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

Mr MATT SMITH (Leichhardt) (12:54): I rise to speak on the Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers (Special Account) (Extending Support and Strengthening Safety) Bill 2026. My eldest daughter is now 18, and she hates this story. I was going to save it for her 21st, but I thought, 'Why not just share it with Australia instead?' Back when I was younger and she was a baby, it was my job to take her to the early childhood education centre every day; her mother would go to work a bit earlier.

I'd take her there and she'd put on a show, 'Oh Daddy, Daddy!' There are tears, I'm feeling terrible, but I've got to go to work. I get back to the car, and I've forgotten my keys. I go, 'Alright, I'll going to have to go through all this again.' I walk back in, and she's standing in the middle of the room listening to The Wiggles, just jiving it up, happy as Larry.

I sneak in to grab my keys, and she hears the keys rattle. She recognises them. She looks at me in the eye with a smile and then turns the waterworks back on. 'Great, what a day!' But I always felt a lot more comfortable after that.

The other one I want to relate comes 18 years later. During the campaign, I stepped into an early childhood education centre, as a lot of us do, and I sat down to read a book. From the back of the class I hear, 'The giant can read!' Two things come away from that: (1) giants get a rough end of the stick, and (2) this child was excited about reading.

This is the point of early childhood education. They might not have access to books in their house. They might not have people reading to them at night.

But on this day, the giant had come to read, and this was exciting. We sat down and we read Possum Magic. They came up and sat with me.

They'd help me with words. It was a really lovely experience. The part about Sienna which is important is that, despite the tears that were purely for show, she felt safe there.

She felt safe enough to stand in the middle of the room and dance happily to The Wiggles with all of her little friends. That's the important part: a safe place where our youngest can learn, where they see the world for the first time, where they meet their first friends, where they get that first taste of education, hopefully igniting in them the curiosity that will carry them through the rest of their lives.

Education is the greatest gift that we can give to anybody, and we need to make sure that our educators are properly valued and properly remunerated. When I speak to early childhood educators, they don't tell me about a job; they tell me about the joy of the children and they tell me that this was what they always wanted to do. I sat down with a young woman in Edmonton.

I said, 'What brought you into this industry?' She said, 'I was never going to do anything else.' One of the litmus tests for me is if you dreamt about doing that as a child and you get to do that as an adult, that's a pretty good job. She came to work every day, living out the best part of her childhood, spending time teaching, watching children grow, celebrating those milestones, sending them back to their parents.

How many of us in here who are parents still absolutely treasure the little calendars where they've tried to write their name for the first time? The E might be backwards, the N is kind of the wrong shape, and who knows what happened to the S. Those things are great, and they sit on my fridge at home proudly.

It's because of the early childhood educators teaching our children to read, to write, to interact with each other. It is a dream worth having, and it is hard work. It is very, very much hard work.

Anyone can tell you if you have a birthday party with 15 toddlers, you're not coming out of that the same. People in the early childhood education area are doing that every single day with patience, good humour and love. Our children feel safe, loved and valued in these places, so we should pay them fairly for looking after and encouraging our most precious things.

If you want to look beyond that, early childhood education is an economic development opportunity for the areas in which they are located. Leichhardt is huge. Not every town has an early childhood education centre, and the ones that don't cry out for it because parents want to get to work.

They want to be able to work knowing that their children are getting that solid base to lead them into school. By placing early childhood education centres in places like Napranum, Horn Island and, hopefully, Cooktown, we are giving the parents an opportunity to get back to work, and we're also giving the children the opportunity to get that start in life that they so richly deserve.

Give them that chance to fall in love with reading before it becomes a chore in year 8 when they hand you Romeo and Juliet for the first time. Make them excited. Learning through play is one of the most effective ways you can teach children.

It's something that I see right across the areas. It's just the joy. But then you start hearing stories about people whose dream it was to be an early childhood educator.

They're having to take on extra work or leave the industry completely. Then there are the knock-on effects when they've had to work an extra shift at the local supermarket or pick up some extra work on the weekend; they're a bit tired when they get to work on Monday, not quite as sharp. They're not able to give the kids all that they want to give, and that hurts them personally.

Or services are losing employees and rooms have to shut for the day, which sends family plans into chaos. Not every workplace is flexible. A lot of them are, and that's great, but it's hard to take a day off sometimes if you know you've got to sling Boost Juice or something of that nature.

There are times when you just have to be at work. If a room is shut, it can throw your entire day into chaos. Taking that off the table, paying early childhood educators properly and respecting the work that they do, allows them to stay in the business and allows them to do what they want to do.

And that allows all of us to get on with our best lives. Now I'll move on to the numbers. As I said, every early childhood educator is helping children learn and grow every day.

And that's why, on 8 August 2024, a 15 per cent wage increase for early childhood education workers was put in place. Already in Leichhardt this has benefitted over 1,200 workers. That's 1,200 families.

It's helping them with their mortgage, helping them get their kids to a birthday party on a Saturday afternoon and making sure their shoes don't wear out. Some of the services had delayed expanding, and some had been closing rooms. They had been limiting enrolments for the simple reason that they couldn't find staff.

This makes early childhood education attractive again, not just from the emotional perspective, the dreams that people have as a young one, but because it makes sense economically. You know you're doing a good job and that good pay will come with a good job. Workforce retention stability is critical to the quality of education, enabling children and educators to develop a consistent and stable relationship.

Children want to trust and love wholeheartedly, and they do that with people they spend time with. It's an old saying that children spell love t-i-m-e. If they've got the same educator over and over again, they'll develop that trust.

And with that trust will come the opportunity to learn. Since the worker retention payment was announced in 2024, there has been an increase of around 20,000 early childhood education workers, which is about an eight per cent increase. Job vacancies have decreased by almost 31 per cent.

The percentages of services operating with a staffer waiver have fallen from 8.9 per cent to 4.3 per cent, and fees at service centres receiving the payment have grown at about half the rate of centres not signed up. This payment has worked to bolster our early educator workforce and keep the costs for families down. It's given our children the best opportunity.

On 14 June 2026 the Albanese government announced that it was locking in the pay rise for another two years to retain and grow these benefits. The funding extension will save the average family around $1,500 over that period of time. The wage justice for early childhood education and care workers is essential to ensuring that our children continue to get what they need.

Combined with support for minimum wage rises, this will mean around $255 more per week for a typical full-time educator and $410 more per week for early childhood teachers compared to December 2024, when the government first implemented the pay rise. Funding will continue to be tied to a commitment from services to receive the payment to limit fee increases for families.

This helps with cost-of-living pressures, but it's more than that. The bill also introduces a new object and condition of funding through the wage justice special account, which builds on the government's commitment to strengthen quality and safety in early learning. We know that about 95 per cent of early childhood education centres are meeting those safety standards, but we also know that we need that to be higher.

This bill encourages that. It ties funding to it, and if you do not meet the national quality standard then funding can be cut or suspended. Services are required to meet quality area 2, which relates to children's health and safety, under the national quality standard.

This is good Labor policy. It shows what happens when Labor backs Aussie workers, and we'll keep turning up for Australians and workers right across the country. We'll work with unions, local workers, Aussie families and Aussie businesses to improve the lives of Australians, and this is where the lives of Australians start.

A lot of kids earliest memories and their first friends are in these early education centres. We need to give the people looking after our most precious things the best opportunity to be the best versions of themselves. That means not worrying about the next bill.

That means not having to work extra shifts on the weekend. That means being paid fairly for showing up and looking after our children. I commend this bill to the House.