Barbara Pocock (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

This is a really important bill. I will be brief. I will associate myself with the comments of my colleague Senator Hodgins-May and endorse the view of others that this is a bill that takes steps in the right direction. It increases wages by 15 per cent for two years for a really important group of workers in our society. Early childhood education and care workers provide an essential service—infrastructure that gets people to work in a way that a road or a car does. It is essential for our social good. It's essential for our economy.

The first five years of a child's life are a very vital period, and the best investments we can make, out of anything that the government spends on, are in quality, accessible, affordable early-childhood education. US economist James Heckman tells us that a dollar invested in these services returns $7 over the life of a child. He describes those investments as the best way to reduce an economy's deficit. They're especially critical, as we just heard from Senator Thorpe, for our First Nations children and families, and it is vital that we get them right. The spend that we do on those early childhood years cuts incarceration rates. It reduces spending on our jails. It reduces spending on welfare. It means more productive workers and workplaces and happier kids, families, communities and women. It's particularly important to the workforce participation of women, where better—and more—child care drives growth in our economy.

Good child care is underpinned, most importantly, by a settled, experienced, qualified, happy workforce with low turnover that delivers continuity of care for our kids. That means paying people properly and giving people security about their pay and conditions.

It means helping workers who give decades of their working life to childcare work to be able to afford to retire. The Australian system of child care is, at the moment, amongst the most expensive in the world—and that is not because we are paying workers in the sector properly.

The current bill, while it steps in the right direction with improved pay for childcare workers, disappoints on two important points. Firstly, the childcare workforce and their union have been calling for a 25 per cent pay increase—well beyond the 15 per cent on offer in this bill. We know that is what they deserve, as so many witnesses and much evidence to the inquiry into this bill made clear. Fifteen per cent is not enough; it's far from enough to deal with the decades-long underpayment of this skilled and experienced workforce.

Secondly, this pay rise is really, as my colleague said, a pay bump; it is not a secure long-term pay increase. It's a payment for just two years. When did we last give a pay rise to construction workers or miners or truck drivers and tell them it was just for two years? When did we give them a pay rise that wasn't embedded in their working conditions for the long haul? If we told those truck drivers, 'You've got a pay rise for two years', I'm pretty confident that within a day or two this parliament would be surrounded by a bunch of very angry truck drivers—probably led by Senator Sheldon and Senator Sterle—who would see the injustice of making a pay rise that is not guaranteed in the long term. In this feminised industry, that is what we are offering those women—those 97 per cent of workers who are women. You just wouldn't get away with it in a male dominated industry. A government interested in fixing the long-term underpayment of our childcare workforce would not just be offering a pay bump; it would be facing up to the long haul and doing the right thing. We should do for the essential infrastructure workers of our childcare system what we do for truck drivers.

The sustainability and quality of early childhood education and care is inextricably linked with the strength and the sustainability of our workforce, and currently that workforce is in crisis. No-one is arguing about this. Wages are too low, workloads are unmanageable and too high, workforce attrition is extremely high and centres are understaffed. The United Workers Union told the inquiry into this bill that early educators are barely able to survive on the wages they are paid amid the cost-of-living crisis they are enduring. As a result, staff are leaving in droves and the workloads of those who remain, the union told us, are unacceptably high. As many as 30 to 48 per cent of educators leave the sector each year; that's an incredible rate of loss of skilled and experienced workers.

Currently in long day care up to 19 per cent of centres are operating with a staff waiver—that is, they are unable to meet the standards of qualification and ratios for our kids in their care. This puts their development and certainly the workloads of those carers at risk. This especially lets down, as we heard from Senator Thorpe, our First Nations kids, who need appropriate, quality care, with the involvement of local communities in culturally appropriate and locally managed care. It also means too many children cannot be included in all the activities of their local centres because there are not enough carers to look out for and include kids with disability. There are too many childcare deserts in our country towns and too many suburbs of our cities.

We need to fix all this with a decent pay rise for our childcare workforce—a rise that goes beyond 15 per cent to meet the expectations, evidence and case for a 25 per cent rise. This bill is a step in that direction. But we need a lot more. We need affordable, accessible, quality care for all who need it. Our economic future depends on it, our families are looking for it and, more importantly, the healthy future of our kids depends on it.