The bigger picture 

The political question of who cares for small children has been one of the central questions of feminist political theory for at least a century. The answer in most pre-industrial societies was that women in the household, supported by extended kin and community networks, did the work without payment. The unpaid status of the work did not mean it was politically invisible. The political system depended on the work being done without acknowledgement, and the absence of acknowledgement was itself the political settlement.

The British socialist feminist Selma James argued in the early 1970s, building on the wages-for-housework movement, that the unpaid domestic and child-caring work that women did was the political foundation of the wage system itself. Without that unpaid work, the paid economy could not function. The political demand for public childcare provision, which emerged from the second-wave feminist movement in Australia and elsewhere, carried a political claim about the recognition that care was a public matter, with public consequences, requiring public investment.

The American political theorist Wendy Brown has written extensively about how political demands for public provision in the late twentieth century were absorbed and reshaped by neoliberal political logic, which converted citizens into consumers and public goods into market services. Australian childcare is one of the clearest places in any economy where Brown's argument lands: the political demand for public childcare was won, in part, but the political form in which it was delivered turned the achievement into a quasi-market, and the contest is still moving.

The colonial transfer 

Childcare in colonial Australia, where it existed outside the family at all, took British forms. The British charity tradition reached Australia in modified form. Free kindergartens for the children of working-class women, run by middle-class philanthropists, emerged in Australian cities in the late nineteenth century. The political idea that the children of the deserving poor needed early educational intervention was a British political idea, transmitted into Australia and adapted to local conditions. 

What that political vision excluded is part of the history. First Nations children had their own systems of care and learning, embedded in Country, kinship, and ceremony, developed over thousands of years. The colonial childcare tradition was not built for First Nations families. The active political project of removing First Nations children from families, intensifying through the twentieth century into the Stolen Generations, broke kinship and care structures in ways that are still doing political work in childcare today. Aboriginal Children and Family Centres, where they exist, are operating as part of the long political work of repair, not as a parallel service stream.

The feminist political demand for childcare

 The Australian feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s placed public childcare at the centre of its political demands. The political argument carried a direct claim: women's increasing labour-force participation could not happen without public provision for the care of small children, and the absence of provision operated as a political constraint on women's lives.

The political achievement of winning federal childcare funding, beginning in the 1970s and developing through successive Labor and Coalition governments, was the result of decades of feminist organising. The childcare assistance scheme, the Child Care Subsidy, and the development of community-controlled and not-for-profit childcare were political achievements, not commercial developments.

The achievement was contested throughout. The political idea that mothers should stay home, that childcare was a private family matter, and that public provision was a state intrusion into family life was held strongly by some political actors and was repeatedly raised in federal debate. The history of Australian childcare cannot be read without that political contest at the centre.

The neoliberal turn

From the 1990s onward, a different political settlement began to assert itself. The political idea that childcare should be marketised, that parents should be increasingly described as consumers, and that providers should compete in a quasi-market for public funding tied to individual children, was developed and rolled out through successive policy reforms.

The shift produced the conditions for large for-profit childcare providers to enter the sector at scale. The collapse of ABC Learning in 2008 surfaced the political risks of this settlement. The continued political conversation about for-profit, not-for-profit, and community-controlled provision is the legacy of that settlement.

The neoliberal turn reached the workforce as well as the funding model. The political conditions of the early childhood workforce, including the wage gap with comparable teaching roles, the casualisation of educator work, and the migrant labour dependency, are the legacies of political decisions made over decades.

The universal-access turn

The political conversation has shifted again. State governments in Victoria and New South Wales, and increasingly at federal level, have been moving toward universal-access politics for early childhood education. Three-year-old kinder, four-year-old kinder, and integrated early learning models are being introduced in different forms across jurisdictions.

The universal-access turn is a political achievement of sustained advocacy, of feminist political organising, of early childhood education research, and of public political conversation about the value of early learning. The political settlement is still being negotiated, with significant operational consequences for providers.

The present moment

Universal-access politics, workforce crisis, and political backlash are reshaping childcare now.

Universal-access politics is moving at different speeds in different states, reshaping what providers must offer and how they are funded. Providers in jurisdictions moving fastest are absorbing political conditions providers in slower jurisdictions are not yet facing.

The workforce crisis carries decades of wage and conditions politics into the present. National conversations about wage parity with teaching, about migration policy for educators, and about the sustainability of careers in early childhood are producing political pressure that providers absorb continuously.

The political backlash against feminist, queer, trans, racial-justice, and First Nations recognition is reaching early childhood through resistance to inclusive curriculum, through hostility to LGBTQ+-inclusive practice, and through political attacks on First Nations cultural presence in services.