Tania Lawrence (Hasluck, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

One of the deepest commitments of the Australian Labor Party underlying everything we do is our determination that everybody deserves a fair go. Doing what can be done to ensure that is the decent thing to do, it's also the smart thing to do. No society should waste the potential of people. Everyone should be given the chance at least to realise their potential. Ninety per cent of the development of our brains occurs in the first five years of life. Where that's forgotten or neglected, the stage is set for underachievement as individuals and as societies. That development in our first five years comes from the complex interaction between what we inherit from our parents and the nurture we do or don't receive in our environment.

Every young child learning to walk and talk is on a pathway. That pathway provides the stepping stones and the foundations for the rest of their life. The people who help them along the path are doing immensely important work. It isn't easy, it certainly isn't unskilled, and it absolutely is not something that everybody can do, for every child is unique. That's a challenge—a wonderful challenge, but a challenge just the same. To all the students now sitting in the gallery: please take that in the way it's intended, as an absolutely positive message. When a child interacts with another child, there are more challenges, and they don't always get along. They're not born knowing how to play nicely or even necessarily interested in learning how, and they are not born knowing how adults want them to behave, as I'm sure some of the students in the gallery might attest. They're capable of resisting, with all kinds of creativity, any ideas about behaviour that don't sound agreeable to them. Even the most agreeable have their days—the days when they're just not in the mood to be cooperative.

Knowing how to understand and respect all that individuality requires much more than being good with kids. It's knowledge requiring observation, reflection and adaptation. Knowing what to do and say in all those situations where children are learning behavioural skills of all kinds requires insight, wisdom, and emotional and intellectual maturity of a high order—and uncanny patience. We are talking about specialised knowledge and skills of immense importance to Australia's future.

It's time the people who possess and develop those skills were treated with the respect that they deserve. The bill setting up the Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers Special Account will deliver a 15 per cent pay rise for up to 200,000 early childhood educators across our country. We would, of course, like to deliver it to them right now, but unlike our predecessors we're committed to sustainability in all its aspects, which means delivering budgets that do what can be done when it can be done.

My hope for this election coming is that voters realise that the coalition couldn't get a budget in surplus while doing virtually nothing to solve Australia's problems or even trying to face them and, conversely, that Labor has managed to get that budget in surplus while working on solutions to real-life problems in real time. Our early educators now will get a 10 per cent pay rise from December this year. That's at least $103 per week. The further five per cent pay rise will come in December of next year. The Productivity Commission gets it. They advise that the first step in building a universal early education system that is affordable and available for more families is a pay rise for those who make it happen. It's good for workers, it's good for the kids, it's good for families, and it's great for Australia.

We've already instituted policies which are seeing 30,000 more early educators working in the sector than before we came to office. That's part of decisive steps that have seen 860 more early education services and 68,000 more children in early education. We need to encourage more of our early childhood education and care workers to stay in work that they entered with such enthusiasm, we need more to return to the field that they know and that they understand, and we need more people to consider a career in early education—a long-term, fairly rewarded and sustainable career. We'll also ensure that this will be affordable for parents by capping fees and constraining fee growth. This will be set out in a legally enforceable agreement between the Department of Education and early childhood education and care providers.

The changes we've made under Cheaper Child Care have, in fact, already cut childcare costs for more than one million families. This can be done while ensuring that the people who care for children are respected, encouraged and properly rewarded. It's part of a wider commitment to removing the undervaluation of wages in feminised industries. We need to ensure that women who work in industries where the majority of workers are other women aren't treated as though they deserve less pay. There's a peculiarly obnoxious set of attitudes behind this—a strange kind of logic, which seems to be that, if women are doing a job, it can't really be that skilled. Where those attitudes have prevailed, the recruitment and retention of skilled workers is in serious difficulty. No matter how dedicated you are, you do need to make ends meet for yourself and for your family. When we have a shortage of skilled workers in early childhood education and care, we have families who aren't able to give that education and care to their children, and, when that happens, we have children who aren't able to access the same opportunities.

In the last 50 years, the Australian Labor Party has introduced universal health care, in the form of Medibank and then Medicare, and universal superannuation. Those great steps forward, which are taken for granted now, changed the health of Australians and the financial prospects of Australians on their retirement. They're still a work in progress, and they always will be. We'll never stop working to make them better as times and technologies change. We're now working to chart the course for universal early childhood education and care. Labor doesn't drift with the tides or stand screaming into the wind; we chart courses. After much discussion—hours and weeks of months of it, believe me—we work out what we believe is the best, most effective way forward. We believe in big dreams, big plans and big goals.

Of course, some people with big dreams, plans and goals don't achieve anything much at all. For individual human beings, that can be caused by sheer bad luck. Governments don't have that excuse. We have to understand and focus upon the realities of today and the challenges of the future, and we're serious about it. We're in the reality business. We've learned what you need to do to make things happen. Grand statements like those that the member for Ryan just made in her 10 minutes won't do the trick. We actually have to listen to others, learn and think and then act.

How, in practice, do you achieve your goals? We're not going to be able to deliver universal early childhood education and care without addressing the problems of workforce shortages, and we can't do that without a legal framework for the establishment and operation of a special account. This one is the Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education Care and Workers Special Account, which will be used to administer grant funding for the Early Childhood Education and Care Worker Retention Payment Program.

So here we are. The grants will be paid as an interim payment while the Fair Work Commission finalises its gender undervaluation review of priority awards. These awards include the Children's Services Award 2010. The government also needs to consider the ACCC and Productivity Commission reports. We've been around. We know the drill. Perspectives and wisdom come from everywhere. You have to pay attention, you have to ask and you have to listen. We listened to service providers, educators, unions and advocacy organisations. We listened to parents and children.

The bill considers and respects the rights of parents and children under the Convention on the Rights of the Child. For those who don't know it, this convention, adopted by the UN in 1989, declares our recognition of 'the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family'. It declares our belief in the importance of the 'full and harmonious development' of a child's personality and the need to have children 'fully prepared to live an individual life in society'. It understands that children need 'special safeguards and care'. Those special safeguards and that care include the necessity of ensuring:

… that the institutions, services and facilities responsible for the care or protection of children shall conform with the standards established by competent authorities, particularly in the areas of safety, health, in the number and suitability of their staff, as well as competent supervision.

Australia made that promise, and we recognised the right of everyone under article 7 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1966 and coming into force in 1976, to 'the enjoyment of just and favourable conditions of work'. Article 7 specifically recognises the right to:

Fair wages and equal remuneration for work of equal value without distinction of any kind, in particular women being guaranteed conditions of work not inferior to those enjoyed by men, with equal pay for equal work.

This is part of ensuring another article 7 right, which is 'a decent living for themselves and their families'. The grant opportunity guidelines will impose conditions on providers to pass on all funding to early childhood education and care workers in the form of a remuneration increase. The guidelines will also provide a mechanism for workers to legally enforce their rights and their entitlements.

If human rights are forgotten when it comes to women and children, we don't really understand human rights at all, and this bill does. I commend the bill to the House.

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