In the vein of Mary Poppins, she was practically perfect in every way, except for one minor fault: she had an annoying habit of musing out loud on the perceived inadequacies of Australia compared with her home country and frequently started sentences with, "In Germany ..." Cue meditation on German superiority.

It happened so often that it become a kind of joke in our family, something my husband and I still mimic with a bit of a giggle.

I thought of this when Federal Education Minister Dan Tehan went on the ABC to warn that Labor's proposed childcare shake-up - including subsidies that would see free childcare offered to the majority of families earning up to $69,000, higher subsidies for families on incomes up to $174,000, and a commitment to address the appallingly low wages of early years educators in this female dominated sector - was "a fast track to a socialist, if not a communist, economy".

Oh dear, just two weeks into a federal election campaign and already we're invoking the spectre of the communist bogey man. That was fast.

In response, and the irony is not lost on me, I have this to say to Tehan: in Germany they realised decades ago that they, actually, could learn a thing or two from the communists in relation to childcare, and they took those lessons to heart to stem an impending demographic crisis that would have seen the entire social welfare system collapse due to falling birth rates - an issue, incidentally, Australia is also facing.

Nearly 30 years on from the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of communist East Germany with the capitalist West, in a series of moves that would surely rock minister Tehan's world, in 2013 Germany declared that every child over the age of one had a legal right to a space in a public childcare facility. And last year, Germany's highest court took that mandate one step further and ruled parents could sue for lost wages if they could not find a place in a public childcare facility.

How did that happen and what do those pesky communists have to do with it? The German experience offers a unique "Tale of Two Cities" allegory for childcare as the two quite different systems came together following Germany's re-unification, with one, the one provided by the Communists, proving somewhat superior.

East Germany's iconic Trabant car may have proved no match for the slick West German engineering of BMW, Mercedes and Audi, but on the issue of childcare, it seems, the East Germans could easily overtake the West Germans on the metaphorical childcare Autobahn.

In West Germany, postwar childcare policy was long dominated by the, now outdated, German adage, "Kinder, Kche, Kirche" (Children, Kitchen, Church) and the government of the day, largely conservative Christian politicians, held fast to the belief that children were best looked after by mothers at home. Decades of policy discouraged women from working, including extremely generous maternity leave of up to three years, generous tax breaks to single-earner families, and a public healthcare and pension systems that granted insurance rights to economically inactive wives. Very little was invested in childcare.

East Germany, by contrast, encouraged women to work outside the home and took a more collective approach to childcare.

The Western way of thinking had a considerable impact. After re-unification, those seeking childcare places in the east found them more readily available, while spaces were available for fewer than one in 10 children in the west.

A generation of Western German women who had invested heavily in their education decided, sensibly, not to have children for no other reason than they knew they would not be able to find a childcare place if they needed one. Nearly half made that choice.

That, folks, is what economists call a demographic time bomb. The kind that explodes when the economy has a decreasing ratio of taxpaying workers whose taxes support the benefits of non-working people, particularly the older, retired generation.

As Germany's demographic time bomb's fuse grew ever shorter, politicians took action, adopting the more "collectivist" approach to childcare long embraced in the East.

Now dubbed the "sustainable family policy", Germany's post-unification childcare policy model conceives of children as society's future assets and seeks to encourage childbearing by supporting parents to be workers and attempts to reduce poverty by boosting mothers' employment.

It's not communism. It's just good economic and social policy.

What on earth could a Liberal minister have against that?

Australia is likewise confronted with birth rates that have been falling for nearly a decade, reaching the lowest level in recorded history in 2017 at below 1.75 per cent. Surely, the availability of childcare and the fact that net childcare costs are 37.6 per cent of the average wage, compared with an OECD average of 16.4 per cent, plays into the calculations of many women and their partners when deciding whether or not to have a child, let alone more than one.

In Germany, even the Christian conservative politicians were dragged kicking and screaming into accepting that reality and the reality that many women want to work, many women need to work and there's an entirely legitimate role for the state in supporting them to achieve those ends through sensible childcare policy. Fail to act, and we all pay the price.

"In Germany" indeed, Dan Tehan.