years. Five years ago the OECD declared that Australia was ranked 13 our 14 countries when it came to our expenditure on early childhood education and care some would say that was pretty disgraceful. Since then we have seen a tripling of the investment in early childhood services. I am incredibly proud that we will invest over $22.3 billion dollars over the next four years in this space. It is not just about the funding, it is also about the impacts that those investments and reforms have had on the sector. We do know that there have never been more Australian children in approved early childhood care and education. I know that not too long ago we celebrated when one million Australian children were in care, we are now at 1.3 million children in care. Never before have we had so many children in care, never before have they been using the services for so many hours a week and never before have we had so many services across Australia. In fact, I was just saying in discussions with the executive that we have seen a 36 percent increase in the number of approved early childhood services since we came into government 36 percent increase that includes 500 new services in just the last 12 months alone. I think when we are looking at the sector we can see that there has been extraordinary change, there has been a huge added investment but there has also been a very rapid