Zoe McKenzie MP
Shadow Assistant Minister for Education and Early Learning
Shadow Assistant Minister for Mental Health
Federal Member for Flinders
TRANSCRIPT
2CC BREAKFAST WITH STEPHEN CENATIEMPO
Tuesday, 12 August 2025
Topics: Expanding Child Care Subsidy
STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: I touched on this story yesterday that actress Madeleine West, who you might remember from Neighbours and a bunch of other things, who’s now a child safety campaigner, has joined thousands of parents urging the government to revamp Australia’s childcare subsidy scheme to allow it to pay parents, grandparents, nannies, et cetera, to care for their own children in the home rather than have to send them to childcare centres. Now, obviously, this is in the wake of those disgraceful stories we heard about abuse in childcare centres. To talk to us about this, we’re joined by the Shadow Assistant Minister for Education and Early Learning, Zoe McKenzie. Zoe, thanks for joining us.
ZOE MCKENZIE: Good morning, Stephen. Thank you for having me. Good morning to your Canberra listeners.
STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: Child safety aside, this is a worthwhile discussion to have, just in a broader sense, isn’t it?
ZOE MCKENZIE: It’s an absolutely essential conversation to have for two reasons. First, parents are rightfully worried about the safety settings we have in place across the early learning and childcare sector. And we’ve moved on a bipartisan front to improve those settings. That’s the first one. But the second one is that the Prime Minister was quite clear before the election that he wanted to move to a universal model of childcare. He refers to a universal, affordable model of childcare. But what they really want, I suspect, is a one-size-fits-all model for childcare. Now, we do know that, at this particular age, zero to four, parents are deeply engaged in the model of childcare. They like to know where their kids are. They like to know who works at their childcare or early learning centre. And they like having choice and flexibility about where the child goes, when the child goes, and the model of childcare or early learning that they go to. It’s a time of deep, deep engagement between parents and the childcare sector. But about 35% of young people, between zero and four, actually live in what we call a childcare desert, meaning they can’t get access to an external model of childcare and need to make do with what they can do at home or with parents and grandparents. So when a third of the sector doesn’t have any access to this universal model, we have to remain flexible. And that’s the point that Madeleine West was making yesterday and that 12,500 people have signed up to on a petition on change.org.
STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: I think there’s a broader issue here, though. And I’ve often lamented the fact that we tend to tell women now that unless they aspire to being the Prime Minister or the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, that they’re somehow not worthy anymore, and we devalue the role of wives and mothers in society. I mean, this obviously opens up that choice too, that, you know, it sort of legitimises a woman’s choice to do whatever she wants.
ZOE MCKENZIE: Well, can I add also that there are an increasing number of men who want to be deeply engaged in their early children’s lives. So to stay at home, maybe share the parenting for the first couple of years. And we should be doing absolutely everything to encourage that model. In my own region, so many of the small businesses are run by women. They’re running flat chat. It would be great if a system could encourage mother or father to stay at home and be super present. We know the more presence you’ve got from a parent in those early years, the better it is for the kid, better for their language development, better for their eye and, you know, interfacial development. It’s fantastic. But we don’t have a system at the moment that recognises rewards or encourages that.
STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: The difficulty here would be developing a model that’s going to work, because, I mean, it’s not easy to determine how much a parent should be paid for staying at home to look after their kids. Do you see it as being, you know, using the Prime Minister’s universal model as whatever you would normally pay to a childcare provider that you pocket yourself, so to speak?
ZOE MCKENZIE: Look, and also, you know, you live in Canberra. I’ve worked in Canberra on and off. Commonwealth is not good at diverse models. It’s not good at bespoke solutions for different parts of the country. It loves one size fits all, one price fits all, one outcome fits all, because it’s easier to administer from the nation’s capital. So I’m very nervous about what that means. You know, you look at what happens in terms of schooling or even university sector, there’s always a push to uniformity, and uniformity is not what we need at this early age. We need diversity and we need parents’ choice, and we need a financial model that backs that in. So, yes, it’s a conversation we need to have. We don’t have ready-to-hand costings of what it might look like, but it’s definitely a conversation with costing that needs to take place.
STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: Given the Coalition’s lack of policies, this would be a good place to start with new policies, Zoe.
ZOE MCKENZIE: And we are very busy. I’m working with Jonno Duniam, who’s our Shadow Cabinet Education spokesperson, and we’re already talking about it together with Sam Birrell, who’s our Regional Education Shadow Assistant Minister. So watch this space, Steve.
STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: Outstanding. Zoe, I appreciate your time this morning.
ZOE MCKENZIE: Thanks for having me on.
ENDS.
