Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Trade) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Faruqi for her question. I do acknowledge that early childhood education providers, carers and educators across the country provide an essential and very important service to many, many families, and an important and essential educational opportunity and benefit to many young Australians. My own children received outstanding care in early childhood education from wonderful carers and I'm sure that is the case for many others in this chamber. We acknowledge their hard work, the care they provide and the foundational start they give to young Australians in their education and wellbeing. It is why our government has been pleased to expand opportunity and access for families to be able to reach early childhood education and care services, and we saw record numbers of children and families accessing the services as we entered the pandemic this year. We value the work of those carers, who, of course, have their wages determined through standard industrial relations processes, as indeed do all Australians as part of the award system. But, increasingly, we have pleasingly seen the number of children accessing valuable care services grow, increasing some 1.8 per cent last year to 1,339,970 over that period of time. The number of families is increasing as well. That growth is a testament to the fact that, under our government, prepandemic, our childhood education reforms had provided for families to be able to access care, with support from the government for those who needed the most hours of support getting the most amount of hours of subsidised care. For those earning the least, they were getting the greatest rate of subsidy under our reforms, and that helped drive more families into a system to receive such care.