Rural families unable to work as childcare waitlists stretch years into the future

Parents are waiting years for places at daycare centres to open up, leaving them unable to return to work at health services, schools and farms across the country.

Sourcing childcare is a challenge Kaitlin Leonard is familiar with.

She has been unable to find a place for her 20-month-old daughter in Griffith, NSW, where centre waitlists are up to 70 families long.

“I’ve had a terrible battle with it,” Ms Leonard said.

Workforce shortages are being made worse by a chronic lack of childcare across regional Australia, according to advocacy groups, as deadlines for national inquiries into the issue approach.

But the federal early learning minister has stopped short of committing to expanding subsidies to cover rural families forced to hire private nannies.

Family finances stretched

Agricultural lobby groups say members have repeatedly named childcare as a critical issue in annual surveys.

Ms Leonard is the major projects general manager at GrainGrowers, which has held a series of roundtables with industry and politicians to find solutions to the problem.

“Family daycares are at capacity, so we ended up going down the route of finding a private nanny,” Ms Leonard says.

“But of course that’s private, there’s no access to the Child Care Subsidy, so the financial burden is greater because there’s not that access to government support.

“The problem and the challenge of access to childcare in the bush is a very big one, with complicated issues that have to do with the dire need for funding reform.”

Industry inquiries underway

Childcare industry inquiries by the Productivity Commission and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) are underway.

The ACCC’s review of the childcare services market is due by the end of the year.

An interim report found there were limited incentives for childcare providers to operate in remote and disadvantaged areas, making draft recommendations for government intervention to secure care for regional communities.

A draft report from the Productivity Commission’s inquiry into the early childhood education and care sector is expected later this month.

That inquiry, which is examining centre-based day care, family day care and in-home care, could recommend a universal 90 per cent subsidy rate.

Federal Early Childhood Education Minister Anne Aly said the inquiries would examine the possibility of reforming the subsidy to provide support for regional families who were dependent on private carers.

Looking for solutions

More than 90 per cent of early learning centres in Victoria have waitlists for new families, according to a survey of childcare centres by the United Workers Union (UWU).

One third of families will be waiting more than a year for a childcare place.

The UWU said there was a clear solution to the childcare crisis — increasing wages, to retain and attract skilled staff.

The union said one third of centres in urban areas were using agency staff to plug daily or weekly staff shortages, but agency staff were out of reach for rural and regional childcare centres.

Professor Jane Mills from the La Trobe Rural Health School said childcare shortages in regional areas were exacerbating the health crisis.

Health and care staff — the majority of which are women — work irregular hours and need access to reliable support services, she said.

“Childcare is often a major issue in rural and regional Australia, and it provides a real barrier to women, in particular, re-entering the workforce,” Professor Mills said.

Victorian MP Roma Britnell said regulations needed to be made “more flexible and nimble” to expand the pool of people who could provide care.

The former dairy producer has called for a parliamentary inquiry into childcare in Victoria, but she said that motion was not supported.

Ms Britnell said creative solutions that would maintain child safety were possible, such as allowing “daycare mums” to operate at workplaces.

“We know that women and men have been looking after children for thousands of years in a safe way, without having to have a Cert III [in Early Childhood Education and Care],” Ms Britnell says.

“While I totally endorse that’s the plan we need to move forward with into the future, while we’re in crisis we have to come up with solutions tomorrow.

 “Workplaces are desperate — the police can’t fill shifts, the hospitals can’t fill shifts, teachers are not able to get back into the classrooms. These are vital services.”