Sally Sitou (Reid, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

My question to those opposite is: how do we increase the number of places at childcare centres? This is something that we all want to be able to do. The only way you do that is to get a workforce in that can sustain increased spots. We want to make sure that these kids are getting good-quality education and that they have well-qualified early childhood educators looking after them. How long does it take to qualify to be an early childhood educator? You can do a TAFE course diploma in a couple of years, so really the hard work of trying to get more early childhood educators in the system needed to have happened a few years ago. Who was in government then? Those opposite. When we talk about the lack of early childhood educators in the workforce, this isn't something that has sprung up in the last one or two years; this is something that has been problematic for many, many years. We ought to have had the foresight to train these early childhood educators some years back so that they would now be in the workforce.

Last week I visited Abbotsford Long Day Care Centre. It's a really special early childhood education centre; you feel it as soon as you walk into the place. It's one of those places where the early childhood educators have been working there for years, sometimes decades. It's a not-for-profit organisation and a community run centre that has been in Abbotsford for almost 40 years and has a strong reputation in the community. Parents play an active role in the running of the centre. I met one of those parents. He spoke to me about how much his three-year-old son had benefited from the rich learning environment that Abbotsford Long Day Care Centre had offered him. I did a video with the centre director, Kylie Lawson, in which we spoke about the importance of early childhood education. Early childhood education benefits the child, their families and our society. I know it; you know it, Deputy Speaker Young; and the parents and educators at Abbotsford Long Day Care Centre know it.

Unfortunately, those opposite failed to value this importance of early childhood education. They're complaining about the government providing help with childcare costs to families. It begs the question, 'Why?' It's because they really don't want to look at their own record in this space. Over their nine years in government, a period of historically low inflation across the global economy and across the globe, childcare prices skyrocketed. They didn't just neglect the system; they also neglected the workforce. They neglected those people doing the hard yards looking after our kids—and it's them that we really need to support.

During the May budget there was a moment when the Treasurer was speaking that struck me. I looked up in the public gallery and saw a row of women who were in tears. They were in tears because of an announcement the Treasurer had made—that we had put a provision in the budget to help fund an increase in the pay for early childhood educators. The next day, bright and early after the budget, I went to a post-budget breakfast run by the Community Child Care Association and Community Early Learning Australia. I got to meet those early educators. They were still emotional the day after the budget, because many of them had been asking for years and years for their work to be valued. In that budget speech, where we talked about ensuring they got a pay rise, they finally felt as though they were being valued—that their work as educators, where they were providing a rich learning environment for our kids, was finally being recognised and valued, and that they were finally going to be paid what they are worth. That was what the announcement the Prime Minister made yesterday was all about: recognising the important contribution of these early childhood educators who had been fighting for so long to finally be valued. We said to them, 'We see the important work you do, we value it and we are going to pay you what you are worth.'

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