Beyond addressing key staffing issues, developing high-quality early childhood programs must involve using school boards to expand access and grow spaces while offering more affordable fees.
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LETTERS TO THE EDITOR:
Retirees welcome the allocation of more funding in the Federal Budget to improve the quality and safety of the aged care system and some additional measures to retirement savings.
The Royal Commission into Aged Care highlighted the need to allow the aged to have greater control over their care and for providers of residential aged care to improve the quality and safety of the care delivered.
It is pleasing to see the Budget allocation to lift the standards of residential aged care and reduce the abuse in aged care homes.
The additional 80,000 new home care packages are welcomed as the waiting lists will be reduced substantially.
The 2021-22 budget includes funding for 15 hours per week of free preschool education for all children in the year before school. This is great, but we need more detail.
Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese’s budget reply speech last night highlighted Australia’s huge unnmet need for social and affordable housing. It’s once again shaping up as a major election issue. Labor is proposing a A$10 billion program to build 30,000 social and affordable homes over five years.
The immediate backdrop for the pledge is a post-COVID house price boom, and a continuing dearth of Commonwealth investment in new non-market housing. That is, rentals affordable to low-income Australians and provided by government agencies or non-profit community housing organisations.
Amid the many new spending plans revealed in Tuesday’s budget, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg maintained the government’s resistance to an ever-wider coalition of voices calling for social housing stimulus.