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Further implications
COVID19 has had a dramatic effect on many social issues in Australia. Emergency measures designed to assist during the onset of the disease in this country have sparked debate regarding whether these measures should be continued into the future.
The question of whether childcare in Australia should be free or more heavily subsidised has been significantly contested prior to the pandemic. The issue revolved around two concerns - the first, the educational and social benefits potentially gained by a properly regulated childcare industry with a focus on the child's intellectual and social wellbeing; and the second, how best to facilitate women's more equal participation in the workforce as a gender equity issue and a means of advancing the national economy.
A major impetus toward using childcare as an opportunity for social, emotional, and intellectual development came with the Gillard government's Early Years Learning Framework introduced in 2010.
Together with the Framework outlining the program to be followed were requirements regarding staff qualifications and staff: children ratios. Subsequent Liberal governments have modified these ratios requiring fewer highly qualified staff. Debate within Australia centring on early childhood education as a right in the same way as primary and secondary education are seen as rights has lost heat over the last ten years.What has remained a live issue is the cost to parents of childcare in Australia and the impediment that this forms for women wishing to return to work after starting a family. The COVID19 period of free childcare has given further momentum to protests over the large expense that childcare represents for parents. The difficult conditions in which many families will find themselves as a result of the virus, with some parents suffering reduced working hours or reduced business profitability, means that families will be even more unable and unwilling to accept the high cost of childcare.
Many economists have suggested that keeping childcare free or dramatically increasing the amount of the childcare subsidy would be an important measure to help the country work its way out of the financial crisis caused by COVID19. It would act as an important means of allowing women to take up whatever employment was available to them and would significantly increase consumption.
What the future holds is difficult to predict. The Morrison government only ever intended free childcare as a temporary support for the childcare industry and a means whereby as much of the workforce as possible could return to employment. The measure was entirely economically motivated as was its premature withdrawal after three and a half months when it was originally pledged for six. Its purpose was to prop up the childcare industry and so it was withdrawn as soon as that end was considered to have been achieved.
What now remains to be seen is whether Australian parents will readily accept the withdrawal of free childcare. Normally voters make their displeasure at policy changes apparent at elections. In the complicated context of a pandemic, it is hard to determine what voters will consider a job well done. If COVID19 has been brought substantially under control by the time of the next election then voters may consider that sufficient to give the Morrison government another term without demanding more policy changes to support employment.
However, if economic hardship has come to seem as significant as the progress of the virus, then voters may well demand that either the current government or its replacement do more to support citizens' standard of living. If this is the case, then the question of childcare subsidies, if not a free service, will again have to be addressed as it forms a vital component of many families' capacity to survive financially.
Regrettably, while the debate is currently focused on the immediate economics of childcare, more significant questions about what types of childcare programs should be supplied and how they might be funded are being largely ignored.