The peak body for Indigenous children and families has welcomed large sections of Tuesday night's budget around the early education and care sectors.
The $5 billion commitment to reforming early education and care was labelled an "important foundation that will help shift the dial" by SNAICC – National Voice for Our Children chief executive Catherine Liddle, who argued it was "heartening" to hear Treasurer Jim Chalmers "acknowledge the importance of early education and care" in his budget statement.
The Arrernte/Luritja woman told National Indigenous Times SNAICC believed there "are some goodies" in the budget.
"We have been saying for a very, very long time that if you want to close the gap, you've got to start with children. So, seeing a commitment of $5 billion to early education and care reform is massive and will be a game changer to our children and many, many families," she said.
The previously announced removal of the Liberal-era Activity Test, heavily campaigned for by SNAICC and which will allow families to access three days a week of subsidised early childhood education regardless of how much they work or study, was also welcomed, with Ms Liddle saying it will see many people "breathing a sigh of relief".
"It has not only been damaging to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and families, [but] all families who are doing it a bit tougher," she said.
"When we're talking about things like the cost of living, it means you can actually afford this vital service. It means you can go to work. It means you can study."
SNAICC said other positives from the budget included $21.8 million to provide family, domestic and sexual violence services to Indigenous women, children, and communities; and $3.1m for the newly created Office of the National Commissioner for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children, which Ms Liddle said had been called for by advocates for "decades".
"Any room that you walk into, people are saying…'Where is the accountability on governments for what is happening to our children?'," Ms Liddle said, arguing the Commissioner is the model to do that.
"That is the mechanism that will talk directly to children and directly to our families and bring that evidence forward to government so that they're working alongside them and making sure that we are implementing strategies and policies that we should be doing."
Furthermore, the $21.4 million to build a nutrition workforce in remote communities was welcomed as it complements the previous announcement on cheaper products for shops in remote areas.
"If you're not familiar with what it looks like in remote areas: if it's $100 to get a bag of groceries in a city, you can expect it to be $300 or $400 to afford that in a remote community," Ms Liddle said.
"So, lowering those prices, building the nutrition workforce, ensuring that there's early education and care; these are really good things."
SNAICC said areas of disappointment include the failure to implement measures under 'Safe and Supported'; and a new funding model for Aboriginal community-controlled early education and care.
Proposals for 'Safe and Supported' - the national plan to protect First Nations children - come as the rate of First Nations children being placed in out-of-home care (OOHC) has reached alarming levels, with Ms Liddle describing them as "disgraceful".
She said, with that in mind, it was a "missed opportunity to do something differently".
"A missed opportunity to genuinely work with those communities that are feeling the most distressed right now," Ms Liddle said.
"We've seen that big investment into early education and care [and] we know that less families are going to come into contact with the pointy end of things like tertiary intervention and out-of-home care, but that is going to take a couple of years to come on board.
"Right now, if we'd invested into the reform of the child protection system, then what we'd be doing is working immediately with communities on the ground to really tackle what is happening where we're seeing distress."
