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

Dr RYAN (Kooyong) (16:53): I rise to speak on the Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers (Special Account)(Extending Support and Strengthening Safety) Bill 2026. This bill extends $3.6 billion in funding to keep the worker retention payment running to June 2028. The worker retention payment provides a 15 per cent wage increase for eligible early childhood education and care workers.

It's an important commitment to ensure that ECEC workers are valued for the important role that they play in our children's lives and in the economy of our country. Importantly, this legislation attaches safety and quality conditions to that funding. Grant agreements can require services to maintain ratings under the National Quality Standard in children's health and safety, with consequences for breaches including the potential suspension or termination of funding.

After the events documented on many occasions in the last two years in this sector—after the horrifying cases that have shocked the country and have led so many of us in this place to call for additional measures, such as mandatory CCTV, tighter working-with-children-check enforcement, and genuine accountability for ECEC providers—this funding mechanism will make safety a condition of public funding, not an optional extra.

But a wage rise and safety standards are not the only reforms that are necessary to deliver the early childhood education and care workforce that Australia so desperately needs. This bill relates to people who are already working in the sector, but Australia has big issues in the pipeline—the pipeline that is meant to bring us the next generation of educators.

Migration has long been part of how this country staffs the early childhood education sector. Chronic structural shortages of qualified educators mean that overseas workers are, for many providers, the only way to keep rooms open while building that domestic workforce. Any tightening of the visa system needs to treat that reality deliberately, not sweep it up as collateral damage in a broader crackdown on migration.

Let me turn first to how the government is not prioritising early childhood education and care, in terms of skilled visas. This government has dropped early childhood and pre-school teachers from the list of invited occupations in the most recent skilled independent visa invitation round. At the same time that this parliament is funding another two years of wage justice for the workforce, the occupation itself was quietly taken off the list of skills that the government says that it prioritises and wants.

Migration shouldn't be a substitute for training and paying Australian educators properly, and this bill's wage measures are the right way to build and attract a growing domestic workforce. But, when 400,000 additional aged-care workers are also needed by 2050, and net zero alone will require 240,000 more workers within the next seven years, training pipelines alone won't close gaps in the workforce in the short to medium term for those sectors which are already in crisis.

I want to read to the House what migration-tightening in early childhood education and care looks like on the streets of the community that I represent—Kooyong. I have received correspondence from the chief operating officer of a day-care provider who operates centres in Queensland, Victoria and New South Wales. She described nine recent refusals of subclass 407 training visa nominations for her educators; she expects more refusals to come.

These nominations or applications are not from people who are trying to game the system. As the provider has put to me directly, these applications relate to qualified, hardworking, ethical employees, who she had hoped to support through workforce training and ongoing professional development to improve their knowledge of the sector and to increase their competencies related to their position within those services.

These are people—overwhelmingly, young women—who are still early in their careers, and they don't yet have the experience which is required for roles that attract a salary above the income threshold for a subclass 482 skills-in-demand visa. Without another suitable pathway for those employees, that provider expects to lose them. She told me that the time and the skills that she has invested in developing those workers' competencies, along with the time and the cost and the dedication that those workers have demonstrated in acquiring those qualifications here in Australia, will end up benefiting other employers overseas instead.

It's a crazy waste of time and of effort. This provider told me that sponsoring overseas workers isn't always or even ever her first or easiest option, but that it's something that she has to pursue because there are simply not enough qualified, competent and experienced Australian educators available to meet the sector's needs—because she cannot otherwise fill critical vacancies in childcare centres.

That provider told me that they expect to spend more than $90,000 on visa related costs in the next 12 months alone, while still turning away a significant number of job applicants, and that childcare rooms have already closed and that enrolments have already declined in the centres that she administers because they cannot recruit enough staff. Every closed room in a childcare centre represents parents who can't yet return to work, and that reflects productivity lost from our economy.

The recent announcement that Edge Early Learning has entered voluntary administration is another concerning indication of the widespread challenges facing the sector. It's not an issue that can be solved purely by extending a 15 per cent wage rise, which is, after all, already in place. This is a supply issue that the domestic labour market simply cannot meet.

The figures bear this out. Home Affairs' own data shows that 55 per cent of subclass 407 applications were refused or withdrawn in the year to April 2026. That makes it now the most commonly refused visa program in the country.

Since March, sponsors have reported that delegates have been refusing nominations on the basis that a nominee is 'too experienced' for the training to be considered genuine, which is precisely the bind which faces early-career educators who have grown competent enough to be useful but not yet experienced enough to clear that income threshold for a subclass 482 visa.

All of this is happening against the backdrop of a wider immigration crackdown that the government has publicly flagged but not yet rolled out and not yet fully explained. The Minister for Home Affairs is understood to be finalising a package intended to bring net overseas migration down to Treasury's forecasts of 245,000 this year and 225,000 the year after.

That is projected to occur through measures which will include partner visas, working holiday-makers, student visas and more. It is clear that public confidence in the migration system in this country needs rebuilding. That reform is long overdue, and that transparency is much needed, but an across-the-board tightening of visa numbers delivered without transparency and without sector-specific carve-outs risks treating early childhood education, which is, as we've established, a generally and chronically understaffed feminised essential workforce at risk, the same as visa categories that the public rightly wants restrained.

Care work does not fit neatly into a blunt occupation list or a single wage floor. Even proposals to replace occupation lists with a recalibrated wage threshold acknowledge that care workers are hard cases and will need to be dealt with separately. The government has not yet told the sector what 'separately' means for it.

My ask of the government is this: I support the passage of this bill because the wage justice and safety measures that it includes are critical, but I ask the cabinet not to allow it to stand in isolation. I ask the Minister for Education to work with the Minister for Home Affairs and the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship to establish a genuine pathway for early-career ECEC workers to build experience in Australia, to progress towards permanent residency and to avoid them being caught in an unfair trap between a 407 they can't renew and a 482 that they cannot yet afford or qualify for.

I ask the ministers to review the cost of employer sponsorship for critical and undersupplied sectors, like early learning and childhood education, so that responsible providers aren't pricing themselves out of the workforce that they need to meet this bill's own new safety conditions. I ask the ministers to commit to publishing, before any further net migration reduction measures take effect, an assessment of the impact specifically on the care economy workforces.

These are sectors that parliament has already recognised, through legislation like this, as facing a workforce crisis that the House cannot afford to worsen by accident. Families in Kooyong and across this country deserve a childcare system that is both safe and available. This bill will make it safer.

It's up to this government to make sure that it is not making it less available. I commend the bill to the House, and I commend my questions to the cabinet.