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

Mr VENNING (Grey) (16:26): Anyone in this place who has spent five minutes talking to a childcare worker knows they deserve wage justice. That is not a controversial statement. These workers spend their days teaching, feeding, comforting and caring for the next generations of Australians.

But I cannot sit here and listen to the government congratulate itself while regional families are again abandoned by this Labor government. This debate paints a picture of a thriving, well-supported early education system. If others in this place would step outside of the major cities and into my electorate of Grey, they would see a very different reality.

I want to preface this by saying that the childcare workers in regional South Australia do a fantastic job and I applaud our childcare workers for the thankless work that they do. However, in 2024, according to the Mitchell Institute, the electorate of Grey, which covers more than 90 per cent of South Australia, was named the worst electorate for childcare access in the entire nation, and it shows.

More than one-third of families simply do not have access to child care, and if you do the waitlists are enormous. You have to plan your child care before you plan to have a child. Worker retention is a serious issue.

If we cannot pay early childhood workers properly, we will not keep them. I want to remind this House that family day care was not part of this bill initially. Of course, family day care supports regional communities, and I'm glad that it was brought back in.

But this isn't even the first problem for us. Before you can retain a childcare worker and before you can pay a childcare worker for the work they do, you need a centre for them to work in. Across large parts of regional South Australia, that simply does not exist.

This is not a new issue. In 2024, 23 councils across South Australia in my electorate formed a group called the Regional Childcare Desert Advocacy Project to highlight this exact crisis. People with the skills and qualifications to teach, to grow our communities and to work in our hospitals are not staying in Grey, because there is nowhere for their child to go.

I have countless nurses, doctors, aged-care workers and teachers who want to go back to work, but they have no choice but to stay at home, and this includes dads as well. Housing, health and child care are three of the biggest issues crippling our regions. They're three areas this Labor government says it's doing a fantastic job on delivering for.

This shortage is holding back regional growth and damaging our state economy. I want to raise the work of Remote & Isolated Children's Exercise, or RICE, which does an amazing job of supporting families in the outback and in regional communities. Even RICE struggles to attract staff, because finding and retaining qualified staff is impossible.

They are advertising a position right now and struggling to fill it. What hope do our regional providers have if an organisation as respected as RICE cannot find staff? This leads me to TAFE.

This government continues to push fee-free TAFE, but it has absolutely gutted TAFE in regional South Australia, including cert IIIs in early childhood education. It's so emblematic of this government—provide services, and provide them for free, but only if you can access them, and that access never exists out in the bush. Then there is outside school hours care, or OSHC.

In the very same week the South Australian Labor government was in Adelaide championing new OSHC services, Stirling North and Quorn closed. They closed that very same week, and it was because of staff challenges. This is not one unfortunate incident.

Crystal Brook and Laura OSHC services have also closed in recent years. This is a pattern playing out across my electorate while the government spruiks new announcements in the cities. When an OSHC service closes in a town, it does not just remove an after-school program; it removes the only thing standing between a parent and having to leave their job because there is no-one to collect their child from school and hold them until the end of a shift.

I want to be precise about why these services are closing, because the government keeps announcing funding as if money alone solves this. There are two distinct problems facing OSHC and child care in regional areas: access to qualified staff and financial viability. A centre's ability to pay wages is based on enrolment numbers, and, in thin regional markets, those numbers are too often too low to sustain a service at all.

This is made harder as South Australia has very specific qualification requirements for childcare services, with primary contact educators requiring a diploma. This is particularly the case in government preschool and rural care programs, and this is higher than the general national minimum of a certificate III for educators working in centre based child care.

In the cities, providers can draw on a steady pipeline of university students working toward these qualifications while they learn. In the regions, we simply do not have that option. At the same time, there are simply not enough people studying these qualifications in the first place.

Regional TAFE training continues to be underfunded, and registered training organisations, or RTOs, have been progressively withdrawing from country South Australia, shrinking the pipeline of qualified educators even further. Providers in the city can draw on university students and a larger labour market. Regional communities like Moonta, Orroroo, Tumby Bay, Crystal Brook or Port Broughton do not have that advantage and do not have access to these services.

No amount of new funding announcements will change that until this government addresses workforce availability directly. There is a practical fix worth this government's attention, and that is family day care. Families and operators in Grey want to see more targeted funding to help communities and educators get buildings up to code for in-venue family day care.

That's one of the barriers for family day care at the moment. Targeted funding would make family day care a more attractive career option in our regions. It would also increase the number of childcare places available without requiring a new centre to be built from scratch.

Then there is the problem of communities trying to build a childcare service to fix their childcare access issues. They want to solve the problem. They go to this government for funding, yet it doesn't work for them in the regions.

The Building Early Education Fund, or BEEF, which this government says will deliver universal child care, does not. In regional South Australia, it is failing badly. Take Crystal Brook as an example.

This is a community that has been advocating for a childcare service for decades. Some of the volunteers started when their kids were young, and now those kids are adults. The Crystal Brook Community Childcare Working Group obtained conditional approval for a site at the local primary school.

They commissioned architectural plans. They found an experienced not-for-profit operator ready to go. This is not a community that sat on its hands.

This is a community that did everything it was asked to do. When the BEEF funding was announced, you would think Crystal Brook was exactly who this funding was designed for. Instead, they were locked out.

The rules required applicants to already operate an existing childcare centre. They prohibit community consortiums from applying. They restrict eligibility to providers already running between one and nine facilities.

It is absurd that a community group cannot even own an asset and lease it to an operator. Expecting volunteers to fund shovel-ready business plans within a two-month application window is an unrealistic burden for a community group with no capital to bring in consultants at short notice. Think about what that actually means.

A community starting from zero cannot apply, because they are not yet an eligible provider, but they cannot become an eligible provider without support to establish the service in the first place. It does not make sense. It is a closed loop, and these restrictive conditions heavily favour existing providers—you guessed it—in the cities, while making it nearly impossible for new regional operators to enter the market at all.

I want this place to hear what this actually looks like for families in regional South Australia, because behind every one of these gaps is somebody trying to hold a job, a business or a family together without any support. Bek, from Crystal Brook, owns a hairdressing salon that employs two staff members. Since she had her first child over four years ago, trying to keep her small business running has been an exhausting and emotional battle, and this is simply because of the lack of child care available.

Bek said the lack of childcare in Crystal Brook isn't just an issue for families. She said it's an economic issue, a workforce issue and a regional community issue. I'll quote Bek: Families want to work.

Parents want to contribute. Small businesses want to grow. But without access to reliable childcare, we are being held back.

Tasmin, from Wilmington, wanted to open a family day care to support her community. She was restricted by the copious amounts of red tape and hoops set up by this Albanese Labor government. She said that, with the cost-of-living pressures and workforce issues, all she wants to do is contribute, but she can't.

Luke, a school principal in Yorketown, says he's watched teachers and families leave the area entirely. Schools are losing critical staff simply because child care is not available. Courtney, a station owner at Manners Well, has no access to child care at all.

She said continued funding to regional and remote services like RICE is critical for families living on stations. Kara, from Appila, put her son on a waitlist when she was 15 weeks pregnant. She said, 'I thought people were joking when they said to put them down that early.' This is common across regional South Australia.

Isabella, a midwife from Port Lincoln, has been on the waitlist since she was six weeks pregnant. Her baby is now three months old, and she still has over a year to wait until she'll be able to access child care. Isabella said: How am I meant to help mums bring their babies into this world if no one can safely look after mine?

Jessica from Port Broughton put it very plainly. In her community, women are being told they have to choose between having a family or a career. She said: If you want a career and a family, you can't live here.

Erin, formerly of Booleroo Centre, made the decision most families are considering. Her partner's family had lived in Booleroo Centre for four generations. They put their name down on two waitlists when Erin was six weeks pregnant.

By the time their child was 16 months old, they had not been offered a place. They left the town permanently, taking two working professionals out of a small community that could not afford to lose them. These are just some of the responses I've received from my childcare survey, and they are not isolated stories.

Across Grey, families are waiting years for a place. In some towns, waitlists run past 100 children, and every single one of those families is being told 'no'. With wage justice for workers in centres that don't exist in my electorate, or centres with staff shortages that no pay rise alone will fix, this bill does nothing for the families I represent.

Families in Grey know what works for them. We need to listen to what they are saying.