EDITORIAL: Prime Minister hoping for clear air on child care poll pitch

Get any group of parents of pre-school aged children together and it’s an inevitability that talk will eventually turn to child care, and the complicated system of taxpayer-funded subsidies on which the system relies.

For good reason.

For thousands of Australian families, childcare subsidies are an essential lifeline. Without them, the exorbitant cost of child care — often in excess of $150 per day — would keep many parents, mostly women, out of the workforce for years longer than necessary.

That would come at a significant cost to the economy. Getting mums back into the workforce after kids is an important driver of productivity. There’s also a benefit to kids themselves of early education and socialisation.

So it’s little wonder that Anthony Albanese is keen to make his Government’s commitment to expand eligibility for subsidies and spend $1 billion building new childcare centres in under-serviced regional and outer-suburban areas a key election battleground.

Wednesday was the third day of the Prime Minister’s childcare policy blitz, announcing at a campaign-style rally in Brisbane his plan to dump the activity test which requires parents to be working, studying, volunteering or looking for work to access subsidies. The policy would guarantee families earning less than $530,000 combined income three days a week of subsidised care.

Like that cohort doing battle in the trenches of the early years of parenthood, child care is all Mr Albanese wants to talk about.

The problem for him is that the rest of the country is keen to talk about other issues.

Issues like the suffocating cost of living. Expanding childcare subsidies will help those families directly affected, but will do nothing for the millions without kids in child care, who are also struggling to make ends meet as inflation continues to put household budgets under enormous pressure.

Those households want to know from their Government that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel and that things eventually will get easier. At the moment, they’re not getting it.

And then there’s the alarming rise in anti-Semitism all across the country.

The firebombing of a Melbourne synagogue last week has Australia’s Jewish community on edge and frightened. Until last October, they had lived in relative security, but that feeling of safety has now been shattered.

The Albanese Government has been slow to react publicly, underestimating or underplaying the depth of the fear and anxiety.

Four days had passed since the arson attack before Mr Albanese finally visited the burnt-out Adass Israel synagogue on Tuesday. The reaction to his belated show of solidarity from many of the community was one of hostility and anger, with some in the crowd heckling the Prime Minister as he examined the damage.

Mr Albanese’s response to yet another anti-Semitic attack overnight, this time in the Sydney suburb of Woollahra, was swifter.

He rightly described the act, in which a car was set alight and buildings scrawled with anti-Semitic slurs, as a “hate crime”. In contrast to his response to the Melbourne incident, Mr Albanese addressed the Sydney attack unprompted on Wednesday.

He’d prefer, of course, to be talking about child care. So would we all. Unfortunately, our frightening new reality demands otherwise.