Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers (Special Account) (Extending Support and Strengthening Safety) Bill 2026
Mr LAXALE (Bennelong) (18:00): 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 because, every day, early educators across this country and in my community of Bennelong help children learn, grow and get ready to start their lifelong love of learning.
Their job is one of the most important jobs in Australia. It's good for families, it's good for kids and it's good for our economy. For too long, this job hasn't been paid to that level of importance.
That's why, on 8 August 2024, the Albanese government announced that it would fund a 15 per cent wage increase for early childhood education and care workers. It's important that we reflect on what the system was like before that decision. Services across the country were delaying expansion plans, closing rooms and limiting enrolments because they could not find or retain enough staff to keep their doors open.
Parents in my electorate of Bennelong told me the same story again and again—waitlists stretching for months, and rooms sitting empty because there weren't enough educators to look after the many children who wanted a place. The 2024 scheme was really important because it started to reverse those trends and give workers the pay that they deserved, but it's important to note that the 2024 scheme was never designed to be permanent.
It was established as an interim measure while the Fair Work Commission worked through its review of gender based undervaluation in a sector staffed overwhelmingly by women, and while the government considered what a longer term funding model should look like. Both of those pieces of work are ongoing. Early childhood education and care sits alongside aged care and disability support as sectors where decades of undervaluing predominantly female workforces left wages well below what the skill and responsibility of that work actually warranted.
The Productivity Commission, the ACCC and Jobs and Skills Australia all separately identified low wages as a central driver of the workforce shortages that were crippling the sector before this payment came into force from 8 August after that announcement. The Fair Work Commission's review has since progressed, and this bill is the next step the government is taking in response.
We are extending the funding rather than allowing it to lapse while those longer term structural questions continue to be worked through. Workforce retention in this sector matters for more than rosters and staffing headaches. Stability in the workforce is central to quality and safety in early learning, because children thrive when they see familiar faces and experienced ones.
Educators do their best work when they're not constantly training up a replacement for the colleague who left last month for a better paying job elsewhere. The numbers since that worker retention payment was announced in 2024 tell a clear story. There are around 20,000 more early childhood education and care workers in the sector today.
That's an increase of about eight per cent. Job vacancies in the sector have fallen by almost 31 per cent, and the share of services operating under a staffing waiver, meaning that they did not have enough qualified staff to meet ratios, has dropped from 8.9 per cent way down to 4.3 per cent. Importantly, fees at centres that signed up to the payment have grown at around half the rate of centres which did not sign up to the payment.
That last point deserves attention because it shows that this policy has kept skilled, experienced educators in our sector and has helped keep costs down for families who rely on early education and care. Fast forward to 14 June 2026, and we did what we had to do. We announced that we would lock in this pay rise for a further period to protect and build on those gains, rather than let a temporary scheme expire and leave families guessing.
The funding extension in this bill will save the average family around $1,500 in care costs over the next two years. The bill amends the Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers (Special Account) Act 2024 and adds an additional $3.6 billion into that special account to fund the retention payment. It extends the retention payment itself, which was otherwise due to expire in November this year, through to 30 June 2028.
And it extends the sunset date of the special account that administers these grants out to 31 December 2029. That's essential to give providers, educators and families a longer runway to plan around rather than face another cliff edge in a matter of months. Members opposite have asked what happens when this funding eventually ends.
That's a fair question to ask of what is, by design, a temporary scheme. But the answer is not that wage obligations disappear when the grant does. Educators who are now being paid fairly expect that to continue, and providers who have absorbed these wage increases into their operating models know that walking them back is not a serious option.
At the current average hourly fee, a family paying for 50 hours of care a week across 50 weeks of the year is already looking at something in the order of $36,000 before subsidies, and providers know full well that trying to claw back educator wages to manage costs would simply push more of that burden onto families. Extending this funding is how the government avoids those extra payments going onto families before the underlying policy settings, including the important work that the Fair Work Commission continues to do, are fully resolved.
The government's judgement has been that this payment should continue through the employment relationships that carry award obligations and entitlements, because that is how the wage floor that this bill protects is enforced. When this wage funding is combined with the government's broader support for minimum wage rises, a typical full-time educator will be $255 better off per week, and an early childhood teacher will be $410 better off per week compared to when this first pay rise came into force.
They are life-changing amounts. It has meant the retention of these important, trained and well-loved educators in our workforce. Importantly, this second round of temporary funding comes with a few extra strings attached.
The funding under this bill continues to be tied to the condition that services have to limit fee increases for families. That matters because a wage rise for educators shouldn't come at the expense of fee increases for parents already managing cost-of-living pressures. For the first time, this bill extends eligibility to employees in every childcare subsidy approved service, closing a gap that had left some educators out of a pay rise that their colleagues down the road were already receiving.
That is a good reform. Across my community in Bennelong, 1,330 childcare services are receiving support for the pay rise, and 1,300 early childhood educators and teachers are directly benefiting from it. Those are early childhood educators I've met in Eastwood, Ryde and Gladesville.
I was out at Lane Cove Goodstart Early Learning the other day, and they were telling me how this retention payment, now to be extended by the passage of this bill, has really helped the centre retain their trained staff and attract more young workers to the sector. Coupled with our reforms in fee-free TAFE, we're seeing more people choose early childhood education as a profession and see a career in there, thanks to this pay rise.
I've sat with centre directors in my electorate who've told me plainly that, before this payment, they were losing qualified staff to retail and hospitality jobs that were paying more for less responsibility. Lacking a stable workforce is not a problem any government should accept in a sector this important, and it's not one that families should be left to absorb through higher fees or fewer workplaces.
It's important to note that this bill also broadens the wage justice special account to introduce a new object and a new condition of funding, tying continued support more directly to quality and safety outcomes rather than wages alone. From July 27, services that do not meet the National Quality Standard when it comes to safety may have their funding cut or suspended.
Services will be required to meet quality area 2, which covers childrens health and safety under the National Quality Standard, as a condition of receiving this payment. It's important to note that around 95 per cent of services already meet that standard, but enshrining those conditions in this bill is about making sure that our remaining services catch up and sending a message to existing providers to not let their standards drop.
Every family in Bennelong and every family across this country deserves confidence that, wherever they drop their child off, that child will be safe and looked after. Taken together with related state and territory investment, this represents around half a billion dollars going specifically into strengthening quality and safety across the sector, on top of the wage funding itself.
Education ministers have also agreed to explore establishing an early education and care commission to keep building on this work over the longer term and giving the sector a clearer regulatory home than it has had until now. I recognise that some members have raised concern about the administrative burden that these place on small and medium sized providers, and those concerns are worth taking seriously rather than dismissing them.
Compliance costs are real, and a family or day-care operator in my electorate running a handful of places out of a home service doesn't have the same back office as a large corporate operator with dozens of centres. The department needs to keep working with smaller providers so that any requirements don't become a reason for these centres to close their doors, but the work is ongoing, and it's important that this parliament backs it.
The alternative to this bill is that this payment lapses, and it leaves workers short changed and centres under pressure. It is good that the coalition has indicated that it will support the continuation of the worker retention payment, and I, for one, welcome that. Certainty for the sector should not depend on which side of the chamber happens to be in government.
This bill asks this House to do something pretty straight forward. It asks us to keep a promise we made to educators in 2024 to extend the certainty they were given and to back it with the funding needed to make certainty real until the end of 2029 when the Productivity Commission and others hopefully finish their work. It asks us to keep faith with families in in Bennelong and across Australia who are counting on affordable, high-quality early learning to help them stay in work and help their children get the best possible start.
Importantly, it asks us to hold every service, without exception, to a standard of safety that our youngest and most vulnerable Australians are entitled to expect. I commend this bill to the House.