On child care, Bridget McKenzie is asked what her plan is for child care:

Q: Do you actually have a comprehensive child care policy because if you’re building new child care centres in regional areas, presumably you need to attract the workers to staff those facilities. Would you support a rise in wages for child care workers, would you support a 3-day guarantee for low-income families to actually go to those child care centres? (Which is Labor’s policy)

McKenzie:

Well we as a Coalition made very clear our child care policy, but when you go specifically to regions, we don’t want to build massive day care centres, we have often got smaller regional centres that actually need a more creative, a more dynamic and flexible…

Q: Don’t they still need well-paid workers?

McKenzie:

Of course, everyone needs well-paid workers, but if you’re a dairy farmer, you need quite a specific child care support, so you can go and do the cows between 6:00am and 8, and again between 5 and 7. So when we’re out in the regions, we have been talking a lot about the funding drought and the child care drought that’s occurring in our regional centres and it’s not because we have got – in some places it’s because we got massive waiting lists for existing centres and in other places, it’s because red tape is tying up existing council offices to be able to be used for child care centres, we have been able to actually make commitments in, say, smaller communities in the seat of Parkes with Jamie Chaffey where a small investment of hundreds of thousands of dollars, not millions, not billions, actually frees up up to 40 places in those smaller towns because they’re just for the lack of space being tacked on to the existing buildings.

So we need a creative and tailored approach in the regions because, as you know, we’re not all the same.