Mehreen Faruqi (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Family Assistance Legislation Amendment (Cheaper Child Care) Bill 2022, and I'm going to start with the title of the bill itself. We heard during the Senate inquiry on this bill that the language of 'cheaper child care' undervalues the role of educators. In her submission, Tamika Hicks, on behalf of the United Workers Union early childhood education delegates, expressed bitter disappointment with the choice of words and questioned how educators could ever change the narrative about the value, recognition and importance they deserve without support from the top. We know early learning educators are some of the lowest-paid workers. Theirs was the first sector from which JobKeeper support was withdrawn by the coalition during the pandemic. But they ought to be highly respected, and their contribution to children's development, the community and society ought to be highly valued. When we talk about respect, language matters. The Greens support the view of UWU and other educators and consider the government should take a leading role in shifting public discourse by replacing the words 'cheaper child care' with 'more affordable early education and care' in the title of the bill. I will be moving an amendment to that effect. We should also commit to consistently using the term 'early education and care' instead of the term 'child care'.

I'll turn now to the bill itself. The bill increases the maximum percentage of child care subsidy, CCS, available to families and extends access to the CCS to all families earning less than $530,000. The bill introduces a new base level of 36 subsidised hours of child care per fortnight for First Nations families, regardless of their activity levels. It also introduces new transparency measures requiring large providers to report annually on their financial information and lease arrangements to the Department of Education and enabling the department to publish this information. The bill enables providers to offer a discount on fees to their educators whose children also attend the centre. Finally, the bill introduces good governance as a core eligibility requirement for provider approval and imposes a new requirement for providers to submit accurate records, receive gap fees by EFT and keep proper records.

The Greens believe early childhood education and care is an essential service that should be universal, free, accessible, well funded by the government and never run for profit. While the bill does not go nearly far enough to achieve our vision of universal and free early learning and care, we support the bill as it represents a step in the right direction in making early learning affordable for more people. This was really such a good opportunity for the Labor government to fix the early childhood education and care system once and for all, but they unfortunately chose not to do that.

There are some key issues that still need to be addressed by the government, and the first of these is workforce. The early childhood education and care workforce is in crisis. It is estimated that around 9,000 more educators will be required because of the reforms introduced in the bill, and there are currently 7,000 vacancies already in the sector. Assuming attrition rates continue as they are, it is estimated that there will be over 10,000 vacancies next year. That would mean there would be a need for around 19,000 more educators in July next year, when this bill comes into effect.

A big driver of this attrition is poor pay, with degree qualified educators often being paid 20 to 30 per cent less than primary school teachers. But also governments have long failed to adequately value the profession. This is what early educators are telling us. I am now going to read what a few of them have told us in the United Workers Union's submission to the inquiry into this bill. One says:

I've been an early childhood educator for over 25 years and I'm now looking for another job not in child care as I'm so burnt out and over everything else I don't feel the quality of care is there anymore as I have so much paperwork we are just getting through the day.

Another says:

We have always been taken for granted, and after all that we went through during covid and all its implications where we were essential, we still are not recognised for what we did. We're so tired of being undervalued, underpaid, and overworked, we are over our profession.

The last one I'm going to read out is this:

With the cost of living rising, educators are leaving every day, as it is near impossible to survive on the wages we receive. After over 20 years in the industry, I've lost my mojo, mostly to the pay but also educators well-being.

This is an atrocious condition for those people who serve such an essential, respected and professional role in society—that is, the development of our children.

Currently, the only measure in this bill aimed at attracting and retaining educators is the provision of a permissible educator discount that providers may offer to their educators. Under this measure, early childhood education and care providers will be permitted to offer a discount on fees to staff engaged as educators without affecting the amount of child care subsidy payable for the educator. We support this measure and want it to be extended to all staff employed at centres, including cooks. But it is completely inadequate to address the scale of the workforce crisis.

Let's not forget that a vast majority of this workforce is women, who already face a huge pay inequality gap. We support calls from the sector that the government should provide an urgent interim wage supplement. The government should implement protections to ensure that the wage supplement is passed on in full to educators. For clarity, this measure should be interim while longer-term structural changes are undertaken to improve educator pay and conditions, such as proposed changes to the Fair Work Act to address gender pay equity and improvements to bargaining processes. As the inquiry into the bill heard, immediate action is need to address workforce shortages and the pay and conditions that workers face before the bill commences in July to ensure at a very basic level that the policy aims of the bill can be realised. The government has been made aware of this fact loudly and clearly and cannot ignore it any longer.

Moving to the activity test, the Greens welcome the new baseline entitlement to 36 hours per fortnight of subsidised early childhood education and care for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children regardless of the activity levels of their parents. This change has been long overdue. The reality is that the activity test as a whole is cruel, punitive and beyond repair. It denies access to early childhood education and care for the most disadvantaged children and punishes families who have insecure casual work. The activity test should be abolished entirely, as many witnesses to the inquiry stated, including Early Childhood Australia, the Australian Childcare Alliance, UWU, The Parenthood and Lisa Bryant. As Lisa Bryant put it, the activity test is:

… a punitive measure introduced by the previous government more or less on ideological terms which said that only the deserving should get access to child care.

No child should be penalised for what their parents do or can't do.

According to an August 2022 report from Impact Economics and Policy, the activity test is also contributing to at least 126,000 children from the poorest households missing out on early education. The report found, because of the activity test:

Removing the activity test would represent significant progress towards delivering universal early learning and would ensure that the full benefits of the CCS increase can be realised by all families and children. Thousands of children from disadvantaged families are missing out on early education and care now. There is sufficient evidence to warrant abolition of the activity test immediately. The government does not need to wait for the outcome of the Productivity Commission's inquiry to act on this. I will be moving an amendment to abolish the activity test and encourage my colleagues to support it.

The Greens agree with the many stakeholders that supported a need for greater transparency in the early childhood education and care sector during the inquiry. Many early learning centres are run by large non-government providers. There has been a proliferation of for-profit providers in recent years, and it is no coincidence that prices have risen by 41 per cent in the past eight years. Given the substantial public money that providers receive, there is a compelling need for a robust transparency regime. I therefore welcome new reporting requirements for large providers but believe that these requirements should be expanded to cover all providers and that this information should be publicly available. I also believe that for-profit providers should have to publicly report full finances, including their profitability, dividend payments, executive compensation, wages expenditure, investment in quality and inclusion, rental costs and fee increases. At the end of the day, education should never be for profit, and we should be phasing this out altogether. I will be moving amendments to that effect later on during our committee stage.

Once the bill comes into effect, it will increase demands for early learning. This needs to be matched with the corresponding investment and providing extra places. As pointed out by regional and rural stakeholders during the inquiry, waiting lists in many places are already too long. According to a report from the Mitchell institute earlier this year, 35 per cent of the population live in neighbourhoods classified as childcare deserts, where there are more than three children per one place. People in regional areas are more likely to live in this desert, while those in remote regions are highly likely to also be living in areas where there are limited places. The Mitchell institute report noted that areas with the highest fees also generally have the highest levels of accessibility, suggesting that providers are establishing services not only where there are greater levels of demand but where they are likely to make greater profits. The government must develop a plan to phase out for-profit early childhood education and care, which has clearly contributed to these inequities, and must work with states and territories to invest in greater availability of early childhood education and care.

The Greens will be pushing for the government to consider this issue in the context of the Productivity Commission's review of the sector, which will commence next year. I look forward to working with the government on this review, which is badly needed. The Greens will keep pushing for an early childhood education and care system that we can be proud of—one where every child in this country has access to high-quality, free, accessible early childhood education and care, no matter their postcode, their bank balance or their background, and every early childhood educator is respected and has better pay and conditions which reflect their profession and the responsibility they take on in the development of our children. I will be moving a Greens second reading amendment which will reflect this by noting that the bill only provides limited support for families that are currently paying exorbitant fees for early childhood education and care, only makes modest changes to the activity test and does not do anything to address the work force crisis and which will call on the government to make early childhood education and care universal and free and to address the workforce crisis by immediately funding an interim wage supplement.

High-quality early childhood education and care can give children the best start in life and is a critical component of lifelong learning. It also enables women to pursue career opportunities and ensures they aren't held back because early learning and care is too expensive or not available. As a migrant parent with no family in Australia, I would not have had the opportunity to study or embark on my engineering career, nor would my children have had the opportunity of early development, if it wasn't for affordable child care at that time. The government should scrap stage 3 tax cuts, which benefit billionaires and the wealthy, and instead invest in an early education system which is universal and free with higher wages and better conditions for workers.