Make the desert measure a trigger, not a research finding
About 35 per cent of Australians live in a childcare desert and about 1.1 million have no service at all. The measure that establishes this is university research, and the response to it is a discretionary competitive grant round.
Steps this would change
Rationale
Two facts sit uncomfortably together.
The problem is measured. Mitchell Institute research finds about 9 million Australians — roughly 35 per cent — live in neighbourhoods with more than three children per childcare place, and about 1.1 million live in regional and remote areas with no childcare at all. Deserts exist in every state and territory and in every capital city.
The response is a grant round. The Building Early Education Fund commits $1 billion, half to build and expand services and half for the Commonwealth to build, own and lease them, targeting about 160 centres and about 12,000 places. Access is by competitive application, with the scheduling wait every round in this database has.
So the shortage is identified by a university, and the remedy is allocated by a competition that a provider has to know about, prepare for, and win.
The proposal. Publish the supply measure as an official dataset, at small geography, updated regularly — and attach consequences to it. An area crossing the threshold triggers supply intervention automatically: capital support offered rather than competed for, and Commonwealth build-own-lease considered where no operator comes forward.
The Commonwealth already does this in health. Distribution Priority Area classification is a published geographic measure that automatically determines where a doctor may practise with Medicare access — this database has criticised how that operates, but the mechanism is exactly the one childcare lacks: a published measure with automatic consequences.
Why the trigger matters more than the money. A competitive round rewards providers with the capacity to apply. Thin markets are thin partly because the operators there are small, and small operators are the least able to run a competitive Commonwealth application. A round designed to reach underserved areas is allocated by a mechanism that selects against the people in them — the same pattern this database recorded in discretionary planning pathways.
Who acts: the Commonwealth alone.
What is being traded away
The measure is contested and would become much more so once money followed it. The 35 per cent figure uses a threshold of more than three children per place; a different threshold from the same research group produces closer to 24 per cent. Neither is wrong — the difference is definitional. But a definition that determines funding is a definition that will be argued over, gamed at the boundary, and lobbied about, and the research would need to become an official statistic with all the governance that implies.
Automatic triggers commit money without a decision. A published measure with automatic consequences is a standing appropriation in everything but name, and governments resist that for good reason. It also removes the ability to prioritise: an area just over the line gets support ahead of an area just under it with greater disadvantage, because the trigger cannot see anything the measure does not contain.
Supply is not only capital. Removing the building cost does not produce educators, and the workforce is scarcest exactly where supply is thinnest. A triggered capital program in a desert with no available early childhood teacher produces a building, not a place. This is the same "an entitlement is not a service" limit recorded across this database, and here it is the most likely failure mode.
And the scale should be stated honestly. About 12,000 places against about 9 million people living in classified deserts. Those numbers are not directly comparable and the fund is deliberately targeted at the worst-served areas, but the order of magnitude is worth saying plainly: this is a targeted intervention, not a solution to coverage, and a better allocation mechanism does not change that.
Precedent
The Commonwealth already runs published, formula-driven geographic triggers elsewhere: Distribution Priority Area classification determines where an overseas-trained doctor may practise with Medicare access, and Modified Monash Model categories drive a range of rural health programs. Geography-triggered intervention is established practice.
Sources
- Mitchell Institute, Victoria University: about 9 million Australians, 35 per cent, live in childcare deserts defined as more than three children per place; about 1.1 million live in regional and remote areas with no childcare at all; a separate threshold produces about 24 per cent
- Department of Education, Building Early Education Fund: $1 billion, $500 million to build and expand and $500 million for the Australian Government to build, own and lease; about 160 centres and about 12,000 places
- Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, Distribution Priority Area classification as a published geographic trigger