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

Ms SITOU (Reid) (17:47): For most parents, there is a moment they'll never forget. It is the moment that they leave their child with someone else for the very first time. You give them one last hug, and then you walk away.

Then, for many parents, you sit in the car afterwards and you wonder: 'Are they going to be okay? Are they crying? Will there be someone there who will comfort them when they're upset?' In that moment, you are handing over the thing that matters most in your world—your child—and you are placing enormous trust in the educator standing in that room.

I've always found it strange that we trust early educators with our children, and yet, for too long, we've failed to properly value their work. These are skilled professionals, they are educators, and their contribution reaches well beyond the gates of the early childhood service. Early childhood education is also good economic policy.

It gives parents, especially women, the confidence and opportunity to return to work. When more parents can work the hours they want, businesses can access the skills they need, household incomes rise, workforce participation rises and the economy becomes more productive. So it's not just an investment into our children; it's also an investment into young families, women's economic participation and the strength of our whole economy.

Yet, for too many years, too many early educators were being forced to ask themselves a simple question: 'Can I afford to keep doing the job that I love?' When we came into government, the answer for far too many was no. In some services, staff turnover was as high as 40 per cent. Imagine loving your job.

Imagine knowing that your work helps shape a child's future—teaching them to count, to communicate and to believe in themselves—and then imagine having to leave that job because you cannot pay the bills. That was the reality for far too many early childhood educators, not because they stopped caring but because the system had stopped valuing their care. For too long, Australia relied on the goodwill of a predominantly female workforce.

We expected people to keep giving and giving because they cared. But care is not compensation, passion is not a substitute for decent wages and devotion to children should never be an excuse for low pay. This bill is about changing that.

The federal budget in 2024 was a great budget for many reasons, but there was a moment, when the Treasurer was delivering his speech, when we saw in the packed public gallery a group of women start to become emotional—some of them were shedding tears—because there was a budget measure that they saw as finally valuing their work and their place in our society.

And those women were all early childhood educators. I really remember that moment because it was a reminder that the work we do in this place has such a profound impact on people's lives. I went to a breakfast the next day that was organised by Community Early Learning Australia, and Michele Carnegie was there speaking.

Many of those early educators were still emotional about that change. And I think this is the important point: they feel they're finally being valued. I thank Michele and CELA for all their work in advocating for this pay rise for early educators.

At the heart of this bill is a very simple Labor principle: if you do important work, you should be paid fairly for it. And there are few jobs more important than educating and caring for our youngest Australians. Every day, early educators help children learn, grow and get ready for school.

They build confidence. They help them make friends. They support families.

And they make it possible for parents to go to work, to study or to run a business. It's a skilled and demanding job, and, for far too long, it has been undervalued. But it matters and they matter to our Labor government.

Dignity at work means decent wages. It means respect for skills, and it means recognising people whose work holds our communities together. The previous government, the coalition government, had nine years to deal with workforce issues in the early childhood sector, yet it never delivered the sector-wide reforms early educators needed.

So by the time Labor came to office, early educators were leaving in droves. Early childhood services were struggling to recruit and were closing, with real consequences for young families. A parent could not get the extra day of care they needed to return to work.

A centre with space for another room and more children to look after could not find enough educators to open it. And a child could lose an educator they knew and trusted. Workforce stability matters in every industry, but it matters most in early education because young children thrive on consistency.

It helps them build relationships and it helps them feel safe. High turnover makes all of that harder. Labor understood that this workforce crisis would not fix itself.

We had to make early education a profession people could afford to join and afford to stay in. That is why our approach has never been about one payment or one piece of legislation. We are building the workforce from the ground up, and we started with wages.

Our government funded a 15 per cent wage increase for eligible early childhood education and care workers through the worker retention payment, and we have consistently backed increases in the minimum wage. But wages are only part of the story. Our secure jobs, better pay reforms created a stronger supported bargaining stream.

And that matters in a sector like early childhood education. It is made up of thousands of different employers and, for too long, workers found it difficult to bargain effectively from service to service and from centre to centre. Those reforms have made multi-employer bargaining possible in sectors like early education.

That means early educators have a stronger collective voice, helping to improve wages and conditions. That is what Labor industrial relations reform looks like in practice. Through free TAFE, early childhood education has been a national priority area.

That means Australians can train for careers in early childhood education without being held back by tuition fees. For someone considering a career in this sector, that can remove one of the biggest barriers to getting started. Meanwhile, One Nation offers a very different approach.

Senator Hanson has described childcare spending as 'completely out of control' and, when asked about the government extending the wage increase for early educators, she responded by asking whether they had not already received a pay rise. That tells us something about how One Nation sees this sector. They see early childhood education as babysitting, not the skilled professional education and care that it actually is, and I fundamentally disagree with that view.

We fundamentally disagree with that view on this side of the House. For too long, work associated with care has been undervalued. We have too often expected people to accept low wages because of what they do.

We know that our measures for reforms in this sector are working. Since we introduced the worker retention payment in 2024, there are 20,000 more early educators—an eight per cent increase—and job vacancies in the sector are now down by more than 30 per cent. Fees for centres that receive the payment grew at half the rate of centres that did not sign up for the payment.

That's why, three months ago, our government announced it was locking in the pay rise for another two years to retain and grow these benefits, which will save the average family $1,500 a year. We are delivering on that promise through this legislation. It will mean a typical full-time educator is around $255 a week better off than in 2024.

For an early childhood teacher, that's around $410 a week. But this bill goes further than just funding. We are requiring, as part of this legislation, that early childhood education services strengthen quality and safety standards.

From July 2027, if services don't meet certain requirements under the national quality standard when it comes to safety, their funding may be cut or suspended. This bill is good for early childhood educators, it's good for parents and, most importantly, this bill is good for our children. At the beginning of this speech, I spoke about the trust parents place in early educators.

Every morning, across Australia, millions of parents hand over that trust. They kiss their children goodbye, they head off to work and they trust that someone will care for their child as they learn and grow. The educators who earn that trust deserve our respect and they deserve fair pay, because the work they do is not measured only in lesson plans or attendance records.

It is measured in a child finding confidence. It is measured in a child learning their first words and how to count. It is measured in friendships formed and in curiosity sparked.

The truth is that, years from now, most children won't remember every activity they did at preschool. But they will remember how they felt: safe, encouraged and valued. And behind those memories is an educator who helped shape the person they would become, and that is work worth valuing and investing in.