School holidays are a time when most families feel the work/care/family juggle acutely, my own family included. Decisions about care arrangements are made in a way that involves and impacts the whole family; grandparents and extended family are roped in to help, holiday programs are booked often at considerable cost, and both mums and dads work from home or burn through annual leave to supervise young children.
This juggle occurs once every 10 weeks or so for families with school aged children, but it’s a constant conversation for parents of children under six. Can we afford early childhood education and care? Can we even find a place for our child? Who will go to the office and who will work from home if we can’t get care? Who will work part time? Can I leave early again? Ask these questions of an economist or the Productivity Commission, and they’ll tell you it’s mum. And often, it is. But, that’s because we have an early education and care system that is based on a system built in the late 70s and added to piece by piece over the last 50 years.
Recently the Productivity Commission released a report A path to universal early childhood education and care and instead of breaking from what has happened in the past to prepare for the future, they have doubled down. Once again, as a man I am told that I am the economic lever for my family and the woman is responsible for caring.
Is this the future we want for Australia? Is this the sort of policy debate we want from Canberra? Anyone who has kids in childcare will tell you that the system is broken. Parents pay a lot, educators don’t earn enough, and operators says that margins are tight. The
Government asked the Productivity Commission to propose a better model, and they haven’t. Instead, they’ve recommended a tinkering at the edges of a old, broken system that isn’t working.
For Australian’s currently paying childcare fees, life is expensive. Housing your family, feeding them. It’s the reality that for many of my generation, you need two parents working. The concept of childcare being a ‘choice’ is laughable. Life wouldn’t happen without it and if it doesn’t change, we will double down on a system that sees women exit the workforce after birth and then play a lifelong game of earning catch up to her male colleagues.
This system no longer serves the modern Australian family. As a Dad, I can tell you that what the Productivity Commission is arguing about early education and care and family choices as being simply “mum’s choices” does not reflect the experiences of ordinary families.
Mum or dad, we should have a choice to work full time or to work part time or not be a full-time parent. Whatever the choice we wish to make to suit our individual families and children, we should have access to affordable and quality early childhood
education and care.
We need bold ambitious reform in early education and care that supports families as a whole, recognising that families make choices together and supports all parents to make the work and care choices that best suit them - a universal system with a fixed
fee that is legislated.
This would better support women, it would create a system that recognised the role that Dads can and should (and already are!) playing and it would help children get the best start in life.
Sean Sammon is the Managing Director of York Park Group, a father of two and serves on the board of The Parenthood.
