QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE

Mr CLARE (Blaxland—Minister for Education) (14:51): I thank my friend the big-hearted member for Blair for his question. As he knows, tomorrow, every Australian worker will get a tax cut and three million Australians will get a pay rise, and that includes hundreds of thousands of childcare workers right across the country. As I told the House last week, when we were first elected, childcare workers were leaving the job in droves not because they didn't love the job but because you could earn more money stacking shelves than educating our kids.

That has now changed. It's changed because of the 15 per cent pay rise that we've delivered. As a result of that, there are now 20,000 more childcare workers working right across the country.

It turns out that if you pay people more, more people want to do the job. That's why what we announced a couple of weeks ago and locking it in is so important. It's good for the workers because they get paid more, but it's also good for parents because the centres have got to cap their fees to get the money.

For the average family with a child in child care, it'll save them about $1,500 over the next two years. So it is good for workers and good for parents, but it's also good for our kids because we've added a new condition. To get the funding, the centre also has to meet the national safety standard.

This builds on the work that we've been doing over the last 12 months—the banning of personal mobile phones in centres, the CCTV trial and the mandatory safety training. I can tell the House that now 99 per cent of workers have done that national mandatory safety training. That's the first phase.

The next stage of that training will start to roll out next month. The reforms also include the legislation that we passed through this parliament last year, which means that if you don't meet the standards, you can have your funding cut. That wasn't an idle threat.

I can tell the House that we've now issued notices against 115 centres. Forty-seven centres have now suddenly fixed the problems they've refused to fix for more than five years, and seven centres have voluntarily relinquished their licences. I can inform the House that, today, my department has cut funding to a service in Victoria that has been warned and continued not to meet the standard.

This is not the end; this is just the start. The truth is that this work will never end, and we'll continue to take the steps we need to keep our kids safe.