Mapping Australia’s childcare blackspots
Like thousands of Australians who turned their backs on pandemic-weary cities over the past two years, Caitlin Wilson and husband Jonathon Peatfield moved to regional NSW to escape the rat race.
They had no idea that the competition for child care in bucolic Uralla, near Armidale in the state’s north-east, would be fiercer than in the cosmopolitan confines of Chippendale, in inner Sydney.
Both Caitlin and Jonathon work full time and want Matilda, 18 months, and Harrison, 3, in long day care five days a week.
“I put our kids’ names down at maybe four different day care centres and couldn’t get anything, not a single day, until February. So ... six months’ wait,” Caitlin says.