Australia

ABC Online
New day care places for Sydney, Melbourne

The Federal Government has announced that 2,500 family day care places will be located in inner-city areas with higher demands on child care.

The Minister for Family and Community Services, Kay Patterson, says the places were allocated in the Federal Budget and in light of expensive child care costs in Sydney and Melbourne, they will be in central areas.

Senator Patterson says she will ask for cooperation with governments to put more places where they are needed most.

"Locating those in inner-city areas, where there's higher demand, where I can actually encourage people to become family day care workers, I can encourage parents to use family day care," she said.

"But what I've got to continue to do is to also call on local governments and state governments to have flexible arrangements to ensure that we encourage child care providers to come into inner-city areas."

Senator Patterson also says a smart card for use in child care centres could improve children's safety.

The Minister says she will be floating the idea of smart cards to the industry that will be swiped when a child comes in or out of care.

"It would give us much better data about usage, it would give us much better data about child worker ratios, it would give us much better data to collect for provision of childcare benefits and childcare tax rebate for paying that," she said.

"It would also give us information for parents so they knew how many days of approved absence they had and it would also give us greater security for children about which children are in children and when they were out and who took them in and out."