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Kids Count: Better early childhood education and care in Australia >
Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item:
http://hdl.handle.net/2123/2149
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| Title: | Funding children’s services |
| Authors: | Cox, Eva
Hill, Elizabeth
Pocock, Barbara
Elliott, Alison |
| Keywords: | Early childhood education -- Australia.
Child care -- Australia. |
| Issue Date: | 2007 |
| Publisher: | Sydney University Press |
| Citation: | Kids Count: Better early childhood education and care in Australia |
| Abstract: | It is now over 30 years since the original federal Child Care Act was
passed in the dying days of the McMahon Liberal government but
funding and policy issues are still confused and contested. Many
more child care places exist and more funding is provided, but
Australia still lacks an integrated national childcare system that
recognises the importance of the early years, and the need for
effective national policy for both early childhood care and
education. Most of the problems are depressingly familiar, after my
thirty-plus years of involvement in this policy area, but there are
some worrying newer aspects.
In the three-plus decades of public debate on funding and
providing such services, there have been major shifts in political
frameworks and priorities. These affect supply, quality and
affordability, so our questions and answers need to be reframed in
current cultural social and political frameworks. The changing
demographic patterns, such as falling birth rates, delayed childbearing,
increased female education and workforce participation,
affect demand questions. The shifts in political frameworks will
affect supply and funding.
Universal publicly funded child care was one of the key feminist
issues we raised in the seventies, as more women were moving into
paid work. Our hoped-for national program of quality affordable
care ran up against the arguments about whether women should be
encouraged to be in paid work and pressure to retain the
separation between education and care. Before this divide could be
resolved, the arguments were overtaken by the 1980s change of
political directions to neo-liberalism which diminished the role of
the state. Child care was expanded but in a framework which shifted
collective risks from the individual by shifting from public services
to market forces. Commercial child care was funded by 1990 and
the expansion of market providers was encouraged by policy
changes after 1996. Overlapping with these changes in the mid 1990s were other,
often contradictory, ideological shifts away from the 1980s emphasis
on encouraging self provision and private providers. This move
signalled the ascendancy of neo-conservatism, indicated by the
move away from smaller deregulated governments to increasing
size, centralised controls and complex demands for accountability
by bureaucratic requirements. The new political masters used this
increase in interventions to promote moral agendas and neoconservative
views. The changes are most evident in the social policy
areas where government funding was to be directed at promoting
conservative social positions. |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/2123/2149 |
| ISBN: | 978-1-920898-70-0 |
| Appears in Collections: | Kids Count: Better early childhood education and care in Australia
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