Steve Georganas (Adelaide, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It gives me great pleasure and pride to be here supporting the Early Childhood Education and Care (Three Day Guarantee) Bill 2025. I do so because we on this side want to make sure that every child gets the best possible start in life, and we believe that every child has the right to go to early education, to help make sure they don't start school behind. This Labor government is going to make that possible. The bill replaces the old activity test with a new three-day guarantee in early education, starting from 5 January 2026. The activity test requires that parents meet a minimum level of approved activity, such as work or study, before qualifying for the child care subsidy. This has created some barriers, and we've identified so, for families accessing the CCS, for example, where a parent needs educational child care in order to look for work, or before they can commit to study. The bill will provide that all families will be guaranteed three days, or 72 hours, of childcare subsidy each fortnight.

Families who work, study or train will continue to be eligible for the 100 hours of childcare subsidy each fortnight. The three-day guarantee will increase entitlements for over 100,000 Australian families, with more than 66,000 families expected to be better off in the first full financial year of implementation, and absolutely no family to be worse off.

The reform is part of the next steps to building a universal early education and care system, expanding access to quality early education across the country. It does a number of things. It builds on cheaper child care, which will cut the cost of early education and care for more than one million families, and, on top of that, our 15 per cent pay rise for early educators. This pay rise has been a critical achievement for early childhood education and care workers, who have traditionally been some of the most important workers in the country, who are dedicated to looking after our children in those very early formative years and those very early years of their education in and around the country. They're also important for our economy, and they deserve to be paid fairly. This government recognises that and pushed for it.

Achieving quality outcomes for children relies on a highly skilled, well-supported and professionally recognised early childhood education and care sector. Decent wages are absolutely critical for this sector to reversing the attrition and growing this crucial workforce. Everyday Australians trust early educators with the most important people in our world, and that is the next generation of Australians and our very young children. We ask our early childhood educators to do some of the most important jobs imaginable, and they desperately deserve that pay rise and to be paid accordingly.

That's what this government has delivered—a 15 per cent rise for childcare workers, a 10 per cent pay rise from December 2024 and a further five per cent pay rise from December of this year. A typical early childhood educator receives an additional $103 extra a week from last December, and that will increase to at least $155 from this coming December. So, wages in the early childhood education and care sector—a heavily female dominated workforce—are amongst the lowest in the caring professions, with award rates for professional qualified educators often comparable to rates of pay for unqualified workers, such as those in retail and hospitality. An effective supported bargaining process will lift pay and conditions for the workforce and contribute towards the government's ambition for that universal, high-quality sector.

This is important because what happens in early education and care is important. It's not just babysitting; it's early education, and 90 per cent of brain development occurs in the first five years of life. Research and experts and professors around the world all have one common thing to say when it comes to early education, and that is that the earlier you start the better off that person's education will be. That is a proven fact. It's not just about babysitting or caring for kids while parents are at work—which are also very important for working families—but also about the development of the child's education for the rest of their life.

This pay rise will encourage more people to stay in or come back to the industry and more people to think about becoming educators—and having more educators means that more children and more parents can benefit from the life-changing work these educators do. The Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers (Special Account) Bill 2024 also supported affordability for families by establishing the fee increase cap in the terms and conditions of the worker retention payment grant. This means that providers are not able to raise their fees by more than 4.4 per cent in the first year. This will put downward pressure on fees, helping to make education and care more affordable for families.

Why am I saying all this? It is because all of it is part of a package to ensure that we have a professional early education industry that provides the utmost and best for our children, our grandchildren and our great grandchildren so that they can develop and have the best education possible to them, which will then benefit the nation as a whole. We're committed to a package that establishes building an early education fund to build and expand childcare centres in areas of need, including outer suburbs and regions, where perhaps people are not as able to access these centres as we are here in the cities. As part of this package the government will also develop the early education service delivery price to help better understand the cost of delivering the services around the country and to underpin future reform.

Going back to the bill: the bill provides that all families will be guaranteed three days, or 72 hours, of subsidised childcare each fortnight, and that is a great start. We hope we will build on and future governments will build on those three days. Families who are caring for First Nations children will be guaranteed 100 hours each fortnight. Families who work, study or train will continue to be eligible for 100 hours of subsidised care each fortnight. This is extremely important across the nation. For example, ABS census data showed that 2,280 childcare workers were working in metropolitan Adelaide in 2021, which compares with 862 in 2011. This is an increase of 1,418, or 164.5 per cent—a huge increase. As at July 2024 there were 157 early childhood education and care services in my electorate of Adelaide. These include centre based day care, outside-school-hours care, family day care and preschools. There were 70 centre based daycare services and 50 outside-school-hours services in the Adelaide electorate—all playing a crucial role in early education and educating the next generation of Australians. There are 9,800 families benefiting from cheaper child care in my electorate alone.

As many of us do in this place, I have had the privilege of visiting quite a number of childcare centres. I always enjoy going along and seeing the work that the early educators do and the activity of the children. I have always been received with open arms wherever I have gone. In the electorate in recent times, I know how well the news that I have just explained is being received in such centres. I'll just name a few of them. One that has been there for many years and which my own children attended is the Lady Gowrie Child Centre. My kids, by the way, are now 40 and 36. That's how long the Lady Gowrie Child Centre has been at Thebarton. They do amazing, incredible work, and they have educated thousands of children in their early years. I've seen the benefit to my kids and my grandkids on top of that.

I visited the Goodstart Early Learning at Plympton about six months ago. There is the Goodstart Early Learning in Prospect, which I am visiting again next month. They've invited me to go down. There is the Parkside Community childcare centre and the Unley Community Childcare Centre, where I had a great meeting with parents, educators and the committee of the centre. They told me about their trials and tribulations a couple of years ago. I fed all of that back to the minister. I hope those discussions that I had played a role in developing some of these policies. Other great ones are Precious Cargo and Little Oxford Montessori early learning centres.

When you visit these centres, you get a great sense of the importance of their work. As I said, I met with the parents, the committee members and some of the early childhood educators who work there. I sat and spoke with them, and they showed me the centres but also told me about their work and how hard their work is. A few years ago, we had a program through the childcare centres and their union. They ran a campaign saying, 'Walk in their shoes,' where they gave us the opportunity to go to a centre and sit and actually do the work of an early educator for just one hour. I went to Camden Park back then when I was the member for Hindmarsh. I recall it clearly. Part of the role was lunch, reading a book and then playing some games. So I sat there with the childcare worker who was guiding me. I was absolutely exhausted after one hour. It is not as simple as you think having 15 to 20 young toddlers in front of you, reading the story, making sure they all eat their fruit and carrying out the activities. I recall that I left exhausted after just one hour. So the work these early childhood workers put in to looking after our kids is very important. They do it because they are so committed to it. They do it because they love it. They do it because they're passionate about it. I really appreciate, as we all should, the work that early childhood educators do for our children.

About a year ago, I met with staff, advocates and parents at the Unley Community Childcare Centre. They also told me about their trials and tribulations. They told me about the long hours of work, their difficulties in recruiting staff and the difficulties in running a family household with such low pay. All of these policies that we have put in place will ensure that they attract more staff, that they are paid a decent wage and that we continue to offer education in the early years of our children.

I am also looking forward, as I said earlier, to attending the official opening of the Prospect Goodstart Early Learning childcare centre next month. Goodstart employees were among the first early childhood workers to receive a pay rise. I know they appreciate the support that they and their families and the children they care for are receiving from this government. Indeed, the management of the centre had this to say: 'The past year has been an immensely exciting one for the early learning centres, with major policies and investments from the Labor Malinauskas and Albanese governments paving the way for improved access to high-quality early learning for children and families. So Goodstart is excited to be a part of the ECEC reform process and we deeply appreciate your ongoing support for high-quality, not-for-profit early childhood providers, which helps ensure quality and affordability remain at the heart of early learning.'

It's clear how critically needed this government's reforms to the childcare sector are and how important it is to retain childcare workers and help parents and carers struggling with cost-of-living pressures. These important reforms ensure that not only will children get the early education access they need to help develop them and improve their entire educational life but parents will get cheaper childcare services, ensuring that we're putting downward pressure on the cost of living.

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