It will be interesting to see what the Liberal Party unveils today in relation to the childcare reform debate. Where are we at so far? Last week’s announcement from Joe Hockey showed the Liberal Party will see Labor’s policy on parental leave and raise it grandparental leave. Did somebody say “me-too and a bit“? Oh, it was John:

John Howard was asked whether he would match Rudd’s child-care policy. Howard accused Rudd of theft. “We will be announcing a child-care policy and it’ll be our own policy and what Labor of course has done is me-too and a bit,” he said.

So far, Labor’s ’and a bit’ amounts to: up to two years’ unpaid parental leave, increasing the childcare rebate from 30% to 50% to be paid quarterly rather than annually; provide 15 hours of high-quality preschool for four year olds; build 260 new childcare centres in areas of need; and fully fund 1,500 new university places in early childhood education.
I guess we’ll see how far the Liberals will go in playing catch-up today.
The difficulty for the Liberals on childcare is it presents a deep philosophical conflict for them. On the one hand, adhering to conservative patriarchal traditions means they want to argue that mothers should stay at home to care for their infants. As such they are opposed to policies that make childcare easier and cheaper to access as this translates to more mothers re-entering the workforce.
On the other hand, the Liberal Party focus on growth at all costs and the emphasis on ‘aspiration’ means that there is record household debt, demand is driving inflation and interest rates up, which then causes further debt stress. In that climate, more people have to work . But full employment of course means more women working. And–if you believe conservative writers like Angela Shanahan and Bettina Arndt–flinging traumatised infants into Dickensian institutions. Bloody feminists, eh?

Already, the Liberal Party’s announcement on parental leave would‘ve surely ticked Shanahan off, given her oft-stated views that women should be satisfied with being the ‘back-up to the main breadwinner’. Essentially it shows the Liberals are modern enough to recognise that the parent who opts to work less might be the father. But it’s a token nod at gender equity unless the Liberals go further, because women are still the ones who are disincentivised from working, and to whom childcare reform will make a huge difference. I have yet to read where Joe Blow says he had to give up his career because he couldn’t find childcare. That men should continue working full-time is presented as a given. This is no surprise, given in the patriarchal tradition they still earn more, but hopefully measures towards gender equity in work/family and IR policies will mean that it will become more common for men to consider trying out the ‘daddy track’. Which parent will be main breadwinner is something for couples to negotiate between them and what is expected from government is to set up an appropriate level playing field.
Commentators from the right have come out to attack Labor’s proposals but fail to convince, maybe because they are aware that voters are quite keen on childcare reform. Recently we had Angela Shanahan’s take in The Australian (’Essential platform’; no link available), and on Friday Bettina Arndt had a go at it.
According to Shanahan and Arndt, childcare generally is bad for children, and parents who ‘park’ their children there are roughly guilty of neglect. But the guilt-trip is a beat-up.
For starters, the existing research is not clear on the effects of childcare on children. There are varying interpretations of the US longitudinal study that Shanahan and other critics often rely on, including some positive effects. Elsewhere the more general findings have been summarised as finding that:

“A compendium of findings from a study funded by the National Institute of Health reveals that a child’s family characteristics and children’s experiences within their families have more influence on a child’s development through age four and a half than does a child’s experience in childcare…Even though links existed between childcare features and child development, the quality of interactions between mothers and children was more important for children’s development. Children did better if mothers were more sensitive, responsive and attentive. Mothers were more likely to be like this if they were more educated, lived in more economically advantaged households, and had more positive personalities.” (my emphasis)

Note that last bit–it’s hardly an argument against women working. And note that it’s quality of mothering, as distinct from quantity of care that is the key.
Still, Shanahan forges ahead with her guilt-trip, claiming there is evidence that childcare itself, particularly for the subset of children who attend fulltime from infancy, is “severely deleterious” to a child’s development. And meanwhile, we all seem to agree that more research is needed into the ‘links between childcare features and child development’, which is a quality rather than ideological issue (and more on that below).
In her column, Arndt is keen to dismiss the separate issue of cross-cultural comparability of the existing research as trivial, but that criticism remains valid and highlights the urgent need for culturally specific longitudinal research. Both sides of the debate agree that there needs to be research in Australia, and better statistical gathering, and generally a lot less confusion in the debate. The two major issues of age of child and length of time in care that regularly crop up in this debate seem intuitively reasonable concerns to have, and there is broad agreement that carer:infant ratios need to come down, but further research on these critical factors is clearly needed. But meantime, be suspicious of claims generalised to childcare as a whole.
The conservative position is also a beat-up because infants being in full-time care is not the norm in Australia. The findings of the HREOC report entitled It’s about time: Women, men, work and family 2007 indicate that:

“Few children attend preschool on a full-time basis with the majority attending two or three days per week (37 and 33 per cent respectively), with less than seven per cent attending five days per week.”

Here, conservative criticism of Labor’s universal policy is strange. Labor is talking about access to two days a week of preschool for four year olds, not babies.
Aside from the issues of age of child and length of time in care, Shanahan also maintains that there are clear differences between the childcare known as ‘preschool’ and the childcare known as ‘long day-care’ , and Feminists Etc supposedly want to conflate the two for ideological purposes. It’s okay for Shanahan to want to differentiate them for ideological purposes, of course.
Shanahan‘s argument for differentiating between them is that preschools are superior to long day-care centres for reasons both of quality and of ideology. First, the quality issue. Preschool programs are widely considered to have better educational content and more highly-trained staff, whereas long day-care centres may sometimes have only somewhat decorative “preschool” programs with untrained teachers.
Nobody disputes the fact that quality varies, both across forms of care and within them. The point of childcare reform is surely to try to achieve similar standards across forms of care so that no matter what a childcare centre is labelled, all children can be assured of receiving the best possible and most stimulating care.

“It is to the advantage of supporters of more institutional childcare, whether they are policymakers ideologically committed to pushing more women in to the workforce or people in the childcare industry, to see all forms of care as equal, irrespective of a child’s age and the hours involved.”

Shanahan’s wrong. It is to the advantage of the children who currently attend childcare centres with sub-standard programs. It is also to the advantage of the children living in areas where there are no preschools, only long day-care centres.
The quality issue makes universal childcare attractive, but conservatives are stingy about the expense and their position is that targeted programs are both more effective and less costly. And actually, there’s no reason Labor’s universal approach couldn’t also be supplemented by targeted early-intervention programs for disadvantaged children. There may be costs involved, but you get what you pay for on this issue. Investment here would’ve made a lot more sense than the inflationary tax cuts.
Quality remains a critical issue because there is such variation in standards–as Arndt describes it, childcare “ranges from excellent, well-supervised programs to very worrying daycare centres where children, even infants, spend long hours competing for the attention of their pitifully few, underpaid and poorly skilled carers.” Since this must partly be a skills shortage problem, you’d think Arndt and Shanahan would be praising Labor’s funding of early education degrees.
In the end, though, even if you did achieve parity of quality, Shanahan would still object to long day-care centres on ideological grounds. This boils down to the fact that long day-care centres accept children under two and have extended opening hours and as such, can make it possible for women to have full-time careers even if their partners also choose to keep theirs. Strangely, Shanahan ignores the fact that preschools also routinely offer a before/after hours service, for extra fees, and as such are probably equally useful to working parents. At least the bipartisan policy on parental leave, a long time coming, is a start in encouraging more men to consider being the full-time carer of their infant. But childcare reform must go further. Where parents choose to–or find themselves forced to–use childcare, it must be of the highest possible quality and have high standards of accountability, and it must be accessible and affordable.
The problem for conservatives is that they are ideologically against any policies that might improve access to childcare through things like reductions in upfront cost and increased availability of services, because these are the things that help women rejoin the workforce. Yet they’re compromised by the Liberal focus on the economic argument for dual income families. So the most confused conservatives can manage is a scare campaign that, while being ideologically aimed at working mothers, only serves to give all parents who use childcare a big guilt trip.
Anyway, stay tuned for more rabbits from the rat’s hat…

Commentary in this debate lately seems to require the inclusion of a disclaimer of possibly vested interests. So I hereby declare that my three-and-a-half year old child has been going to an excellent long daycare centre on a part-time basis since he was about one-and-a-half. If that makes any difference to my arguments to anyone, I’d be curious to hear.

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