TONY Abbott is framing a childcare policy that will boost family daycare, to shift the balance away from formal institutional long-day care.
It comes as The Australian can reveal the cost of childcare in Western Australia will rise by about $50 a week from Monday for each child in full-time care, as a result of the government's award modernisation process, which is making carers' wages higher, and a requirement that staff have higher qualifications.
President of the Childcare Association of Western Australia Roslyn Thompson said the increases were due to the national award modernisation process, in particular the 25 per cent casual loading when childcare centres need to replace an absent employee, due to staffing regulations.
The government has made it clear it favours long-day care centres, with plans to cut the one-off payment currently given to those who want to start running family daycare from their homes.
But The Australian understands the Coalition's policy involves a re-introduction to the start-up grants and a boost to family daycare so parents have more choice about where to send their children.
The government will cease providing the family daycare start-up payment, worth $1500 a service, and the remote area family daycare start-up payment, worth $5000 a service, from this month. The cut is expected to save $14.8 million over four years.
Coalition childcare spokeswoman Sharman Stone said without start-up grants there would be a contraction of places within family daycare. "That therefore means you are pushing more of the places on to long-day care and they are already, in different parts of Australia, hugely overstretched," she said.
"The problem with long-day care is it is very lumpy in terms of provision: some have waiting lists and there's others where there is under-utilisation."
She said the government's pursuit of a "one-recipe, one-size-fits-all solution to childcare" showed it was out of touch.
"This government seems to think that there is a magic solution -- it seems to be thinking that that magic solution is simply long-day care embedded in early child education, and it can't be," Dr Stone said. "There's got to be a plethora of options."
She said the Coalition would introduce a strong childcare planning system which would only allow parents to receive government childcare benefits for services in centres that were built where there was demand.
The Coalition will try to capitalise on the anger of parents at the Rudd government's backdowns on childcare promises by unveiling a series of policies, including making the childcare rebate payable through childcare centres weekly in arrears, so costs to families are slashed.
The government has been under fire since it announced it would cap the annual childcare rebate to the 2008-09 level of $7500 a child, down from the current annual cap of $7778, and abandoned a promise to build 222 of a promised 260 new childcare centres.
Childcare is shaping up to be a major election issue, as new regulation on centres could cause fees to rise and price parents out of childcare.