Tanya Plibersek: 'Waleed Aly must be smoking drugs' if he agrees with the Coalition.

Tanya Plibersek said she thinks Waleed Aly “must be smoking drugs” if he thinks the Coalition has the superior child care policy leading up to this weekend’s federal election.

Aly came down in favour of the government’s approach in a segment on last night’s episode of The Project, deeming it the better long-term fix.

Read Aly’s entire argument here.

“We need to listen to the experts,” he said.

“They say that the current system is a total mess and it can’t be fixed just by tweaking a rebate here or increasing a cap there. It needs a major overhaul if we want to improve services and costs for all Australians in the long-term.”

Speaking to Mamamia in a Facebook Live session this morning, the deputy Labor leader said she couldn’t understand how Aly could possibly have come to that conclusion.

“I think he must be smoking drugs,” said Plibersek, “Seriously, there is no way anybody could suggest that.”

“Our policy actually increases the childcare benefit for everybody who gets it by up to $1600 a year, so everybody is better of on childcare benefit.

“And then a lot of people also get childcare rebate, and we’re increasing the childcare rebate cap from $7500 a year per child to $10,000.

“We’ve also said that we support the building or expansion of childcare centres in high demand areas, so that there will be more places available. We’ve also said that we’ll support extra out of school hours care.”

Plibersek said the fact that the government has spent just $9000 of the $185 million set aside for its nanny pilot programme, demonstrates that the Coalition is “incompetent and incapable of managing child care”.

“We need more places and more affordable places and we still need to focus on quality,” she said and this government’s been really trying to undermine the quality framework that we set up in government.”

Mamamia invited a member of the Coalition to participate in this morning’s Facebook Live session, but they were unable to provide a candidate.