Childcare provider Goodstart Early Learning has made a last-ditch plea to the Senate to ensure low-income families are not worse off as a consequence of the Turnbull government’s long-awaited childcare changes.
While the $1.6bn package is expected to be passed by the Senate either on Thursday or Friday, it is not yet clear what amendments will be added during debate.
Goodstart on Thursday released modelling showing close to 100,000 families would be disadvantaged by the package if it passed the Senate without amendments ensuring that all children can access at least two days of early learning.
Labor, the Greens and One Nation have expressed interest in amendments to ensure low-income families can access at least 15 hours of early learning – but it is not yet clear how the package will come together.
The Turnbull government cut deals on childcare with various crossbenchers in order to allow a revised savings proposal to be submitted to the Senate on Wednesday.
That package, which includes a freeze in the rate of family tax benefit for two years, to help offset the cost of the new childcare reforms, passed the Senate on Wednesday night.
The Nick Xenophon Team demanded as part of its negotiations the government maintain $61.8m in existing childcare funding for Indigenous, remote and disadvantaged communities, and commit an additional $49m for services in remote communities or highly disadvantaged communities.
Crossbenchers Derryn Hinch and David Leyonhjelm sought agreement that the government would ban childcare subsidies for families earning more than $350,000. Leyonhjelm also wants a gradual cutoff in subsidies once family incomes reach $200,000.
Labor has not ruled out supporting the package if the government is prepared to accept amendments. The shadow minister for early childhood education, Kate Ellis, met the education minister, Simon Birmingham, on Wednesday.
Ellis subsequently wrote to Birmingham saying Labor was concerned proposed changes to the activity test “will halve access for many vulnerable and disadvantaged children”.
She said Labor agreed with the childcare sector that the government needed to increase the base entitlement for children’s early education from 12 hours to 15 hours, and increase the household income threshold for the low-income entitlement from $65,000.
The government may have to rely on Labor or the Greens given the former Liberal senator, Cory Bernardi, and Leyonhjelm, the Liberal Democratic party senator, are signalling they may not support the package when it comes to a final vote.
In the late-night Senate vote on the savings measures connected to the childcare reforms, the Tasmanian senator Jacqui Lambie castigated crossbenchers for voting with the government to impose a freeze on family benefit rates, which she said amounted to a cut.
The finance minister, Mathias Cormann, said a freeze was not a cut.
“No family will actually receive less as a result of the changes today,” the finance minister told the Senate. “They will receive the same payment, many of them will receive higher payments because, of course, relevant low-income eligibility thresholds will continue to be indexed.”
But Lambie rejected this argument. “You are taking money off them,” the Tasmanian senator said. “I don’t give a stuff which way you look at it. Freeze is taking money off them. That is what is going on. That is the truth.”
Lambie also criticised the One Nation leader, Pauline Hanson, for doing a deal that would leave some of her voters and supporters worse off.
She said the former leader of the Palmer United party, Clive Palmer, had come unstuck politically by doing what she termed “dirty deals with the Libs”.
“He stopped doing what he said he would do for the battler,” Lambie said. “He was full of it.”
Hanson rejected the critique. “No deals have been done.”
“I have always looked at policy based on what is right for the Australian people, so I don’t bargain with people,” Hanson said.
