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

Ms BRISKEY (Maribyrnong) (16:44): It is a great honour to be able to rise in this place to talk to this piece of legislation, the Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers (Special Account) (Extending Support and Strengthening Safety) Bill 2026. It is something that I have been working on for some time. I'd like to start my contribution by going back to March 2018, when I stood in front of thousands of early childhood educators in Melbourne.

They'd all walked off the job to be there. Every one of them had lost a day's pay that they couldn't afford to lose, and every one of them knew the odds of anything changing that week were close to nil. They came anyway.

They were angry and passionate and entirely justified in being both. Their wages at that point were less than half the average wage in this country. They were predominantly women with certificates, diplomas and degrees, running rooms full of two-year-olds and doing the most formative work anybody does with a human being.

I said at that time that we paid them a pittance, and we did. That rally was part of the Big Steps campaign run by educators through the United Workers Union. Some of the women in that crowd had been making that same argument since the 1980s, for 40 years.

That is the timeframe this House is dealing with today—four decades of being told the country agreed with them in principle but could never quite manage to do so in practice. This bill, like similar ones before it from our government, did not arrive out of nowhere. It arrived at the end of a very long queue, and there are women who've spent their entire careers in it.

For most of those years, the answer from the coalition never changed: you can have early learning that families can afford or you can have educators paid what they're worth, not both. Anyone who pushed got a lecture about how the economy supposedly works, an attitude that aligned with the notion that this work was simply babysitting, not education. I was on the receiving end of that lecture for more than a decade, first at The Parenthood, campaigning alongside parents wanting more high-quality early learning and care that they could afford for their kids, and then in the union movement, standing shoulder to shoulder with educators themselves.

I watched what that previous coalition government did with its nine years. They never funded a wage increase for early childhood educators—not once in nine years. They rolled preschool funding over 12 months at a time, again and again, leaving 350,000 children and their families in limbo while a whole sector tried to plan a future on a one-year pay cheque.

When they finally moved on early learning in 2017, their idea for paying for it was to take money off other families—off paid parental leave, off family tax benefit and out of the NDIS. I remember it very well because I was campaigning against it. I sat with Australian Navy lieutenant commander Sandra Croft, who had been called a double dipper by her own government at the time for seeking to have paid parental leave through both the government's scheme and her employer, the government.

That was the posture at the time: families were an expense to be contained and educators were someone else's problem. Here is what all that had produced by 2022. Some centres in this country were losing 40 per cent of their staff in a single year.

Educators were leaving jobs that they loved because they could get more stacking shelves at Coles. Services were closing rooms, capping enrolments and shelving expansion plans because they had no-one left to hire. That churn landed where it always lands: on children and on their parents.

An educator learns a toddler's signals and earns a parent's trust. Then she leaves in June and the whole thing starts again with somebody new. My own daughters were in our early learning system.

Gweny and Margot both went through early education and care while Ravi and I did what many families in my community do: two jobs, no village close by, and a week that only worked because an early educator unlocked the doors at seven in the morning. I got to understand firsthand how much of my daughters' lives was happening in those rooms. They learned to share in there.

They had adults who noticed things about them. My girls are now in primary and secondary school, and I can see so clearly what those years in early education gave them. They walked into a classroom already certain that they belonged in one.

I pay tribute to those incredible educators who cared for and educated my two girls. I thank them dearly for the profound impact that they had on their growth and development and for what they did to help Ravi and me just make life that bit easier. But 'thanks' doesn't pay the bills.

That's why, in August of 2024, our Labor government did something nobody had been willing to do: we funded a 15 per cent pay rise for early childhood educators. I remember standing beside some incredible educators who've been campaigning for so long, who stood there with the Prime Minister when he made that announcement at an early childhood centre in Sydney.

It was an incredible moment for those educators. And then we found out whether that old argument had ever been true. It was not.

There are more than 20,000 more people doing this work of early education and care than there were two years ago, an increase of about eight per cent. Job vacancies have fallen by almost 31 per cent. The share of services running on staffing waivers has more than halved, from 8.9 per cent to 4.3 per cent.

A typical full-time educator now takes home $255 a week more than in December 2024, and an early childhood teacher takes home $410 a week more. Fees at the centres receiving that payment grew at around half the rate of fees at those centres that didn't sign up. Educators were paid more, and families paid less—in the same centres, at the same time.

The trade-off that this country lived with for over 40 years turned out to be just a wrong choice that we kept making. Early educators, though, knew this long before this parliament and our country did. In my electorate, 65 services receive this payment and around 800 workers are better paid because of it.

I've had the pleasure of meeting many of these educators. I have been to Goodstart in Flemington a few times now. I love going there.

It's been beautifully renovated and it is so welcoming. When I was last there, the educators were so excited to talk to me about what the pay rise meant to them. They even brought it up well before I had the opportunity to ask.

While this bill is a boost for so many educators, I can't help but think of one educator—my namesake, Jo—who I met at Guardian in Ascot Vale. I've given her a shout-out in this place before, but she has been at that centre for 18 years. She has educated a whole generation of children in our community, and she has seen how this country has undergone a change in how it values her and her career.

Now, there is no clause in this bill that creates women like Jo, but what it does do is make it possible for her to stay in the sector and the career that she loves and is committed to. Take Guardian in Essendon, for example; the centre holds the titles of the Guardian Victorian Kinder Educator of the Year and the Cook of the Year in the same building. That is what a settled and properly valued workforce produces.

This bill extends eligibility to workers in every early learning subsidy approved service for the first time. This also includes those who are doing the cooking, who are involved in a child's day as much as anyone in the room. What is also important is that the fee condition travels with the money.

Services taking it have to limit what they charge families, and that will save the average family around $1,500 over the next two years. The department has been pretty blunt about the alternative. Without this bill, fees could climb by around 17 per cent—17 per cent, across 65 services in Maribyrnong, on families already running the numbers at the kitchen table every fortnight.

That is why this bill needs to pass with some urgency. There are many families in my community that carry a mortgage bill well above the Victorian average, and more of our households than the state average have both parents working full time. A second income in my community is how many pay their mortgages.

When early learning gets more expensive, somebody works out that the fourth day costs more than what they earn, and it is almost always the mum who drops it. She drops the day, and then the year, and it follows her all the way to what is then sitting in her super at age 65. I expect those opposite to support this legislation.

They supported the previous bill. They failed Australian families when they were in government. My hope is that they will not fail them in opposition.

Since the Prime Minister announced this pay rise being locked in, it has prompted some debate, including from One Nation. We know many families are doing it tough and they are looking for an alternative, but I will say plainly that what that party offers working parents when it comes to early learning is nothing whatsoever. They have never once come into this parliament to argue that an early childhood educator deserves a professional wage.

They call early learning 'babysitting'. They call the subsidy a waste. What they will not say out loud is who they are describing: a workforce that is more than nine in 10 women, who are educating this country's children on wages that sat below half the average for a generation.

That was very easy to leave alone for as long as everybody called it minding kids. Then there are the families using these centres in my community. They are the nurses coming off a night shift.

They are the tradies at a site in Airport West. They are the woman who is working the check-out in Moonee Ponds. While others are focused on culture wars, we are focused on them.

There is one more part of this bill, and it concerns my community deeply. Last year, families in Maribyrnong learned that a man charged with the most serious offences against children had worked across centres in my community. I stood in this place shortly afterwards and said it was a parent's absolute worst nightmare—it was and it is.

Those matters are now before the court, but we must address it because that changed something permanent about how many parents in my community and others affected drop their child off at the door. From July 2027 this bill requires a service to meet quality area 2 of the National Quality Standard to keep its funding. That is the standard covering children's health and safety.

Fall short of it and then the money can be cut or suspended. Let's be clear: about 95 per cent of services already meet that standard now. However, it absolutely can be higher.

It should be 100 per cent, and it is worth saying that a few harmful humans do not represent the overwhelming majority of early educators, who are kind, compassionate, intelligent, caring and the lifeline to so many working parents. I stand in solidarity with you, as I have for decades. The strongest protection any child in this country has is an educator who is paid properly, trained properly, backed by enough colleagues and still there the next year.

Safety and wages have always been the same argument. The centres where things go wrong are overwhelmingly the ones running on churn and waivers and wherever they might be able to find cuts. I want to acknowledge the Minister for Education and the Minister for Early Childhood Education for how quickly they moved on all of this.

I also want to acknowledge the educators and the United Workers Union delegates who carried this campaign for decades, before many of us were in this building. They did not wait around for a government to become interested in them. They made the case for why government should be interested—and our government is very interested.

We know there is more work to do. This pay rise is locked in, but it does not yet hand this sector the permanent settlement it has earned, and there is work to be done to fully recognise early childhood education and care as the first rung of our education system. I want to finish my contribution at a local centre in Avondale Heights.

When I visited Nido early learning centre, I was greeted by a group of passionate educators who do incredible work. Mehreen, who manages the centre, showed me around with the help of a little co-guide on the tour, a very determined young boy who made sure I missed nothing—every painting, every book, everything. He was four years old.

He did that because of the room he was standing in, because the adults in the building were patient with him, because they noticed him and because they were still there the next morning and the morning after that. Children hand back whatever surrounds them. The little boy is surrounded by care, so care is what he offers.

In my first speech here, I said my daughters inspire me by their curiosity and move me with their kindness. That is what this little boy did too. He and the educators that look after him are why I commend the bill to the House.