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

Mr NG (Menzies) (12:35): I rise today in support of the Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers (Special Account) (Extending Support and Strengthening Safety) Bill 2026. This bill is rightly called 'Wage justice for early childhood education' because it recognises the essential and skilled work that early childhood educators do to help our children learn and grow and thrive.

It is one of the most important jobs in the country, and for too long that has not been properly recognised. This bill addresses that. It shows that we value our early childhood educators by providing them long-term security and pay that reflects the important work that they do.

Like a lot of people, when my children were younger, they attended kindergarten and child care—Starfish Early Learning Centre in Nunawading and Tunstall Square Kindergarten close to my house in Donvale. I was incredibly grateful to be able to leave my children with early childhood educators who were skilled and caring and knew my children really, really well.

It's hard for every parent when you drop your children off at child care or at kinder and they're a bit tearful. My youngest in particular was a bit of a barnacle. It was always hard to get him off our necks and with the early childhood educators, but the fact that he knew those teachers and workers meant that we were able to go out and do our jobs without as much guilt.

There's still some guilt for parents, but I could be confident that my children would be well cared for and safe and also that they were being well prepared for school. No matter what our job is, and no matter how important our job is, if any of us got a call on our phone saying, 'Your child's been injured,' or 'Your child's unwell,' we'd drop everything and go and pick up them up.

That just reflects how important is the role that early childhood educators and kindergarten teachers play. Parents in my community, in places like Doncaster, Box Hill, Surrey Hills and Mont Albert, know the early childhood educators at their centres and they can also have that confidence of knowing that they're leaving their children with a trusted carer. They know that teacher who calms their child when they drop them off.

They know that an educator is there to notice if their child is struggling or not developing in their speech or in their fine motor skills as much as some of the other kids. Sometimes it's those early childhood educators that will bring that to the attention of parents and make sure that they get those early interventions that they need. They're not easy jobs.

They're not unskilled jobs. For some of us, standing up in parliament and speaking publicly might be intimidating. But, if I had to go and look after a classroom of three-year-olds and four-year-olds, I'd find that much more intimidating.

These are jobs that require patience, skill, qualifications and enormous emotional labour for years. Anyone who's spent a day, let alone five days or seven days a week, looking after a toddler knows how much hard work it is. If you had a room full of toddlers, that'd be even harder work.

We're fortunate to have 900 early educators in my community of Menzies. We have nearly 29,800 children under the age of 15 in our electorate, and many of those children would have spent their earliest years in some of our fantastic childcare centres and early education institutions before setting foot in the classrooms. Recently, we've had the opportunity to celebrate some of our early childhood educators, and it's a very well deserved recognition that we're able to pay them.

A few weeks ago, during Early Learning Matters Week, I visited Creative Play in Doncaster to see the reforms that we've put in place in action. Early Learning Matters Week is organised by Early Childhood Australia. It brings educators, families and communities together to celebrate the difference that quality early learning makes in a child's life.

There's no better place to see this than in a room full of kids in Doncaster as they interact with the educators that look after them. I sat with the team at Creative Play and heard what this pay rise has meant. It's meant that they can stay in a profession that they love and consider it as a career in the longer term, and it also means that they don't have to go and work in another profession or retrain, because they know that they're going to be properly remunerated and that they'll be able to pay the bills, the rent or the mortgage.

I also sat with some of the kids in some of those very small chairs that they have at early education centres, where your knees are up around your ears. It must be how the member for Leichhardt feels when he's sitting in a regular sized seat! I served some of those kids some food.

We received some very important feedback from those stakeholders. Corn chips were a big hit; cucumbers and carrots were not so popular. It was nice to be able to spend some time with the kids and see just how happy they are and how much fun they have playing with their early educators and playing beside their peers.

I was also lucky enough to visit Starfish Early Learning Centre in Blackburn last week for Early Childhood Educators' Day. I met with the educators there. They were incredibly engaged and committed to their work.

The centre's director, Cathy, spoke to me about how important it is that we recognise the skilled work that early educators do. With some of the reporting that there has been on early education, it's important that we show how much we value early educators. The overwhelming majority of early educators are committed to child safety and to caring well for the young people that are in their charge.

This government is focused on doing everything it can to give the workforce the recognition that they deserve, and that's backed by strong wages. Good, well-paid child care is also important for gender equity and, as my friend the member for Griffith said, for closing the gender pay gap. The reality is that the early childhood educator workforce is more than 90 per cent women.

This bill very directly makes sure that they're paid the wages that they deserve. The reality is also that the majority of primary carers are women and that women undertake much more unpaid work around the house and outside the house, such as running kids around. Better, more affordable child care ensures that parents—often mothers—can stay in the workforce, build careers and provide for their families.

It's direct, practical, targeted measures like this that mean that our government has narrowed the gender pay gap to the lowest point in history, and that's something that we can be very proud of. Families in my community know exactly what it means to rely on quality, affordable early education so that parents can make that choice about whether they want to work or stay home with their children.

It's really important that people have that choice. With our increase in paid parental leave to 26 weeks, we've also provided flexibility so that that 26 weeks can be shared equally between parents. We do want men in couples to be taking on more of the caring burden and sometimes to be making that choice to stay home and care for their children in their early years of life.

Our reforms in that area are also facilitating that. For many families in my community, two incomes are also necessary in order to pay the bills and pay the rent or a mortgage. It only works if the person who's looking after your children while you're at work is properly trained and supported and is sticking around long enough so you can feel confident leaving your child with those early educators.

When early educators leave the sector, it's not just the workers who lose out but every family who's relying on a centre that can't find enough staff, as well as every child who loses a teacher that they've started to form that connection with and that they've just started to trust. On 8 August 2024, the Albanese Labor government announced it would fund a 15 per cent wage increase for early childhood education and care workers.

At the time, there were services across the country that were delaying expansion plans, closing rooms and limiting enrolments because they simply could not find the staff. That's disruptive for local families, and that's disruptive for workplaces as well. It means that sometimes the staff can't come in and do the job they need to do.

Workforce stability is also a safety and quality issue, because children and educators need consistent and stable relationships, the former in order to thrive and the latter in order to make the most of their jobs. A centre that can't keep staff because of wages is a centre that can't give children the consistency of care that they need. The results of our reforms speak for themselves.

Since the worker retention payment was announced, there are around 20,000 more early childhood workers. That's an increase of around eight per cent. That's in combination with other policies that we've implemented like fee-free TAFE for childcare workers.

Job vacancies in the sector have dropped by almost 31 per cent, and the share of services operating under a staffing waiver, meaning they don't have enough qualified staff on the floor to safely meet the required child educator rates, has fallen from 8.9 per cent to 4.3 per cent. Fees at centres receiving this payment have grown by around half as much as fees at centres that didn't sign up.

This policy has bolstered our early education workforce, but it's also kept costs down for families. It's a cost-of-living measure as well, and that's precisely what good policy is meant to do. In June this year, we announced that we would lock in this pay rise for a further two years to keep it growing and to make sure that those gains continue.

That extension is expected to save the average family around $1,500 each year over the next two years. This bill is what gives that promise delivery. It amends the Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers (Special Account) Act 2024 to credit the special account with an additional $3.6 billion and extends the act's sunset date to 31 December 2029.

Combined with this government's support for minimum wage increases, this means a typical full-time educator will now be earning $255 more a week and an early childhood teacher $410 more a week compared with December 2024, when this pay rise first began. Funding will continue to be tied to a commitment from services to limit fee increases, easing cost-of-living pressures on families while delivering better early learning for kids.

And, for the first time, employees in every service approved for childcare subsidy will be eligible for the payment, closing a gap that left some educators behind. This bill also strengthens safety, and that matters just as much as families. Every parent in this country was shaken by the revelations that emerged from a Melbourne childcare centre last year and by what those revelations exposed.

It was every parent's worst nightmare to hear some of those reports and those revelations. Parents in my community rang my office and sent us emails, rightly asking questions about safety in childcare centres and rightly making sure that we were taking action to keep their children safe. This bill introduces a new object and funding condition through the wage justice special account, tying continued funding to safety and performance.

From July 2027, if a service does not meet the national quality standards on children's health and safety—specifically quality area 2—its funding under this payment could be cut or suspended. The safety measures that we've put in place include things like a national childcare early educator register. When I visited a childcare centre last week, I had to leave my phone at reception, and early educators also can't take their phones into the classrooms.

These are really important reforms that make sure that the youngest members of our communities are safe. Around 95 per cent of services already meet that standard, but we want to make sure that every single centre around the country is meeting these standards. We want to make sure that every single child that attends early education is safe.

It's worth remembering, as well, what came before these changes. For a long time, while those opposite were in government, early education was an afterthought. Wages stagnated while educators left the sector in droves, not because they didn't love the work that they were doing but because they couldn't afford to keep doing it.

There was no serious plan for a pay rise and no mechanism for trying to fund better safety outcomes. It's the same pattern we saw with Medicare—neglect. Medicare was frozen at a level that was unsustainable, that caused standards to drop and that caused bulk-billing to drop.

Just as we've increased the bulk-billing rate with Medicare, we've improved funding for early educators' wages, and we've made sure that safety standards are improved as well. A Labor government legislated the National Quality Framework. They set real standards for the sector.

It took the election of this government to deliver wage justice. This government is strengthening the safety expectations attached to that public funding. Wage justice and child safety in early childhood education are essential for the growth of our country, for the growth of our economy, but also for the wellbeing of the youngest members of our community.

I commend this bill to the House.