Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers (Special Account) (Extending Support and Strengthening Safety) Bill 2026

Mr CLARE (Blaxland—Minister for Education) (09:25): I move: That this bill be now read a second time. Early childhood education and care workers do one of the most important jobs in this country, but you wouldn't know it from what they have historically been paid. When we were first elected, childcare workers were leaving the job in droves—not because they didn't love the job but because they couldn't afford to keep doing it—because they could get paid more stacking shelves than they could educating the most precious things in our lives: our children.

In some centres the attrition rate was as high as 40 per cent. That's 40 per cent of the workforce leaving the job they love in any given year. That is a crisis.

But that has now changed, and it's changed for a reason: the 15 per cent pay rise that this government delivered almost two years ago. When combined with the government's support for minimum wage rises, this means $255 more per week for a typical full-time educator and $410 more per week for early childhood teachers, compared to December 2024 when we first implemented this pay rise.

More than 215,000 early educators at more than 11,600 centres across the country are now benefiting from this. Job vacancies are now down 31 per cent, job applications in some places are up 30 per cent, and there are now 20,000 more childcare workers doing that sort of life-changing work right across the country. In other words, it's worked.

That's why on 17 June, the Prime Minister announced an investment of $3.6 billion over the next two years to lock in this historic pay rise. This bill delivers on that commitment. It amends the Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers (Special Account) Act 2024, crediting the special account and extending the act's sunset date from 30 June 2028 to 31 December 2029.

The special account is used to administer the early childhood education and care worker retention payment grant to ECEC providers to fund higher wages for eligible workers. For the first time, all childcare-subsidy-approved services will be eligible for funding as long as they meet the grant requirements. This includes that all educators are engaged under a workplace instrument.

This is an important protection for workers to ensure the government's investment is passed on in the form of higher wages. But it's not just workers who will benefit from this legislation. To receive the funding, services have to limit fee increases.

This has a real impact for families. Over the first year of the program, fees at centres that have received the payment have increased by about half the amount of centres that didn't sign up. If this legislation doesn't pass, the advice of my department is that childcare fees could skyrocket by about 17 per cent.

We don't want this to occur. That's why this legislation is important. It means childcare workers are paid what they deserve and that the costs are not passed on parents.

That will save the average family about $1,500 over the next two years. That's big. This bill does something else as well, something very important.

It establishes a new object and condition of funding for the act which puts service quality and the safety of our children at its heart. To receive the funding, services will now also be required to meet quality area 2 relating to children's health and safety under the National Quality Standard. If they don't, their funding can be cut.

About 95 per cent of services already meet this standard, but I want that number to be higher. That's what parents have got a right to expect. And it's what our children deserve.

This bill also allows for equivalent conditions to apply to services that are not regulated by the National Quality Framework, such as in-home care services. This is the latest in a raft of reforms that we've introduced to improve safety in our early education system. The legislation that we passed last year gives my department the power to cut off funding to operators that don't meet the quality, safety or compliance requirements under the national law.

Since that legislation passed, my department has taken compliance action against 119 centres, putting them on notice to lift their game. These are centres that haven't met the safety standards for at least five years. And it's no accident that 55 of those centres have now suddenly fixed the problem that they had refused to fix in the past.

The threat of cutting off their funding has forced them to act. This is not an idle threat. In June we cut off funding to a service for the first time.

Seven other centres have voluntarily decided to close. That legislation also gave my department the power to undertake unannounced visits to childcare services. Since November last year, the Australian government authorised officers have conducted more than 1,300 unannounced visits to services across the country.

States and territory regulators have stepped up as well. In the last quarter, regulators undertook 1,540 compliance actions, which is more than double the 735 at the same time last year. On 27 February, two other big reforms came into force.

The first of those is the National Early Childhood Worker Register. The events of last year made clear how important this is—to know who is working where and to be able to track people from centre to centre and from state to state. The second is mandatory child safety training.

This is now a requirement for everyone who works in a centre—and not just them. Everyone up to the CEO and the board of directors has to do it as well. They've got six months to complete that training, and we've seen more than 350,000 do that foundation training so far.

The next stage of child safety training began two weeks ago. We've also banned personal mobile phones in centres. A national CCTV trial is also underway in more than 300 services.

The Federal Police are part of an advisory group on that, as well as the Australian Centre for Child Protection, the National Office for Child Safety, and other leading experts. All up, our government is investing an extra $226 million in child safety reforms. The states and territories have committed more than $270 million as well.

That's around half a billion dollars that governments are investing in strengthening the quality and safety of early childhood education and care. And last month, education ministers agreed to explore the development of an early education and care commission to further strengthen quality and safety in the system. This bill supports the educators who support Australian families every single day.

It supports workforce participation. And it helps to make our centres better and fairer. I commend the bill to the House.

Debate adjourned.