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

I am concerned about any injection of funds that could be inflationary at this time, when inflation is having a huge impact on cost of living, but childcare workers are some of the lowest paid workers in the country. In a budget of more than $600 billion, it seems reasonable that we should be able to find a few billion to pay women well and value our children's early education. I am concerned that there's no allocation of funds for this special account, despite the estimated cost of the grant program being $3.6 billion for the next few years. We'll have to wait for the annual appropriations bill to see how much money is put into this account, but the giving of grants is not dependent on funds being put into this account.

It's possible that the payments have been set up through this special account as a way of making it harder for an alternative government to take the pay rise away from childcare workers if the government doesn't win next year's election. But setting this up without allocating funds does feel like kicking the can down the road.

My last concern is in relation to the short-term timeframe. The bill is hazy about what happens after the first two years. The worker retention payment is considered an interim payment while the Fair Work Commission finalises its gender undervaluation review of priority awards and the government considers the recent ACCC and Productivity Commission reports on early childhood education and care. If the government wants to see long-term structural reform to pay feminised industries better wages and drive a long-term improvement in the quality of care, the government will need to come clean about how it would fund this in the long term. If this increase is not going to be paid through higher fees in the long term, we need to have an open discussion about the social and economic benefit of high-quality early childhood education and care. Without the support of the coalition, this may go the way of the similar Early Years Quality Fund, which was ended with Tony Abbott not supporting that program.

Another concern is the broad discretionary powers created. The government can make grants and there isn't much guidance on the use of these powers in the legislation. I am hoping that these and other issues are addressed in the Senate Education and Employment Legislation Committee's report, which I believe came out today.

Beyond the changes made in this bill, further reform is needed. There is some momentum towards creating universal access to quality early childhood education and care. This is obviously a big change and would require a pathway to get there, but it's the sort of bold thinking that has the potential to set us on a pathway to a better educated and are more fully productive population. I recognise that this would require nearly 50,000 early childhood education and care graduates a year by 2030, more than double recent graduating numbers. This will take time, but it seems to me to be the right direction.

The other reform needed is in relation to the activity test. The activity test is based on an assumption that early childhood education and care is a benefit for parents, not for kids. Recognising the benefits for kids, especially from lower socioeconomic families, leads to the conclusion that reforming the activity test would have long-term benefits. I would like to see the activity test removed, relaxed or substantially reconfigured in line with recommendations from the Productivity Commission, the Women's Economic Equality Taskforce, the ACCC, Thrive By Five and Early Childhood Australia.

In conclusion, I support this bill as one step towards quality, accessible and affordable early childhood education and care. Early childhood education and care is important for kids and families. Like workers in many traditionally feminised industries, childcare workers are underpaid. We need to attract a quality workforce to educate and care for our kids, and paying them better is a good start. There are a few issues with this bill that I hope are addressed in the current Senate inquiry. In particular, the bill takes a short-term approach and doesn't allocate money to the special account being established, so it's kicking the can down the road on longer term reform and costs. The broad powers in the grant-making laws leave a lot to the government's discretion. So it's appropriate that the bill be reconsidered in a few years in light of a number of reviews currently underway.

While you couldn't say that the bill will have no inflationary impact, increasing the pay for our lowest-earning women seems an appropriate decision. Having more women here in parliament means that we are starting to correct the long-term gender bias in how we value different types of jobs. Paying childcare workers better is a good step, but I urge the government and the opposition to be bold in thinking about universal childcare access as a step to a better educated population and greater workforce participation for women.

Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Housing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to thank the member for Curtin for her typically thoughtful discussion with regard to this bill, the Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers (Special Account) Bill 2024, that is before the parliament. It's a really important one, Speaker. You and I are Labor people who got into parliament to try to fight inequality and make sure that the quality of life of people in our country isn't defined by their income or indeed by the family that they grew up in. I think when you looked at these matters of social justice and inequality a generation ago you probably would have looked at wage justice and these fundamental things that affect the lives of Australians as adults. But the more we understand about how the life cycle of poverty continues across generations the more obvious it is that the best time for us to focus on is those first thousand days in a child's life.

We don't need any more evidence about this point. There is study after study here in Australia and overseas that show us that, if we intervene in the life of a child, we can radically reshape their trajectory just by making sure that they get off to the right start. That's got an element of health care. It's got an element of supporting parents who might be in a really disadvantaged situation. But probably the most important thing that we can do through politics and through this chamber is making sure that we provide really quality early learning to every single Australian child. They expect and deserve nothing less from this chamber and from this amazing country of ours than for us to be able to extend that generosity to young people by supporting them through those first thousand days.

What we know about early learning in our country is that we're on a real journey here. We've had some periods of time where we've had Australian governments that have thought about this as merely child care, someone taking care of your kids while the families went to work. We as the Labor Party and a Labor government have been working over a number of decades now to really switch the mindset up here. This is not just about looking after children; this is about starting their journey of education in the most positive and powerful way while they take those first steps as really young children and babies.

One of the things that really sticks in my mind in the work that I have done in this area is looking at the different ways in which children who grew up in really advantaged families and really disadvantaged families experience language. There are some studies that have been done overseas that show that there are literally 20 million fewer words heard by children who grew up in very low income and disadvantaged households versus children who grew up in different kinds of households. As Australians, we can't tolerate these things. We've got to intervene, and it is certainly the role of government to reach in and try to give every support and assistance to those children to make sure that they're standing on a platform of support of the Australian people.

The bill before the parliament is about the workers who support these incredible young Australians to get off to the very best start. I'm sure I'm not alone here, but one of the most absolutely fantastic things that we get to do in our work as members of parliament is visit childcare centres where these young Aussies are getting taught by these incredible people, who are spending every day going to work and helping children form their first words and helping them learn through active participation. I'm so lucky to see my three children have had that opportunity. These workers are as good as gold, but for too long the Australian people and the Australian government have not been giving them the rewards that they deserve. We know that they are doing essential work to help build a great future for our country, yet they are being remunerated as though that work were not important, and that's not good enough.

We are on a journey here of making sure those workers in our economy—our aged-care workers, our childcare workers and our disability workers—are getting properly recognised for the support that they give to other Australians. I've got the government whip just behind me here, who has spent her life in education. Don't get her started on the value of educators! I really want to emphasise for the parliament and for people listening at home that Labor understands how difficult and important this work is. If you're a parent of young children, as I am, you know that it is no mean feat to go to work every day and try to educate a whole classroom of three- or four-year-olds, but this is what these people do every day, and they deserve to be properly remunerated. That is what this bill is about.

I want to mention some of the gender issues that lie at the heart of this. It's not something that the parliament is always comfortable talking about, but we've got to address this. We have one of the most gendered workforces in the entire world in our beautiful country of Australia. A lot of people wouldn't believe that, but, if you look at a type of work like construction, you'll find that somewhere around nine in 10 workers in parts of that industry are male. If you look at something like childcare workers, you'll find that almost nine in 10 of those workers are female. This is really important because what we see is that those parts of our economy where women are really dominant tend to be the most underpaid parts of the economy. Of course, we all understand why that is. Historically, women's work has not been sufficiently valued. For a long time, generations of people have talked about that work as though women were going to work out of the goodness of their hearts. That's not respectful, and it's not right, and that's why our government is trying to correct it.

I'll make a final point. Over the last couple of days, the Prime Minister made a series of outstanding announcements about the other end of the education spectrum in making sure that young people who make the fantastic choice—a choice we want them to make—to go on to further study aren't penalised in the way that they are today, and that, for those fantastic young people who want to go into trades, we want to support you. The announcement to make 100,000 fee-free TAFE places available every single year will have transformative effects on our economy and on the lives of all of those young people who take that opportunity.

I want the parliament to know that it is not about picking out one year or one part of our education system; it's about saying that, as a government, we have a special role in helping our youngest Aussies get the right start in life, supporting them all the way through that arch and through to their TAFE training and their university education. As a government, we have an amazing offering on education. It's something that I'm very proud of as a Labor Party member and a member of this House for a long time now.

Elizabeth Watson-Brown (Ryan, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Early childhood educators do some of the most fundamentally important work in Australia. For too long, they've been underpaid and undervalued. Frankly, I am disappointed that this government could not dig deeper to offer more to them and truly address the issues facing the sector.

This Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers (Special Account) Bill purports to support our early childhood educators, but it does fall a long way short of what is actually needed. These important foundational educators have been calling for a 25 per cent pay rise. This bill offers 15 per cent. Effectively, the offer is a two-year grant, with no guarantee of pay rises beyond 2028, and locks in a 4.4 per cent fee hike for families already struggling with the dire cost-of-living crisis. People—and I've heard from many in my electorate—are heartily sick of watching this government crow about back-to-back surpluses, as the Treasury did again in question time last time we were in this House, and then offering a pittance to workers and families while doling out massive subsidies and tax handouts to the wealthiest corporations. It's insulting. It's a kick in the guts for those who are overworked, underpaid and feeling left behind by this government.

Australian early childhood education care is in a state of crisis. Educators are doing their absolute best to educate our kids while being totally squeezed. Every educator can tell you this, but the government is tinkering around the edges of this deep problem. Across the country, families tell us the same thing: child care is too expensive and too hard to access. One in four people in Australia have no access at all to early childhood education and care simply because of where they live. Families are waiting months, sometimes years, on multiple lists just to find a place for their children. Parents are being locked out of paid work, and their kids are missing out on the critical early years of education that set the foundation for their futures. In a wealthy country like Australia, it's cruel and, indeed, it is socially and economically irresponsible that so many families are missing out on this essential service—a right, even.

The government has proposed this bill in the hope that it can address one of the key issues of our child-care system—that is, acute workforce shortages. The Greens, of course, welcome the government's long overdue recognition of the importance of early childhood educators. This recognition is a critical first step, but there is so much more to do. It's high time our early childhood educators were recognised and received the respect and the pay that they're worth. Educators have been leaving the industry in droves because their wages simply don't match the importance of the work they do. Let that sink in. Educators cannot afford to be educators, and the government's response to this crisis is a short-term fix—15 per cent for two years, if providers decide to apply for it. What happens after that? Will it be the providers or the parents who foot the bill? Or will more educators walk away because they still cannot make ends meet?

While the government boasts about a 15 per cent pay rise, let's be clear, it still leaves our educators underpaid. This workforce performs the critical role of educating and caring for our kids in their crucial early years. It's a workforce that is overwhelmingly composed of women, as the previous speaker said, who continue to take home less than two-thirds of the average adult weekly wage. Even with this pay increase, early childhood educators will still be underpaid. In fact, with the current housing crisis, it would take an educator in this country 31 years to save for a home deposit—31 years! These issues are exacerbated in regional centres and rural areas that are already childcare deserts. Centres in these areas are absolutely struggling to attract and retain staff because of the crippling housing prices, rising rents and the poor pay and conditions right across the sector. The combination of low wages and unaffordable housing only worsens the childcare drought across Australia.

If this government is serious about addressing the workforce crisis, the answer is simple: pay our educators properly. So far this year we've had two government commissioned reports on child care. Two of them, by the ACCC and the Productivity Commission, have been released, and both of them confirm what we already knew—that Australia's early education system is in crisis. We cannot fix Australia's childcare system if we cannot secure a sustainable workforce. And we cannot secure a sustainable childcare workforce unless our undervalued, underpaid early childhood educators are given a decent wage.

Educators have fought long and hard for a 25 per cent pay rise. They know that's what they need to stay in the industry. If we want high-quality, universal early years education and care we must invest in the workers. We need to make sure families are not being left behind due to lack of access and rising fees amid a cost-of-living crisis.

The Greens have long campaigned for the cruel and unfair childcare subsidy activity test to be abolished because we recognise that a genuinely universal and high-quality early education system doesn't discriminate based on a parent's income. This is a test that keeps 160,000 children locked out of an early childhood education. The same test keeps around 40,000 parents out of work. It's a test that prevents the most disadvantaged kids from accessing an early education because it is linked to arbitrary work or study requirements. This test could be scrapped with a stroke of a pen.

The Australian Greens have repeatedly asked the government if they will listen to parents and the childcare sector's calls to abolish this childcare subsidy activity test. And the government has repeatedly said it was waiting for the Productivity Commission to release its final report. Well, the Productivity Commission report released a month ago backs the Greens calls to abolish the activity test. So, Labor, what are you waiting for? Families just can't afford to wait. Educators can't afford to wait. The government is not listening to families or to educators. Our childcare system is in crisis and it cannot be fixed with bandaid solutions.

As a mature, just and practical society, if we want all kids to have the best start in life, we must invest in our educators. The Greens want to ensure early childhood educators have well-paid and secure jobs. The government should listen and respond to this important campaign for the 25 per cent pay rise they deserve and for which their unions have been calling for ages. We have a clear plan to make the transformative change needed to fix the patently inadequate system of early years education and care here.

Today the government is making a small first step, recognising educators aren't paid enough. Now it must commit to further steps to fix our childcare system and to pay our educators what they deserve. After all, early childcare educators are doing some of the most important work in our communities—educating our kids, the groundwork for a thriving future for them and for Australia.

Tania Lawrence (Hasluck, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

One of the deepest commitments of the Australian Labor Party underlying everything we do is our determination that everybody deserves a fair go. Doing what can be done to ensure that is the decent thing to do, it's also the smart thing to do. No society should waste the potential of people. Everyone should be given the chance at least to realise their potential. Ninety per cent of the development of our brains occurs in the first five years of life. Where that's forgotten or neglected, the stage is set for underachievement as individuals and as societies. That development in our first five years comes from the complex interaction between what we inherit from our parents and the nurture we do or don't receive in our environment.

Every young child learning to walk and talk is on a pathway. That pathway provides the stepping stones and the foundations for the rest of their life. The people who help them along the path are doing immensely important work. It isn't easy, it certainly isn't unskilled, and it absolutely is not something that everybody can do, for every child is unique. That's a challenge—a wonderful challenge, but a challenge just the same. To all the students now sitting in the gallery: please take that in the way it's intended, as an absolutely positive message. When a child interacts with another child, there are more challenges, and they don't always get along. They're not born knowing how to play nicely or even necessarily interested in learning how, and they are not born knowing how adults want them to behave, as I'm sure some of the students in the gallery might attest. They're capable of resisting, with all kinds of creativity, any ideas about behaviour that don't sound agreeable to them. Even the most agreeable have their days—the days when they're just not in the mood to be cooperative.

Knowing how to understand and respect all that individuality requires much more than being good with kids. It's knowledge requiring observation, reflection and adaptation. Knowing what to do and say in all those situations where children are learning behavioural skills of all kinds requires insight, wisdom, and emotional and intellectual maturity of a high order—and uncanny patience. We are talking about specialised knowledge and skills of immense importance to Australia's future.

It's time the people who possess and develop those skills were treated with the respect that they deserve. The bill setting up the Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers Special Account will deliver a 15 per cent pay rise for up to 200,000 early childhood educators across our country. We would, of course, like to deliver it to them right now, but unlike our predecessors we're committed to sustainability in all its aspects, which means delivering budgets that do what can be done when it can be done.

My hope for this election coming is that voters realise that the coalition couldn't get a budget in surplus while doing virtually nothing to solve Australia's problems or even trying to face them and, conversely, that Labor has managed to get that budget in surplus while working on solutions to real-life problems in real time. Our early educators now will get a 10 per cent pay rise from December this year. That's at least $103 per week. The further five per cent pay rise will come in December of next year. The Productivity Commission gets it. They advise that the first step in building a universal early education system that is affordable and available for more families is a pay rise for those who make it happen. It's good for workers, it's good for the kids, it's good for families, and it's great for Australia.

We've already instituted policies which are seeing 30,000 more early educators working in the sector than before we came to office. That's part of decisive steps that have seen 860 more early education services and 68,000 more children in early education. We need to encourage more of our early childhood education and care workers to stay in work that they entered with such enthusiasm, we need more to return to the field that they know and that they understand, and we need more people to consider a career in early education—a long-term, fairly rewarded and sustainable career. We'll also ensure that this will be affordable for parents by capping fees and constraining fee growth. This will be set out in a legally enforceable agreement between the Department of Education and early childhood education and care providers.

The changes we've made under Cheaper Child Care have, in fact, already cut childcare costs for more than one million families. This can be done while ensuring that the people who care for children are respected, encouraged and properly rewarded. It's part of a wider commitment to removing the undervaluation of wages in feminised industries. We need to ensure that women who work in industries where the majority of workers are other women aren't treated as though they deserve less pay. There's a peculiarly obnoxious set of attitudes behind this—a strange kind of logic, which seems to be that, if women are doing a job, it can't really be that skilled. Where those attitudes have prevailed, the recruitment and retention of skilled workers is in serious difficulty. No matter how dedicated you are, you do need to make ends meet for yourself and for your family. When we have a shortage of skilled workers in early childhood education and care, we have families who aren't able to give that education and care to their children, and, when that happens, we have children who aren't able to access the same opportunities.

In the last 50 years, the Australian Labor Party has introduced universal health care, in the form of Medibank and then Medicare, and universal superannuation. Those great steps forward, which are taken for granted now, changed the health of Australians and the financial prospects of Australians on their retirement. They're still a work in progress, and they always will be. We'll never stop working to make them better as times and technologies change. We're now working to chart the course for universal early childhood education and care. Labor doesn't drift with the tides or stand screaming into the wind; we chart courses. After much discussion—hours and weeks of months of it, believe me—we work out what we believe is the best, most effective way forward. We believe in big dreams, big plans and big goals.

Of course, some people with big dreams, plans and goals don't achieve anything much at all. For individual human beings, that can be caused by sheer bad luck. Governments don't have that excuse. We have to understand and focus upon the realities of today and the challenges of the future, and we're serious about it. We're in the reality business. We've learned what you need to do to make things happen. Grand statements like those that the member for Ryan just made in her 10 minutes won't do the trick. We actually have to listen to others, learn and think and then act.

How, in practice, do you achieve your goals? We're not going to be able to deliver universal early childhood education and care without addressing the problems of workforce shortages, and we can't do that without a legal framework for the establishment and operation of a special account. This one is the Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education Care and Workers Special Account, which will be used to administer grant funding for the Early Childhood Education and Care Worker Retention Payment Program.

So here we are. The grants will be paid as an interim payment while the Fair Work Commission finalises its gender undervaluation review of priority awards. These awards include the Children's Services Award 2010. The government also needs to consider the ACCC and Productivity Commission reports. We've been around. We know the drill. Perspectives and wisdom come from everywhere. You have to pay attention, you have to ask and you have to listen. We listened to service providers, educators, unions and advocacy organisations. We listened to parents and children.

The bill considers and respects the rights of parents and children under the Convention on the Rights of the Child. For those who don't know it, this convention, adopted by the UN in 1989, declares our recognition of 'the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family'. It declares our belief in the importance of the 'full and harmonious development' of a child's personality and the need to have children 'fully prepared to live an individual life in society'. It understands that children need 'special safeguards and care'. Those special safeguards and that care include the necessity of ensuring:

… that the institutions, services and facilities responsible for the care or protection of children shall conform with the standards established by competent authorities, particularly in the areas of safety, health, in the number and suitability of their staff, as well as competent supervision.

Australia made that promise, and we recognised the right of everyone under article 7 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1966 and coming into force in 1976, to 'the enjoyment of just and favourable conditions of work'. Article 7 specifically recognises the right to:

Fair wages and equal remuneration for work of equal value without distinction of any kind, in particular women being guaranteed conditions of work not inferior to those enjoyed by men, with equal pay for equal work.

This is part of ensuring another article 7 right, which is 'a decent living for themselves and their families'. The grant opportunity guidelines will impose conditions on providers to pass on all funding to early childhood education and care workers in the form of a remuneration increase. The guidelines will also provide a mechanism for workers to legally enforce their rights and their entitlements.

If human rights are forgotten when it comes to women and children, we don't really understand human rights at all, and this bill does. I commend the bill to the House.

Darren Chester (Gippsland, National Party, Shadow Minister for Regional Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I do take great pleasure in joining the debate on the Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers (Special Account) Bill 2024. In doing so, I would note this is one of those occasions where there is a high degree of agreement across the chamber in relation to the importance of the issues we're addressing in this bill. I also want to recognise that I think every member in this place would have a shared passion for ensuring that all young Australians have an opportunity to achieve their full potential and that investing in our families, supporting families and allowing them to support their children in fulfilling their dreams and aspirations are, in fact, a core business for the federal parliament of Australia.

I'll make a couple of general observations. In my role as shadow minister for education and also as a local MP now for 16 years, I've had a great deal of consultation with people around Australia and across Gippsland in relation to the issues surrounding early childhood education and care. It struck me over that period of time that it's quite ironic that we like to almost deceive ourselves as Australians in that we say the people we care about the most are our young people, that we really care about our old people, ageing and elderly, and that we really care about people with disabilities, but the people who are employed to care for those older Australians, younger Australians and people with disabilities are often the most poorly paid people in our nation.

It is a deception on ourselves, and that's why I do welcome many aspects of the bill before the House because it does seek to address some of the inequities in what is a predominantly female dominated industry which has been undervalued and underappreciated in the past. I do congratulate the government in that regard. Some of the worst-paid Australians are those who are involved in the care economy, and we do need, though, a very strong economy to ensure that taxpayers are in a position to provide the additional support that's required to fulfil our honourable and very desirable aims in this regard. So, as a matter of basic principle, I do understand and welcome the efforts to attract and retain a workforce in the childcare and early education sector.

Those early days in a child's life are critical to their future outcomes, whether it be through a formalised care environment through long day care, family day care or other models. Particularly for vulnerable children, the opportunity to have them in an environment where they can be assessed for any learning or developmental delays and then getting access to appropriate allied health care, whether it be speech pathology or whatever it might be, is critical to those long-term outcomes I spoke about at the outset of helping every young Australian achieve their full potential.

I am worried, though, that, as much as those opposite have moved in a manner to address some of the pay issues for our childcare and early educators, they seem to have missed the point in relation to the families who live in rural, regional and remote locations. We're still facing an enormous problem with childcare deserts in many of the electorates that the people on this side of the House represent, particularly in the National Party. Sadly, where we live, in many of our communities, there are no long day care centres available, and whether or not you pay a childcare educator more doesn't really matter if there's no centre for the children to attend to in the first place.

So just increasing the childcare wages for the workers or even increasing the Commonwealth childcare subsidies actually doesn't address the fundamental issues for those people in those communities that we represent. I would encourage the government, the minister and people on this side of the House as well to keep working in a constructive manner together as much as possible to address the issue of childcare deserts so that all young Australians, whether they live in a rural or remote location, suburban or inner urban area, have the opportunity to achieve their full potential and have the opportunity in their earliest years to have access to child care and early education. I would note that the coalition and every member of this place—obviously the government and those on the crossbench as well—would recognise that our early childhood teachers and educators work extremely hard. We won't be standing in the way of a wage rise for those people but we still have some concerns about this bill and the policy going forward.

There's no question that the government's policies in the last 2½ years have contributed to the cost-of-living crisis, which has made it harder and even more necessary for Australian families to have additional working hours and then draw on the need for child care in the first place. So we believe, as those opposite believe, that our early childhood educators do an incredible job caring for and educating our youngest Australians. The reality is that this policy is appearing now as something more of a pre-election sweetener and an effort to appease voters on the eve of an election period.

Just as we saw on the weekend a very expensive announcement by the Prime Minister trying to buy some friends amongst the university set, we now have this policy which appears to be very focused on ensuring that a unionised workforce has access to higher wages in the lead-up to an election period. What concerns us is there is not enough focus on the real challenge in our rural, regional and remote communities. This is an issue that the government has been urged to address throughout its term in office and has failed to do so.

Appearing at the committee inquiry in this legislation, Mrs Louise Martin from the Isolated Children's and Parents' Association stated that it would do nothing for the families that that organisation supports. When asked by Senator O'Sullivan: 'Do you believe this bill will make much of a difference to the families you represent without a measure similar to what we're discussing here?', Mrs Martin said, 'I would say about zero per cent, really.' Mrs Martin also noted the Albanese government wasn't doing much to increase access in the regions. Again, when asked by Senator O'Sullivan: 'Are you aware of anything the current government is doing alongside this bill that might address the lack of access in these childcare deserts specifically in the areas that you operate across rural and regional Australia?', sadly, Mrs Martin's response was, 'Not specifically. Occasionally there is money for mobile day care. Grant care funding is uncertain. Really, I don't see anything of significance that this government is doing to address this issue out here.'

I raise those points because, looking to the future, we do need to be investing in our early educators and child carers. We also need to be investing in our families and in the important role that parents play in ensuring young people have the best possible start in life. Looking to the future, if we think we are going to keep on doing the same thing and get a different outcome in our rural and regional communities, we are sadly mistaken. We need more focus when it comes to early education and child care on choice, on access, and on flexible models that can work in our regional communities. When I say 'choice', I quite deliberately make the point that this is about respecting the choice that different families will make with their children's upbringing. We do need to make it possible for more families to care for their own child in the first place if that is their choice and it's possible in their circumstance. There's no judgement intended here, or no judgement should be given by anyone in relation to that choice. I respect the choice of families who need to access full-time day care, just as I respect the choice of families who have made the decision to look after their own children as much as they possibly can. But I'm disappointed that, throughout the past probably 20 years, there has been more of a focus away from providing that choice for those families who would prefer to spend more time—that most precious of all commodities—where possible raising their own children, rather than feeling obliged or forced or pressured in some way to have to access a childcare centre. I think choice is an important issue in this debate going forward.

The question around access is one that I've touched on already and it's one that every rural and regional member would be well aware of. In the childcare deserts that many of us represent, there is simply no opportunity to access a formalised care model which is subsidised by the Australian taxpayers. If we are going to be in a position to attract and retain a workforce in regional communities, whether it be in teaching, nursing, paramedics or policing, you name it, we need to be able to offer child care. It is very difficult to attract and retain a skilled workforce in a regional community if you can't offer child care to the families seeking to relocate to those communities. In that regard, child care and early education are services that enable those families to provide other essential services to the broader economy and the broader community. It allows people to get back to work, if that is their choice. Improving access to child care right across rural and regional Australia has to be a fundamental aim. It's become more challenging in the last few years as cost-of-living pressures have really started to bite.

There is no question that a vast majority of families would not be able to pay their mortgage, cover their household bills and face all those increasing costs without having access to more than one income. Maybe not two full-time incomes, but maybe 1½ incomes or one income and some casual work, but they certainly need more than one regular household income to meet those bills in a lot of our communities. Having access to childcare services in more communities is critical for us if we're going to be able to attract and retain the workforce and allow our families to deal with the cost-of-living pressures in rural and regional areas.

The other point I want to make is in relation to looking to the future. I mention choice, I mention access, and I mention flexibility. Flexibility means the bureaucrats in Canberra need to start listening to those smaller communities where the model of corporate care, a large day care centre, simply doesn't work. There's no demand for 100 childcare places in many of our towns, but there is still a need for the local nurse, police officer or paramedic to have access to care. We need to find some more flexible models that support those smaller communities. That may well be investing more in family day care and supporting infrastructure required for that. That may be to go to the local councils and ask, 'Do you have a public building that you could actively repurpose for a smaller day care, childcare, early education environment?' And we may have to assist them with their infrastructure needs. The corporate model will not work in many of our communities. Simply saying that we're going to keep increasing the Commonwealth childcare subsidy or increasing the wages for existing childcare and early educator workers will not overcome the challenge of access and flexibility in our rural and remote communities.

I'll finish where I started, on a very bipartisan note. I genuinely believe that across this chamber there is an enormous amount of goodwill when it comes to early childhood education and care workers and ensuring that every young person in this great nation has the opportunity to achieve their full potential. I urge those opposite to continue to engage constructively with this side of the House. Many of us have backgrounds in rural, remote and regional locations and believe we can assist in coming up with local solutions to what are very much local problems and in working with the minister to ensure that every child in Australia has the opportunity to achieve their full potential. I thank the House.

Brian Mitchell (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers (Special Account) Bill before the House today will help address significant workforce shortages in early childhood education by supporting the delivery of a wage increase of 15 per cent for eligible workers over two years. A typical early childhood educator on award wages will receive an additional $103 a week from December 2024, increasing to at least $155 from December 2025. A typical early childhood teacher on award wages will receive an additional $166 a week from December 2024, increasing to at least $249 a week from December 2025. These are very significant pay increases.

The wage justice bill also establishes terms and conditions of the ECEC worker retention payment grant, including a limit on fee increases. Let's be clear: the government does not accept centres seeking to raise fees for families as a result of these wage increases. Our measures put downward pressure on fees, helping to make ECE more affordable and accessible for families. The wage justice bill also encourages good-faith bargaining and the making of enterprise agreements in the sector. This will help support the steps the government has already taken to make ECE cheaper for Australian families.

In September 2017, I spoke in this place when on the opposition benches to stand with the United Workers Union's Big Steps campaign and the early childhood educators of Tasmania in their struggle for better pay. I asked for the undervaluing of our early childhood educators by the then coalition government to end. It never did. I'll take the words of the member for Gippsland at heart that there is a good deal of bipartisanship in this place, but it took the election of a Labor government to bring wage justice to early childhood education workers. Unions have played a pivotal role in these changes, with the Australian Education Union, the Independent Education Union and the United Workers Union all advocating tirelessly for their members.

Jo Schofield, National President of the United Workers Union, said:

This wage increase recognises a group of predominantly female workers who have been undervalued for decades, despite providing the social, emotional, and educational foundations for Australia's next generation. It means educators will be able to stay in the sector and in the jobs they love.

Early Childhood Australia CEO Sam Page agreed it was time to value early childhood educators. She said:

This is a well overdue pay increase, and I am thrilled that the Government has acknowledged the professionalism of our educators … Early childhood educators play a crucial role in the learning and development of young children, and this recognition is a significant step towards valuing their contributions appropriately.

Paying ECE workers fairly is a crucial step in charting the course to universal accessibility of early childhood education and care. The Albanese Labor government is proud to say to our early childhood educators and carers that we value you. We recognise your essential work, and we will continue to support you, just like you support the families who entrust their children with you.

I would like to mention and congratulate Tammy and Michael of Bagdad Education and Care, who in August were awarded national winners of the excellence in early STEM education for their project 'Will the ropes break under our weight?' Codeveloped with children aged three to six years old, this project involved children experimenting with ropes, physics and motion over many months to develop and test hypotheses around the properties of ropes and how to strengthen them. It's tremendous—and I'm sure the member for Gippsland will take note—that the highest quality early STEM education in the entirety of Australia took place in a very small town in my electorate. I commend the work of Tammy and Michael, who provide an exceptional service, locally owned, locally delivered to local children and families, and they deserve all the support they can get to ensure they can continue to provide their service to the community for many years to come.

The work of Bagdad Education and Care reminds me that 90 per cent of brain development happens before a child reaches school age. Just think—in their project at Bagdad, those preschool children were learning physics. Fostering brain development with early childhood education has benefits throughout life, and I would argue it is one of the most important investments we can make as a country. The Australian Early Development Census demonstrates early learners are advantaged with significantly higher social and emotional skills. Early learners outperform their peers in physical, cognitive, communicative, socioemotional and adaptive developmental criteria. When they enter school, children who attended early childhood education consistently show higher test scores across mathematics, science and literacy compared to those who did not. ECE provides a massive head start.

I take the words of the member for Gippsland to heart; there are significant parts of the country where there are not enough early childhood education centres. A good way to start is to make sure there's wage justice for staff. If you can attract more people into the sector, then it makes it much more attractive.

Conversely, a child deprived of ECE performs worse in every metric by nearly half. Before you say that kids in early childhood education are more likely to come from more affluent and stable homes, which skews the figures, I have to tell you that, no, that's been taken into account. The figures are consistent across socioeconomic categories. Children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds with access to ECE perform better than those without. It's the same story across all other socioeconomic categories. The common factor is the existence or absence of early childhood education in a child's life.

The 2014 Australian government report called Access to early childhood education in Australia: insights from a qualitative study confirms that most parents are aware of the advantages of early childhood education. The study also details that many parents make the difficult decision to opt out of ECE because of concerns about cost and quality—and that is something that this government, elected in 2022, eight years after that study was published, is doing something about. Early childhood education and care workers are simply some of the most important workers in the country, but, for far too long, their pay has not reflected that. Just like in aged care, early childhood education is an overwhelmingly feminised workforce and, just like in aged care, the pay has been too low for too long. No early childhood educator should have to face the choice of leaving the job they love because they need a job that will pay their bills.

With this bill, and with the other changes that we've implemented over the past three years, this Labor government is changing that. We are progressing towards universal early childhood education that will be accessible for every Australian family. We're not there yet; we have some distance to go; but we have started the journey. The Albanese Labor government has already taken significant steps to make early childhood education and care more accessible for more Australian families. More than a million Australian families are benefiting from our cheaper childcare reforms, which are already reducing out-of-pocket costs for centre based day care by 11 per cent, while preserving higher subsidies for families with multiple children in care. More than 1,400 families in my electorate of Lyons are included.

After just three years of Labor government, the early childhood education and care sector has grown by more than 30,000 workers. We haven't just arrested the decline that was occurring under the former government; we've turned it around. This achievement is a direct result of our efforts to respect ECE workers with higher pay and to work alongside providers to develop practical solutions for staff retention and strengthen recruitment and training. We are investing in the next generation of early childhood educators already, with our Australian Labor government providing more university places and more access to fee-free TAFE. We have provided sustainability grants for regional ECE centres, ensuring that no matter where you live—with some exceptions, unfortunately—there is a quality centre available to you.

I recently met with Letitia at Discovery Early Learning Centre in Bridgewater, Lucy at Uniting outside school hours care in Bagdad, and Monica at Bicheno early learning services on Tasmania's east coast. All are receiving sustainability funding to ensure that access can continue for disadvantaged and regional communities. I heard similar stories from each of them: demand is increasing, but trying to find, train and retain employees is a constant challenge. Decent wages are critical to growing the workforce and providing the service. Services nationally have been delaying expansion plans, closing rooms and limiting enrolments because they simply couldn't find enough qualified staff. That has been impacting on the availability of early childhood education and care for families and limiting parents to shorter hours. As well as the impacts on childhood development, this means more parents, usually women, are staying home when they'd rather be in the workforce, contributing to both household earnings and national economic output.

In providing wage justice to ECE workers, this Labor government is supporting workers, supporting children, supporting families and, ultimately, supporting the national economy. I commend the bill to the House.

Sam Birrell (Nicholls, National Party) Share this | Link to 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.

Libby Coker (Corangamite, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Early childhood educators hold one of the most important jobs in modern Australia. Each and every day, parents entrust their most cherished loved ones to these educators. In their care, children learn to connect and socialise in a safe, caring environment, develop skills in literacy and numeracy, and discover new ways to deal with the world around them. It is our early childhood educators who facilitate all these learning opportunities, guiding children to learn in a fun, safe and supportive environment. The benefits flow beyond our children. Our educators create opportunities for families. They create opportunities for parents to rejoin the workforce, care for an elderly parent or run a small business. They also give parents confidence and comfort that their children will receive the care, attention and quality education they need and deserve. That's why, day in, day out, early childhood educators and carers have our utmost respect, and it's why they deserve a pay rise.

The Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers (Special Account) Bill 2024 is about just that. It provides a 15 per cent pay rise for 200,000 early childhood educators and carers. This increase is also the result of strong advocacy from unions, dedicated workers and their families right across the country.

I want to take a moment to recognise some of the outstanding advocates from my own electorate of Corangamite, in Victoria—champions like Raelee Fechner, from the United Workers Union, who has been instrumental in this fight for many years. Your advocacy for better outcomes for early years educators has been invaluable, and it has helped make this pay rise a reality. For far too long, early childhood educators like Raelee and her colleagues from across the nation have been asking for a fair wage that reflects their skills and expertise.

The truth is that those voices were ignored by the former coalition government. But, despite these calls for better, fairer wages falling on deaf ears, they were continuing to raise their voices. But, now, the Albanese Labor government has listened. This is a victory for workers in a highly feminised sector, and I'm incredibly proud to be part of a government that made this pay rise possible. It is a pay rise that will change lives. It will open the door to possibilities that so many early childhood educators and their families may have considered impossible.

In my electorate, I know that many of these workers were considering leaving the sector, and this is not because they wanted to but because they simply couldn't afford to work in the sector they love. It was something that I heard often, but these workers are so passionate. These early years educators want a decent pay packet, and it is a challenge for them. So it is a celebration that we are providing these early years educators with a substantial pay rise.

As a direct result of this pay rise and the cost-of-living relief our government is rolling out across the board, from tax cuts to energy bill relief, these workers are recommitting to the sector, staying in much-needed jobs that deserve our respect. Just as our government hopes this pay rise will encourage more people to stay in the sector, we know it will encourage more people to become early childhood educators. It must be said that there are around 30,000 more early years educators working in the sector today than there were when we came to office. But we do need more, and a 15 per cent pay rise will certainly help to attract more educators to the profession.

So, to make this pay rise a reality, this bill sets up the Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers Special Account. This account will allow the Albanese government to deliver a 15 per cent pay rise over two years through the ECEC Worker Retention Payment Program. It means a typical early educator paid at the award rate will receive a pay rise of at least $103 a week in December of this year, increasing to at least $155 per week from next year. That's around $7,800 a year. For a typical early education childhood teacher, they'll receive an additional $166 a week from December this year, increasing to $249 from December of next year.

So, for early years educators who may be thinking, 'I love this job, but I can't afford to do it,' you can now embrace your job and earn more at the same time. For people who've left the job, perhaps you may reconsider and return to the job you love. Importantly, this wage increase will encourage more people to become early years educators.

We know early childhood care is a female dominated profession, and the Albanese government understands that, to build an economy that truly works for everyone, we must ensure it works for women. An economy that works for women must deliver wage parity. The Albanese government is committed to this goal. While we have made significant strides towards closing the gender pay gap, there is still much work to be done.

Data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows that we are on the right track, with Australia's national gender pay gap now reaching its lowest point on record. Since the Albanese government came to office, it's fallen from 14.1 per cent in May 2022 to 11.5 per cent today. That's no fluke. It's no coincidence. It's because our government has taken action to ban pay secrecy clauses, modernise the bargaining system, enforce transparent gender pay gap reporting and deliver pay rises for the aged-care sector. And now, with passage of this bill, we will ensure a pay rise for early childhood educators.

It's a move backed in across the board, with Ros Baxter, the chief executive officer of Australia's largest early education provider, Goodstart, stating:

We expect that [this] announcement will see qualified early learning educators return to our sector, while encouraging others to establish a career in early learning. This in turn will help make more quality child-care places available for families who need it.

Also speaking in support of this bill is Early Childhood Australia CEO Sam Page, who said:

This is a well overdue pay increase, and I am thrilled that the government has acknowledged the professionalism of our educators … Early childhood educators play a crucial role in the learning and development of young children, and this recognition is a significant step towards valuing their contributions appropriately

It is the point about recognition that gets to the heart of this pay rise. It is recognition of long hours at work; recognition of high piles of paperwork, often completed after hours; and recognition of the skills and expertise employed in educating our children—children of all abilities and capabilities. This legislation doesn't just deliver a pay rise for early educators; it delivers long-overdue respect.

It also lays the groundwork for a truly universal early childhood education system. The Productivity Commission said that, if we are going to build a universal early education system which makes early education and care affordable and available for more families, the first thing we need to do is deliver a much-needed pay rise to the workforce.

On top of all of this, Deputy Speaker, it also delivers cost-of-living relief for parents and carers at a time when so many are doing it tough. As a condition of funding the wage increase, early education and care centres will not be allowed to increase their fees by more than a set amount over the grant period, with that amount set at 4.4 per cent up until August of 2025. That's informed by the work of the ACCC, which has been doing so much work with the government to monitor providers and prevent them from unfairly raising fees. This condition will be set out in a legally enforceable agreement between the Department of Education and providers. We will also set a cap for the following 12 months based on the work that the ABS will do.

Capping fee increases provides certainty to families and will help keep a lid on fee growth. It also builds on our Cheaper Child Care reforms—reforms that have already resulted in cheaper child care for more than one million families. Under these reforms, a family on a combined income of $120,000 is now paying about $2,000 less in childcare fees, and that should be a source for celebration. As the Minister for Education has said, we need to reform our entire education system to make it better and fairer and to help more people finish school and go to TAFE or university. This journey starts with early childhood education. This pay rise is an investment not just for early-years educators and not just in individual families but in our national productivity.

In closing, I say to our 200,000 early childhood educators: thank you for the work you do and for your care, your compassion and your skilful dedication. But this game-changing reform doesn't just happen. It takes a visionary government—an Albanese government, a Labor government that understands the power of education as a catalyst to a better future, a better wage, better self-esteem and a better, more prosperous nation.

Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers (Special Account) Bill 2024. It's difficult to make any argument against better wages for childcare workers, and I certainly don't intend to. This side of the House will be supporting these increases. But it is worth considering in this debate how we've got to this point and, probably more to the point, what the increase will achieve, given the current economics of the nation.

This wage increase is to be 15 per cent over the next two years, with the first instalment of 10 per cent coming next month and another five per cent in December 2025. There are some conditions that are outstanding at the moment, and we're told there are more. At this stage the childcare centres and the companies that run them, the organisations, are unsure what the extra criteria will be. They know not what the changes will be, and it's supposed to start next month, in December. We can assume, maybe, that it's not 1 December. But, certainly, this needs to be in place by the middle of the month or so—six or seven weeks at the maximum. Yet the government seems to have not yet sat down with industry and worked out exactly how it's going to run.

This government has a track record of doing exactly that, of making a motherhood statement—a grand announcement, if you like—and then trying to work out the detail afterwards. Only this morning I picked up the Australian and it was telling me that the Labor government will make the decision, perhaps on Melbourne Cup Day, that the $7 billion investment in the military satellite program is to be axed. It was only 18 months ago that they made the decision. So, in 18 months, they made a decision to spend $7 billion on a new military satellite system for Australia and then walked away from it. This has the feel of The Hollowmen. They make the big, bold announcement without considering the detail of how on earth they're going to get there in the endgame. There's been a whole host of Labor policies across the board that have been in this ilk. One would think that this one will be delivered, because at the end of the day they're dealing with taxpayers' dollars and a known number of workers, but it is running it down to the line. Why on earth wasn't this work done when the policy was announced back in August so that organisations—companies, councils, community organisations—that run these daycare centres can make ongoing, concrete decisions on what they know will be the situation?

The higher wages for childcare workers and carers were announced, as I said, on 8 August. And I read in the government's notes that this program will run for just two years. Then what? What happens after that two-year period? It gets us past the next election, sure. I understand that. But what happens after that two-year period? Does the funding just stop? At this stage that's exactly what it will do, on 30 November 2026. Will the childcare centres or the parents then be lumped with this wage increase, which by then will be well and truly locked in? There won't be any going back on wage increases, and I don't think anyone would be suggesting that. But it becomes a question then of who will pay for it and how it will be paid for.

The problem when government starts subsidising anything, but certainly wages, is how they get off the sticky paper. If wage increases are not accompanied by efficiency gains, in the end it can only come out of the taxpayers' pockets and out of the industries that drive the economy. By that I don't mean to downgrade any industry but what we would have called, when we went to school, the primary and secondary industries, the ones that create wealth. A wage increase for a government funded workforce can only come at the expense of others. The problem with these jobs in particular is that this government has no focus on driving productivity at the same time that it makes the wage increases. That is dangerous for the books of Australia and our underlying success in the longer term future.

We know that the lowest paid childcare worker at the moment receives around $24 an hour, and that's somewhere less than $50,000 a year—I'm assuming a 37-hour week or thereabouts, which is $46,000 or $47,000. That's no princely sum for somebody who's well educated in their area. If we want good people to work in that area, I think we ought to accept the fact that it's got to have a higher wage. But there needs to be more focus on how child care is delivered in this nation so we don't fall into this trap of just throwing more money and not getting a different result out of it.

The rub is that while this wage is going up, the cost of living is exploding. The government has actually been forced into having to take this step because people have been falling out of child care. The cost of living is increasing exponentially, it seems. I went to a suburban supermarket the other day. It's on the eastern side of Adelaide; I'll admit that. It was $85 for a kilogram of undercut steak—85 bucks. Gee whiz! That's just about out of reach for most, I'd say. It was $16 for sausages. If people think that the cost of living's only going up by three or four per cent, have another think. The things that families buy—electricity, council rates, insurance, education—are all going up by greater amounts than the headline inflation rates.

This wage increase will be welcome, but it will be eroded quite quickly unless something changes in the way this economy is being managed. It's worth recalling that in 2023 the government put $3.6 billion into child care for reducing subsidies. The subsidies for anyone under $83,000 a year went from 85 per cent to 90 per cent. Effectively, the parent had a reduction of 30 per cent of their payment for the child care. Everyone welcomed that, saying, 'What a wonderful outcome.' But what's happened since that time? This extra $3.6 billion has gone into the sector, and the price of child care has gone up by 12 per cent. This was supposed to reduce rates for parents, so where's the money gone? We know that the centres aren't making a fortune and that it hasn't gone into profits. It's gone into the inflated costs of all the things that childcare centres have to buy, which are remarkably similar to those things that the parents have to buy—electricity; council rates; labour, in this particular case; and insurance. Most of those things are controlled or at least driven by government decisions.

It hasn't had the effect that one might have thought or that the government certainly thought, and I wonder if they're actually across their economic brief well enough to understand what they're doing with the economy generally. We've seen another announcement today about HECS debts. This is off-budget money, for goodness sake. It actually turns out to be quite counter productive to the economy and all the people that have to work within it.

They have form here in the childcare sector. During the six years of the former Labor government—the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years—there was a 54 per cent increase in childcare costs, around nine per cent a year, and now we're having a 12 per cent increase in childcare costs. Over those six years, they averaged around nine per cent a year. Whatever it is they do to child care, they certainly know how to drive the cost of it up. If we keep driving the cost of these services up exponentially across Australia—don't get me started on the NDIS, the health sector or a number of other things—Australia becomes unsustainable. That's why these are serious issues. We are not opposing this wage increase, but the government needs to better understand what it is doing to manage the economy.

There's another line in the government's statement that greatly concerns me—and I've spoken in this chamber many times about this. It says, 'This increase will not apply to family day care or home care educators.' They're not eligible. I'm here to tell you that around 30 or 35 per cent of my electorate lives in a childcare desert. It's one of the worst in Australia, and, in many of these towns and communities, family day care and home care are just the kind of child care that can be established in what I call these suboptimal populations. We know that if we have fewer than about 4,000 people in a community—if there are only 3,000 or 4,000 people in the community—a commercial model of childcare delivery is simply not viable, and yet the government seems to be completely content to allow that situation to continue.

The government has put $3.6 billion into lifting the subsidies for parents and another $4.7 billion, I think, for higher wages in the sector, but not one dollar for a new place in the childcare deserts of Australia. Increasingly, we see governments—and we also saw the Royal Commission into Early Childhood Education and Care in South Australia, chaired by Julia Gillard—recommend that early years learning from three years of age should be available universally. It should be available to every child in Australia, yet we've got all these people living in communities that absolutely cannot access any kind of child care. It's holding the communities back.

Companies can't recruit workforce to their operations, because, when a family arrives and asks, 'Where's the childcare centre?' they're told, 'Oh, we haven't got one; you'll have to take them to your own family,' and the family says, 'Well, my family doesn't live here. They live in Queensland.' It's creating a handbrake right across the economy. It's the government's role. I've said in this place many times that, in South Australia, we have a thing called rural care. It's where the Department for Education in South Australia stepped up to the plate with 18 centres across South Australia—I think 17 were in my own electorate—recognising that the best organisation to deliver child care in smaller communities is the education department. What we need is for the federal minister to speak to the state ministers about coming to an agreement about how you fill this gap. I have no doubt that, if you've got a population of fewer than 2,000 or 3,000 people, the education department is by far the best organisation to be delivering early years learning. They have schools, staff and campuses. They have administration; they have a gardener—the whole bit. It might run at a loss, but it'll run at less of a loss than anyone else doing it. That's the place for the federal government to step in and find common ground with that state government. I've got centres from all across South Australia in that boat. Towns like Wilmington, Booleroo, Kadina, Kimba—my home town—Wudinna and Orroroo are all looking for increased places or just some places in the childcare system.

This is something that I feel quite passionately about. It shouldn't be acceptable that people in the regions, in the country and in the rural areas get to pay higher taxes to fund a service that they can't access so people in the city can access that service at a cheaper rate. It just doesn't wash with me. It's like universal health care—if it's going to be universal, it has to be universal care. I know we're not going to have brain surgeons in every little country town in Australia, but how about we have doctors in every country town in Australia or we properly fund our hospitals so they can manage and not take away all the skills and responsibilities that small country hospitals have until they are very little more than aged-care services. These services are very important to these communities, but they shouldn't be undermined in their ability to deliver these services. I'll leave my comments with that.

Lisa Chesters (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'm pleased to see that the coalition have had a change of heart and are going to support early childhood educators and support wage justice. I've been in this parliament for 11 years now and I remember one of the first acts of the Abbott and Hockey administration was to axe the national early years quality fund that was created by the previous Labor government to start addressing the inadequacy of pay and wage justice for early childhood educators. So it's good to see that, after decades of campaigning and decades of reform put forward by Labor, the coalition have finally got onboard and are going to help deliver wage justice for early childhood educators.

This is a sector that is highly feminised. Over 96 per cent of people working in early childhood education are women and it's one of the reasons why so many people have said that this is also about pay equality and pay justice for women working in this sector. Quite often throughout this campaign over the last two decades, early childhood educators who have degrees, who have diplomas, who have certificates, have compared their wage to the wage of male-equivalent industries with certificates and diplomas, and the numbers just don't stack up. For far too long, women working in this sector as early childhood educators have been paid minimum wage—the award—and this bill helps incentivise and encourage services and educators to get together to collectively bargain to lift themselves out of being trapped in low pay.

Early childhood education sector workers do some of the most important work in our country. They work to give our children the best possible start in life. They work with parents to literally give meaning to that term 'it takes a village to raise a child'. Everything they do helps to shape the next generation. They embraced the National Quality Framework that was introduced by the former Labor government. They have goals and plans that they draft for each child in their education and care services. Yet for all that extra work they do, that individual planning that they do, the education that they provide for our youngest Australians, they have not been compensated or paid. They have not had the wage justice that they deserve. It took this government, a Labor government, to introduce these reforms to see them finally be paid what they are worth.

I want to take a moment to acknowledge some of the many activists in my local electorate who've campaigned for this for decades, some of whom have retired but are still excited to see that the next generation of educators will benefit from their campaign. For example, Roe Sally worked forever at the Goodstart Golden Square centre. Her passion for early years education is extraordinary yet she did it on minimum wage. She was so committed to the families and to the children but, equally, she was committed to the other women working in the sector and to the union that ran the campaign, the United Workers Union. If we wanted to keep qualified, good educators in the sector, we had to address the matters of pay. I want to acknowledge Ash and Lisa, who are still working in the sector. Lisa, who is now the director of the Bendigo Goodstart centre, says that she already has the list of educators and teachers that she is ready to call up to say, 'You can come back now; we've fixed the pay.' One of the key reasons why women leave the sector is because the wage that they earn doesn't pay the bills.

Too often, I have heard, like other members of parliament on this side of the House have heard, that educators could earn more money working in retail or working in hospitality than they could working in early childhood education because it was an industry that was stuck on the award. Far too many great educators left the job, not because they didn't love the job, not because they didn't get fulfilment out of the work, but because it literally did not pay the bills. This bill and addressing wage justice will encourage women to come back to the sector. I know, through talking to my local centres, that is key.

It's not just something that, anecdotally, we're hearing from people, from centres and from educators. It was also supported by the Productivity Commission's release of its report a few weeks ago that said that the first step to increasing access to ECEC for families is addressing and building the workforce, and pay is critical to that. Far too many services in our deserts—and I acknowledge the previous speaker, who spoke about deserts. I too even have them in an electorate like mine. It is a regional electorate with nowhere near the geographical challenges of the member for Grey's electorate, but even in my electorate we have desert areas.

These services have delayed expansion plans. They've been closing rooms or limiting enrolments because they just haven't had the qualified staff to open. I've been to many centres in my own electorate where the front room or the back room is closed. On the Building Blocks website, they have the capacity to take more children, but they refuse the enrolments because they know they don't have the staff or won't be able to attract the staff to open their rooms to full capacity.

We conducted our own survey where we wanted to get a handle on how many centres this was affecting. So we rang all of our directors in our electorate and just asked, 'Is staffing an issue, and by how much?' All of them except for a handful said that they were not at capacity, because they didn't have the qualified staff required. The few centres that were at full capacity included the council run centres—where they are under a different enterprise agreement where they pay their staff more—and they were able to run at full capacity. So having qualified educators is linked to being able to expand services, and having wages fixed is linked to being able to have the qualified staff.

This wage justice bill does two important things. It will help address workforce shortages by supporting those workers by increasing pay, with 15 per cent for eligible workers over two years—as identified, 10 per cent this year and a further five per cent next year. A typical early childhood educator will receive an additional $103 from December 2024, increasing to at least $155 in December 2025. That's real pay justice that will make a real difference to household budgets. A typical early childhood educator teacher will receive an additional $166 from December 2024, an increase of at least $249 from December 2025.

This is critical if we're going to achieve another objective around kinder and make sure that all of our children have access to three- and four-year-old kinder before entering their foundation and prep years. The Victorian state government has set a bold plan in terms of kinder attendance, yet this state kinder funded program is struggling to keep up with demand. In my area, like most other areas of Victoria, it falls to the kinder program in the long day care setting to be able to make sure that every child has access to the kinder requirements that they need to transition into the foundation years of primary school.

What I also really respect about this bill and what I'm so pleased to see is that it's not just a straight increase to the award. It is about incentivising enterprise bargaining. It encourages good faith bargaining and the making use of the multi-employer bargaining stream that was introduced by this government. This fund will help support that legislation achieve its objectives. It will help support the steps the government is already taking to support early childhood educators and to see a fairer bargaining system.

In my own family's experience, like so many in this place, I could not do this job without the amazing educators and teachers in my children's life. I have a three- and four-year-old, and we've had the opportunity to not just attend our local Annie Galvin, which is a council run centre where my children are today—although they'll be home by now and getting ready for dinner; they've also had the opportunity to attend the service here at Parliament House, the Capital Hill Early Childhood Centre.

I want to take a moment to thank and acknowledge the great work of Melita and her team, who balance the unique position of parliamentarians and staff enrolling their children on a casual basis during sitting weeks. They manage the disruption of our children coming into their service, yet they don't miss a beat in the quality of the education that they provide. For my daughter Daisy, this was the first childcare service that she attended. She was born right before COVID, and, as you know, Victoria went into lockdown before any of the other states. A lot of the natural opportunities for young children, for babies and for parents with toddlers to interact in playgroups, rhyme times and tumble tots, all those things you usually do in the first 12 months of life, were suspended. So the very first children that Daisy met were at the Capital Hill Early Childhood Centre. I think of the impact that had. I think of the opportunity she had to be able to do what is just so natural for young children to do—to learn, to meet, to play and to interact with children.

We'll be talking about the impact that COVID has had on Daisy's generation for many years. I do know that, during that period, our early childhood educators really stepped up. They really made sure that essential workers had an opportunity to go to work, to do what we needed them to do, and that their children were cared for. They were such an important part of the response. Yet they did it with not a lot in the way of thanks, particularly from the previous government. They did it on minimum wage. They did it while dealing with all the other barriers that came with the COVID years. There were drop-offs at the gate. There were masks all the time. There was the challenge of separation anxiety, with parents unable to stay in the room with their children that little bit longer. We had to communicate through apps and notebooks because we had to limit our engagement. But they did it, and they did it well. They made sure that those young children still had a quality education and a great experience, as well as the foundation to their stepping stones for being successful in their primary school years.

This bill addresses a campaign that has been run by our unions that have been involved in this sector for a long time. They did it not just for their members but for every child, every child that will enter into their service for years to come. I pay tribute to the United Workers Union, the Australian Education Union and the Australian Services Union for their passion and their commitment. I also acknowledge the amazing educators who just did not give up, from the days when they walked off the job to draw attention to this issue to working and to the delegations they've had in this place. They invite us into their service with warmth. Regardless of political colour, they will always welcome a member of parliament to share with them the work that they do and how critical it is.

This bill is critical to ensuring we achieve our ultimate goal, which is access to universal early childhood education. I look forward to the work that our government will do to help achieve that. Until we have a situation where every child, regardless of their parent's income or postcode, has access to early childhood education, work is not done in this space. Critical to getting there is ensuring we address wage justice and that we are paying these amazing educators and teachers value for their work.

I cannot think of another example in the Australian workplace or in the Australian economy that speaks more to why we need a parliament, why we need to address gender equality and why we need to address pay. I encourage all of those present to vote for this bill. I would again like to acknowledge the extraordinary work of the many educators and teachers in my electorate who each and every day give our children the great opportunity of early childhood education and the care that they require.

Helen Haines (Indi, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to acknowledge the contribution from the member for Bendigo. How good it is to be in a House where we have parents of young children who are members of parliament and who can give lived experience of what it's like to be juggling work and early education and care and who can give us lived experience of the extraordinary quality of the early childhood educators that we have across Australia. So I thank the member for Bendigo for sharing her story just now.

Quality early childhood education is transformational. As an Independent member of parliament I support a childcare system where families can access affordable child care no matter where they live and no matter their income. Universal child care is among, I think, the most aspirational goals we as a nation could have. It supports the cognitive, social and emotional development of our children and it prepares them better for the challenges that life throws before all of us. For parents and caregivers, it helps makes it easier to balance parenthood and work and this benefits whole communities because so many moms and dads work in vital jobs particularly in our regions, whether that be nursing, teaching, psychology, running a small business or so many other professions and occupations. A thriving early childhood education sector should also create rewarding careers for those who work in it, the carers and educators who help our young people as they develop foundational skills that set them up for life.

So I support the intention of this bill, the Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers (Special Account) Bill 2024, because it will make a difference and it will reward a workforce so often undervalued and underpaid. As a society, we do not do nearly enough to recognising the life-changing influence that early childhood educators have on our young people and all the skills that are required to do these jobs well. I want this to change. Like the member for Bendigo, I have met with many, many early education and care workers and professionals, and I absolutely value what they do.

This bill implements the government's decision to fund a 15 per cent wage rise for early childhood educators over two years. The minister said in his speech that a typical early educator will receive a pay rise of at least $103 per week or around $7,800 a year. That will make a difference to the educators and teachers contacting my office who are struggling with the cost of living or, indeed, finding suitable housing. Some are even considering leaving the children and centres that they love for better-paid jobs elsewhere, and we just can't allow that to happen.

Firstly, the bill creates a special account to be called the Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers Special Account which will hold money for the purpose of delivering pay rises over two years through the worker retention payment program. Secondly, the bill will enable the minister to establish a grant program that funds childcare providers to pass on wage rises through their regular pay rise system. This will mean that early childhood educators won't be required to do anything. The pay rise will appear automatically in their payslip. The creation of a grant program will also enable the government to limit childcare fee increases to less than 4.4 per cent over the next 12 months. This will mean that the wage rise will be passed on in full to employees and won't see price rises for young families trying to access child care. That's really important because this is already so difficult for people in my electorate. However, the wage rise provided by this bill is only temporary. The bill also creates a sunset clause to reflect the pay rise is only for two years. This means the government has two years to ensure that sustainable and long-term wage rises for the childcare and education sector can be delivered. We simply cannot find ourselves in a situation in two years time where a sector seeking to grow and expand is then facing a 15 per cent drop in wages.

So, while I support the intention of this bill, it's a short-term fix and, at this point, is not the long-term solution that we need. The government says that this bill will deliver an interim payment while the Fair Work Commission finalises its gender undervaluation review of priority awards, which includes the Children's Services Award. The government is also considering longer term funding arrangements as part of its response to the recent Australian and Competition Consumer Commission and Productivity Commission reports.

As an independent MP scrutinising this plan, this raises some questions for me. How will this future transition be managed? As I said earlier, I support the intention of this bill, including plans to limit price increases to 4.4 per cent over the next year but I do ask the question: how would the limits of price rises be implemented in an inflationary economy? If inflation increases to more than 4.4 per cent then there could be severe impacts on the viability of childcare providers. I've heard from childcare providers in my electorate who really are very worried about the impact on their viability because the costs of providing high-quality care are still rising. The additional burden of administering wage rises on behalf of employees will only add to their mounting pressures.

While the government this week announced that limits on fee growth for 2025 will be determined by a new childcare cost index being developed by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the ABS, we at this stage have little understanding of what this index will look like and how it will work. And given the recent experiences that I've had in my electorate of outside school hours care providers, I am concerned about the government's ability to successfully implement this program, so we need to watch this. Nonetheless, we need these wage rises because providers tell me the lack of staff is the overwhelming reason they cannot meet the demand for child care in the regions, and we've heard this today in this House from various members of parliament.

The care industry has been undervalued for too long in our society and we see the evidence of that in the wages paid in sectors like early childhood education and care, aged care and disability care too. These are sectors with highly feminised workforces doing skilled work and, as a community, we are finally waking up and realising we cannot manage without these people and we certainly cannot manage without the high quality of the work that they deliver. A Jobs and Skills Australia report released last month found that the early child care and education workforce would need to grow by an additional eight per cent to satisfy estimated unmet demand for early childhood services. Across much of Australia, particularly in the regions, there are simply not enough educators to keep up with demand. And without enough early education and care workers, we don't have enough places available—you can see the pattern. I hope that, by increasing these wages, we will attract new workers to the sector and retain the workers who are already providing this invaluable and skilled care and education. Again, I commend the minister and the government on the work they are doing in the training of early education and care educators through TAFE; it is really important. I've met many of these students who are working in the sector and undertaking the studies, sometimes online, sometimes in person.

While child care is a family responsibility, we know in reality it is mothers who are disproportionately affected when child care is unavailable or difficult to obtain. There wouldn't be a woman in Australia right now who wouldn't smile and nod when they heard that. Take the story of Rebecca from Beechworth in my electorate. Rebecca wrote to me, sharing that her son was waiting so long for a childcare place to become available that he started school before he could attend child care. That is, quite frankly, absurd. I hear from mums driving their children 20, 40 or 60 kilometres to neighbouring towns so they can find a centre with availability. I speak to mothers who drive between different centres and who share between centres in order to get care, and this really does have real tangible impact on female workforce participation.

Recent ABS data showed that a lack of child care is the No. 1 reason stopping women from entering or re-entering the workforce. When families cannot access child care, women pay the price, losing out on career progression, superannuation and social connection. The data is clear—it's crystal clear: a lack of child care is creating a motherhood penalty that holds women back, and we need to fix it. That's why earlier this year, I hosted two playdate events with The Parenthood, one of Australia's leading advocacy groups for a better and fairer childcare system. These playdates informed The Parenthood's recent report on childcare shortages in regional, rural and remote Australia. The findings, while shocking, were actually quite unsurprising. What I heard at the playdate events in Wangaratta and Wodonga was that our childcare system is not working for families in north-east Victoria.

Amy in Wangaratta is studying to be a nurse. There are not enough childcare places in Wangaratta to accommodate her son. As she told The Parenthood:

Twice a week, I drive 50 kilometres—about 40 minutes each way—to Yarrawonga. I study at the library in Yarrawonga while my son is at daycare, as the driving time and cost would add up if I returned to Wangaratta.

So, day in, day out, Amy is having to make hard decisions about cost and time versus care and connection. Like so many families, Amy is pushed to the brink of burnout because her family cannot access the child care that they need close to where they live.

Hannah, in Wodonga, had attained high standing in her profession. She has a mortgage, and, when she and her husband had their first child, they had prepared as best they could and put themselves on waiting lists when their child was still in the womb. So you can imagine their shock when the time came to go back to work and they could only get care for three days a week across two different centres, and they live in the biggest town in our electorate. Keep in mind that, in Wodonga, there are 2.4 children for every available childcare place. Because extra care cannot be found, Hannah has reduced her work to four days a week, so Hannah's income is reduced by 20 per cent each and every week. She misses out on 20 per cent of her superannuation. She could be passed over when promotions arise. This is why we need a childcare system that works for all of us but especially for mothers.

As I mentioned earlier, I have little reason to trust that, when it comes to implementation of policy in this area, the government will be up to the job. In recent months, I've become aware of a widespread and extremely concerning situation in my electorate of Indi. The fourth round of the Community Child Care Fund saw 75 per cent of funding disappear from Indi. This is funding that supports outside-school-hours care in places like Yackandandah, Whitfield, Greta, Benalla, Moyhu, Mount Beauty and Rutherglen. If you've never heard of those names, look them up. They're tiny, beautiful places. Some of them are quite remote.

Some of these services have received this funding for more than a decade. To lose it so suddenly has come as a shock to principals, families and educators. Indeed, it's sent a shockwave around the whole community because, if we see these services close, parents won't be able to work if they can't find alternative care. Some parents may be forced to move their kids to schools in larger towns where they work, because the small rural school simply won't be an option if they can't provide after-school care. For these schools, then, that risk is existential—lose children, lose teachers, lose viability. It could exacerbate the gender pay gap, because we know it will be disproportionately mothers who will drop those shifts or days at work to provide this care if those OSHC services close. It could also exacerbate broader workforce shortages, with so many parents and caregivers in my electorate working in crucial occupations such as teaching, nursing and psychology. In fact, I've met two psychologists who have waitlists from Wangaratta to Sydney, and they had to drop the amount of work that they can do in order to take care of their children because the availability of child care is simply not there for them.

So I met with the minister as soon as my office discovered the extent of the issue with OSHC, and I subsequently asked the minister in question time what the government is doing to ensure those services don't close in my electorate. I went to see her again today, and I recognise both ministers in the House this afternoon. I've now helped to secure emergency funding for two of these services, and I hope more services will soon receive this desperately needed support. But I do say to you: that's one year of emergency funding. We absolutely need security for these services.

I conclude my remarks by affirming my support for this bill, despite my implementation concerns. It will ensure that early childhood educators and teachers right across Australia will see a wage rise in December. This wage rise—make no mistake—is long overdue, but I am fearful that, at this point, it is only temporary. If this government is serious about fixing workforce shortages in this sector, then it needs to deliver on its commitment to long-term funding solutions, because this bill alone is not enough. It is simply one step among many that we must take if we're to fix our childcare system in Australia.

As a regional Independent member of parliament, I will continue to be a strong advocate for regional families and regional communities. Childcare deserts cannot be allowed to persist in regional communities or any community. I'll continue pushing for childcare systems that work for families across the electorate of Indi, across north-east Victoria and, indeed, across the nation because I believe this nation is well and truly overdue for considerable reform in the early education and care sector, and I support the minister in her efforts to achieve that.

Anne Aly (Cowan, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Early Childhood Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Significant, momentous, historic, a monumental moment, a lifeboat, proof that early learning matters and life changing: these are just some of the descriptive words that early childhood education advocates and workers have used to describe this government's 15 per cent wage increase. I'm proud to stand in this chamber today alongside my colleague the Minister for Education speaking on the Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers (Special Account) Bill 2024, because I know early childhood educators have long been fighting for respect, for fairness and for a world-class early childhood education system for our children.

I want to start by acknowledging all the early childhood educators and all their advocates, who, for more than a decade, have been fighting for a wage increase for this vital workforce. When I first became a member of parliament in 2016 I signed a pledge, the Big Steps pledge, to support a pay rise for early childhood educators, as did many of my parliamentary colleagues on this side of the chamber. I did that for a number of reasons. The first reason was that I, as a single mother, relied very heavily on early childhood education and care. I know I owe the educators who gave my two sons a sense of normality, a routine, the nurturing and the education they needed at a significant time in their lives and in my life a debt of gratitude that I don't think I could ever repay.

Quite recently I was at an Early Childhood Australia conference in my hometown of Perth. As I was leaving the room, at the back of the room a woman stood up and came to me. She said, 'Anne, do you remember me?' Of course I remembered her. She was the educator who looked after my two boys, Adam and Karim. There were tears on both sides as we embraced, and I said to her, 'I don't know how to thank you.' I said to her, 'You saved my life,' and I said to her, 'I don't know if you knew what was going on in my life at the time when you were educating my two sons.' She looked at me and she simply said, 'Anne, we knew; we all knew.' That is one of the reasons why I feel so passionately about recognising just how important early childhood education and care is, just how important the workers and the professionals who educate our children are and just how important their fight for respect and for wage equality has been.

The other reason that I signed that pledge was that I knew, though I did not know that I would one day be the minister, that it would take an Albanese Labor government to deliver that wage increase for early childhood educators. Here we are: a government that recognises this vital profession with this historic investment. When we first came into government we knew that the early childhood education and care system was working, but it wasn't working for everyone. It wasn't working for every child, and it wasn't working for every family. It wasn't working for every parent. So we embarked on reforming this important sector—a sector that was long due for reform, I will add.

The very first thing we did was make early childhood education and care more affordable. Latest data shows that average out-of-pocket costs decreased by more than 13 per cent from the June quarter of 2023 to the June quarter of 2024, following our government's Cheaper Child Care policy coming into effect. We also knew that cost wasn't the only barrier that families were facing in accessing early learning. And we knew, as we know today, that there is more to do. So we asked the ACCC and the Productivity Commission to each do a review, providing guidance on how we can achieve that vision of a universal early learning system, a system where every child, no matter who they are, no matter their background and no matter where they live, has access to quality early childhood education and care.

We know that to get to the Albanese government's vision of a world-class, universal early childhood education system in Australia—one that is affordable, accessible and inclusive—we need a strong foundation. That foundation is a quality and sustainable workforce.

This wage increase is important for families, for children and for the entire early childhood education and care sector across Australia. Ninety per cent of brain development occurs in the first five years. We talk about children learning to walk, to talk, to play and to share. That should be enough to tell us that, in those first five years, early childhood education is not babysitting. It's not wiping bums and noses. It's education. I want to say to the early childhood workers across Australia: the Albanese government sees you, we hear you, we acknowledge you and we know the vital and professional work that you do in helping our youngest Australians grow and thrive.

Early childhood educators are some of the lowest paid people in the workforce, and, as many have mentioned, it's a highly feminised workforce. Their pay, for far too long, just hasn't reflected the level of professionalism that they bring to their work and the heart that they put into educating children between the ages of zero and five. Anyone who's ever visited an early learning centre will tell you, just from observing the way that children interact with their educators and with each other, that there is more than just sitting and care going on here. There is a real level of professionalism reflected in those interactions that you see.

The Productivity Commission's final report confirms what the Albanese government already knew: that prioritising the early learning workforce is critical to any reform. That's why this bill is so important. The wage justice bill supports this historic 15 per cent wage increase for our early childhood education workers. It ensures that funding gets passed on to workers in full. It requires early childhood education and care services to agree to limit the increases they make in the fees they charge families, so it will help strengthen the early learning workforce without passing these costs on to families.

So, in a practical sense, what does this mean for the early childhood education and care workforce? It means that 200,000 early childhood workers right across Australia will get more than $100 more a week in their pay packets in time for Christmas, and, by the end of next year, it means more than an additional $150 in their pay packet each week. It means a livable wage. That's what it means for early childhood educators.

I want to share a little story with the chamber today. I was getting off the plane in Melbourne just last Tuesday, A young man pulled me aside and he said, 'Thank you so much for what you're doing for early childhood educators—for the pay increase.' I said to him, 'Oh, are you an early childhood educator?' He said, 'No, my wife is.' I said, 'In Melbourne or in Perth?' He said, 'In Perth.' I said, 'Whereabouts does she work?' He said, 'Goodstart Joondalup.' He shook my hand and he said: 'This means so much for us. It means so much for her, recognising her work and her professionalism, and it means so much to our family.'

Those words that that young man said to me that day were echoed by Leane, who is a 19-year veteran of the sector. She's worked in early childhood education and care for 19 years. Let me tell you, Deputy Speaker: those early childhood educators who have devoted a lifetime to a sector while earning wages that are so low are just champions. They do it because they love what they do. Leane said:

To be recognised as professionals and to have a wage that reflects that is a huge step forward, not only for educators, but for children and their families

That's what this bill means. That's what this wage increase means.

I've listened to some of the contributions here in the House, and I want to acknowledge the previous speaker, the member for Indi, for her engagement on this and her devotion to this issue. But I have heard some speakers from the Liberal-National coalition, but also some speakers from the Greens political party, denigrating or downplaying the impact of this 15 per cent wage increase. I would say to those people: Go and speak to early childhood educators. Ask them what it means for them. It is significant for them because it means that, along with this government's tax cuts, they're able to earn more. They're able to keep more of what they earn. They don't have to take a second job. They can stay in the profession that they love. They're able to earn a liveable wage. They're able to make ends meet. As one early childhood educator put to me: 'I'm able to buy real food. I'm able to pay the rent.' This is not something that is insignificant. This is really, truly meaningful to the people that it impacts most.

It means that we are on that path to building a strong, stable early learning workforce as we have more early childhood educators coming through our free-TAFE pipeline. I went and visited one TAFE in Perth recently. They've had a 400 per cent increase in the number of people doing a Certificate III in Early Childhood Education and Care. I spoke to those young people undertaking the TAFE course, who said to me: 'I wouldn't be able to do this if it wasn't free. I wouldn't have been able to afford it.' We're building that system. We're building that workforce. That's because we know that accessible and affordable early learning is critical to supporting more people, especially women, to have a choice when it comes to undertaking study, re-entering the workforce or increasing their hours of work.

I come back to my own experience and why I say that those early childhood educators saved my life. It's because they afforded me choice. They afforded me the ability to go back to study. They afforded me the ability to go back to work and to put a roof over my head and my children's heads. They afforded me the ability to provide for my children, an ability that I would not have had had it not been for those early childhood educators.

This bill represents real cost-of-living relief for the household budgets of families struggling with the rising cost of living and it improves economic security for women. It's what the children of Australia deserve. It's what the families of Australia deserve. It's what the Albanese Labor government is delivering. It builds on a range of measures the government is delivering to support this important workforce. We've already increased the pipeline of early childhood educators, as I mentioned earlier. We've got $72 million in the early childhood education workforce package that's helping to retain the existing highly skilled early learning workforce. And now we're increasing wages, helping early childhood educators who have been struggling for so long, attracting more back into the sector and encouraging more people to take up early childhood education and care as a viable career option.

From visiting centres across the country and meeting with so many of our precious early childhood educators, I know that they love the job. But I also know that love doesn't pay the bills. We want to build an early childhood education system that works for everyone. That means that it needs to work for educators as well as for parents and, importantly, it needs to work for children. Every Australian—whether you're a parent, a grandparent, an aunty, an uncle or a great-aunty, as I have just recently become or whether you know someone who works in early childhood education or are an early childhood educator—can get behind this. Every Australian knows just how important the work of nurturing and educating our youngest Australians is. With that, I commend this bill to the House.

Alison Byrnes (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would also like to thank the minister for telling her personal story and also for her passion in bringing to this House this bill, the Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers (Special Account) Bill 2024, that implements the 15 per cent pay rise for all of our early childhood education workers, who play a crucial role in providing children with a nurturing and supportive environment where they can explore, learn and grow. Through their expertise, they create spaces that guide children through essential development milestones and encourage the foundational skills necessary for lifelong success. These environments encourage curiosity and discovery, helping children not only to build cognitive abilities but also to develop socially, emotionally and physically. Early childhood educators are dedicated professionals who deliver more than lessons. They inspire a love of learning and cultivate an inclusive atmosphere where children feel valued and understood.

In May this year, the Minister for Early Childhood Education and Minister for Youth visited the University of Wollongong and met with the early childhood educators. The minister was an absolute rockstar when she came to Wollongong. Whether it was to meet with early childhood education workers or young people from our local high schools, she just shone. They absolutely adored talking to you. You're an absolute rockstar. She listened to the concerns and experiences of early childhood educators when they highlighted the challenges that were faced in delivering quality care and education in the Illawarra. These conversations emphasised the need for targeted reforms to ensure that the sector can continue providing high-quality education and care to all families while retaining the skilled workforce, especially in regions like mine in the Illawarra.

Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers (Special Account) Bill 2024 is an instrumental piece of legislation for these workers. It not only addresses pay equity but also tackles broader issues such as workforce retention, early childhood development and family support. Despite their crucial role in the development of our children, these educators have historically been underpaid. Many early childhood workers earn wages significantly lower than those in comparable industries. During their decade in government, those opposite failed to take any action to address underpayment or the broader challenges facing the early childhood education and care sector. The Albanese Labor government recognises how important early childhood education and care workers are to our country.

The wage justice bill will help address significant workforce shortages by supporting the delivery of a wage increase of 15 per cent for eligible workers over two years. For many educators, this could mean a rise of $7,800 annually, bringing their pay more into line with the important work that they do. This bill acknowledges that early educators are more than just caregivers; they are professionals who deserve to be recognised and compensated fairly. By improving wages, we are also investing in the quality of education for our children.

In our Illawarra region, access to early childhood education is strained due to the long waitlist for care. Many parents are forced to delay their return to the workforce because they cannot find affordable and available childcare spots. Belinda Jackson and Summer Finlay, two mums from the Illawarra, wrote a submission to the Productivity Commission inquiry regarding the issues that Illawarra families face accessing child care and the implications. They conducted a survey of 73 families around the Illawarra and found that over 33 per cent of respondents had lost more than $50,000 per annum due to the lack of availability of early childhood education and care. A further 49 per cent lost somewhere between $10,000 and $50,000 a year, with almost 60 per cent of respondents being on waiting lists for more than 18 months. This is affecting household budgets around the Illawarra, but it is also a loss for the local economy, with predominately women having to delay their return to work or work part time as a result of places in early childhood education and care centres. The staffing shortages in our local early childhood education and care centres are a contributor to these waitlists.

This bill directly addresses these shortages by improving wages, making the profession more attractive and encouraging qualified professionals to remain in or return to the sector. For families in the Illawarra, this will help centres to increase capacity, offering more places for children. And the ripple effect is significant. When more children can access care, parents, particularly women, can return to the workforce sooner, boosting local economic activity. With better pay for educators, we can ensure that all early childhood education and care centres are adequately staffed and that children receive the high-quality care they deserve. Research has shown that the first five years of a child's life are critical for brain development. Educators in this sector support this growth, providing children with the cognitive, emotional and social skills they need to thrive in school and beyond.

I asked some of my local childcare professionals what this pay increase would mean to them. Marina Harris, the executive lead for people and learning at Big Fat Smile, said:

This victory has impacted our 500 eligible Long Day Care and Out Of School Hours (OOSH) Care employees, recognising the valuable and essential contribution that teachers and educators make to Australia's children, families, and workplaces.

The government has shown a strong commitment to establishing a truly universal early childhood education system for all of Australia's children and families.

A key component is having qualified early learning teachers and educators who are compensated fairly.

Properly valuing the early childhood education and care profession is crucial to attracting and retaining a skilled and capable workforce.

It is a vital step towards ensuring universal access to early learning and the sustainability of our sector.

Bridy, an out-of-school-hours director, said:

When I found out the news as an OOSH Director I was in shock because I didn't think we were included.

This wage increase validates the work that we do every day with our children, while helping reduce finance stresses on our educators.

This increase is a step forward; showing just how important our sector is.

That keeps coming up. It shows that they are valued and that we think that their sector is important. She said:

It allows people to do what they love and be financially stable in this economy. I am looking forward to the future.

Danielle, an early learning centre educator, said:

I was pleased to hear the news about the pay increase for early childhood educators.

A pay increase in the early childhood sector is crucial because it acknowledges the valuable work done by educators.

By providing a higher salary, it not only recognises our dedication and hard work but also helps attract and retain future educators in the field.

This leads to better quality care and education for young children, ensuring their well-being and development are in capable hands.

These are just some of the many workers and managers who are excited to see a wage increase in the sector. Others have said it is still a talking point in many centres as it will be changing the lives of those employed but also helping to attract more educators and teachers. Early childhood education and care centres have been delaying expansion plans, closing rooms and limiting enrolments because they can't find qualified staff. This is impacting on the availability and the cost of early childhood education and care for families.

One of the most pressing concerns for families in the Illawarra is the rising cost of child care. Even with increased subsidies, families often find that costs outpace wage growth, making child care a significant financial burden. This bill not only ensures wage justice for workers but also implements a cap on childcare fees increases at 4.4 per cent per year. This cap will prevent fees from skyrocketing, providing much-needed cost-of-living relief for families across the country, including those in the Illawarra. By capping fee increases, the bill ensures that the benefits of the wage rises for workers are not undermined by unaffordable fees for families. Parents will be able to access affordable care secure in the knowledge that the government is taking action to prevent unreasonable fee hikes. For working families, this is a game changer. Affordable child care is essential for parents to re-enter the workforce, increase their hours or pursue further education.

In the Illawarra, where many households are juggling the cost of living with the challenges of finding child care, this bill offers both short-term relief and long-term solutions. It is about much more than wages; it's about shaping the future of early education in Australia. By investing in our educators, we are investing in the success of our children and our society. Research consistently shows that high-quality, early education leads to better educational outcomes, lower rates of social disadvantage and stronger future participation in the workforce.

In the Illawarra, a region known for its resilience and innovation, we understand the importance of investing in people. When our children receive the best possible start in life, they are more likely to succeed in school and contribute meaningfully to their communities. This bill is a step towards ensuring that every child in the Illawarra and across Australia has access to the best early education opportunities regardless of their background. It is also a huge step in recognising the dedication, passion and tremendous effort of all early childhood education and care workers and the care that they put in every day for children.

This increase will help build a bigger early education and care workforce that will, in turn, help to build a bigger and better early education system. This bill is a landmark step towards building a fairer, more sustainable early childhood education and care system. It addresses wage inequality for our educators, enhances access to child care for families and ensures that quality of care remains high. For the Illawarra, this will help to achieve shorter waitlists, more places for children and more opportunities for parents to return to work. It means creating a more equitable and just society, where the importance of early childhood education is recognised and supported.

I would like to thank the United Workers Union for their fierce advocacy for early childhood education and care workers through their Big Steps campaign to help secure this pay rise, and I would also like to thank all the early childhood education and care workers, especially those in the Illawarra, for everything that they do. You deserve this pay rise, and I commend the bill to the House.

Mike Freelander (Macarthur, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers (Special Account) Bill 2024 is a hugely significant step, and it's a sign that the Albanese Labor government understands early childhood development, understands our society and understands our future. My electorate of Macarthur has one of the highest growth rates in the country, and our fertility rate is well past that of population replacement. We're a rapidly growing electorate, the biggest in the country by population, and we have many young children and young families who require high-quality child care and early childhood education.

I'd like to congratulate the Minister for Early Childhood Education, who has visited my electorate several times and has been an iconic figure in the development of early childhood education policy since we've been in government. I congratulate her on this bill. I also congratulate the Minister for Education, who, again, has visited my electorate on a number of occasions and has been a towering figure in the development of education policy in Australia over the last three years. I feel very proud that I've been able to have him and, indeed, the Minister for Early Childhood Education visit the electorate of Macarthur and see our wonderful kids and their families, who are the future of our country and our society.

The purpose of the bill, of course, is to establish an account to fund grants that support financial incentives for early childhood educators by increasing their wages. This has been a long, long journey for me, as both a politician and a paediatrician. I love visiting early childhood education centres. They are really exciting places where we can see the potential of our kids blossoming with the support they get from our early childhood educators. I've been to just about every early childhood education centre in my electorate, and some outside the electorate as well, in almost half a century. My own children have benefited from the support of early childhood education workers, and I thank them so much for the support they've given my family and my patients as a paediatrician.

When I say it's been a long journey, as a young medical student I was involved in a study that looked at brain development in young children and found that the brain development in terms of the number of neuronal cells was virtually complete by age two. The connections that come after that are in response to stimulation from the environment that occurs. We are to thank our early childhood educators for that stimulation and that support that they give our kids in early childhood centres around the country. The fact that we can see the wonderful potential of those children is a tribute to our early childhood education workers and to the families that support our children as well.

The first part of this bill deals with a range of matters, including the object of the bill and provisions that establish the payment systems and the support and supervision of that. Our early childhood educators have done a wonderful job, but they've been underpaid for many, many decades. This has led to poor career structures. It's led, in many instances, to frequent staff changes. Anyone who's had children in preschool understands how important it is for our kids to have a stable teaching environment and teachers who are there for the long term.

All six of my children have benefitted from early childhood education centres in my electorate of Macarthur, and they're all well grown now. In fact, we now have nine grandchildren, who have also benefitted from early childhood education. I love going and seeing my own children and grandchildren in early childhood education. I love seeing my patients, and I love to see the support they're getting and how they're growing up with the support of our early childhood educators. To have a plan where they now have a remuneration system that allows them to live a normal life in stable housing, to be able to feed their families and to be able to educate their own families is a really crucial step. It's a sign, as I've said, that the Albanese Labor government understands the huge importance of early childhood education and what it is doing for our children and for our future.

Our society depends on our children having the best education possible, and we know that that education starts from birth. As a medical student, I was involved in one of the first studies that looked at brain development in very young children. In more recent times, I've been promoting the First 1,000 Days as an early childhood development program to see how we can stimulate the brain development and the overall development of our young children. That is a very important thing that we're only now beginning to recognise. It is so important for the future education of all our children. If we can build on this further, it will be of great benefit to our young children.

We know that many young children in the past missed out on the benefits of early childhood education, and we know that from talking to our teachers. It has been shown that children who start school at age five often develop language and skills much slower than those who've been to early childhood development centres. It is something that we need to encourage, and it's important to recognise that all children should start school on an equal footing. This bill, by getting proper remuneration for our early childhood centre teachers, will help stimulate the ability of people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds to enter early childhood education. The bill establishes the mechanism for this, and we will build on it further.

I congratulate the ministers involved, and I look forward to visiting many more early childhood education centres to see the progress of my grandchildren and my patients, who are attending the preschools in the Macarthur region. I thank all of them—the teachers in the centres—for their support over many, many years of the early childhood development of those kids. I look forward, in the future, to seeing them prosper even further in our schools, our universities and our TAFEs. Our children deserve the very best. In centres around the world, we know that the very best centres provide ongoing early childhood intervention and support for children from a very early age, with a seamless transition into primary school. I'm very hopeful that will continue in Australia, provided we can build on this bill, make sure we have a stable workforce and make sure that workforce is properly trained and attuned to the developments of the 21st century in early childhood education. I commend this bill to the House. I look forward to its implementation. I congratulate the minister, and I congratulate all those early childhood intervention teachers that have been involved in getting this bill through the House.

Michelle Ananda-Rajah (Higgins, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am reminded of the importance of good quality early childhood education and care when I'm confronted with its removal. Two centres in my electorate currently face closure, and three have recently closed, as churches, councils or other institutions leave the field by seeking other uses for their land. The common thread is that these have    all been community-led centres. These decisions leave families and communities shattered because the selection of a childcare centre or kindy is made so thoughtfully and individually, often based on interactions with staff, obviously the needs of the child, word of mouth and online quality standards, which are universally higher for community-run centres.

Little St Margaret's Kindergarten, Ewing Street Kindergarten, Gardiner Preschool, Windsor Community Children's Centre, the Craig Family Centre, Chabad Malvern's early childhood education and care centre are places I love visiting to meet caring and impressive staff and curious children.

Currently, Windsor Community Children's Centre and Gardiner Preschool are fighting to survive. A campaign is underway to protect Windsor Community Children's Centre. The land on which this beloved centre is sitting on is being rezoned and sold. It is one of the few remaining not-for-profit centres in the City of Stonnington. It is a special place where children are nurtured, educated and prepared for their future in a safe and loving environment. Gardiner Preschool in Glen Iris is a quality community-run kinder that opened in the 1940s. It, too, is at risk of closure due to the Uniting Church's decision to terminate its lease. I am asking Higgins residents and people at all levels of government to visit these centres and have a look at their websites to learn about their histories and what they provide, and to support the campaigns to save them in whatever way they can.

The educators and carers in these settings perform vital work and become part of our families. But therein lies the trap. They are not in our family; they are skilled professionals who should be paid fairly. Parents agree. Time and time again I have had parents cite the need to pay our educators better. They are concerned that their fees may not be getting to the workers.

Caring professionals provide the foundation for a caring society, from the cradle to the grave. Ninety per cent of brain growth occurs in those first five years—they are critical—underpinning the importance of high-quality early education and care, noting that the workforce, like in every other caring profession from teaching to nursing to aged care, is everything. The workforce is everything. But sector reform is needed because there is a shortage of workers. Providers have been delaying expansion plans, closing rooms and limiting enrolments because they can't find quality and qualified staff.

Since Labor came to office, the workforce has increased by 30,000, but more work is needed. The future of the early childhood education profession: Early childhood education and care workforce capacity study summary report stated that Australia needs 21,000 more qualified ECEC professionals to meet current demand. ECEC remuneration is low compared to other competing occupations, which presents a significant disincentive to entry and accelerates attrition. Given that 92 per cent of the workforce are women, this is a gendered issue and it is close to the heart of this female-dominant government. I congratulate Minister Anne Aly and Minister Jason Clare for their work on this game-changing bill. It is a game changer.

Change is needed not simply as a matter of fairness but to attract people to the profession and retain them. I have met educators who have been at centres for decades, some up to 25 years. We want the sector to be seen as a career destination, and remuneration is vital to making that a reality. High-quality child care and early childhood education are essential for increased workforce productivity, particularly for women, and for better biopsychosocial outcomes, not just education, for children. It's holistic.

The Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers (Special Account) Bill 2024 we are debating establishes a special account to fund grants to approved early childhood education and care providers to support a wage increase of 15 per cent for eligible workers over two years, and to limit fee increases charged by providers. This is the ECEC worker retention payment program. The 15 per cent pay rise will be phased in over two years, starting with a 10 per cent increase from December this year with a further five per cent increase from December next year. A typical early educator, paid at the award rate, will receive a pay rise of at least $103 a week in December this year, increasing to at least $155 per week from next year. For a typical early childhood education teacher, they'll receive an additional $166 a week from December this year, increasing to $249 from December next year.

To be eligible to receive the funding for the wage increase, early childhood education and care services must agree not to increase their fees by more than 4.4 per cent between 8 August this year and 7 August next year. This will place downward pressure on fees. It will constrain them. The funding for this change has been set for two years to allow the Fair Work Commission to finalise its gender awards review, which is expected to overhaul the care and health sectors. Watch this space.

This bill builds on the government's support for the ECEC sector and Australian families, including the cheaper childcare measures, which injected $5 billion into the sector in our first budget. This in turn has made child care cheaper for more than a million families. Our children and parents, especially our mums, and our economy will be the beneficiaries, but it all starts with the workforce. I commend this bill to the House.

Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank all members who have contributed to the debate on the Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers (Special Account) Bill 2024. This is a really important thing that we are doing here today, lifting the wages of some of the most important workers in this country. When my wife was pregnant with our second child, my oldest child, who'd been badgering us for a second child for a long time, was shown an image of the ultrasound of the little baby in the stomach. My colleague across the chamber would know how special that moment is. It is a really special moment. Jack, my older son, didn't know what he was looking at, at first, and we had to tell him that it was a baby. He said, 'Is it a boy or a girl?' We said, 'It's a baby boy.' His first reaction wasn't what we expected. The first words that came out of his mouth were, 'I can't wait to tell Kelly.' And you can guess who Kelly is. Kelly was his early childhood educator, the woman who cared for him and educated him when he was little before he started school.

When that happened, at that moment, I think something clicked with me. I understood just how important our early educators are. In a much more powerful way, I understood what we get told in this debate and what we get told in this job, which is that everything that a child experiences when they're little—every meal, every smile and every book that gets read to them—shapes the child that they become. So much of who we are is made in those formative years, those early years before you even start school. I want to thank members who have contributed to this debate that have told that in such a powerful way, who have told us how our early educators not only help parents return to work and help them return to study. I think my friend Anne Aly said it more powerfully in this debate than anybody. They can save their lives, change their lives, put a roof over their heads and help them raise their family. I think that's not too strong a word.

So these are important people in our own lives, in our community, for our country, but you wouldn't necessarily know that from how they're paid. The truth is that early educators are some of the most underpaid workers in this country, despite the importance of the work that they do. This bill is about addressing that. It'll deliver a 15 per cent pay rise for up to 200,000 early educators across the country. That's a 10 per cent rise in just a few weeks time on 1 December and then a further five per cent rise from December of next year.

What does that mean in real terms? It means that, for a typical early educator who's paid at the award rate, they'll receive a pay rise on 1 December this year of at least $103 a week, and that'll increase to $155 a week from December of next year. That's about $7,800 extra a year in their pocket. If you're an early childhood education teacher, you'll receive an extra $166 a week from 1 December this year—only a few weeks away—and that'll increase to 249 bucks from December of next year. That's big. That is something that will seriously change the lives of those 200,000 Australians.

It's not just about those 200,000 early educators who are educating and caring for our littlest Australians right now. The Productivity Commission report that we released a couple of weeks ago makes the point that we need them and we need more of them. There are 30,000 more early educators working in the sector today than when we came to office. We need them to stay, but we also need more of them—many more. People who might be thinking, 'I love the job, but I can't afford to do it,' will, hopefully, think, 'Well, now I can.' I remember the day that we announced this with the PM. I dropped my little guy, Atticus, off at the centre where he goes. I said to Kerry, who looks after him, 'Have you heard the news?' She said no, and I told her. She said, 'Maybe I won't have to quit now.' That's the difference that something like this can make. People who might have been early educators but left the job, not because they wanted to but because they couldn't afford to keep doing it—people who might have gone off to work at the local supermarket or somewhere else because they could earn more money—will, hopefully, see in this that they can go back to doing the job that they love—more people doing some of the most important jobs imaginable.

I thank everybody who has contributed to this debate, most particularly my friend and colleague the extraordinary Minister for Early Childhood Education and Minister for Youth, Anne Aly. Anne, you have worked tirelessly for this. This is your victory. The real heroes of this story are the 200,000 people into whose pockets we're making sure that we put more money, but the truth is that it wouldn't have happened without you and without the Prime Minister of Australia, Anthony Albanese.

I also want to acknowledge the many stakeholders who have spoken in support of this pay rise that we'll be voting on in a few moments, like Goodstart, who said:

With this $3.6B commitment the Prime Minister has demonstrated he is serious about delivering a truly universal early education system for all of Australia's children and families—because the first thing a universal system needs is a strong workforce.

The Community Child Care Association called this measure 'life changing'. The Parenthood described it as 'historic' and 'decades in the making'. Sia, who works for Big Steps and was interviewed on ABC breakfast a little while ago, talked about her passion for the work that she does, and she said, 'That passion, if I'm honest, has been slowly dying, because we don't get recognised and we haven't been getting paid what we are worth. It's just like we've had it at the tip of our fingers and now we've finally got hold of it, and it's going to make such a difference for our industry.'

I also want to thank the Senate Education and Employment Legislation Committee for their inquiry into the bill, and I welcome their recommendation that it be passed. This an important thing that we're doing here right now. It'll benefit some of the most important and some of the most underpaid workers in our country, workers who have one of the most important tasks: to educate and to care for our youngest Australians. I commend the bill to the House.

Maria Vamvakinou (Calwell, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The original question was that this bill be now read a second time. To this the honourable member for Moncrieff has moved as an amendment that all words after 'That' be omitted with a view to substituting other words.

Milton Dick (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The question before the House is that the amendment be agreed to.