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

Ms AMBIHAIPAHAR (Barton) (16:13): I rise to speak in respect of the Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers (Special Account) (Extending Support and Strengthening Safety) Bill 2026. Before I came into this place, I spent a over a decade in the employment and industrial relations space as a solicitor. I stood in the Fair Work Commission and the Federal Circuit Court representing workers and, just as often, the small businesses and family enterprises that employed them.

If there's one thing that decade in particular taught me, it is that fair pay is not charity. It is not a good-to-have line item to be traded away when budgets get tight. Fair pay is the foundation for a functioning workforce.

It's how a functioning economy is built. When you get it wrong, people leave the profession. When you get it right, they stay, they grow, and the whole system around them gets so much stronger.

That is exactly what this bill is about. This bill amends the Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers (Special Account) Act 2024 to credit the special account with an additional $3.6 billion and to extend the act's sunset date to 31 December 2029. In doing so, it locks in for another two years the 15 per cent wage increase for early childhood education and care workers that this government announced in August 2024—a commitment the Prime Minister earlier this year confirmed would be extended.

It also, for the first time, opens up eligibility for the payment to employees in all childcare subsidy approved services, and it ties continued funding to new safety and quality conditions under the National Quality Standard. This is a bill about wages, but it is also a bill addressing trust—the trust families place in the hands that care for their children every single day.

Let me tell the House what this actually looks like on the ground. You have to talk about the rooms it happens in and the people who show up to do the job. Between now and the previous sitting week, I visited a number of early learning centres in Barton and also phoned a number of the small early learning centres just to check in and connect with them.

I visited Goodstart Early Learning on Millett Street in Hurstville, which is in the centre of the electorate of Barton. The centre director, Emily, and her staff took me around the service room by room, introducing me to other educators and to the children in their care. I will confess I did not expect to leave that visit holding a little hand-painted cup and saucer and a small stack of drawings which, I am informed, were meant to be portraits of me.

They now sit proudly in my electorate office. I was also very impressed to learn that at this Good Start there's a very close connection with the local primary schools and their relevant principals, who have a very close interest in the collaboration to ensure that children at the centre are school ready when they transition into primary school. But behind that warmth and that impact was something much more serious.

Educators talked to me quite candidly about the pressures of the sector and about what stability in their pay and their teams actually means for the children they teach. This is not a minor thing. Consistency of care is not a nice-to-have in early childhood education.

It's the whole model. Children learn and settle through relationships, and relationships take time to build. Every educator who leaves because the pay does not stack up means a relationship broken and a service that has to start again.

I saw the same story told a little differently at another early learning centre, Learn Bright Early Learning Centre in Kingsgrove. I met the early childhood educators working in a really beautiful, purpose-built facility run by the centre director, Vicki. What struck me there was the professionalism, the qualifications in the room and how much the children radiated confidence and a strong bond with the educators.

These are genuine, qualified early childhood teachers doing work that shapes children's brain development in the first five years of life, for wages that have historically lagged well behind comparable professions. This bill, combined with the government's support for minimum wage increases, will mean $255 more per week for a typical full-time educator and $410 more per week for early childhood teachers compared with December 2024.

For workers in Kingsgrove, this is really the difference between staying in the job they trained for and leaving it for something that pays the bills more reliably. I also visited Goodstart Early Learning centre in South Hurstville, where I met centre director Verna and her team during Book Week. It was a small thing, perhaps, to sit on a tiny little chair while children told me about their favourite books and their favourite foods, but it reminded me of why the sector matters so much.

This is where curiosity gets its first real encouragement. While I was there, I also spoke with Kelly, a local and an education leader at the centre, who spoke so powerfully about the importance of educators reflecting the diversity of the community they serve. Barton is one of the most multicultural electorates in the country, and Kelly's point from my conversation with her really stayed with me.

She really described her Chinese heritage and the importance of language while she is working at that particular centre and supporting these children. If we want children to grow up seeing themselves reflected and valued, that starts with who is standing at the front of the room. Retaining a diverse educator workforce is not possible if that workforce cannot afford to stay in that sector.

And there is Whizzkidzz Early Childhood Centre in Beverly Hills, run by Fiona. It is a smaller service than some of the others I have mentioned, but no less vital to the families who really rely on the service. This early learning centre supports many families in the surrounding area, and Fiona's centre is a reminder that this sector is not only made up of large national providers but also includes small, community rooted operators, not-for-profit and for-profit alike, who are just as squeezed by workforce shortages and just as committed to the children in their care.

Any policy in this space has to work for services like Fiona's, not just for the biggest players, and I'm glad that this bill's expansion of eligibility to all provided services does exactly that. These four recent visits in Hurstville, Kingsgrove, South Hurstville and Beverly Hills are just a small sample of a much bigger picture, but they tell a very consistent story.

Early childhood educators are showing up every single day to do some of the most significant work in this country for wages that have not always reflected that. The data bears this out. Since the worker retention payment was announced in 2024, the sector has added around 20,000 more workers, an increase of about eight per cent.

Job vacancies have fallen by almost 31 per cent. The proportion of services operating under a staffing waiver—a polite term for services that could not find enough qualified staff to meet ratios—has dropped from 8.9 per cent to 4.3 per cent, and fees at centres receiving the payment have grown at around half the rate of centres that are not signed up. That is what a functioning labour market intervention looks like: it does not just lift wages, it stabilises an entire workforce and in turn stabilises the cost of living for families.

My last point matters enormously in an electorate that's very diverse, like Barton, where families in Rockdale Kingsgrove, Kogarah, Bexley and Carlton are also juggling mortgages or rent stress along with the cost-of-living pressures of raising a kid. This funding extension is forecast to save the average family around $1,500 over the next two years, because continued funding remains conditional on services limiting fee increases.

That is a government using public investment as leverage for public good—better pay for workers and lower costs for families achieved through the same mechanism rather than pitting them against one another. I want to speak briefly to the safety provisions in the bill, because they matter just as much as the wage setting. From July 2027 standards will be required to meet quality area 2 of the National Quality Standard relating to children's health and safety as a condition of continued funding under this special account.

Around 95 per cent of services already meet this standard, which speaks very well of the sector, but 95 per cent is not good enough when we are talking about children's safety. Binding continued wage-funding to safety compliance sends the right signal that this government values the people who do the work and that it expects, in return, that every service meets the standard that families are entitled to assume is already in place.

As a former employment lawyer, I want to make one further point on the structure, the architecture, of this bill. It includes a technical but important amendment that clarifies that, where an approved provider is not a legal person, such as a partnership, the worker retention payment grant agreement can be made between the Commonwealth and a person acting on behalf of that provider.

This is necessary work and good legislation that makes sure a policy designed to help real people in real workplaces does not get tripped up by a technicality in how a small business happens to be structured. I've seen too many well-intentioned schemes falter on exactly this kind of gap, and I'm pleased to see it addressed here. Passage of this bill is required by the end of the September sitting period to ensure that sufficient funds remain in that special account to continue the work of the retention payment without interruption.

I don't think anyone in this House wants to be the reason why an early childhood educator or teacher in Kingsgrove or South Hurstville opens their pay slip in October to find that their pay has gone backwards because we didn't have enough time. So I say to Emily, who has an amazing team at Goodstart in Hurstville; to Vicki and the educators at Learn Bright in Kingsgrove; to Verner at Goodstart in South Hurstville; to Fiona at Whizz Kidzz in Beverly Hills; and to every single educator across the electorate of Barton and across this country who shows up for our children this bill says very clearly that this parliament sees your work, it absolutely values the work that you do and this Labor Albanese government is prepared to back it with real money and a real ongoing commitment to the sector.