Broken childcare needs radical reform: ALP

Australia's childcare system is broken beyond immediate repair and Labor wants to look at how it can be radically reformed.

Too many parents have told opposition spokeswoman for early childhood education Kate Ellis child care is too complicated, too hard to navigate, too inconvenient and too expensive.

"Parents are frustrated by political debates which don't seem to acknowledge their central and their absolutely heartfelt view about the system that it is broken," she told the National Press Club on Wednesday.

"There is a pressing need for us to discuss radical reform of our sector, a bold vision for the future, and not just how we might tinker with the edges of the existing payment reform."

The federal government spends $10 billion a year on child care but it has no way to cap the out-of-pocket costs of parents or make sure places are available where they're needed.

Labor is starting consultation with parents, child development experts, educators and providers to develop an idea for a new early childhood education system.

It will also push to extend guaranteed preschool places to three-year-olds.

Ms Ellis dreams of a system that has children's development at its centre, improves social mobility, increases women's workforce participation, and pays educators fairly.

"It is a system that is simple, that's affordable and effective for Australian parents to use with a place down the road available like our school system," she said.

International examples that could be instructive include France where early education is part of a free school system, the UK where children get up to 30 hours of free care a week, and Canada where employers get a tax break for offering child care.

Other countries give every child the legal right to a care place.

Ms Ellis suggested the government could directly purchase places based on how many children were in an area, limiting costs to parents similar to the Medicare benefits schedule.

"Ultimately we could work towards ensuring children could get a guaranteed place in a local centre," she said.

"Just imagine how much easier it would be for parents to get back into the workforce to plan their own lives, to increase their hours, if they knew that they could get a local place and that the price was capped and affordable."

Ms Ellis knows many people will dismiss wholesale reform as too hard or even impossible.

However, now was the time to talk about change with the government's plans to overhaul childcare subsidies stalled in parliament and not due to start until mid-2018.