$15 Billion for Childcare — Not One Cent for Mums Who Stay Home
Canberra now spends more than $15 billion a year subsidising childcare. Two Four Corners investigations have shown exactly what that money is propping up. And the families who want something different haven't been given a cent.
Fifteen Billion Dollars, One Kind of Care
Every year, Canberra spends more than $15 billion on the Child Care Subsidy (CCS), and since the 5th of January 2026, the government has been spending more than ever. Because that was when the Albanese Government replaced the activity test that used to decide whether a family got any subsidised care at all. Under the new "3 Day Guarantee", every family eligible for the CCS, regardless of income, is now automatically entitled to three days a week of subsidised care each fortnight.
It sounds generous. But look at where the money actually goes. The Child Care Subsidy has never been a payment to parents. It is paid straight to an approved provider. The benefits are only felt if a family decides to enrol their child in childcare. However wide the guarantee gets, it is a guarantee for centres, not for families. It's worth understanding exactly why many families don’t want to send their children to these centres.
What All That Money Is Actually Funding
In March 2025, ABC's Four Corners aired Betrayal of Trust, the result of a six-month investigation by Adele Ferguson into the childcare industry. It’s estimated the industry is now worth around $20 billion a year. The report found that the childcare regulatory body (Australian Children's Education and Care Quality Authority) was so under-resourced that centres were typically tipped off before childcare inspectors arrived, services with repeated breaches of national safety standards had been allowed to keep operating for over a decade, and educators who tried to report problems feared losing their jobs.
Seven months later, Ferguson returned with a follow-up investigation that uncovered something even worse. Hunting Ground, built on more than a year of reporting and over 200,000 pages of documents, identified more than a hundred cases of alleged paedophiles who had worked, or were still working, inside Australian childcare. Ferguson didn't call this a series of isolated failures. She called it endemic, enabled by high staff turnover, poor training and lax supervision in a system built to maximise enrolments. The investigation won Australian journalism's highest honour, the Gold Walkley, as the story of the year. Astonishingly, Australia's own National Children's Commissioner, Anne Hollonds, admitted that years of government focus on affordability and getting mothers into paid work had left too little attention on whether children in these centres were actually safe.
This is what $15 billion a year is being funnelled into.
Families Are Opting Out
It should surprise no one that families are looking for a way out, and some simply cannot use what's on offer. Many have lost confidence in the childcare system. After everything Betrayal of Trust and Hunting Ground uncovered, that isn't paranoia; it's a reasonable response to the state of the industry. A growing number of families don't want to take the risk. They want to raise their own children themselves, full time, without paying someone else to. That is not a fringe preference. For many mothers, it is the whole point of having children.
Other families don’t even have access to childcare centres. As Stephanie Bastiaan, from Women's Forum Australia, has documented, nurses, police, hospitality staff, aged-care workers and emergency services personnel are rostered on evenings, nights and weekends when no childcare centre operates, yet the subsidy system was built almost entirely around standard business hours. Rural and regional families face waitlists that stretch for years, because there is often no centre in their region.
Also read: The Tax Office Punishes Stay-at-Home Mothers
None of That Fifteen Billion Reaches Them
Not one of these families is helped by the $15 billion subsidy.
The shift-working nurse can't use a subsidy tied to a service that closes at 6 pm. The rural family can't use a subsidy for a centre that doesn't exist in their town. In-home care (a carer coming to the family rather than the child going to a centre) used to be the answer for exactly these families before the Turnbull Government's 2018 childcare overhaul cut it down to a small, tightly rationed program that now excludes most families.
And the mother who wants to care for her own child at home gets the least of all. Not a discount, not a rebate, not a lower rate of support: nothing. The Child Care Subsidy was never built to recognise her choice, because it isn't a payment for raising children. It's a payment for outsourcing that job to someone else.
Canberra's Answer: More Money, Same Model
The government hasn't ignored what Four Corners uncovered; it just hasn't drawn the obvious conclusion from it. A $226 million reform package has since funded a national worker register, mandatory child safety training, a CCTV trial, bans on personal devices in centres, and more than a thousand unannounced compliance visits since November 2025.
But notice what none of this does. It doesn't create a single new option for families who want to choose a different kind of childcare. It spends millions of dollars making the same one-size-fits-all system marginally safer, rather than spending a fraction of that to allow families to pursue alternatives. A safer centre is still a centre. It does nothing for the family that can't get near one, doesn't trust one, or never wanted one in the first place.
What You Can Do
So, the mother who wants to raise her own child is exactly where she started: invisible to a $15 billion scheme that funds every arrangement except hers.
Family in Danger has launched a petition calling on Treasurer Jim Chalmers to replace the Child Care Subsidy with a universal childcare payment that a family can put toward a centre, an in-home carer, a grandparent, or supporting the mother doing the job herself.
No mother should be made to feel that raising her own children is a financial burden.
Sign the petition: Stop Punishing Stay-at-Home Mothers
References
- Stephanie Bastiaan, "Childcare: It's Time to Expand Subsidies for In-Home Care," Women's Forum Australia, 2 July 2026.
- Adele Ferguson, "Betrayal of Trust: Australia's Childcare Crisis," ABC Four Corners, 17 March 2025.
- Adele Ferguson, "Hunting Ground," ABC Four Corners, 27 October 2025.
- Anne Hollonds, National Children's Commissioner, media statement, Australian Human Rights Commission, March 2025.
- Australian Government Department of Education, "3 Day Guarantee."
- Australian Government Department of Education, "A year of action to strengthen child safety in early childhood education and care."
- "Australia's childcare safety changes are turning one. Are they working?", The Conversation, 2026.
- "Childcare crisis hurts rural families facing two-year wait," ABC News, 8 April 2026.
- Walkley Foundation, "What made the story of the year? Adele Ferguson on the Gold Walkley-winning childcare stories," 2025.