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

Ms BERRY (Whitlam) (13:06): The Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers (Special Account) (Extending Support and Strengthening Safety) Bill 2026 delivers on our government's commitment to lock in a pay rise for early educators for another two years. Early childhood education and care peak bodies, unions, providers and parent representative groups advocated strongly for wage funding to be extended and are supportive of our government's commitment.

This bill confirms the government's commitment to supporting higher wages in a historically undervalued, female dominated care sector. Our government is committed to gender equality. A gender impact assessment was undertaken in relation to these changes by the Office for Women, and these changes progress gender equality by supporting higher wages for a female dominated workforce.

Our government is committed to improving early childhood education and care affordability for families. Our reforms support cost-of-living relief for families, limiting fee increases in early education and care services as a condition of wages grant funding. It also complements a range of actions our government is taking to strengthen safety and quality in early childhood education and care.

Every day, early educators help children learn, grow and get ready for school. It's one of the most important jobs in the country, and early educators should be paid fairly for their work. That's why, on 8 August 2024, the Albanese government announced that we would fund a 15 per cent wage increase for early childhood education and care workers.

We did this in part because services were delaying expansion plans, closing rooms and limiting enrolments because they couldn't find the staff. Workforce retention and stability is critical to safety and quality in early childhood education and care. Since the worker retention payment was announced in 2024, there are now around 20,000 more early childhood education and care workers—that's about an eight per cent increase, which is a fantastic result.

Job vacancies in early education and care have decreased by almost 31 per cent. In June this year, the Albanese government announced it was locking in the pay increase for early childhood educators for another two years to retain and grow these benefits. This bill amends the Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers (Special Account) Act 2024.

It credits the special account with an additional $3.6 billion and extends the act's sunset date to 31 December 2029 to support the wage funding extension. When combined with the minimum wage rises supported by our government, this will mean an additional $255 per week for a typical full-time educator and $410 more per week for early childhood teachers compared with December 2024, when we first implemented these pay rises.

Funding will continue to be tied to a commitment from services receiving the payment to limit fee increases for families. This will help to ease cost-of-living pressures while delivering better early learning for children. The bill also introduces a new object and condition of funding through the wage justice special account, building on the government's commitment to strengthen quality and safety in early learning.

From July 2027, if services don't meet the national quality standard when it comes to safety, their funding may be cut or suspended. Services will be required to meet quality area 2 relating to children's health and safety under the national safety standard. Around 95 per cent of services meet this standard, but we want that number to be higher.

This bill is straightforward. It aims to sustain the wage increase paid to early childhood and education and care workers beyond the initial two years in the original legislation by extending the sunset date for the grant money available to providers and services to pay their workers. This means workers will continue to be paid better for the essential skilled work they do in educating, developing and supporting the children in their care.

For too long, early education was undervalued in Australia. Like many other sectors, it was suffering from the coalition's years of neglect—years of neglect in aged care, years of neglect in disability support and years of neglect in early childhood education. Notably, these sectors are dominated by female workforces, which may explain—at least in part—why they've been undervalued by those opposite.

On this side, we value the work that is undertaken by a highly skilled workforce in human services and early childhood education. In my working life, I've been the CEO of a women's health service that had an early childhood education and care centre attached to it. I've also been the CEO of one of the largest disability service providers in Australia.

I've seen firsthand the dedication and expertise of our human services and our early childhood education workforce. I know how much they deserve every dollar of extra pay that we can provide to them. I recently had the pleasure of visiting a community preschool in my electorate of Whitlam: Koonawarra Community Preschool.

There I met codirectors Sharon and Karen. Both of these exceptional women had dedicated over 30 years of their careers to educating the children of Koonawarra. These outstanding and passionate educators were running one of the most engaging educational environments I have ever had the pleasure to visit.

These women are so dedicated to giving those children that they educate and support the very best start to life in one of the communities that I represent. I'm so grateful for their service, and I know that many local families are too. Educators in early education across the nation have also told us that their jobs are very demanding.

When early education workers walked off the job in 2018 to bring attention to their concerns—their third national strike in two years—the Labor Party was there with them. When the Albanese Labor government came to office in 2022, we acted on what we heard from those educators. We also acted on what we heard from parents, who needed greater access to early childhood education, and from those early childhood education services seeking to build greater quality in the system.

In 2024, we acted to ensure that a strong early childhood education workforce would be an integral part of the solution to better outcomes for children, for families and for those women that make up the overwhelming majority of the early education and care workforce. Decades of research in neuroscience, developmental science and economics has taught us that early years learning cannot be treated as an option or an add-on in a quality education system.

Early childhood education is highly skilled work, and it requires significant professional judgement. The work required to help educate and support a child in their early years requires deep knowledge of emotional, cognitive and physical development. Early childhood educators make informed decisions every day about how to support each and every child.

In 2024 the Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers Special Account Act was introduced by our government after significant consultation with the sector. We knew universal access to quality early learning was something that Australians wanted. Workforce sustainability across the early childhood education and care sector had to be addressed if we were to build genuine universal access.

The legislation we passed in 2024 was also backed up by the Productivity Commission inquiry report entitled A path to universal early childhood education and care in September 2024. We welcomed this report as a vital step and a basis for building a universal early childhood education and care system. The Productivity Commission report and the unions representing the early childhood education and care workforce laid bare the fact that these educators were paid significantly less than teachers in primary and secondary schools.

Providers urged the government to fast-track reform and implement permanent structural funding as soon as possible. Our government understood the important reforms that were required in the early childhood education and care sector, and we resolved to act. When we were first elected, early childhood educators were leaving the sector in droves not because they didn't love their jobs but because they simply couldn't afford to keep doing it.

That's now changed because of the 15 per cent pay rise that this government delivered almost two years ago. More than 215,000 early educators across the country are now benefiting from those pay rises. Earlier this year, two other reforms came into force.

The first of those is the National Early Childhood Worker Register. It is critically important for the safety of children that government and regulators know who is working where and be able to track employees from centre to centre and from state to state. The second is mandatory childhood safety training.

This is now a requirement for everyone who works in an early childhood centre, which includes the CEO and the board as well. Over 350,000 workers and staff have completed that foundational training so far. Our government has also banned personal mobile phones in centres.

A national CCTV trial is now underway in more than 300 services. All up, our government is investing an extra $226 million in child safety reforms, and 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.

This bill is a sensible and necessary amendment to the legislation passed in 2024. That groundbreaking legislation recognised the need for structural adjustment to end chronic underpayment of early childhood educators. The legislation was groundbreaking not only for the real recognition of the intrinsic value of early childhood education, largely performed by women.

The legislation has also helped to shape the sector and the profession by ensuring that wage-increase-grant recipients, and that's employers, provide employment conditions through a proper workplace instrument—that is, through a transparent set of conditions that could be properly agreed to by workers and employers. This was an important part of helping to build the reputation of the sector, to attract, to recruit and to retain workforce.

This legislation is significant in a sector in which over 260,000 early childhood workers are employed nationally. According to the Australian Children's Education and Care Quality Authority, this workforce has on average just over seven years of experience, and over 70 per cent hold a certificate qualification, just over 13 per cent hold a diploma qualification and nearly 23 per cent are currently studying or upskilling.

The sector is growing in strength and capability across Australia, and I'm pleased to note that in my electorate of Whitlam 68 early childhood services and at least 800 workers now benefit from this pay rise. More Australians are seeking qualifications to work in the early childhood sector. Just last month, we released figures that showed the popularity of an early childhood qualification.

Early Childhood Australia, a key stakeholder, welcomed the news of more than 65,000 enrolments in early childhood education since 2023. Of these, the cert III in early childhood education is the second most popular free TAFE course nationally, with over 51,000 enrolments, while there are almost 13,000 enrolments in the Diploma of Early Childhood Education and Care.

We are seeing these students through to completion, with over 15,000 course completions to date. Everything that we are doing is working towards an early childhood education and care system that is fair. We're helping more parents into the workforce through lower childcare fees, we're helping more children get a quality start to life, and we're helping to bring wage equality to a female dominated sector.