- Making child care tax deductible 73 per cent
- Encouraging employers to offer more opportunities for flexible work 62 per cent
- Greater regulation of fees to improve affordability 50 per cent
- Expansion of child care subsidies to include nannies 43 per cent and expanding subsidies to other care such as grandparents, preschool and babysitters 42 per cent
Nannies, babysitters and grandparents should also qualify for rebate
With 70 per cent of working mums in our survey saying that the child care rebate makes a significant difference in terms of making going back to work viable or not, it stands to reason that all child care that is undertaken to allow parents to be back in the workplace should qualify for the same rebate… Doesn't it?
However nannies, babysitters and grandparents are largely excluded, not being deemed "formal child care".
This is particularly pertinent when combined with the lack of child care places for the under twos. Many Australian families are simply being caught between a rock and a hard place.
According to one working mum: "Affordability is the biggest issue for my family and availability! We had to use nannies for 8 months, 4 days a week until we found a vacancy at a child care centre. So no CCB or CCR was applicable for this whole period! We were going backwards financially at a rapid rate!"
There has been a lot of talk about nannies and the need to make them approved child care to qualify their employers for the child care rebate. This hasn't yet happened, and nannies are therefore often still an expensive child care option, which could account for why slightly fewer families are using them this year compared with 2013.
In 2014 just 11 per cent of families are using nannies while in 2013 more than 13 per cent listed this as their child care option. The missing two per cent seems to have switched across to long day care centres, which rose from 76 per cent in 2013 to 78 per cent in 2014.
But many Australian families can't find child care and resort to hiring a nanny as a fall back. Just under a fifth of responders (18 per cent) said they couldn't get the child care they wanted.
As far as making nannies and other forms of child care equal, 62 per cent believe families employing nannies should qualify for CCB and CCR, with 43 per cent of families saying this would make a difference to them in terms of the affordability of working.
It remains to be seen what the Productivity Commission's findings will be and how far the Government will act on them, but it's clear from our survey and the response from you, the parents on the front line, that tax deductibility and making all child care the same in the eyes of the Child Care Rebate are two key issues that could make all the difference to the affordability of going back to work and the lives of working families.
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