Andrew Leigh (Fenner, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities and Treasury) Share this | Hansard source

My three boys are now in secondary school or graduated, but this bill certainly brings back memories of the great benefits that they got from their time in early childhood, attending the Acton Early Childhood Centre. I would sometimes cycle, with one of my boys on the back of the bike, to the campus at ANU. It's a lovely spot, surrounded by areas where the kids could walk and where they could enjoy playing. They had little carts and so they could be out and active in the play spaces. There were chickens for the kids to engage with, and there were educators who were dedicated to spending time with the kids—reading to them, singing to them, nurturing them.

Later, we moved our youngest to the Wiradjuri Preschool and Child Care Centre on the campus of the University of Canberra. Their motto is: 'We care, we share, we love to learn.' Wiradjuri had a smaller outdoor space, but they made terrific use of it. They enjoyed taking the kids for walks across the University of Canberra campus. I'm not quite sure what the young students made of these little tackers being taken across the campus, but the educators used the space to their best abilities.

What we really appreciated about Wiradjuri was the way it operated as a kind of teaching hospital model, where those students who were studying early childhood would come in and be mentored by experienced early childhood educators. They had two pictures on the wall, one of Gough Whitlam and one of Vincent Lingiari. They would tell the kids about that wonderful moment when, in the land handback, Whitlam poured a handful of sand into Vincent Lingiari's hand and Vincent so generously, so extraordinarily, said, 'We're all mates now.'

They played at the piano and gave the kids a love of learning and a love of friendship as well. The times at those centres are ones that shaped all three of our boys. As it happened, we drove by the Acton Early Childhood Centre on the weekend and the kids were immediately telling stories about how it influenced them more than a decade ago.

Today 1.4 million Australian children went off to an early learning centre, enjoying the benefits of a quality early learning education. We've gotten well past the notion that early learning is simply babysitting. Yes, there are huge benefits to workforce participation, particularly for women who've traditionally done the lion's share of the caring duties, but there's also a key education benefit, which is why it's so important to ensure that the early learning sector attracts and retains great educators.

The early learning reforms in this country really kicked off in 2007 when the Rudd government committed to a series of significant early childhood reforms, and I pay tribute to the work of Maxine McKew in this reform journey. The Starting strong II report acknowledged that Australia performed relatively poorly on early learning and committed to a national quality framework which would see all early learning centres in the country properly assessed. That national quality framework reflected the fact that the Labor government recognised it was important to have quality as well as affordability at the heart of what was done.

We have seen an increase in the number of children attending early childhood centres, but we have also seen challenges placed on the take-up of early learning as a result of the activity test. That was one of the factors that led the government to commission a key Productivity Commission report titled A path to universal early childhood education and care.

The three commissioners of that report were Martin Stokie, Lisa Gropp and Professor Deborah Brennan. I would particularly like to acknowledge the work of Professor Brennan, who I've known for a very long time—since I was eligible for early child care myself and then at the University of Sydney when I took her course on social policy. She has been an extraordinary advocate for a better early learning system in this country. I would like to thank Professor Brennan, as so many of the members the government have, for the important insights she brought to that Productivity Commission report. She is truly a national treasure. Her expertise and deep understanding of the history of reform in this sector, as well as the international experience, really made this a landmark report.

The Productivity Commission report noted that nearly half of one-year-olds and around 90 per cent of four-year-olds attend some form of early child care. Also, around one in seven children aged five to 12 attend outside school care. The report noted that the expansion of early learning has enabled an increase in parents' labour force participation, particularly of mothers of children aged zero to four. It noted that, in 2023, three in four mothers with children aged zero to four were in paid employment. But the report noted, too, that not all families benefit from early child care. The report reads:

In parts of the country, services are scarce and for some families, ECEC may be unaffordable or not inclusive of all children. Children experiencing disadvantage and vulnerability, while most likely to benefit from ECEC, are less likely to attend.

That has led the government to put in place this bill, which builds on our prior reforms.

When we came to office, we brought in our cheaper childcare package, which cut the cost of early education and care for more than a million families. We implemented a 15 per cent pay rise for early educators. This is part of a package that establishes the billion-dollar Building Early Education Fund to build and expand childcare centres in areas of need. We have understood, as part of our reforms, the importance of ensuring that we're raising quality while also tackling affordability. That is why, in our reforms, which saw the 15 per cent pay rise, we linked that wage rise to caps on fees. For providers to be eligible, they must not increase their fees by more than 4.4 per cent in the first year and 4.2 per cent in the second. That is putting wages up for workers and keeping costs down for families. We've seen vacancies in the early childhood education and care sector plummeting over the last 12 months. According to Jobs and Skills Australia, internet vacancy rates are down 22 per cent in that sector, since December 2023. It is good that we are seeing an increase in the workforce in that sector.

We know that a universal early learning system will require a significant journey. One of the things that strikes you, when you read the Productivity Commission's doorstopper report on early learning, is that it lays out a pathway for reform. The bill that is before the House today is part of that journey, but it's not the end of the journey. I'd encourage members to look at the way in which that journey is set out, going right out to 2036, acknowledging the importance of steadily building up the workforce and the number of available early childcare centres—we're going to have to build more early childcare centres in order to expand accessibility—and the importance of ensuring that early childhood care remains affordable.

Recent data shows an Australian family on an income of $120,000 a year, paying an average quarterly fee for 30 hours of child care per week, has saved approximately $2,768 since September 2023. Our cheaper childcare policy is delivering for Australian families, as our Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers (Special Account) Act is delivering for the early childhood educators. This reform journey is absolutely critical if we are to improve the accessibility of the sector. The Productivity Commission has noted that ensuring that all children aged zero to five years have access to some form of high-quality, subsidised early childhood education and care—at least three days a week, 30 hours a fortnight, for 48 weeks a year—would accommodate the needs of families and the benefits to children from ECEC participation.

This three-day guarantee is about making sure that every child can have the best start in life. It's about ensuring that we get rid of the Liberals' activity test, which locked out children and families. Instead, we have put in Labor's three-day guarantee. It's a crucial step in delivering on the commitment to universal early learning.

The activity test has been at the centre of the debate over this bill, and I want to take a moment to talk about our rationale for scrapping the activity test, which was introduced by the Liberals in 2018. As Jay Weatherill from Thrive by Five states:

The Activity test was intended to encourage parents into work but in fact it has done the opposite. It has limited choices and made it harder for parents—especially single parents—to make an income.

An evaluation by the Australian Institute of Family Studies found no evidence that the introduction of the activity test caused any increase in workforce participation. The Productivity Commission found that the effects of the activity test on workforce participation were ambiguous.

We do know that the activity test has made early learning harder to access for many families, including disproportionately affecting those families that may be experiencing disadvantage. The Parenthood's Georgie Dent said the activity test is 'a barrier that disproportionately locks out children who stand to benefit the most from participating in quality early childhood education and care'. In 2021, only 54 per cent of children from the most disadvantaged areas were enrolled in early childhood education and care, compared with 76 per cent of children in the highest socioeconomic areas, and that is despite the fact that the most disadvantaged children are those who are most likely to benefit from early education and care.

We know this through a series of important randomised trials conducted in the 1960s: the Perry Preschool Project, the Abecedarian Project and the Early Training Project. These studies were critical because they used random assignment to assign children to high-quality early learning or to a control group. That meant that, as in a medical trial, we could be sure that we were seeing causal impacts of early learning. Those causal impacts didn't just show up in social skills and school readiness. They carried through until the children were in teenage years, at which point the girls were less likely to become teenage mums and the boys less likely to commit crimes, and they carried through to participation in university and higher earnings. Those randomised trials showed very clearly the benefits of early childhood education for the extremely disadvantaged cohorts who were targeted by them.

A similar randomised trial was conducted by Yi-Ping Tseng and Jeff Borland and a range of other researchers at the University of Melbourne. They set up a centre in Heidelberg West, providing high-quality early childhood services to children who had been exposed to domestic and family violence. Like the US randomised trials, the Melbourne randomised trial focused on a group of extremely disadvantaged children, and the Early Years Education Program, as it's known, is producing results as those children are tracked through into older years. Through randomised trials of this kind, we are learning about the impact of early childhood education and the importance of extremely high-quality early childhood education for extremely disadvantaged children. It's another area in which randomised trials are shedding insight on how to shape better public policy in Australia.

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