Georgie Dent Addresses The National Press Club

The mother and father of all problems

Georgie Dent · National Press Club · 23 September 2026

I acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the lands of the Press Club - The Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples.

I pay respect to Elders past and present. I honour the generations of First Nations parents who have raised their children on this land for more than 60,000 years, the oldest continuing culture of parenting and care in the world.

I want to thank the Press Club for holding space for this conversation. I want to sincerely thank and acknowledge my team at The Parenthood, our board, our Chair Jess, our Patron Wendy. Our partners. I also want to acknowledge my family…without whom this path would not have been mine.  To everyone in this room who knows this story because you have lived it … thank you for being here.  

Sixteen years ago, I became a mother.

I was astonished by our tiny daughter.

By how much I loved her.

By how little I knew about tiny babies.

And, after a particularly long labour, by the fact that anyone in the history of civilisation had ever done it twice.

We now have three daughters.

Becoming a parent opened my eyes to something I haven't been able to look away from.

The way families live and work has changed but our expectations of parents, and the policies built around them, have not.

My husband Nick and I had become parents to exactly the same baby. Yet the world seemed to think we had signed up for entirely different jobs.

He could take her to the park on a Sunday morning and be greeted with something akin to a ticker-tape parade. I could take her on a bus and attract disapproval if she made a noise.

My husband is a skilled professional and devoted parent. He found the hero’s welcome for something as ordinary as a park outing wildly funny and insulting.  

The difference goes well beyond who gets congratulated at the park.

Treasury has calculated Australia's motherhood penalty: having children reduces women's earnings by an average of 55 per cent over the first five years of parenthood.

And it happens even when the mother was the higher earner beforehand.

For men, becoming a father had little discernible effect on earnings.

When I wanted to return to work, we assumed finding care would be a bit like primary school. There would naturally be a place for our daughter.

How else were parents supposed to work?

After a string of knockbacks, we found one in a suburb where neither of us worked. We took our toddler into the city on a bus in peak hour, twice daily, and spent more on childcare than rent for the privilege.

While I was on parental leave with our second daughter, Marina Go approached me about editing Women's Agenda.

My dream job. Part time, with flexibility built in.

But we couldn't get both girls into the same centre. Arrangements across different centres and suburbs looked vaguely possible on paper but unravelled in practice.

I was being offered a job championing women's participation in the workplace and I could barely arrange the care that would allow me to turn up.

With a flexible employer and by stretching ourselves financially, we made it work, but I know how little hard work counts for parents when care doesn't exist.

How many women have had to turn down their version of that opportunity?

Earning an income can mean having a say over your life. Being able to support your children. Being able to leave a relationship.

These are enormous things to leave contingent on a wait list.

Wanting this fixed took me from writing about these problems to campaigning to change them at The Parenthood.

For sixteen years, I’ve watched parents try to overcome failures of public policy with their own private ingenuity.

Raising children will always require time, money, patience and compromise. But there is a difference between the inherent work of raising a child and the unnecessary difficulty created by systems designed for another era.

To the parents listening today: I know how it feels to appear capable while being completely overwhelmed. To love your children fiercely and still struggle to make it all work.

Struggling under these conditions does not mean you are failing.

No parent can meditate their way out of a childcare desert. Or meal-prep their way out of housing stress. Or time-manage their way into a 25th hour.

When millions of families face the same obstacles, it’s not a personal failure. It’s a policy failure with profound economic and social consequences.

Why?

One third of Australia's workforce have dependent children. The ability to earn a living and raise a family belongs at the centre of our economic agenda. We need to build the family infrastructure that makes both possible.

That is what I am here to argue for today.

Three pieces, in the order a child's life runs.

A full year of paid parental leave families can afford to take.

Affordable, accessible and high-quality early childhood education and care delivered by a professionally paid and supported workforce.

And workplaces that recognise the reality of care.

Getting these things right delivers a triple dividend: healthier children and stronger parental wellbeing, greater workforce participation and productivity; and less inequity, giving more children the chance to thrive.

We can improve the lives of parents and children now and underwrite a more prosperous, sustainable future in the process.

Take the birth rate.

Australia’s birth rate is in decline. Big time.

In 2024 it was 1.48, the lowest on record. This week’s Intergenerational Report shows it will drop again to just 1.34.

Changing preferences are only part of the picture. Two children is still the most commonly desired family size - among men and women. But wanting a family and being able to build one are different things.

Treasury’s Centre for Population estimates that if fertility intentions had been realised between 2001 and 2022, Australia could have had 881,000 additional births.

Money is not the only reason people have fewer children than they hoped but we know the conversations beneath that gap.

Can we afford another bedroom? Two children in care? Another period with one of us not working?

Families register the cost of having a baby immediately: in the household budget, the income forgone, the paraphernalia needed.

The economy registers the consequences of those decisions over decades. A persistently low birth rate puts pressure on the services and public finances we all depend on.

We cannot talk about the economic consequences of a declining birth rate while treating the economic obstacles to having children as a private problem for families to solve on their own.

We have to make raising children more affordable, more secure and more compatible with earning a living.

Then is not now

A generation ago, a single income could stretch to a house, a family and a retirement. That model worked because one adult, almost always a woman, supplied enormous amounts of care for free. Free for everyone except her.

Moving beyond that model, with both parents able to enjoy paid work is progress. In 2003, around 58 per cent of couple families with children under fifteen had both parents in paid work. By 2025, it was 73 per cent.

But families needing two incomes to stay afloat in the current economy, with less breathing room, cannot be described as progress. For many families it feels like a cruel game of whack-a-mole.

New analysis The Parenthood commissioned from ConnellGriffin shows this isn't a story about families wanting more or getting ahead. It's about families needing more to get by.

Raising one child now costs an Australian family around $17,800 a year. Two or more, more than $36,500.

Budgets haven't kept up. What it actually takes to run a family has risen 134 per cent. But the money that lands in the bank each week has risen only 102 per cent.

Whatever is left after the essentials to cover kids' clothes and shoes, haircuts, swimming lessons and birthdays isn’t much. For single parents, the margin has shrunk from a third of the household budget to less than a quarter. For coupled families it’s a third. That’s a very thin margin when the car breaks down.

Over two decades, childcare has climbed from 27 to 33 per cent of the cost of raising a child.

That is not a feeling or avocado toast. It is not parents being bad at budgeting.

It is a measurable gap.

Meanwhile the care work itself has not shrunk by a single hour. Babies still wake at night. Meals still need making. Somebody still has to be at the school gate.

The school day runs roughly nine until three. The working day does not. Australian children get twelve weeks of school holidays. A full-time employee gets four weeks of annual leave.

New ABC analysis found that two parents working full-time with primary-school-aged children have to find at least 814 hours of care a year to bridge that gap, even if they take all their annual leave separately. That’s over 107 full time days.

Workplaces, schools, communities and the economy quietly assume there is a spare adult somewhere in every household picking up this slack.

There rarely is.

The parents are not alright

Ask a parent how they're going and many will say fine. The group chat tells a different story.

A major survey of Australian parents found 45 per cent reporting moderate psychological distress, and a further 12 per cent high distress.

The collision between work and family is getting worse. In the 2024 National Working Families Survey, 74 per cent of women and 57 per cent of men said they felt stressed balancing work and family. Five years earlier, it was 51 per cent of women and 34 per cent of men.

Sixty-two per cent said those competing demands were causing stress or tension in their relationships with their partner or their children. That’s doubled since 2019, despite the expansion in flexible and remote work.

Think about what that means.

The pressure is not just on parents. It is inside their closest relationships.

Then there's loneliness. Seventy-three per cent of Australian mothers with a child under six feel lonely at least a few times a month.

Then there’s the money. Australians experiencing financial stress are more than twice as likely to report high or very high psychological distress.

This is not just an “us” problem. In 2024 the US  Surgeon General issued a formal public health advisory on the wellbeing of parents. Not because parenting can be stressful. Everyone knows that. Because parental stress shapes children's long-term outcomes, which makes it a matter of public health and policy.

Parents carry responsibility for raising their children.

But the conditions in which they do it are created collectively.

Somebody Pays

The gap between how work is organised and how children actually live does not close by itself. In every household, somebody absorbs it. And we know a fair bit about who.

Women's participation in paid work is at a record high but the headline rate tells us nothing about the terms.

Remember the 55 per cent drop in income for mums? Behind that number are hundreds of thousands of compromises. Talent, experience and ambition do not disappear when a woman gives birth. Often, the opportunity to use them does.

Sometimes it’s discrimination — during pregnancy, during leave, on return. Sometimes it’s compromise. Women "choosing" part-time work because every full-time job assumes another adult is handling everything else. Turning down the promotion because they cannot get the care. Going freelance because nothing else fits.

We call it flexibility. What it usually is, is the maximum a woman can work given everything else we have left her holding.

It perpetuates an old arrangement: men earn more, women care more.

For single parents, there is no second adult to absorb anything. Every failure I am describing today lands on single parents and their children first, and hardest.

The arrangement costs dads something different.

When care is too expensive or unavailable, the consequence is not simply that one parent works less. Very often another works more.

Movember recently surveyed more than 1,200 fathers. Almost three in ten took no parental leave at all after their first child was born.

Among dads who did take leave, 56 per cent said it was not enough. More than half believed taking more would have put their career at risk.

They overwhelmingly describe the leave they did take as valuable. Dads want this time. They know it matters. Too many calculate that they cannot afford to take it.

Mums lose income. Dads lose time. Both lose choice.

The way care begins is very often the way it continues.

It shapes who learns the ropes. Who becomes the default parent. Whose work is treated as less interruptible. Who knows which child will only eat yoghurt from the blue bowl.

There is nothing innate about knowing why the blue bowl matters.

You learn by being there.

The impossible bind

For parents of young children seeking to raise and provide for their family one obstacle towers over the others: early childhood education and care.

Too many face an impossible bind. They cannot access it, they cannot afford it, or they cannot trust what is available. This isn’t perceived: the options families have are largely determined by what the market has delivered.

It’s delivered a childcare desert to 24 percent of Australians. It is most acute among regional and rural communities, as well as areas of greater disadvantage.

In small communities, enrolments fluctuate. There may never be enough children at one time for a service funded per child to stay commercially viable, however much families need it.

Subsidies cannot make a place or service exist.

When there is no service, parents cannot work the hours they need. Essential employers struggle to recruit. Young families leave town.

Among regional, rural and remote parents struggling to access care, our research shows 86 per cent were experiencing financial stress as a result.

Finding a place does not resolve the question of price.

Since 2018 day rates across all care types have increased by 44% more than 1.5 times the rate of inflation.

The Child Care Subsidy is supposed to make care affordable. But the ACCC found that subsidy increases only reduce families' bills temporarily, before fees go up.

That's why you can live in a well-served suburb and still have no genuinely affordable option.

The so-called hourly rate cap is not a cap on what a provider can charge. It’s the amount that the Government is willing to subsidise.

Providers can charge above it. Families pay the difference.

In 2020, only 12.5 per cent of centre-based services had average fees above the fee cap. Today, it is about 43 per cent.

Meanwhile parents are left deciphering subsidy percentages, hourly caps, session lengths and tax interactions just to work out whether another day of work leaves them ahead.

And then there is trust.

No parent should have to choose between confidence in their child's safety and the income their household depends on.

Too many feel they are making some version of that choice every morning. They hand over the person they love most in the world, walk back to the car, and carry a feeling of disquiet into the day.

Because they need to work. Because there’s nowhere else.

The workday starts. The unease doesn't stop.

What inaction costs

Children's development does not happen independently of the adults around them. Professor Andrew Whitehouse says the soil in which children grow is time, attention, space and energy. Australian parents have never been shorter of all four.

The most recent Australian Early Development Census found almost one in four children developmentally vulnerable in at least one domain when they started school. It used to be in 1 in 5.

The census doesn’t tell us why but a record low birth rate, rising family costs, rising parental distress, isolation and more children arriving at school behind are warning lights on the same dashboard.

The Minderoo Foundation’s latest Cost of Late Intervention report puts the annual cost of help that arrives too late at $22.3 billion, up 47 per cent since 2019.

So when people ask how we pay for supporting families, remember: we are already paying.

The question is whether we invest early enough to prevent harm, or keep paying for its consequences.

Victoria has begun to put that principle into its budget. Its Early Intervention Investment Framework considers both the cost of an intervention and what government could avoid spending on crisis services if it succeeds.

Bernadette Black and the Sydney Policy Lab have proposed a national approach. That deserves serious consideration.

We calculate the cost of investing in children with extraordinary discipline. We owe the same discipline to the cost of failing them.

And prevention begins with the conditions in which children grow up.

The first year

So what are the investments and care infrastructure families in Australia need?

The first year requires paid leave a family can afford to take.

We now provide eligible families with 26 weeks of government-funded paid parental leave, at the minimum wage, with superannuation and 4 weeks reserved for a partner.

That is significant progress and the Government deserves credit.

But time you are entitled to take is not necessarily time you can afford to take. Wanting to share the care does not always pay the mortgage.

When dads can share the care and take decent parental leave, it changes the whole family: who does what at home long term, what happens to mum's pay packet, and even whether the parents stay together.

Across the OECD, the total paid leave available to a family averages 55 weeks. Ours is less than half that.

Australia is one of a very small number of OECD countries that pays a flat rate rather than a proportion of what a parent actually earns. Ours is the national minimum wage which is less than half of average earnings.

We announce a scheme in terms of weeks but families experience it in dollars.

Our first ask is a pathway to 52 weeks of paid parental leave, moving towards replacement wages, with meaningful, dedicated time for fathers and partners and appropriate provision for single parents.

Many employers already provide paid parental leave. We need to build on that contribution and work out how government and employer schemes can fit together to support every family.

We are calling for a national roundtable bringing business, government, unions, academics and civil society together to plot that pathway: who contributes, how we get there, and how we make it work for families and employers alike.

Casual workers, contractors, self-employed parents and small-business owners must be part of that design from the beginning. Time with your baby should not depend on who employs you.

The next challenge is early childhood education and care

I remember the night of 8 October 2020 vividly.

Anthony Albanese was Opposition Leader, delivering his Budget reply. He put early childhood education and care at the centre of his plan for Australia's economic recovery.

And then he said this.

"If I'm Prime Minister, I will make quality, affordable childcare universal too."

Too. Alongside Medicare. Alongside superannuation.

I had spent a decade living these problems and arguing they deserved to be taken seriously. Here was an alternative prime minister recognising these intensely personal struggles belonged at the centre of economic policy.

And his Government has taken significant steps to give that ambition substance. The Three Day Guarantee. The educator wage rise. The Building Early Education Fund.

We campaigned hard for each of them. They are monumental changes, recognising children's entitlement to early learning, the value of educators' work, and the public responsibility to build services where the market has failed.

During last year's election campaign, the Prime Minister said he wanted access to early education to become as natural as access to public school.

So what kind of system can actually deliver that?

The current Child Care Subsidy is a financing mechanism. It is not, on its own, an early childhood education policy.

You have just heard what that means for families.

Where there is no viable market, a subsidy cannot create a place.

And where there is a market, a subsidy cannot reliably control the price.

Seventy per cent of long day care is now run by for-profit providers. Since 2013, 78 per cent of new services were opened by for-profit operators. Not every for-profit service is a poor service, and parents know that.

But ownership changes what a service is optimising for. When an owner's ultimate obligation is to shareholders, quality and staffing become cost lines to be managed. When the obligation is to children, they become the point.

It’s not small change we’re talking about.

The Child Care Subsidy costs taxpayers around $16 billion a year, heading for $21 billion by the end of the decade, and families still pay conservatively $12 billion on top.

At some point we have to stop topping up the bucket and look at the hole.

So The Parenthood's second ask is for Australia to move deliberately towards a service-funding model for Universal Early Childhood Education and Care, with the bulk of Commonwealth funding paid directly to services through base operating grants.

Fund the service, not the transaction.

Start with a base amount reflecting what high-quality provision actually costs. More for younger children, whose care costs more to deliver. More where geography and scale make provision more expensive.

Then add equity funding for disability, additional needs and disadvantage.

Attach conditions to the public money: fee controls, proper educator wages, transparency, inclusion, and enforceable safety and quality standards.

The quality we promise children depends on the educators and teachers around them: their skills, their experience and the conditions in which they are asked to work.

Make early education free for low-income families, and keep an income-tested subsidy for hours beyond a universal entitlement, so parents can work the hours they need.

Invest deliberately to create and sustain services where the market has not, including a stronger public, community and not-for-profit presence.

Public money should buy public outcomes.

And do it with the states, not around them. Right now we run different funding systems for the same child's learning and it’s driving parents and educators spare.

State funding for preschool. Commonwealth subsidies for long day care. The same three or four-year-old can move between different services and providers in a single week, because of the clash of systems. The child has not changed. Only the funding silo has.

Parents should not need a working knowledge of Australian federalism to access consistent early education.

We already use supply-side funding when we want public expenditure to deliver a specific outcome.

States directly fund preschool. The Building Early Education Fund recognises that when supply does not appear by itself, government has a role in making it appear.

The Worker Retention Payment funds services directly to improve educator wages, with conditions attached including constraints on fee growth.

Direct funding leads to better results and lower fees.

Ireland pays providers an operating grant, and in return those providers freeze their fees.

Norway caps what any family pays at 6 per cent of household income, and applies that cap to public and private services equally. 

Nations that do this well don’t just subsidise the parent and hope for the best.

Somebody has to be responsible for making the whole of it work. Safety and quality, where services exist, the workforce, the data, affordability and whether public money is actually delivering for children. Right now, nobody owns the whole picture.

We have argued for a National Early Childhood Education and Care Commission for eighteen months. In July, Education Ministers agreed to develop the proposal further, with advice due back to them next month. A Commission with real authority would finally give Australia someone responsible for making the whole thing work.

Universal cannot mean uniform. The entitlement is the same. The way we deliver it can differ.

In a growing suburb, it may be a large early learning centre. In a farming district, family day care, flexible in-home care, or mobile provision.

Children with additional needs or disabilities need genuine inclusion to be funded and supported as the rule not the exception.

For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, universal cannot mean extending the mainstream system a little further. It means sustainably funding community-controlled early years services, designed with communities, grounded in culture, and able to bring early learning together with health and family support.

Universal does not mean every community fitting the same model. It means a system capable of reaching every child.

Now, what does a directly funded universal system buy us?

CPD has modelled more than $3 billion in additional annual tax revenue, and up to $6.9 billion in annual GDP, from parents working more hours under a universal, low-cost system.

When you count the benefits to children, the Nobel prize-winning economist James Heckman shows that every $1 invested in quality early education returns between $7 and $12 back to society, in present value terms.

The Prime Minister wants access to early education to become as natural as access to public school. He’s right. And it should be funded like public school too.

If we define universal childcare as a bigger subsidy, we’ll be back here having the same conversation in ten years time.

If we decide to make it a directly funded system, it will be the best social and economic reform for Australians since Medicare.

Every year after that

Our third ask is for workplaces that treat caregiving as a normal part of working life, not an inconvenience to be managed

Because parental leave ends.

Early education ends.

Caring doesn't.

Adults have caring responsibilities outside of their paid work.

This is the piece government cannot legislate alone so there is an important role for employers.

First, in backing public policy reform for families. Not as welfare. As an enabler.

Every year, the Workplace Gender Equality Agency publishes the gender pay gap of every large employer in the country. Every year, leaders have to stand in front of their staff and explain why the gap is still there.

Much of that gap isn't made inside their companies. It's made in the first year of a baby's life. On a childcare wait list. In a parental leave scheme that makes it rational for mum to stay home and dad to go back.

No employer can fix that alone. Public policy can. If parents can't genuinely share the care, the gap will persist, however good an employer's intentions. Get the settings right and we disrupt it at the source.

Backing this reform isn't a favour to parents. It's the most effective thing an employer can do about the number they have to publish.

I gave you the number earlier. One in three workers is raising a child. That child is your future workforce.

The evidence on what work and care conflict does to retention, to productivity and the wellbeing of parents is overwhelming.

Supporting parents is not a wellbeing initiative. It is a workforce strategy.

The flexibility Marina offered me at Women's Agenda helped preserve a career. It shouldn't come down to luck.

We do not need to invent family-friendly work from scratch.

Parents At Work and UNICEF Australia created Family Friendly Workplaces to give employers standards to benchmark against: parental leave, flexibility, family care, wellbeing, leadership and measurement. It is evidence-based, and five years of data show it is making a real difference in the lives of families.

Some employers go further.

This year DISSH introduced an extra two weeks of paid leave each year for employees caring for children up to the age of twelve.

Indigo Construction has reimagined the working day around six-hour shifts. For a parent, that can mean paid work and school pick-up fit into the same day.

Not every employer can adopt the same policy. Not every job can be done flexibly.

But where it can be done, flexibility should be part of workforce infrastructure for everyone

Employers already publish their pay gap. The next step is measuring what drives it: what happens to people's careers after they become parents. Who returns? Who progresses? Who quietly leaves?

Government has the same job at a national level. In 2014, the Australian Human Rights Commission found around one in two mothers experienced discrimination during pregnancy, parental leave or on returning to work. That survey hasn't been repeated in twelve years. It must be reinstated.

We can't fix what we've stopped counting.

Paid leave and accessible, affordable, high quality early education and family friendly workplaces are not generous extras a wealthy country bestows on parents. They are the baseline infrastructure required to make work and care sustainable.

The baseline.

We are asking parents to raise children, earn enough to support them, absorb some of the highest housing and care costs in the developed world, navigate workplaces and schools that still assumes somebody else is at home, and somehow stay well while they do it.

Is it any wonder that for too many Australian families, the margin has become impossibly thin?

No margin in the bank account. No margin between the school bell and the end of the working day.

No margin when a child gets sick, for a second baby, for dad to be home more, for mums to choose.

We keep asking whether Australia can afford to support families.

I say, Australia cannot afford for raising a family to be unaffordable.

My eldest daughter is now sixteen. She and her sisters will make their own decisions about children. I do not know what those decisions will be.

But I do know this.

They deserve real choices, without grappling with systems designed for another era. We all do.

And I want the parents listening today to know that the answer cannot always be another private sacrifice from you.

As a nation, we need to build the systems that match modern parents' lives.

Raising a family is personal.

Making it possible is national.

Thank you.

Georgie Dent

CEO 

The Parenthood