Question Time

Child Care

Mr McBRIDE (MacKillop) (14:35): My question is to the Minister for Education. Can the minister provide an update to the house on plans to build a childcare facility in my electorate of MacKillop? With your leave, Mr Speaker, and that of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

Mr McBRIDE: In May last year, the state government pledged $3.5 million dollars for a childcare facility to be built in Kingston. This followed a $1.8 million commitment from the federal government in the 2022 budget.

The Hon. B.I. BOYER (Wright—Minister for Education, Training and Skills) (14:36): I thank the member for MacKillop for this question and also take the opportunity to thank him for the very collaborative way that he has worked with me and the department on what is a very complicated issue. I am sure members of this place know that we have an issue right across Australia, particularly in many regional and remote areas and also some rural centres as well, with not having access to child care. Certainly, Kingston South East has been one of those areas for a very long time.

The community down there, ably supported by the member for MacKillop, decided that enough was enough, essentially. They were sick of hearing excuses that had been made by governments of all persuasions for decades around why we could not come together across all tiers of government, federal, state and local, to find some kind of solution. It would be remiss of me not to mention the subject matter of the last few questions in here, given the skills shortage that we face as a nation and what we need to do to make sure that we can activate the workforce we need for projects like AUKUS but also for things like three-year-old preschool.

Part of that is to make sure that we can provide childcare arrangements for all those people who either might want to re-enter the workforce or may not have as many hours of paid employment as they would like to have. More often than not, in regional parts of our state, in those childcare deserts, the reason they cannot do that is that they cannot find childcare solutions.

So we took it upon ourselves to work with the member for MacKillop and a couple of very impressive local community members down there. I should take the opportunity here to mention their names because really the member for MacKillop and I get to finish off their work. They are the ones who have stood up and said that they were not going to take no for an answer. They are Kirsty Starling, Fiona Rasheed and Nat Traeger, who will be known to many people in this place as well.

These are uncharted waters in some respects for state governments because child care has usually been the domain of the federal government. I think the opaque nature of the way that the early years work, where it depends on what state you are in, whether it is run by local council, whether there is state government involvement or whether there is federal government involvement, makes it very hard for communities to understand what is happening and what they need to do to solve issues like childcare deserts.

What we came to do in the case of Kingston South East was work with the council, work with the local community and also work with the federal government. Both sides of politics federally made a commitment around providing money for the physical infrastructure build, which of course is another challenge here—the cost of all those builds has gone up—to leverage that money, find a site and co-locate it with the school in Kingston so that there is first and foremost a physical location to house child care and then work with the Department for Education around what kind of model of care we could actually provide.

I can update the member for MacKillop and the house on where we are at in terms of making good on that commitment. Council have engaged an architect to complete the concept design. I am told that representatives from Kingston South East are visiting Adelaide in early April to tour some early-years services to make sure that they can contribute to those designs in a meaningful way, to make sure that what we build there is not just fit for purpose for the generations of young people who will use it but is also what the local community wants.

We will continue to support the Kingston community to get the service off the ground. This will very much be a model I think that will be looked at very closely by other parts of the state, and indeed nationally. I see the member for Flinders nodding his head, and he is certainly a member of parliament who represents an area that is suffering from those child care deserts, as are other members on that side of the chamber.

I understand that what we are doing here is new, novel, a bit expensive too, but I do hope we can replicate what we have achieved down at Kingston South-East in other parts of our state as well.