Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s failure to tackle the rising cost of childcare in the Budget has been slammed by ABC’s Leigh Sales.

She challenged Morrison to explain “who will look after the children?”

Anthony Albanese is preparing to pledge a Labor government that will slash the cost of childcare for families, but the Prime Minister has ruled out offering “free” childcare.

In a tense interview on  7:30, the Prime Minister insisted he had not forgotten about families while trying to create one million new jobs.

“Who do you think is going to look after the children of the new workers?’’ Sales asked.

Morrison noted that record spending on childcare was good for women’s workforce participation, but Sales was quick to point out that childcare should be 50/50.

“Why do you assume I’m talking about women. Men are responsible,’’ Sales interjected.

“Men are responsible for childcare as well, you have pivoted to talking about women but men should be 50 per cent responsible for childcare, too.”

Morrison said he as “not disagreeing with that”.

“If you are suggesting we should have free childcare for everybody, that is not something we are proposing,’’ he said.

“Free” childcare was something that was offered by the Morrison Government as a temporary option during the COVID-19 pandemic but has since been axed.

Labor is proposing a plan to cover 90 to 95 per cent of the cost of childcare for low-income earners with a small co-payment to boost attendance rates.

This new policy ties in with the Grattan Institute’s push for a childcare co-payment for as little as $20 for most parents.

“Under this scheme, 60 per cent of families would pay less than $20 per day per child for childcare, and no family would be worse off,’’ the Grattan report states.

“The childcare subsidy for low-income families should be raised from 85 per cent to 95 per cent, gradually tapering for households with income above $68,000.”

Labor’s treasury spokesman confirmed on  The Project  that making childcare more affordable would be a big part of Labor’s budget-in-reply speech.

“One of the key omissions from the budget, one of the things that a lot of Australians are scratching their heads about is why they couldn’t do something about childcare in particular,’’ Dr Chalmers told  The Project.

“We don’t want a lot of working parents, often mums, to have to make a decision about going to work when almost all of their salary goes into paying for childcare. We’ll have more to say about childcare but that’s one of the obvious omissions from the budget.”