Sam Birrell (Nicholls, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers (Special Account) Bill 2024. The bill, which is supported by us, legislates a special account known as the Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers Special Account to support a government funded 15 per cent pay increase for childcare workers across Australia. This will be phased in over two years, starting with a 10 per cent increase this December, followed by an additional five per cent next December. The special account will be used to administer grant funding for the Early Childhood Education and Care Worker Retention Payment Program. It does not set out the required wage increases or the specific conditions on providers who receive grants. Once the legislation has passed, the department will task Services Australia to build a payment system. That comes into effect in July 2025. I note that the cost of this bill is $3.6 billion.

I think people across the chamber have expressed how important early childhood education is. It's something that many of us have had experience with and talked to our constituents about. It's certainly something that I've gone through, with two children who went to early childhood care, day care, three-year-old kinder and kinder after that. I can tell you it's one of the most important services you'll ever engage, for someone to care for the most important people your life: your children. I can remember going to a place which was then called Florina but is now called Little Stars and dropping off my daughter when she was about two or three years old and crying at the start of the day. You feel a bit bad but then you go away and come back—and it turns out she's had the most wonderful day socialising with the other kids and engaging with the early childhood educators. It was a great experience. So the coalition supports the pay rise for those early childhood educators.

I have been going around my electorate talking to people about their experiences of early childhood and I had the member for Moncrieff, the shadow minister for early childhood education, join me just last week. We went around talking to constituents to hear their experiences, particularly in places like Seymour and Avenel. We got a lot of engagement from young parents who can receive the childhood subsidy but find there are simply no places available because of where they live. We spoke to a young woman, whose name was Larissa, who would like to pick up more shiftwork at Seymour hospital—and Seymour hospital would like her to pick up more shiftwork—but she's unable to do it because her family daycare place has closed down. She's on a waitlist, but she can't get her kids into an early childhood centre.

We heard that situation echoed in a place called Avenel in my electorate, where the proprietor of the local equine hospital came down to see us in the park and talk to us. She brought a number of her staff members. Some were mums and some were people who want to start a family. She's concerned that these high-level professionals will leave the region if they can't find childcare places. I think Labor's policy is very focused on metropolitan areas where it's viable to have these big corporate type centres.

I want to raise the issue of what we on this side call childcare deserts—reports have been written about this—where there simply aren't enough places for child care and it's having a flow-on because we're having trouble attracting and retaining a professional workforce because of that lack of child care.

I would like to see policies focus not just on the subsidy. I note a couple can earn up to $533,000 before they no longer get a subsidy. I don't want to think that people who are earning high incomes and who have worked hard to become professionals and earn those high incomes should not get some assistance, but we are helping some very wealthy people to access child care. I'm not opposed to that, but we don't seem to have any focus on ensuring that there are more childcare places in regional and rural Australia, in places like my electorate.

I really hope that we can come to a bipartisan agreement in this place. Yes, the wages need to increase, and they will. Yes, there need to be subsidies for parents, and people will have different views on the income level at which those subsidies should kick in or no longer be there. But, where there's not the equity of opportunity for people who live in regional and rural Australia because there are simply no childcare places, then we've got to really do something about that as a federal parliament.

I hear 'cheaper child care' all the time in this place, and I know that there are more subsidies going into it, but parents are telling me that they're not better off because any increased subsidy that they're getting, whether it be for child care or energy relief or anything else, is being eaten up by inflation. So, unless the government gets on top of the inflation issue—and I don't believe they have got on top of the inflation issue yet; it has stayed too high for too long—parents and Australian families will continue to be worse off. I hear from parents who are saying: 'I've got to go back to work. I can find a childcare place. Yes, I'm getting a subsidy, but the interest rate on my mortgage or my rent has gone up. Food's gone up. Electricity's gone up.' So many things—health care is another—have gone up by so much that people are just not feeling better off. A lot of money is thrown at things in this place, and we have debates about that all the time, but I think the government has got one focus that it needs to get back on track with, and that's making sure that we get inflation under control. It's not under control at the moment. It has stayed too high for too long, and interest rates aren't coming down. It's putting people under serious pressure.

The coalition's got a good record on child care. When my kids were in child care, the coalition was in government. We almost doubled childcare investment to $11 billion in 2022-23. We locked in ongoing funding for preschools and kindergartens. We made big reforms to the early childhood education system over 40 years. More than 1.3 million children from around one million families have access to the child care subsidy. Our targeted extra support introduced in March 2022 made a real difference. Childcare costs came down 4.6 per cent in the year to June 2022, and we saw women's workforce participation reach record highs at 62.3 per cent compared to 58.7 per cent when Labor left office. So I think we all agree that child care is a good thing. It helps young people. It helps their socialisation. It helps young parents—and I've been one of them—get back into the workforce, and that applies to parents of either gender. It does help young families. We support helping families with the costs of child care. We support a wage increase for those early educators. But I would like to see the focus of the policy more on making sure that we—if I could put it this way—sprinkle some water on those childcare deserts and make sure that there are some places there in rural and regional areas.

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