Free childcare was one of the goals of second wave feminism, when we took up the cause of gender equity in the 70s. It seemed logical, because children need access to other children and expert care to develop the skills that parents can’t provide, and allowed particularly mothers, as the primary carer, time for paid work and other activities. After all, child rearing was not intended to be the sole responsibility of parents but a community: “it takes a village to rear a child”. But community child rearing was harder after urbanisation, and the contraceptive pill offered control over fertility, so women more time for other roles.
As an active early advocate for funding childcare, my hearing the prime minster on the radio announcing free childcare in the midst of the very scary Covid-19 pandemic was startling. It was obviously too good to be true, and my examination of the newly devised policy proved it.
The billion-dollar-plus program is proving to be an odd version of public funding as its primary aims do not target specifically the needs of children or mothers – though these may benefit from it – but instead provide a relatively short-term (maximum six months) quite generous funding of care centres and services.
These centres will offer free care to those attending and free continuing places to enrolled non-attenders. The justification is the massive need for the mainly female qualified healthcare workforce to manage virus patients after childcare centres threatened to close as anxious parents withdrew children.
Keeping childcare centres open would allow workers in the services to be covered by the jobkeeper payments of $750 per week and reduce the numbers of official unemployed, as well as freeing essential, mainly female health and welfare workers to continue in their needed jobs (and others in unrelated jobs). Together with the wage subsidy, the new grants would cover the costs so care would be free. Note, luckily for the government, most childcare workers are grossly underpaid so the costs would be covered. The sums will work!
There’s a big benefit for the government by the reduction in the numbers of unemployed on jobkeeker payments. Low-paid female workers are likely to remain in their vital jobs, as will others who are still employed. Together with the earlier massive commitment to businesses of jobs and grants, this program is obviously targeted at the image of the government’s competence in a crisis. Rather than using the crisis as the means to reform the problematic high-fee structures and maldistribution of childcare services – let alone needed reforms to very low pay rates – good PR appears to be the aim. The questions of excessive profits made at taxpayer expense by too many centres, and poor community links, are also ignored as politicians clearly state the current model will be reinstated as soon as the crisis passes.
The brief experience of free care is also problematic. New users will be encouraged to take on unused places, others to increase their use. However, there are criteria set for prioritising essential job holders. Who decides these conflicting needs and what happens to these new users when the scheme is switched off? There are also unanswered questions about the eligibility of family day care and owners of multiple centres who may be too big for the jobkeeper scheme. There are also a range of unanswered questions about how non-attenders who are covered can reclaim their places.
Interestingly, the Labor party and the unions are backing the program without any signs that there is also a need for reform of the current funding. This brief glimpse of free care will raise expectations that are unlikely to be met when these one-offs are withdrawn. So underpaid workers and overpriced, badly located services will continue to be problems.
But we will be left with a brief example of the benefits of free care. My dreams in 1972 were that public acceptance of care for kids would mirror the early years public school provisions. As a sole parent I committed myself to this issue as I had had serious problems finding care for my child. Funding of services was started by Phillip Lynch under Billy McMahon. By 1983, we had convinced the incoming Hawke government to plan and fund community-based care services as an entitlement. A decade later saw the effects of a major shift in policy by the incoming Howard government. It removed the direct conditional childcare funding that was based on needs, and encouraged for-profit services that abandoned and distorted the process. So now a once useful part of local community services are mostly replaced by a profit-oriented business model.
Maybe the brief experience of thousands of users of the temporary model will create the demand for a serious revolution in this (and other) community services. Maybe my brief flash of nostalgic hope was a sign that place-based community services that meet user needs would reappear, and the social contract that offered trust between those elected to serve citizens’ needs and voters, who are sick of being just powerless customers.
Maybe!