HAINES: My question is to the Minister for Early Childhood Education. Out-of-school-hours care services at small rural schools across my electorate face imminent closure after sustainability funding was cut. If these services close, parents won’t be able to work in a cost-of-living crisis. It is clear there is not enough money in the Community Child Care Fund. Will the minister stand by while vital childcare services close due to a lack of government funding?

MINISTER ALY: I thank the member for Indi for her question and for the constructive way in which she has engaged in relation to early childhood education in her electorate and, indeed, on issues on early childhood education right across Australia. The Community Child Care Fund that the member alluded to supports early childhood education and care services to open and to stay open. Just by way of background, it’s a more than $600 million program currently supporting around 700 services across Australia, and 85 per cent of those services are in regional and remote areas.

In the recently announced CCCF, or Community Child Care Fund round 4, more than 380 services received offers of sustainability support to help them remain open and 90 services received offers of capital support. That’s to help them undertake important modification or expansion of their work, and that includes five services in the member’s electorate that received sustainability funding and two services that received capital funding.

The CCCF round 4 grant opportunity was a competitive grant. It’s a competitive grant process run by the department, and decisions are made at arm’s length from the minister. I make no apologies for that. In the interest of transparency, in the interest of accountability and in the interest of integrity, it is important that these competitive grants are run in a way in which selection is based on merit.

The guidelines for the grant opportunity were published on GrantConnect. The assessment criteria remained broadly similar across all CCCF rounds for sustainability funding, but there were some changes in the grant guidelines reflecting lessons learned on reviews of previous grant rounds. Those lessons and the feedback that we got on those were that the round should be open to applications from priority areas as well as services that have been successful in previous rounds as well as vulnerable and disadvantaged cohorts.

I appreciate that it can be disappointing for services when they’re not successful in competitive grants. I can really appreciate that. I can appreciate the difficulty for families and communities, and I can appreciate the way in which we can continue to discuss this, particularly for your electorate as well, Member for Indi. I’d encourage the member to relay to those services that there is a CCCF special circumstances round that they may be eligible to apply for and to encourage them to see whether or not that is a viable option.