One of my enduring memories as a mother with a 12-month-old infant was covering the 1998 constitutional convention at Old Parliament House in Canberra.
Back then, carrying on a working life meant making the 90-minute commute in the dark twice a day, while hoping not to meet a kangaroo on a similar path.
When the second child arrived, after a short stint working part-time, I threw up my hands and stayed at home. The internet was barely a thing. Working from home was still considered deeply suspicious by employers.
For me and many other rural mothers (and it is still mostly mothers), the combination of distance and lack of available childcare increased the difficulty of returning to work to such a degree that it was not worth it. We could afford to make the choice, though my superannuation has suffered.
Jobs are more mobile now and childcare is better recognised in 2024 as an actual economic good, but I am not sure it is any easier.
Work by the Mitchell Institute at Victoria University in 2022 found nearly half (44.6%) of those in regional areas live in so-called childcare deserts and that nearly doubles (85.3%) for those in remote Australia.
This year the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission report into childcare services concluded that markets were not delivering on key policy objectives for all households and communities. Childcare is often not accessible or affordable.
The thing about living in a small town is that the size and population strips back the white noise of the city.
If a local nurse can’t get childcare, you can see your one hospital missing out and directly link the two. If a teacher cannot get childcare, you see your one school missing out, and you know that school will probably have to wait until her own children have reached school age to get that teacher back.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that rural services are harder and generally more expensive to provide. Like our hospitals, schools, aged care and allied health professional services, rural childcare suffers from lack of attention partly because the demand is simply not as high as in metropolitan centres. That means for-profit businesses are generally not interested.
Or in the words of the ACCC interim report, “for-profit providers are less likely to operate in more disadvantaged areas, and more likely to operate in major cities which are also more advantaged. Accordingly, there is likely to be greater availability for children under the age of two in these areas”.
Sometimes small places don’t know the qualifications hiding in their midst because people are not able to work. This will be amplified since the great regional migration from cities, particularly among under-40s, in the pandemic years. If you combine burgeoning regional skills with the big long-term workforce trends, things get even more interesting.
Do you know what the biggest industries in regional Australia are? Not mining, not farming but healthcare and social services, retail, education services and construction. Apart from construction, all of those industries are dominated by women, even more so in country towns.
We also know women are now more educated than men and female professionals replaced male tradesmen as the largest group of workers by occupation in 2015. Women dominate many of the service industries in country towns that are crying out for a workforce.
Look through the government’s workforce figures for rural and regional areas and you will see the dominance of women in our biggest service industries.
Outback Queensland, for example, had 4,100 women employed in health and social services compared with 800 men in February this year. Women dominate professional and technical services (1,400 female workers to 500 male) in that region as well as retail trade (3,100 female workers to 900 male). Education and training is pretty much all women. You can pick any regional area and see similar trends. (Incidentally, Queensland has seen the largest growth in fees for centre-based childcare and family daycare since 2018, according to the ACCC report.)
Skilled and unskilled women are the great sleeping giants of the regional economy. We have written about teachers who can’t teach for lack of childcare options. Or nurses who cannot work in ICU for lack of childcare options and long distances.
Keeping women out of the regional (and city) workforces by lack of childcare also sets up an early pattern where female earnings plummet. This has long-term effects on superannuation, career advancement and even housing.
At the same time, local councils can tell you that workforce shortages could be alleviated by more childcare options. Paul Fernee, the director of community wellbeing at Gannawarra shire council, told Guardian Australia last year: “Getting people to move here and find a house is almost as hard as getting childcare, but people who are already here can’t get childcare and can’t get back into work.”
So if you think childcare is a “soft” issue, or if you think your child rearing years are over and it doesn’t concern you, please understand that childcare is an issue that has knock-on effects on every other part of your town, your state and your country’s economy, not to mention its wellbeing.
Childcare is as important, and connected, to all the other big issues in regional Australia such as worker shortages, lack of housing and health services and the ongoing teacher shortage. It is the egg to the chicken. Or is it the chicken to the egg?
