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

Ms JORDAN-BAIRD (Gorton) (12:37): If you walk around my community in Melbourne's western suburbs, you'll notice it's full of young families. The median age of the electorate of Gorton is 35 years old. This is the age when families are settling down, buying houses, having kids and planning for the future.

As more and more young families choose to call the western suburbs home, there is a greater need for quality early childhood education and care. Last month we celebrated Early Learning Matters Week. I think we celebrated it appropriately, in Melbourne's western suburbs, by announcing a new government-built early learning centre that is coming to Rockbank.

This is a partnership with both the federal and Victorian Labor governments that will see the new early learning centre co-located with the new school in Rockbank, meaning parents can avoid the double drop-off and get to work and school more easily. This is so exciting, because investments like these early childcare services support workforce participation and help more children get the best possible start in life.

It's a reflection of what happens when a Labor government prioritises families, and the workers who support them, in growing suburbs like mine. The impact of this investment is already being felt. We know that, when workers are paid fairly, they are more likely to stay in the jobs that they love.

Our 15 per cent wage rise, known as the worker retention payment, has made a real difference. Since we introduced the 15 per cent pay rise, there are 20,000 more childcare workers across Australia. Job vacancies have fallen by 31 per cent, and, in some areas, job applications have increased by 30 per cent.

That is what happens when you make a job more sustainable—when you make sure that people can afford to stay in the profession that they have trained for. With this investment, we're making a difference in my own community in Melbourne's western suburbs. In Gorton, 1,110 childcare workers have received the worker retention payment.

That's 1,100 workers getting recognised for the important work that they do, staying in the job that they love in the centres that families in our community rely on. This bill gives certainty to workers and providers by extending the worker retention payment. It puts another $3.6 billion into supporting higher wages over the coming years, and it makes sure that the government can continue supporting those wages while the Fair Work Commission's increases to the children's services award are progressively implemented.

Earlier, I mentioned that the childcare workers I speak to in my community are more often than not women. This isn't just in my community. We know that this is a workforce made up overwhelmingly of women.

This is an important thing to mention because the work of early childhood educators has historically been undervalued. The Productivity Commission found that early childhood teachers working in ECEC settings can hold equivalent degrees to teachers working in schools, but their median wages have historically been around 20 per cent lower. Educators have also been among the lowest paid occupations for which comparable earnings data is available.

When we talk about wage justice, we are talking about correcting a structural problem. We are talking about the fact that caring for, educating and protecting our youngest Australians is skilled work. It is professional work, and it deserves pay that reflects that.

Our changes don't just mean women earn more, which is another step towards closing the gender pay gap, but they also mean that women retire with more. That is what our government is working to deliver. For a young family in Melbourne's west, child care is often one of the biggest household expenses.

We're making sure that supporting workers does not come at the expense of families. That is why this funding comes with conditions. Providers receiving the worker retention payment must limit increases to childcare fees, and we know that this works.

Over the first year of the program, fees at centres that received the payment increased by around half as much as fees at centres that did not participate. That is a really important outcome because we should not have a situation where we give workers a well-deserved pay rise only for families to face a massive increase in their childcare bill. This Labor government want workers to earn more, and we want families to be able to keep more of what they earn.

That is why the wage support and the fee protections go hand in hand. This bill also strengthens the quality and safety of the services children attend, because every dollar of public funding should come with the expectation that children are safe and properly cared for. Parents should be able to drop their child off at an early learning centre and know that the people caring for them are meeting the standards that we expect.

This bill makes that expectation stronger. For the first time, the government will be able to make meeting quality area 2 of the National Quality Standard a condition of receiving the worker retention payment. Quality area 2 is about children's health and safety.

It's about minimising risks, protecting children from harm and making sure appropriate health and safety practices are in place. Around 95 per cent of services already meet this standard. That's really good, but it's only 95 per cent.

When we're talking about the safety of children, no childcare centre should fall through the cracks, and, if a service does not meet those standards, there should be consequences. This bill allows those consequences to include the suspension or termination of grant agreements and the cessation of funding, and parents should expect nothing less. This is also part of a much broader set of reforms this government is delivering to strengthen safety in early childhood education.

Last year, we passed legislation giving the Department of Education stronger powers to cut funding to operators that do not meet quality, safety or compliance requirements. Since that legislation passed, compliance action has been taken against 919 centres. These are centres that had not met safety standards for at least five years, and 55 of those centres have now fixed the problems they had previously failed to address.

It means that our policy is working. When there are consequences, providers have an incentive to lift their standards. Where providers refuse to do so, governments need to have the power to act.

In June, the government cut off funding to a service for the first time. Seven other centres have voluntarily closed. That is not about punishing providers.

It's about protecting children, and it's about making sure that the standards we set are actually enforced. We have also strengthened our ability to see what is happening inside these centres. Since November last year, Australian government authorised officers have conducted more than 1,300 unannounced visits to services across the country.

State and territory regulators are also stepping up their compliance work. In the last quarter, regulators undertook more than 1,500 compliance actions. That is more than double the number at the same time last year.

On 27 February, two more reforms came into force. The first was the National Early Childhood Worker Register. This is an important step because we need to know who is working in early childhood education and care.

We need to be able to track workers as they move between centres and between states, and we need strong systems that help regulators identify risks. The second reform was mandatory child safety training. This doesn't just apply to the educators working directly with children.

It applies right through the organisation, from the workers on the floor all the way through to CEOs and the boards as well. More than 350,000 people have already completed the foundation training, and the next stage of child safety training has now begun. We've also banned personal mobile phones in centres, and we're trialling CCTV in more than 300 services.

We're bringing together experts, including the Australian Federal Police, the Australian Centre for Child Protection and the National Office for Child Safety, to help guide us with this work. All up, our government is investing an additional $226 million in child safety reforms, while the states and territories have committed more than $270 million to strengthen quality and safety across the early childhood education sector.

And now we know that investment is working. The workforce is growing, vacancies are falling and more people are choosing to stay in this profession. Our government knows that early childhood education is essential infrastructure for families.

We believe the workers who deliver it deserve to be paid fairly. We believe parents deserve affordable access to quality early education and care, and we believe every child deserves to be safe. You can't have a strong early childhood education system without a strong workforce, and you can't have a strong workforce if people cannot afford to stay in the profession.

I want the families in Melbourne's west to know that, as our community grows, we are making sure the right infrastructure is there to support it. We are making sure that, as families move into suburbs like Rockbank and Kings Park, they have access to the services they need. We're investing in the workforce, which is an investment in the infrastructure of our community.

This bill is about whether an educator can afford to stay in the profession they love. It's about whether a parent can afford to go to work, knowing their child is being cared for, and about whether a child can walk through the doors of an early learning centre and be safe, supported and given the opportunity to thrive. That is the kind of early childhood education system we should be building.

I commend this bill to the House.