By Peter Munro
IT'S AFTERNOON peak hour in Gisborne and a rush of cars arrives at Twin Oaks Childcare Centre. Headlights shine on the nearby Calder Freeway, as commuters drive to and from Melbourne, 45 minutes south-east. But here, traffic is busy with parents collecting their offspring.
The number of children at Twin Oaks has more than tripled in less than 18 months, to about 70, since the centre was salvaged from the failed ABC chain.
Jason Standring with his children, Harrison, 6 and Allana, 11.Credit: Craig Sillitoe CSZ
Demand for places in the surrounding local Macedon Ranges Shire is expected to grow 25 per cent by 2026, to 822, as families seek cheaper housing outside Melbourne. Both centres are in the federal electorate of McEwen, the most marginal seat after the previous election - 23 per cent of the population is aged 14 and under, says the census. In Australia, it is 19.8 per cent.
Playing in the autumn leaves at Twin Oaks is 18-month-old Sienna Billman. Mother Louise, 24, drops her daughter here up to five days a week, while she studies counselling in Melbourne and her husband, Brendan, commutes to work for Telstra in Clayton. She nominates paid parental leave, the cost of petrol and federal budget plans to cut its cap on the childcare rebate among her biggest concerns.
Louise voted Labor in 2007 but is not sure how she'll vote this year. ''It's a lose-lose situation. I did vote for Kevin Rudd and I feel let down by that. But I don't want to vote for Tony Abbott either … It's difficult, because the parties seem so close in their positives and negatives.''
Competing offers of paid parental leave by the main political parties don't seem to have swayed these voters. Chef Jason Standring, 38, collecting his children Allana, 11, and Harrison, six, from after-school care, is more worried about long hospital waiting lists and unemployment levels. Life is a struggle at times. He and wife Josephine, a registered nurse, live from pay packet to pay packet, with little savings and a $190,000 mortgage on their three-bedroom Gisborne home. Childcare is expensive, he says. He worries, too, about teacher shortages in the area.
Anne McLennan, the council's director of community wellbeing, says there is growing need for more preschool places and sporting facilities.
Demand is driven, in large part, by families seeking more affordable housing while commuting to work in Melbourne or at the city's airports. About 18 per cent of the population in McEwen are technicians or trade workers. In Gisborne, the average house price is $402,500 against $580,000 in Melbourne, according to Residex.
Meanwhile, about 400 people across the Macedon Ranges Shire are on a waiting list for low-income housing, Ms McLennan says.
The area is popular, too, among high-income professionals seeking a rural lifestyle and easy access to childcare. Twin Oaks owner Maryanne Hussey says two families have booked childcare places in the past week, before moving to the area because of shortages in Melbourne. Her childcare centre has places for 130 children and is only about half full. It's a different story in McEwen's less wealthy southern stretches, which are bulging with new residential estates. The director of a childcare centre in South Morang, in Melbourne's outer north, with 150 places, says he has waiting lists of up to 20 children, three days a week.