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

Mr HOLZBERGER (Forde) (17:31): 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. In doing so, I recognise the work that the Minister for Education and the Minister for Early Childhood Education, the Labor Party caucus and the labour movement generally, especially the United Workers Union, put into making this happen in the first place and have put into making sure that it gets extended.

Of course, it's only going to be the labour movement and the Labor Party that bring about this sort of thing. It's something that we can achieve in a clear and measurable way. Fifteen per cent more in your back pocket is a lot of money, and it will make a clear and measurable difference in the lives of the people that it is going to impact.

In many ways, I think that we have underestimated the 'education' part of ECEC. I'm reminded of that Jesuit saying, 'Give me the boy until he is seven, and I'll give you the man.' Anybody that has sat in a class of hardened and cynical 16-year-olds, as I'm sure all of us have at one time in our lives, knows how much harder it is to get a message through to that cohort than to a bunch of keen, active and energetic three- and four-year-olds.

Among some of the things I've done was try to learn the Japanese language in my early 20s. It's something I came back to in my 40s. I spent thousands of hours doing that.

I know that because I ended up taking notes on how much I did. Even after about 2½ thousand hours, I still didn't manage to learn how to have a fluent conversation in Japanese. You can look very jealously at how a child learns either their first language or a second language.

There's clearly something going on there. Clearly, it's an opportunity that you miss if you don't get to those kids when they are at that age, because they learn so effortlessly. They don't even know that they're learning.

I think that there are figures somewhere around there showing that every dollar that you spend on early childhood education returns $2 pretty quickly but that, over the lifetime, the dollar spent at that time on the three- or four-year-old will be worth $6 or $7. So at the heart of this, and at the heart of everything that this government does, there is a clear economic purpose, which sometimes makes me wonder why the opposition are opposed to these things.

There is a clear economic purpose to early childhood education and care. There is a clear purpose to providing it in the first place, and there is a clear economic purpose to making sure that the workers there are properly paid. In fact, when I was doing a little bit of research for today's speech, I got a text message from Kylie in Norfolk Village, who said to me: 'Us educators are grateful that this has helped with the cost of living.

We're feeling heard and appreciated for the work that we do, and we are finally getting recognised as the professionals that we are and not as babysitters like we've been seen in the past.' I think that, for too long in early childhood education and care, there hasn't been the focus that there should be on the 'education' part. I think now we are starting to see that there is a turnaround in that, not only in the language of the government but also in the language of the workers who are there at the coalface.

For the first time ever, they are now beginning to be seen as the educators that they are—the stewards of these little kids. However, I wouldn't say that that in any way diminishes the 'care' part of ECEC. When I think about how important child care is, I'm reminded of a constituent who I saw before Christmas last year, called Alex.

Alex came into my office with her autistic child, four-year-old Hunter, and sat in my office desperate to get financial support—through the NDIS, as it happened—in order to pay for the specialised child care that Hunter needed. During our meeting, Hunter was climbing over Alex, biting her and pulling her hair. It was a challenge for Alex to sit there and have a conversation with me.

That just made me think how hard it is for Alex from day to day. She needed that funding to get that child care, as she told me, in order to keep her job so that she could pay her rent, because, if she didn't pay her rent, she'd be sleeping in the car over Christmas with Hunter. And that's what happened.

She didn't get the funding. Because she couldn't get into child care, she couldn't keep her job, she couldn't pay the rent and she spent Christmas sleeping in the car with her boy, Hunter, with all of the behavioural challenges that he has. So it should not in any way diminish the importance of the care aspect of this and the central importance of it to our modern economy, because it is just a fact of life that you're doing it tough enough when you're a double-income family but, when you're a single-income family, life is almost impossible.

There is almost no chance of owning a home or finding somewhere to rent. So, if you're a single-income family, that work is even more important. For a double-income family, it's important enough.

Without the 'care' part of ECEC, that just wouldn't happen. I am 53 years old, and when I was growing up it just wasn't really a feature of our economy, but it is today, and it is important that we have the childcare component of it operating as well as it can and in as good-quality a way as it can as well. Here we have this legislation, which builds on the work that we did to increase wages in the first place by locking in this 15 per cent wage rise for the next couple of years.

It is something which sits at the very heart of the Labor mission: pay and conditions. There is really nothing more fundamental to the Labor Party than pay and conditions. As to the childcare industry as a whole, a couple of people have given me some interesting facts which I think really highlight how vital it is that the government gets this right.

I met the independent schools association and they told me that, across the whole of Australia, in the whole country, there is one high school that is for profit. Every other high school in Australia is either state run or is a not-for-profit, usually associated with a religious denomination. So there is one for-profit high school in the whole of Australia.

Yet, in our early childhood sector, something like 80 per cent of operators are for profit. I don't really know quite how we got to this point, but here we are. It just underlines the importance of the federal government being able to deliver the proper funding to look after wages and conditions in the proper way.

What I mean by that is that, historically, it has been up to the shop floor to organise and to try and get the best deal that they can for their workforce, but always within the constraints of the business. In private enterprise, there is always a bit of an opportunity, I think, for the business to grow—but not in early childhood, because, if the ECEC workers tried to organise and to achieve a 15 per cent pay rise without any support and backing from the government, then those providers would just go out of business.

So there is an absolute recognition of the vital role that the government plays, as to pay, in the ECEC sector. So we are backing our workers, and backing the union movement that has been involved in the ECEC sector—recognising that, ultimately, it takes a government to deliver that funding. And it is no surprise that it takes a Labor government to deliver it.

The final thing I'd say is that early childhood education is, as I say, central to the Labor mission. It is central to the Australian economy. But it is also a central passion of our prime minister, and, as he says, each thing that we do moves us along the path to universal early childhood education, which is what it should be.

It is a Labor government, led by this prime minister with a passion for ECEC, that is taking us down that path. I think one of the first things that the Prime Minister talked about as opposition leader was cheaper child care—making child care cheaper for something like 1.2 million Australian workers. We delivered on that promise, and we delivered on it in spades.

We have saved the average family something like $11,000 as a result of that policy. So we've been focused on making child care cheaper. We have been focused also on making sure that the services exist, in areas where they don't operate.

The government has a policy, which is being developed, to step in and provide those services—ideally, to co-locate them at a primary school, because, if a parent is dropping one child at a primary school and then having to drop off another child across the other side of a suburb or across the other side of a city, it becomes utterly impractical for that parent.

The idea of co-locating them at primary schools, though it shouldn't be, is a revolutionary idea, apparently! Again, it has taken this government to do it. The third thing that this latest legislation does is to lock in the 15 per cent pay rise, because this 15 per cent pay rise is not only a support for the cost of living for the workers.

It is about attracting workers to an industry that was struggling to find workers, which was lower paid than a lot of the easier jobs out there. It is also being used to lock in lower fees, and those fees are saving families something like $1,500 a year over the next two years. It is using a mechanism like this to ensure that, if the ECEC centres are going to be able to access this money, they're not going to be able to gouge the family extra fees.

It is going to save those families something like $1,500 a year. It is innovative mechanisms like this that, I think, tackle the immediate problem of cost of living, but it also sets up our economy for the future, with the recognition that women should have an equal place in our workplace, that we should be closing the gender gap and that we should be unleashing the productive capacity of everybody in our community that wants to make a contribution and be paid for that contribution.

This is certainly not the end of the Labor story when it comes to early childhood education. It is also not the beginning of the story. It is something that takes us along that path to universal early childhood education, and it is something which this government will look back on in years to come and see as one of our greatest achievements.

I commend this bill to the House.