QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE

Mr CLARE (Blaxland—Minister for Education) (14:07): I thank my friend the formidable member for Forde for his question. Childcare workers do one of the most important jobs in this country, and, when we were elected, four years ago, many of them were leaving the job. They were leaving in droves.

That's not because they didn't love what they were doing; it was because they could earn more in a lot of other jobs than they could educating our kids. The attrition rate in some places was as high as 40 per cent. That's 40 per cent of the workforce out the door in any year.

That's a crisis. But that's now changed, and it's changed for a reason. It's changed because of the 15 per cent pay rise that we have delivered.

As proof of that, there are now 20,000 more childcare workers right across the country. Job applications in some places have jumped by 30 per cent. Job vacancies are down by 31 per cent.

In other words, it's worked. It turns out that, if you pay people more, more people want to do the job. The legislation that I introduced this morning locks all of this in.

It's good for workers because they get paid more, but it's also good for parents, because part of the legislation here is that childcare centres only get the funding if they also cap their fee increases. That'll save the average family about $1,500 over the next two years. As part of the legislation this morning, I've also added another condition and that's this: childcare centres only get this funding if they meet the minimum safety standard.

Ninety-five per cent of centres do this already; I want to get that to 100 per cent. It's the sort of thing that I think every parent across the country would expect. It's certainly what all of our children deserve.

So this is the trifecta. It's good for workers, it's good for parents and it's good for kids. It's why everyone across the country is backing it—everyone except the Liberal Party and One Nation.

But that shouldn't be a surprise, because, whether it's cutting student debt, whether it's expanding paid prac, whether it's fixing the funding of our schools or whether it's paying childcare workers what they deserve—this only happens because of this Labor government and because of this Labor prime minister.