The government’s revised Family Tax Benefit proposals will still have some significant negative impacts on low-income families, but they are not as regressive as the 2014 budget.
Many grandparents compromise their own working lives to enable their daughters and daughters-in-law to go to work.
Flickr/hugabib
The role of grandparents as the biggest providers of childcare is a huge blind spot in policy-making for workforce participation, childcare, early childhood education and retirement.
Former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton watches as a youngster is enthralled by a picture book in New York.
REUTERS/Kathy Willens
There is no one perfect package for alleviating poverty, but there is agreement on what the elements should be. Combination and sequence of interventions varies, depending on context and beneficiaries.
Childcare and education: the building blocks for equality.
from www.shutterstock.com
David Cameron and his government will have to be masters of tactics to get through this parliament. They’re already correcting their course.
Social Services Minister Scott Morrison announces that a A$3.5 billion child-care subsidy will begin from July 1 2017 if the Senate passes previously rejected Family Tax Benefit savings.
AAP/Paul Miller
Lost in the political debate about subsidising child care is the fact that universal free preschool care has been abandoned as a goal of good social policy.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Social Services Minister Scott Morrison hope the government’s childcare policy will encourage more Australians to enter or re-enter the workforce.
Paul Miller/AAP
The government estimates its proposed $3.5 billion child care package will encourage more than 240,000 families to increase their involvement in paid employment, including almost 38,000 jobless families.
Good deeds don’t always work out that way.
Nailia Schwartz
Social Services minister Scott Morrison has unveiled the first part of the Abbott government’s “families package” ahead of next month’s federal budget and the signs are not good. With the announcement…
From January, conscientious objectors to vaccine will lose up to $15,000 of childcare and family tax rebates.
Daria Filimonova/Shutterstock
Efforts to get fathers more involved in raising their kids often entail changing leave provisions, but research shows that’s not helping dads get more involved in caring for their children.
Removing the childcare rebate for parents who do not fully immunise their children is unnecessarily punitive and could have repercussions.
Oksana Shufrych/Shutterstock
Immunisation in Australia isn’t compulsory – and doesn’t need to be controversial. Most Australians recognise the incredible benefits that vaccination provides to prevent serious disease.
The Productivity Commission’s report on childcare will help inform the Abbott government’s soon-to-be-unveiled ‘families package’.
AAP/Paul Miller
Many of the Productivity Commission’s proposals derive from assumptions that the funding of these services should ensure minimal interference, with a classic, market-based model for meeting “demand”.
Adjunct Professor, Department of Applied Psychology and Human Development at Ontario Institute for the Study of Education (OISE) and Senior Policy Fellow at the Atkinson Centre, University of Toronto