to make a difference should do.
Coming up with a better system of childcare should be a no-brainer for an opposition led by a former childcare minister. Certainly, in terms of winning back female votes, a real policy on a vital topic would be much better than gimmicks such as quotas for female candidates.
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