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Tuesday, 23 August 2011
Page: 5166

Senator FARRELL (South Australia—Parliamentary Secretary for Sustainability and Urban Water) (13:14): I thank Senator Nash for her question. We probably need to put the measure in some perspective. The way I propose to do that is to indicate that the vast majority of families using approved child care—some 95 per cent or 759,000—will not reach the reduced annual cap in the financial year 2011-12 and therefore will not be affected by this change. Less than five per cent of the families in the year 2011-12 using approved child care will be affected by this change and it will be very modest—there will be on average a $7 per week impact on these families. The measure will not affect childcare benefit payments to lower income families. Those benefit rates and their thresholds will continue to be indexed in line with the current policy.

I further point out to Senator Nash—and this might be of some interest to her constituents—$59.4 million of the expected $81 million savings from this measure will be redirected to help improve the quality of up to 142 budget based funded services by 2014 that operate predominantly in rural, remote and Indigenous communities and provide care to some of Australia's most vulnerable children. Almost half of these services are the only provider of child care in their community.