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#09 | Is Foreign Investment Threatening Aussie Farms? Plus, Why Are Supermarket Meat Prices So High?
Gillian’s solo on the mic this week with Sarah Secker — a Keith, South Australia farm and business owner who traded a marketing career in Sydney and London for regional advocacy — to dig into why childcare access is quietly strangling rural communities, and why nobody in Canberra seems to have noticed.
#84 | Childcare Challenges in Regional Australia with Sarah Secker – Agsolutely Fabulous
In episode 84 of Agsolutely Fabulous, Gillian is solo today with her guest, Sarah Secker, a farm and business owner in Keith, South Australia, who previously worked as a marketing and advertising executive in Sydney and London. Secker describes how the country work ethic helped her gain opportunities, then explains her current advocacy focus: regional childcare access as a critical “livability” and economic development lever for rural communities with seasonal work patterns and smaller populations.She argues government policy is city-centric, market-driven childcare fails in low-density areas, and government must play a larger provider and regulatory role, including more flexible subsidies and support for in-home care. They discuss practical reforms such as adding au pairs to the 88-day ag visa and addressing HECS indexing when parents can’t work due to childcare shortages. Sitker calls for regional voices at decision-making tables, sharing media links, and contacting local members, noting impacts on essential workers, volunteers, and regional political shifts.Links & ResourcesLandcare Australia: https://landcareaustralia.org.au/Find or Register a Group: https://landcareaustralia.org.au/find-a-group/Learn how to Get Involved with Landcare here: https://youtu.be/3s74Lvmlutk💕 Support Our PartnersTHANK YOU TO OUR PODCAST SPONSORS!Farm Table – Your online hub for all things ag, connecting farmers with resources, events, and opportunities. Check them out at https://farmtable.com.au/Book Box – Use code Fabulous15 for a special discount at checkout!Start your next chapter here → https://bookbox.au/Why a marketing exec from Sydney ends up fighting for childcare in Keith
Sarah Secker’s story doesn’t start on a farm. It starts in her twenties, in a Mitsubishi Lancer, driving out of a country town with her family quietly wondering what the hell she was doing. A decade later she’d worked on major brand campaigns in Sydney and London, been flown business class to LA to shoot with Ashton Kutcher, and generally lived the ad-industry version of Mad Men — hard partying, harder mornings, and a CEO who didn’t care what you did at night as long as you were at your desk by nine.
Then she went home. Now she’s a farm and business owner at Keith, about 250km south-east of Adelaide, in a mixed farming region running livestock, broadacre and olives across a population of roughly 1,500 people. And the skills that got her into rooms with Hungry Jack’s owner Jack Cowan are now going into district council economic development meetings and DMs to Karl Stefanovic.
Because Sarah’s realised something a lot of regional Australia has worked out the hard way: childcare isn’t a parenting problem. It’s an economic one.
The “livability” argument — and why the city model doesn’t travel
Here’s the thing city-based policy makers keep missing: childcare in the regions isn’t just about whether a mum can get back to work. It’s the difference between a town that holds onto its teachers, nurses and tradies, and one that slowly bleeds them out to the coast. Sarah calls it “livability” — and once you hear the argument, you can’t unhear it.
Childcare is a market. In the city, population growth drives supply — roughly speaking, every hundred new houses justifies a new centre, and private operators like Goodstart move in because the numbers stack up. In a town of 1,500, they don’t. There’s no version of childcare-as-private-enterprise that pencils out in low-density regional Australia, which means government has to be a bigger player in the regions than it is in the city — not because the regions are asking for special treatment, but because the market genuinely doesn’t work the same way out here.
Then there’s seasonality. A farming region’s economy moves in waves — harvest, shearing, picking — and childcare demand moves with it. But government-funded centres are built for steady, 52-week-a-year demand. Sarah’s example: a migrant family in her district doesn’t need a full-time centre place, they need eight weeks of care to cover an income spike during harvest. Right now the system makes them book a full year to get any access at all — so they don’t bother, and the second income never materialises.
Two levers, and neither of them cost much
What struck me listening back to this conversation is how small the actual asks are. Sarah’s not lobbying for an Olympic pool or a NICU in Keith. She’s asking for two specific, practical fixes — and we checked both of them against the current rules, because it’s easy to say “government should fix this” and much harder to point at the exact clause.
- Add au pairs to the 88-day regional work visa. Working Holiday Makers currently need 88 days of “specified work” in agriculture, construction, mining, fishing or disaster recovery to unlock a second-year visa — childcare and domestic work don’t count. Sarah can legally put a backpacker on a header for 88 days and get them a visa extension, but not a nanny doing the school run. That’s a regulatory gap, not a budget one — it’s the kind of thing that changes with a stroke of a pen, not a Treasury allocation.
- Stop indexing HECS debt for parents locked out of childcare. HECS-HELP balances are indexed every 1 June against the lower of CPI or the Wage Price Index. The rate was 3.2% in 2025 and sits at 2.8% for 2026, on top of a one-off 20% reduction applied to most balances in June 2025. Sarah’s point: if you’ve got a skilled qualification and genuinely can’t get childcare to use it, your debt keeps growing anyway — which is, in her words, a punishment for not working that you never chose.
The handover document from 2010
The line that actually stopped me was this: Sarah was recently handed a briefing document for her local town written in 2010. She could resend the exact same emails today — workforce participation, women’s equal access, regional service gaps — without changing a word. Sixteen years, and the problems haven’t moved. I’ve got my own version of that timeline: I first got involved in remote and regional childcare advocacy back around 2006, when my eldest was a baby. He’s twenty now. My youngest is about to start high school. Genuinely nothing has changed in that time, and that’s not one government’s failure — it’s a bipartisan one, stacked up over successive terms of “we’ve fixed it” press releases that fixed nothing.
And when childcare doesn’t exist, the fallback is grim in ways that would never be tolerated in the city. Kids in portacots with bars on top so they can’t climb out near a well. Kids fenced into the cab of a ute while a parent fixes a pump. Ask anyone in the regions and they’ll tell you the same story with different props. Nobody thinks it’s ideal. There just isn’t another option — and that’s precisely the point government policy keeps missing: this isn’t about parenting choices, it’s about the complete absence of infrastructure.
What actually moves the needle
Sarah’s ask isn’t complicated: get regional and remote voices in the same room as the department heads who write childcare policy, before it’s written — not after. Use existing infrastructure creatively (she floated a mobile childcare model that follows seasonal peaks through under-used community halls, the same way you’d move horticultural labour). And stop treating volunteering — the Meals on Wheels runs, the footy club canteen, the CFS callouts — as somehow less legitimate than paid work when it comes to justifying access to care.
If you want to actually help: engage with the media coverage on this when you see it — share it, comment on it, because visibility is the only lever advocates like Sarah have without a lobby budget behind them. And write to your local member. Not the minister, your local member — because when a policy submission lands on a minister’s desk, the first call they make is to the local member asking “is this actually happening in your patch?” If your local member says no, your submission dies right there. CC everyone. Make it harder to pretend nobody raised it.
Regional Australia isn’t asking for anything special here. Just the same baseline service access our urban counterparts don’t think twice about. As Sarah put it — and I don’t think you can improve on it — “the standard you walk past is the standard you accept.” We’ve been walking past this one for twenty years. Time to stop.
Sources & further reading
- Australian Government Department of Home Affairs — 88-day specified work requirements for the Working Holiday visa (subclass 417/462)
- ATO / Study Assist — HELP debt indexation rates, 1 June 2025 and 1 June 2026, and the 2025 20% debt reduction
