Victoria’s new Covid restrictions on childcare spark confusion among parents and providers
The Victorian government’s new restrictions on childcare has caused confusion among parents and childcare providers with many unsure whether their children could still go on Monday.
On Saturday, with Covid-19 case numbers hitting levels not seen since Victoria’s second wave, the premier, Daniel Andrews, announced only children of authorised workers would be able to send their child to childcare.
In the public health order published on Saturday, it stated that in two parent or guardian households, childcare is only available when “both of them are...an authorised worker or work for an authorised provider” and are not working from home or can’t make other supervision arrangements.
The change sparked concerns that in two parent households, one parent was going to be forced to take leave in order to care for the children.
When asked about it on Sunday, the health minister, Martin Foley, said he believed only one parent was required to be an authorised worker with a permit.
Late on Sunday, the public health order was amended again so that only one parent needed to be an authorised worker, and they can access care even if they are working from home.
Paul Mondo, president of the Australian Childcare Alliance, said service providers have been on the phone all day trying to clarify the situation.
“There was a whole lot of confusion over the weekend, for families around attendance, and we’ve sought to try to clarify that situation, regularly throughout the weekend,” he said. “Families need certainty and need to know what’s going on to the best of their ability because it does impact their capacity to undertake their normal work so that has been a real challenging scenario.”
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“We would have loved to have been able to have the right answer the first time.”
Foley said the decision to limit childcare was due to the rising case numbers among children, and exposure sites at childcare.
“We’ve seen a significant number of cases in kids under nine I think a quarter of the current cases, we’ve seen childcare centres and early childhood education centres as point of transmission,” he said. “We can’t take that risk, knowingly to put our kids in harm’s way.”
“That’s why the public health orders as tough as they are, are about protecting those kids, and I have nothing but huge admiration and support and sympathy for all of those parents and carers who are providing that frontline the home care support now, whilst at the same time dealing with the tribulations of the wider restrictions, I can totally get the frustrations.”
Out of 494 active cases in Victoria on Monday, 112 are children under the age of 10 and 100 are aged between the ages of 10 and 19.
On Monday, Andrews apologised for the “lack of clarity” and said the new order would come into effect from midnight on Monday.
He said he intended to talk to the federal government about support for the childcare sector and parents.
“We need them to be there on the other side of this, and what does it also mean for parents who might be out of pocket and all those sorts of issues,” he said. “Quite a complex system, childcare, but I know …if you have less kids going to childcare, then that’s less income for childcare centres and that can be a pretty finely-balanced industry.”
Danielle Wood, the CEO of the Grattan Institute, said the parents of young children already have the highest workload in the country at around 80 hours per week, and removing childcare for some families would further burden those parents, and in particular women.
“I think it’s inevitable that women end up doing more and we certainly saw that in the lockdowns last year there was a big rise in unpaid care work with remote schooling and the closure of childcare centres in Victoria,” she said. “Both fathers and mothers did more, but women really took on a disproportionate share of that additional burden. And that comes on top of what is already a much higher load of unpaid care for women.”
Wood said she was concerned about the long tail of lockdowns making it harder for parents to return to the level of work they had before. Under the direction, single parents must also be authorised workers to qualify for childcare, and Wood said single parents were forgotten in the policy.
“I don’t think many of our decision makers are in that situation I think it’s overlooked. What is hard for couples is impossible for single parents,” she said.
“They do not have a choice but to basically cut back on work. If they have to mind the child, it just becomes impossible to do your job.”
Tim Piper, the Victorian head of the Australian Industry Group said employers and employees would need to compromise during this period.
“I’m sure that employers are wanting to work with employees,” he said. “So there will be some employers probably particularly the larger ones and those that are not in the service sectors are probably more easily able to work with their employees and give them some support, and others who might be, might be struggling a bit more that are finding it difficult and therefore need to get their workers doing as much as they can from home.”