Kate Chaney (Curtin, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support the Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers (Special Account) Bill 2024, which creates grants for early childhood education and care providers to support a wage increase for their workers. I want to talk about why accessible, quality childcare is important for kids and families, why it's important that we pay childcare workers better, the structure of the bill and some concerns with it, and further reform that is needed.

Child care is important for both kids and families. For kids, quality early childhood education is linked to improved academic achievement, reduced delinquency, increased school completion, higher earners in adulthood and improved social and emotional wellbeing. Children from lower socioeconomic groups experience greater and more enduring benefits from early childhood education than children from higher socioeconomic groups. For families, greater access to quality early childhood education and care increases female participation in paid work.

I've heard a range of views about the modelling done by the Productivity Commission in relation to the impact of greater access to care on female workforce participation. From personal experience, I wouldn't be surprised if this impact was understated in the PC modelling. Anecdotally, mums I know make decisions about returning to work based on the care that's available and it's cost. Having had kids in every combination of childcare options when they were small while I worked part time, I remember being asked to come into work for a meeting on a day when I was scheduled to be at home. If I was lucky enough to be able to add a casual daycare day, it cost me more than $100 per kid. I wasn't paid anything extra to come in on that day, so it cost me a lot to be flexible. Even in a well paid job, it was sometimes only marginally financially beneficial to work.

I also know how much my kids gained from the stimulation of being in centre based care and how important the workers there were to their development. Educators at my kids' childcare centres taught them things that kept surprising me as a parent. They came home with new knowledge, new ways of resolving conflict and the inevitable new viruses to build up their immune systems.

Childcare workers are underpaid. About 221,000 people are employed in the early childhood education and care sector. Like other professions traditionally considered women's work, we've systematically undervalued child care. The Productivity Commission has found that early childhood educators are just above the lowest paid decile when measured against other occupations. Early childhood education and care workers are paid less than people in other sectors with similar qualifications and are paid significantly less than primary and secondary school teachers, even though the years before a child turns five are a crucial time for learning. All you need to do is spend a few hours in a childcare centre, and you realise how underpaid educators are. They need to have patience, compassion, curiosity and good immune systems to do those jobs. We need to attract people to work in child care. It's such an important time for our kids' learning.

I'm very proud that my son, George, who's studying astrophysics at ANU, is also working part time in child care. He loves it. He loves helping kids learn how to solve problems and sharing the wonder that he finds in the world with them. Child care needs more people like George, and paying them a decent wage is a good start to attracting a vibrant and diverse workforce. I recognise that there's an inherent tension between improving access to early childhood education, and care for more people, and paying childcare workers more. Centre based day care in Australia is relatively less affordable for Australian households than in most other OECD countries. Obviously paying people more makes child care more expensive indirectly, but a pay increase recognises the inherent value of this type of work, attracts more people and contributes to the quality of care. It's worth noting that the proposed wage increases fall short of the union's calls for a 25 per cent wage increase but are a significant step up.

The structure of this bill is a bit clunky. It creates a special account to fund grants to early childhood education and care providers to support a wage increase for their workers. To be eligible, providers will need to increase workers' wages by 10 per cent above the current award in the year of payment and 15 per cent above the current award in the second. Providers will need to limit fee increases a maximum of 4.4 per cent in the first year and meet other conditions. I understand it's been set up like this to ensure funding allocated goes directly to workers and not to providers' bottom lines.

There are four issues with the bill that I want to comment on: it's inflationary impact, the lack of allocated funding, its short-term nature and the discretionary powers that it creates. Firstly, will this bill have an inflationary impact? Based on modelling, it could, effectively, be an injection of $3.6 billion over the next few years. Some providers may not take it up if they're already paying above the award, if they don't want to agree to the cap on fees, if they don't have an appropriate workplace instrument or if theirs covers more than the specific types of workers eligible for the grant. Of course, the extent to which it's taken up is correlated to its inflationary effect. I am concerned about any injection of funds that could be inflationary at this time, when inflation is having such a huge impact on cost of living.

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