Louise Miller-Frost (Boothby, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Great news: early childhood education workers are set to get a well-deserved 15 per cent pay rise. For the typical early childhood worker, this means an extra $103 a week in their pay packet by the end of this year, increasing to an extra $155 per week in their pay packet by December 2025, and this also applies to out-of-school-hours workers. This is fantastic news for these valuable workers—around 200,000 people across Australia whom we entrust with the early education of our youngest Australians—and it's long overdue.

We've spent decades, literally decades, talking about how female dominated professions such as early childhood education are underpaid, but doing nothing about it. We have spent decades talking about how valuable workers in early childhood education are and how they need to be skilled because early childhood education is really important for our children and can set them up for life. Of course, these workers worked through the pandemic, demonstrating that they are vital frontline workers not only for our children but also to enable the necessary parts of the economy to keep going.

We want early childhood education to be a career of choice. We want people who are passionate about education for young children to see this as a viable long-term career. We want them to be able to earn a good living, with a well-paid, secure job that they want to stay in. We want early childhood workers to keep investing in their own education and skills because they see a long and bright future doing what they do so well—educating young children. We don't want these valuable workers drifting into other sectors because they can get paid better. We don't want them drifting off into other sectors because they can't see a career in early childhood education. This pay rise puts early childhood education back on a par with where it should be, a valued profession and a career of choice—and more workers in the early childhood sector means more childcare places for children.

This package helps strengthen the supply of quality early childhood education and care workers in the sector. I speak to many early childhood centres in Boothby who tell me they have space for more children but not enough staff—because there is a productivity angle to this as well. A pay rise for early childhood education workers is good news not only for the workers themselves; it's good news for all of us, whether we have young children or not.

We also know that early childhood education is good for children. Children experiencing extra years of high-quality early childhood education have additional opportunities to learn and develop. It helps children make friends and socialise generally. It helps them learn routines and self-regulation, and it helps them feel safe and secure. It helps them to learn independence and emotional resilience, and it helps with their transition to school. Children who have experienced high-quality early education exhibit less impulsivity and have more advanced expressive vocabulary and greater reported social competence.

When I was campaigning prior to the 2022 election, I constantly heard from all sectors of the community about the shortage of workers. Businesses large and small, from all sectors, told me how the previous government had neglected their vital need for skilled workers and how this was limiting their ability to grow or even exist. As a country we need more workers, and parents choosing to return to work is the low-hanging fruit in terms of increasing the workforce. The ability of families to choose if it is right for them and their family for both parents to return to work means more workers—often skilled, experienced workers—and that's really important to our country and really important to our economy. And, of course, for families wanting to consider allowing both parents going back to work, the availability of good-quality early childhood education is vitally important. An estimated 1.2 million families use early childhood education, plus all of those who use out-of-school hours care.

I take a whole-of-life view on this pay rise. I often speak of my experience working in women's homelessness, and the women we saw had often experienced a lifetime of gender disadvantage. They worked in female dominated sectors such as early childhood education. When they turned up in the homelessness sector, they had experienced a lifetime of lower wages and often insecure conditions. They consequently had little savings and little superannuation. It's very hard to financially recover when you are 60 or 70 years of age. The Albanese Labor government has managed to get the gender pay gap down to 12 per cent, the lowest ever in Australia. This 15 per cent pay rise for early childhood education workers will undoubtedly improve the gender pay gap even further, and it will change lives. This is good for workers. It's good for families, it's good for children and it's good for our economy.

I met today with some of the early childhood workers who were here in parliament celebrating their win, along with the United Workers Union. They should be congratulated for their campaign, literally over decades, to get a decent pay rate that appropriately values their skills, their commitment and the importance of the work they do. I'd like to take the time to thank the United Workers Union and the workers. Their campaign has changed the lives of over 200,000 workers across Australia, and, of course, we hope more will be joining them. This is the value of unions. It's the value of collective action. It hasn't been easy for them over this long period of time, and this is the importance of staying on message. So congratulations to them. This is life changing for them. It's life changing for families, but it also is life changing for our country.