TRANSCRIPT – ABC RADIO MILDURA-SWAN HILL – BREAKFAST

Angie Bell MP
Shadow Minister for Early Childhood Education
Shadow Minister for Youth
Federal Member for Moncrieff

TRANSCRIPT

ABC RADIO MILDURA-SWAN HILL – BREAKFAST

30 October 2024

Subjects: Shadow Minister’s trip to Mallee, Multi-employer bargaining

E&OE…………………………………………………………………………………………………

ANDREW MURDOCH:

Angie Bell is the Federal Shadow Minister for Early Childhood Education. She’s a member of the Liberal National Party of Queensland and the Member for Moncrieff, but for the past few days she has been touring the Mallee, investigating the child care services available in the region. Shadow Minister, good morning.

ANGIE BELL MP:

Good morning, Andrew. How are you this morning?

ANDREW MURDOCH:

I’m quite well. What prompted this tour?

ANGIE BELL MP:

Well, it was your local member, Anne Webster, who has been very focused and dedicated on this particular issue across the great electorate of Mallee. Yesterday, we undertook a tour where we visited a number of towns, Robinvale, Cohuna, Beulah and Rainbow all in the one day. It was quite a very long itinerary in a very small six-seater, and we crisscrossed the electorate and visited many areas and spoke with lots of stakeholders, including council representatives from Swan Hill, Gannawarra, Yarriambiack, hope I got that right, and Hindmarsh Council. It was a fantastic tour of the electorate and having a look at the difficulties that families here in your communities are facing.

ANDREW MURDOCH:

I hope the aircon was working in the car. It would have been a lovely day. But were you impressed with what you saw in terms of child care services available? What did you see?

ANGIE BELL MP:

Well, we saw a lot of parents, a lot of early childhood educators, school principals, businesses and services like health services, and we visited some kindergartens, but what we saw was a community under a great deal of stress because of the inequity of access in Mallee to early childhood education and care.

We saw the effects of mental health concerns, the isolation effects that it has for particularly mothers with their husbands, who are often farmers in this region, who don’t have access to early childhood education and care, and the family stress levels, of course, that increase when you’re not able to work and bring in those two incomes. As I’m sure your listeners are aware, we’re in a cost-of-living crisis and it’s difficult to pay the bills, and especially during harvest time as well, where women are often left for long hours with their children to care.

There are all these concerns and the big point too here is that the Government has spent about $8 billion since coming to power on extra child care subsidy and pay rises for workers, well deserved pay rises for workers, but they have not delivered one new place in the great electorate of Mallee, and I think families are upset about that.

ANDREW MURDOCH:

Well two things, one they must have known you were coming or known you were going to chat to us, because just released I think yesterday, we saw a media release about six new state run, this is on a state level, but run child care centres including in Cohuna and Red Cliffs, so that is a little bit if positive news. And as you mentioned there the early childcare workers across 64 providers will receive a 10 per cent pay rise in December, that is signed off kind of, that is going to get signed off today as part of the first multi-employer bargaining agreement. They’re good initiatives are they not?

ANGIE BELL MP:

Absolutely, however I would point out that some announcements have been made about promised centres but there has been no further detail that has come from the state government. So, I will be talking to and sending letters to the state government around that on behalf of your communities to ask them when exactly that will be delivered.

In terms of the bargaining agreement, I think we should wait and see what is going on with that because that has been going on for about 12 months now. I don’t wish to pre-empt what that agreement will look like, but certainly the government is putting in a 10 per cent pay rise from 1 December, and another five per cent next year in December.

These are all issues our communities are facing, those educators deserve a pay rise because they do the hard work while others go to work to pay their bills. It is a very important step for the sector. But here in Mallee, families are screaming out for a place and extra child care subsidy is no good to them because they can’t even access a place, and that is the problem here.

ANDREW MURDOCH:

If you’ve just joined us, we are chatting to Angie Bell, who is the Federal Shadow Minister for Early Childhood Education, who has been touring the Mallee the last few days. There is an election coming up next year, if instead of the Shadow Minister you were the Minister responsible for this, what can you tell us you’d actually do for this region?

ANGIE BELL MP:

I’d like to see a bit more flexibility and choice built into the sector. It is difficult because you have got two levels of government who regulate this area, state and federal. The Federal Government delivers child care subsidy, the states deliver some infrastructure and they do all the audits and undertake those measures as well.

It is a difficult area to reform. There has been a lot of work done on our side, I’ve looked into a number of different policies, but I am not really in a position today to announce what our policy is. I would like to assure those in your community that we are fighting for them, that Anne Webster, the local Member who is very passionate about this issue is fighting for them in Canberra. We are working together to try and come up with something to solve some of these problems.

ANDREW MURDOCH:

So you’re kind of saying what is going on right now isn’t good enough, but we don’t currently have a plan to fix it?

ANGIE BELL MP:

We’re in Opposition at the moment Andrew, so we are formulating our policies as we head towards the next election, which we think will be around about May according to the Prime Minister’s schedule. He thinks that things will improve before May, I am not sure they will for him, he is having a difficult week, and Australians know it.

We are working on our policy so that we can deliver for people in regional and rural Australia, and that is very important.

ANDREW MURDOCH:

Shadow Minister, thanks for taking the time to have a chat with us this morning, we appreciate it.

ANGIE BELL MP:

My pleasure, have a good day Andrew.

[ENDS]