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

Ms PENFOLD (Lyne) (17:19): There are few decisions more personal for a parent than who cares for their child, and there are few jobs that carry more trust than the work of an early childhood educator. Every day, parents across my electorate of Lyne hand over the person they love most in this world to an educator and trust that person to care for them, nurture them, teach them and keep them safe.

That is an enormous responsibility, and I thank all those educators across the Lyne electorate for the tremendous, wonderful work that they do. Speaking here today, I start from a very simple position. Early childhood educators do important work.

They deserve to be valued. They deserve safe workplaces, and the children deserve the highest standards of care. The Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers (Special Account) (Extending Support and Strengthening Safety) Bill 2026 provides another $3.65 billion for the worker retention payment to extend the scheme from November this year until 30 June 2028.

It also enables grant conditions to be linked to the health and safety requirements contained in quality area 2 of the national quality standard. We welcome the certainty that that provides. I also think this parliament needs to be very clear about what this bill does not do.

It does not solve the childcare shortage. It does not guarantee a place for a family that's been sitting on a waiting list for months or years. It does not resolve the long-term funding of wages after June 2028.

Despite the government saying that it is extending support to family day care and in-home care, the bill, as it's presently designed, does not give many of those educators a realistic pathway to actually receive it. That matters enormously in regional Australia, because child care in regional Australia does not always look like child care in metropolitan Australia.

In smaller communities—for farming families, nurses working shifts, police officers, aged-care workers, hospitality workers and parents working outside nine-to-five hours—family day care and in-home care can be absolutely essential. Yet Family Day Care Australia told the Senate inquiry into this bill that virtually all of its approximately 8,500 educators operate as self-employed sole traders or independent contractors.

Together, they support more than 47,000 families and 67,000 children. Under the government's rules, services where educators operate through those lawful contractor arrangements can be excluded from the payment. That simply makes no sense to me.

If the purpose of this payment is to retain good educators, why design it around an employment model that excludes so many of the educators we are supposedly trying to retain? A regional family doesn't care whether the person caring for their child is technically employed under one particular industrial instrument. They care that the educator is good, they care that their child is safe and they care that the service is still there next week.

That is why the coalition will seek amendments in the Senate to establish a practical pathway for family day care and in-home care educators to access the payment without forcing providers to abandon lawful contractor arrangements. For Lyne, this is not an academic argument. Across the Mid North Coast and the Hunter region, access to child care has been a serious problem for years.

Regional Development Australia Mid North Coast found that only about 65 per cent of childcare demand was being met in 2023. The estimated consequence was an extraordinary $384 million a year in lost wages for families across the region because parents could not work the hours they wanted or needed to work. The underlying survey paints an even more confronting picture.

Ninety-one per cent of responding families were on at least one waiting list. A quarter of providers were operating below their approved capacity because they could not find enough staff. A third had been trying to fill vacancies for more than 12 months.

That is the regional reality. You can build a childcare room, you can subsidise the fees and you can announce billions of dollars from Canberra, but, if there isn't an educator available to work in that room, there isn't a childcare place. I see that problem very clearly in Gloucester.

Gloucester Pre School & Early Years Learning Centre has 58 children enrolled and a waiting list stretching for up to two years. The community has not sat back waiting for someone else to fix it. The centre has purchased another property in nearby Barrington because it wants to expand its not-for-profit service and create more places.

It needs assistance with the capital works to make that happen. That is why I included the project in my prebudget submission to the government and asked the government to support the project through the Building Early Education Fund. There is a fairly obvious point here.

You cannot send your child to a wage increase; you need a childcare place. Sometimes families need more than a childcare place. We see that very clearly in Taree through the extraordinary work of First Steps Count.

First Steps Count is built around a simple understanding: if we want children to thrive, sometimes we need to support the whole family around them. It is a child and family hub where families with children from birth to 12 can simply walk through the door without a referral, without having to know which service they need and without having to navigate a complicated system on their own.

A parent might come in with their child for a playgroup or an activity. They might need some parenting support. There may be concerns about the child's development, behaviour or wellbeing, or that family may be dealing with much bigger pressures in their lives and need help connecting with health, family or specialist services.

First Steps Count brings those worlds together. There are supported playgroups—I've seen them and I've seen the amazing play area outside. It warms your heart to see the kids out there, I have to say.

It's not in my speech notes, but I've got to say it. It is just a wonderful space. There are also early learning programs, parenting programs and family support.

There are health and wellbeing services and specialist supports. Importantly, there is a navigator who can walk alongside a family and help connect them with the right services, both within First Steps Count and across the wider community. That matters because too often we expect a parent who is already struggling to work out which door to knock on, fill in another form and tell their story all over again.

First Steps Count turns that around. The door is open. Families are welcomed, relationships are built and support can come to the family rather than expecting the family to navigate the system alone.

That vision didn't happen overnight. I particularly want to acknowledge Rosemary Sinclair AO, one of the founding members and now patron of First Steps Count. For well over a decade, Rosemary and an extraordinary group of local people held on to the belief that Taree could do something different, bringing services together around children and families rather than leaving families to find their own way through a fragmented system.

That persistence has created something our community can be enormously proud of, and I think there is a lesson in it for this parliament. Early childhood policy cannot just be about childcare places or workforce participation. It must also be about development, early intervention, strong relationships, confident parents, connected families and identifying problems early enough that we have a chance to change the trajectory of a child's life.

Ultimately, the measure of our success should be a very simple one: are we giving every child the best possible start in life? That brings me to the Page Research Centre's recent report, Raising the next generation. I think it raises an important question that's been missing from this debate.

What are we actually trying to achieve? Is the purpose of family policy simply to get every parent back into paid employment as quickly as possible, or is it to help families raise healthy, secure children while giving mums and dads genuine choices about how they organise work and care? The Page report starts from the principle that children are a public good, that caregiving is productive work and that women deserve genuine choice rather than being funnelled into one prescribed pathway.

I think there's something very important in that. Most families I meet aren't looking for government to tell them how to raise their children. They're trying to make the best decisions they can.

One mum may desperately want to return to work. Another may want three days at work and two at home. A family may rely on grandparents.

Another may depend on family day care. A nurse working night shifts may need in-home care. A farming family may need flexibility that a standard metropolitan childcare centre simply cannot provide.

None of those families is wrong, yet our current system overwhelmingly subsidises one particular model. The Page report argues that this has created an implicit policy preference for centre based institutional child care, while parental care, kinship care and other home based forms of care receive little equivalent recognition. It goes further and proposes replacing the existing childcare-only subsidy for children aged zero to three with a choice-in-care subsidy, available for parental care, kinship care, home based care, community care or centre based care.

That is a proposal worthy of serious consideration, because genuine choice means more than making one option cheaper; it means recognising that families are different. The report makes another point that is particularly relevant to country Australia. More than one-third of Australian communities are what it describes as childcare deserts—generally, areas where there are at least three children for every available place.

In some regional communities, there are more than five children competing for each place, and in some small towns there are no long-day-care services at all. The report specifically identifies workforce shortages, long waitlists, reduced operating hours and long travel distances as problems that fall particularly heavily on regional families, agricultural families, shift workers and small-business owners.

That sounds very familiar to anyone living on the Mid North Coast. So, when I look at this bill, I support better remuneration for educators, but I don't want us to confuse spending more money with fixing the system. Families' childcare costs are still rising quickly.

Childcare prices had risen by 7.3 per cent annually in July, more than twice the headline inflation rate, while average centre-based day-care fees have increased by around 28 per cent since the June quarter of 2022. Providers, families and educators are all under pressure. The government is extending a temporary program for another 19 months without answering what happens when it ends.

The worker retention payment was originally intended as an interim measure while the Fair Work Commission completed its work on gender based undervaluation. That Fair Work Commission process has now been completed. But, instead of a long-term model, this bill extends the temporary grant until 2028.

As evidence to the Senate inquiry warned, that potentially creates another funding cliff when the scheme finishes. Educators deserve to know what comes next, and well before the next federal election. Providers deserve to know, and parents certainly deserve to know, whether the answer in 2028 will simply be higher fees.

Finally, there is child safety. There can be no qualification on this. Parents must be able to trust that, when they leave their child at an early learning service, that child will be safe.

The coalition support strong and enforceable safety standards and welcome the bill's provisions linking grant funding to children's health and safety requirements. But a condition attached to a temporary wage grant cannot substitute for comprehensive, nationally consistent child safety arrangements across the sector. The Page report also reminds us that quality is about more than compliance; stable relationships matter.

Its review highlights the consequences of high workforce turnover and argues that continuity of care is particularly important for very young children. That gives us another reason to retain good educators. The coalition will not oppose the bill's package, but I want much more ambition for Australian families than another temporary Commonwealth grant.

I want an early childhood education system that values educators; that allows the family-day-care educator in a country town to participate on equal terms; that helps Gloucester create the places its community desperately needs; that recognises the realities faced by shift workers, farming families and small businesses; that puts child safety above everything else; and that trusts parents—because, ultimately, parents should not be forced into the childcare arrangement Canberra thinks they ought to choose.

They should have genuine options: centre based care, family day care, in-home care, grandparents, kinship care, caring for the kids themselves or some combination of all of them. The goal shouldn't be one-size-fits-all child care. It should be strong children, supported parents, valued educators and, most importantly, strong families, particularly in regional Australia.

That means building a system around how families actually live, not how Canberra assumes they live.