Senator CHRIS EVANS (3:01 PM) —I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Minister for Family and Community Services (Senator Newman), to questions without notice asked by Senators Evans, West and Crowley today, relating to child care.

What we saw today was the exposure of a very serious issue. I appreciate that the minister has at this stage denied involvement, and I will take that on face value. In July this year the Department of Family and Community Services produced a very highly misleading report entitled Child Care in Australia . The government's report purports to support the government's claims that government expenditure on child care, the number of child-care places and the number of child-care centres are all growing. It attempts to paint a very rosy picture of child care in Australia. The minister launched the report and, when the industry disputed the claims contained in it, she said on the 7.30 Report :

People should believe in me because I am from the government and I have the department's statistics.

She has used some of the department's statistics and left others out. She has used some of the department's old statistics but refused to use the more recent ones. She has statistics that, for the first time, move figures from one column to another to create the impression of growth. She has not produced the statistics the department has that show that her claims for child care are false. She has not allowed to be published those statistics that show child-care funding falling, child-care places falling and the number of child-care centres declining. They are not in the report.

It is interesting that the report is very selective in its use of statistics. Different time lines are used—different periods of time are used as points of comparison. The report was released in July-August 1999, but the most recent figures in it from her department date back to June 1998. Those are the most recent. On occasions when it has suited them they have used even older figures. At best, the figures are 13 months old. That made us very suspicious. When we looked at the document we became even more suspicious because it is the thinnest document ever produced by the department—32 key items of data that had been in previous department child-care updates are not included. Why have those 32 key items of data been excluded on this occasion?

We know that the department has figures—and I have been given copies of them—that show the impact of the government's cutbacks on child care. I know that the minister has access to those statistics. Her department has access to those statistics, but a decision was made not to use them. We want to know why. The government purports to represent what is happening in child care in Australia in this publication, when they have statistics that create a very different picture. Not only is it a claim by the opposition that a very different picture emerges; the department's own more recent statistics prove that, but they were not published. We want to know why they were not published.

The number of child-care services actually fell from 4,170 in June 1998 to 4,120 in December 1998, but those figures were not included. There were no figures on the number of child-care services in this report, but there had been in all previous ones. The number of places in centre based care fell from 194,600 to 193,300 from June to December 1998, but those figures were not included. When the minister came to launch the report in August, someone chose not to include figures that had been available since December.

We know that the number of community based places has not risen by 5,400, as this report would have us believe. I do not know what the real number is because it is unclear. A complete dodge has been used in the presentation of the figures for community based places that is totally unbelievable. We know that the out of school hours figure showing a growth of 60,000 places is not the result of the creation of new places but the result of a change in methodology and the way things are funded. Those figures are used to support the government's claims that they have created 100,000 more places. They have misled us and misused figures; they have used old figures and omitted more recent figures all to try to paint a picture of child care that everybody in the child-care industry and the community knows is not true. Funding, places and centres are all declining. The government has the statistics to prove that, but they refuse to publish them. Instead they have a collation of old and carefully selected statistics that attempt to prove the opposite—that child care in Australia is growing. The reality is that it is not. The minister has those figures and we want to know why they were not used. (Time expired)