Childcare, or as it should more properly be known, early childhood education and care. While I am very much looking forward to the Morrison government's attempt to fix the problem, until they can take advice from the vice-president of the United States, I'd put my money on more delay and more denial that childcare is a problem for Australian families.

On Thursday morning, Australians might have seen reports of Kamala Harris speaking at a roundtable discussion where she asked "female business owners to help make the case to critics in Washington".

What case? The case for infrastructure spending to include investment in child care. As she put it, infrastructure is "things you just need to get to where you need to go".

"We should not ask women to put their jobs before their children," Harris said. "It's a false choice." Could we get the vice-president to give all our political parties here a stern talking to?

She's not the first US politician to make the case for childcare as infrastructure. Democrat Elizabeth Warren did it before her. But here in Australia, that case has not been made clear. While Warren was making her case, so too was Leah Ruppanner of the University of Melbourne's Policy Lab. She was up at 5am Melbourne time giving a seminar on Zoom to women around the world about this very thing.

Ruppanner says there has been a real lack of recognition by politicians to acknowledge early childhood education and care as infrastructure. And there are two key reasons why it matters. One, childcare has similar benefits to public schools - access to quality early educational care is essential to closing inequality gaps. Two, it is essential for maternal employment. The high cost of childcare puts off women's participation at work even among women who earn higher incomes.

Think of childcare as a bridge. There you go, a bridge over which we can cut inequality and give women a way into the workforce. Of course, it is infrastructure.

Ruppanner says it is because politicians for too long have considered childcare as babysitting instead of quality care which, as Georgie Dent from parenting lobby group the Parenthood puts it, there is nothing better than having access to high quality early learning environments in formative years. "There is no replacement for the kind of formal training in the brain and social development of small children and the socialisation and stimulation that children experience among their peers, led by trained early educators."

Plus, as she points out: "While all children benefit from high quality early learning, disadvantaged children benefit the most and in Australia they are the cohort least likely to attend. The fact one in five children arrive at school developmentally vulnerable reflects this."

Here is the other wonderful thing about high quality early learning - those who attend are half as likely to be what Dent describes as developmentally vulnerable. Which is perfect and a silver bullet because children who arrive at school behind rarely catch up, she says.

The best - best - possible outcome would be free universal childcare. But that's not what anyone is promising. As Sally Whyte explained earlier this week, under the extra funding announced by the government, the maximum subsidy for families with two or more children aged under five will increase from 85 per cent of the cost of care to 95 per cent. Under the current system, families with a combined income of $189,390 have a childcare subsidy cap of $10,560 per child, which will be removed.

Which is not generous enough. The cost of good quality childcare is a massive burden on families and puts women off working more days because in Australia, still, women are carrying the burden of care. And there is another problem. Instead of going in to bat for women straight away, these changes won't start for another 13 months so it's all promises, promises. For all we know, this government will revert to its debt and disaster mode and remove the enticement to vote for them in 2022. I expected Labor's promise to be more along the lines of free universal child care but it's not quite as bold as that. Labor says the rate of childcare subsidy would increase for all families with incomes under $530,000 and would commission a Productivity Commission review of childcare "with the aim of implementing a universal 90 per cent subsidy for all families". So close, but not free

As Ruppanner told her international audience on Thursday morning, childcare and public schooling are fundamental forms of infrastructure that support families, businesses, and the economy. The workforce participation of Australian women has been severely impacted by COVID and hardest hit where children were supported at home doing remote schooling. You can see why that might be the case. It all got too hard and despite our rebounding economy, women are still being left behind.

MORE JENNA PRICE:

As Janine Dixon and Helen Hodgson revealed last year through analysis of the last budget for the National Foundation for Australian Women, the government invests heavily in men: apprenticeships, traineeships, construction of physical infrastructure and tax breaks for the purchase of assets in the male-dominated industries of mining and manufacturing. All of which is great and necessary but those same men are dropping little bundles all over Australia yet not quite picking up those bundles from childcare. Or even worrying about what it costs and what's available.

It also demonstrated new modelling by the Victoria University Centre of Policy Studies on government investment in the care sector; and what would happen in that sector if capacity met demand. To cut a long analysis short, it would dramatically increase employment. Everyone would be happier (OK, I made that bit up).

But it is true that Dixon and Hodgson found paying unpaid carers to work an extra 10 hours a week would increase labour supply by two per cent, and women's paid employment would be nearly four per cent greater. Both men and women would earn more. Told you. Everyone would be happier. Money may not buy happiness but it certainly takes worry out of the equation.

But this will only happen if we recognise childcare is infrastructure. It is just like bridges and schools and hospitals and roads and as Harris explained on Wednesday night our time, it is one of those "things you just need to get to where you need to go".

Where we need to go is better support for Australian families to get where they need to go.