To win parents’ votes, put their kids first – with childcare that hits home

Childcare centres, despite regular scandals and misdemeanours, enjoy a protected status in modern life. To criticise them is equated with criticising feminism and gender equality itself. It must mean opposing women’s right to participate in the workforce. As a result, their place in our society is not properly examined.

The prime minister, keen to appeal to women and do something about the cost of living, has committed to further subsidising childcare costs while removing the activity test, which was a barrier to parents not engaged in work or study accessing centre-based care. This week, he announced flat-fee childcare as part of his “second term vision” – also, of course, to be delivered through centre-based care.

Some parents have no option but a childcare centre.Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto

But in the same week, NSW acknowledged that these centres often have quality issues. State Education Minister Prue Car announced an independent review into the rise in safety breaches in daycare centres, including “hair being pulled and kids being dragged along floors” by workers. The upper house Greens MP Abigail Boyd, who spoke of that kind of mistreatment, attributed it to the fact that “many of these centres are backed up by private equity, whose mandate is to get as much profit out of it and to squeeze costs wherever possible”.

It’s true; childcare centres are a licence to print money for the private sector. But they’ve got significant benefits for social democrats, too. In Labor’s case, they’re a licence to print union membership fees, which end up funding its campaigns. And this might be a clue as to why successive governments, blue and red both, have been resistant to change.

From a private equity perspective, centre-based childcare is an absolute dream. When the business model is done right, they invest in land and extract money from the government and the private sector simultaneously to pay for it. The government keeps tipping in more and more because the idea of being or even being seen to be responsible for inadequate quality standards around the care of our very youngest children is politically untenable. And parents are over a barrel, choosing to stump up or stay home and forgo wages. Meanwhile, the value of the land on which the centres are located typically rises, supercharging the total private equity portfolio.

From Labor’s perspective, centre-based childcare workers are prime targets for unionisation. The education and training workforce is the most unionised in Australia, with 27 per cent of employees signed up. That’s more than double the union membership rate across the wider economy. And, of course, where there are union members there are, in the regular course of events, union donations to the Labor Party. Last year, the United Workers Union, which represents childcare workers, was one of its top five donors.

So, if you’re after profit or power, centre-based childcare is a tempting trough for your snout. But it’s less clear that it’s the ideal policy solution for parents and their offspring.

Of course, the evidence in this field is hotly contested. Some research conducted in the past was probably motivated by the desire to persuade mothers to maintain traditional gender roles. Other research conducted latterly has probably been motivated to show that the connection between mother and child is just a gender construct. Scientists are only human, not the brains-on-sticks we would sometimes wish they were, and this is a deeply emotive discussion that affects them, too.

Parents who have no option but to use childcare centres are resistant to the idea that they are less than an ideal environment for their babies. (Especially if you’re reading this at your desk on Monday morning after dropping your dearest – maybe crying and grasping for you – into the arms of childcare staff. Know then that the mixture of grief and relief isn’t just unique to you.)

But, since there is evidence that children aged under three produce more of the stress hormone cortisol in childcare settings than at home and that babies under 12 months old are the most stressed, it would make sense to question whether there isn’t a better way to support families to access care.

For a baby, the ideal form of care is one-on-one. And yes, if most babies had control of the family purse strings, they’d probably hire the milky parent. But let’s just for a moment agree that there are situations in which the mother can’t stay at home with her child or – and this is OK too – doesn’t especially want to. Let’s also acknowledge that grandparent care is less available than it was in the past. None of that means it’s centre-based care or bust.

A system in which parents could choose to hire individuals, create in-home care collectives, or enrol their child or children in a centre if they saw fit, would allow every family to tailor arrangements to best suit them. Now would be a great time to put tax-deductible childcare back on the table.

I’ve previously quoted an excellent paper on this topic by Rosalind Dixon and Richard Holden, which offers a solution to the problem of some parents not earning an income from which they could deduct payments. It suggests childcare centre placements be made available to those children.

The objection to this suggestion is sometimes that such a system would be open to fraud. But who exactly would be defrauded if a parent were to, say, pay a friend to mind their child? Not to mention that the current centre-based system is hardly fraud-free.

Instead of continuing this madness of tipping cash into a system that’s less than ideal, an innovative policy could eliminate childcare profiteering and political self-interest to create a system that actually works for babies and parents alike.

What a brave pre-election promise that would make, and a happy International Women’s Day (next Saturday) to the smallest among us.

Parnell Palme McGuinness is managing director at campaigns firm Agenda C. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens.