Childcare desert sucking the life out of regional towns
For psychologist and mother-of-two, Tegan Podubinski, a lack of childcare access will leave her community 20 weeks poorer in mental health services this year.
“We have have a very limited mental health workforce,” Dr Podubinski told AAP.
She is an example of the one-in-three Australians who live in a childcare desert, where there is one childcare spot for every three or more children, data from Victoria University’s Mitchell Institute shows.
In Wangaratta and its surrounding northeast Victorian catchment, more than nine in ten people live in a childcare desert, which means fewer doctors, nurses and teachers can offer full-time services in regions already under-served by worker shortages.
“I’m really privileged in that I have three days a week of care and a very supportive social environment and community around me,” she told AAP.
“Every time you jump on the Facebook notice page, you see somebody desperately looking for access to childcare and trying to figure out how the heck they’re going to be able to work.”
Dr Podubinski sometimes takes her children to her work as a research fellow, or has been able to have Henry join a playgroup at a rural school when she offers treatment.
“My daughter absolutely loves it; she has adored coming into work,” Dr Podubinski said.
“My son, Henry, on the other hand, he’s probably a bit young to do that, being three, and he’s also not as social.”
Despite the support, her limited days of childcare forced her to knock-back a role supervising rural psychologists-in-training, a missed opportunity to expand the local mental health workforce.
“These students would would have been likely to stay in a rural area,” Dr Podubinski said.
“You can’t have a rural health workforce without the basic infrastructure that’s needed for a rural health workforce to exist.”
Maddy Butler is the campaign director at parent and carer group, The Parenthood, which is working to highlight the flow-on effects of poor childcare access.
“Teachers, nurses and allied health professionals have shared their frustrations of not being able to work and earn as much as they want to,” Ms Butler told AAP.
“They earn less, while the entire town lacks essential services.”
Ms Butler said government subsidies were welcome, but did not go to the heart of the issue.
“The regions need better access to early learning services, full stop,” she said.
“Even with the subsidy, there simply aren’t enough early childhood education places and the federal government needs to intervene.”
Ms Butler and Indi MP Helen Haines hosted playdates in July to hear from northeast Victorian parents and were shocked by two-year waitlists.
“I commonly heard young mothers saying that as soon as they had a positive pregnancy test, they were on the phone to the local childcare providers to put their name down,” Dr Haines said.
Mothers were driving more than 120 kilometres to access childcare, while grandparents were also cutting work hours to help ferry kids around.
“We’ve got willing workers out there in our communities who want to be participating fully in the workforce, but simply can’t because they can’t get childcare,” Dr Haines said.
Centres that wanted to provide more places did not have the workforce to provide them, she said.
Better wages and conditions were key to addressing the workforce shortage, early education consultant Lisa Bryant said.
“The wages are lower than retail,” Ms Bryant told AAP.
The federal government announced provisioning in the May budget for a wage boost for the sector, which has yet to be finalised by Fair Work Commission.
The government is yet to table a Productivity Commission final report on government services, but the commission has indicated it would call for a minimum of three days per week of care and education for children under five.
The Centre for Policy Development has proposed that each of those three days cost parents no more than $10 per day, and wants the childcare subsidy model replaced with direct funding of education centres.
Historically, rural childcare began with groups of mothers banding together and applying for government grants to offer services as not-for-profits.
“That just doesn’t happen anymore,” Ms Bryant said.
Around 70 per cent of the sector was now run by for-profit entities, she said.
“There isn’t that money there to enable families and communities to organise their own childcare needs,” Ms Bryant said.
Family daycare – where trained and registered educators provide care from their homes – could help solve the regional childcare crisis, but funding has been scarce due to scams.
Ms Bryant said in some regional and remote areas there were not enough children to ensure profitable centres, and bigger companies were cautious of setting up centres in staff-starved regions.
Back in Wangaratta, Dr Podubinski notes she’s privileged to be part of a dual-income household, despite the constant manoeuvring.
“That’s not the case for a lot of people within our community,” she said.
“If they can’t get back to work it’s the difference between them losing the house and the difference between them feeding their kids and that’s absolutely not okay.”
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