Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers (Special Account) (Extending Support and Strengthening Safety) Bill 2026
Mr WATTS (Gellibrand) (18:38): I rise to speak on the Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers (Special Account)(Extending Support and Strengthening Safety) Bill 2026. It's hard to think of a more important job in our community than caring for and educating our youngest Aussies. Parents entrust their children's wellbeing to the early childhood educators in their neighbourhood.
Our nation entrusts our collective future in the ability of our early childhood educators to get our youngest Australians off to the best possible start in a lifetime of learning. The vital nature of this kind of work hasn't been reflected in the past by what early childhood educators have been paid to do this important work. Before the Albanese Labor government came into office, early childhood educators were leaving their jobs in droves.
It wasn't because they didn't love their work. It wasn't because they weren't passionate about this important vocation. It was just that the pay didn't reflect the importance of the job.
That's now changing because of the 15 per cent pay rise delivered by the Albanese government nearly two years ago. It's why this bill is so important. It builds on these strong foundations to provide additional funding to continue this historic 15 per cent pay increase for early childhood educators.
It amends the Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers (Special Account) Act 2024, crediting the special account and extending the act's sunset date from 30 June 2028 to 31 December 2029. The special account is used to administer the early childhood education and care worker retention payment grant to ECEC providers to fund higher wages for eligible workers.
This bill provides certainty for workers and early childhood services. It also strengthens safety requirements by making compliance with the national safety standards a condition of receiving Commonwealth funding. This bill ensures that early childhood educators are remunerated appropriately, that we keep fee increases as low as possible for parents across the country and that we make sure that we keep our kids safe.
The extension of the pay increase helps to build and retain a quality, stable and dedicated workforce. This workforce creates a stronger early learning system and means more stability and more support for children and their families. Fundamentally, this bill recognises that the people who help educate our youngest Australians perform some of the most important work in our nation.
They help our children to learn. They help our children to grow. They help prepare children for school and for life, and they deserve to be valued accordingly.
The members of my community in Melbourne's west know this better than anyone. Point Cook, in my electorate in Melbourne's west, is known as the mum capital of Australia. It's home to more than 16,000 mothers.
In Truganina, in the next suburb over, one-fifth of the community is aged between zero and nine years of age. Caring for children is an essential part of my community. I saw this myself when I visited the Little Learners Day Care Centre in Truganina just this month.
During that visit, I met with 19 kindergarten children, along with their educators and the centre's leadership team. What struck me was not only the enthusiasm and confidence of the children but the way that the centre was actively encouraging them to participate in the decisions of the centre, to share their ideas and to express their views, creating little citizens.
The educators explained that these conversations help children to develop confidence, leadership skills and an understanding that their voices matter. Those are the sorts of foundations that help children transition successfully to school and beyond. They're the building blocks of lifelong learning.
Outcomes like this don't happen by accident; they're the result of skilled, dedicated professionals who invest their knowledge, care and expertise in children every single day. When we talk about early childhood education, it's important to remember that we're not simply talking about a service. The days of referring to this as 'child care' are long past.
We're talking about one of the most important investments that we can make. The first five years are a crucial window of opportunity in young lives—90 per cent of brain development occurs in those first five years. That's why our investment in early childhood education workers is an investment in Australia's future.
High quality early childhood education helps children to develop the cognitive, social and emotional skills that they need to thrive throughout their lives. It gives children the best possible start in life. It supports parents to participate in the workforce.
It helps businesses find the workers that they need. It strengthens productivity throughout the economy. Yet, for too long, there was a contradiction at the heart of this sector.
As a community, we recognise the importance of the work. It's implicit: when you drop your kids off at an early childcare centre, that is a profound act of trust. But for many years the importance of childcare workers, a workforce made up largely of women, was not reflected in their pay.
Too many educators were asked to take on significant responsibilities while being paid less than their skills and their contribution deserved. The consequences were predictable: services struggled to recruit workers, experienced educators left the profession, workforce shortages became more acute, children missed out on continuity of care and families found it harder to access the services that they rely on.
When the Albanese government was elected, the sector was facing serious workforce challenges and high levels of staff turnover. Educators were leaving jobs they loved because they simply couldn't afford to stay. That's why the Albanese government acted.
Almost two years ago, Labor delivered a 15 per cent pay increase for early childhood educators and teachers. We've committed $3.6 billion to extend the worker retention payment, supporting the wage increase for early childhood education and care workers to June 2028. When first introduced in 2024, we worked alongside the sector to implement the pay increase, and now we're acting again to ensure the support continues.
We're already seeing consequences from these reforms. Today, more than 215,000 educators, working in more than 11,600 services across Australia, are benefiting from this initiative. There are now more than 20,000 additional early childhood educators in the sector.
Job vacancies have decreased by over 31 per cent. Those figures matter because they represent real change. Educators have been able to remain in a profession that they love.
Workforces have been able to recruit new team members, and children have benefited from greater stability and continuity in their learning environment. In my electorate, in Melbourne's west, approximately 87 early childhood education services are receiving support through this program. Over 1,000 workers are benefiting from the wage increases supported by this policy.
They're not abstract numbers; they're educators working in neighbourhoods across my community in Melbourne's west. They're part of families, caring for the children of other families. They're helping children take their first steps in learning.
They're providing support to families, balancing work and caring responsibilities, and they're contributing to stronger local communities. The reforms being debated today build on these successes. We're locking in the pay rise for another two years to retain and grow these benefits.
When combined with the government's support for minimum wage rises, a typical full-time educator will receive more than $255 per week, and it will be $410 more per week for early childhood teachers. These reforms have been designed to deliver benefits not only for workers but also for families. The government's funding is tied to requirements that help limit fee increases for families.
That means better wages do not simply flow through to higher costs for parents. The funding extension will save the average family around $1,500 over the next two years, and we're demonstrating that it's possible to value workers properly while supporting families at the same time. That matters because early childhood education must be accessible.
It should be affordable, and it should be high quality. The bill also recognises another fundamental principle—that nothing is more important than the safety and wellbeing of children. That's why this bill also seeks to strengthen the safety of early childhood education.
Parents must have the confidence that, when they leave their child in care, their child will be safe. Children deserve services that meet the highest standards. We've already acted in response to incidents across Australia, including in my community.
We've banned the use of phones by educators and other staff when they're working directly with children. We've also implemented the National Early Childhood Worker Register, a secure nationwide database, launched earlier this year. It tracks early childhood education and care staff across the country to improve child safety and regulatory oversight.
We've also implemented mandatory child safety training, which 99 per cent of staff have done in the first couple of months. This legislation takes the next step. Australians rightly expect that government funding support should support services that are delivering safe and high-quality care.
This bill strengthens the connection between public funding and compliance with national safety standards. These reforms mean that, if a childcare centre wants funding for their staff, they have to meet the national safety standard—95 per cent of centres have already met that standard, but we want it to be 100 per cent. Services receiving support under these arrangements will be expected to meet the standards that children deserve and that families expect.
I know how important this is to families in Point Cook in my electorate. These parents often need to commute significant distances to get to their workplace, to their job, in order to pay the family mortgage. They rely on child care and being able to trust their children are safe in our childcare system.
Parents should not have to question whether their children are safe when they drop them off in the morning. Safety is non-negotiable. That's why we've acted.
This legislation means that there may be financial consequences where safety standards are not met. These reforms recognise that quality, safety and workforce stability are not competing priorities. They reinforce each other.
A stable workplace supports better outcomes for our children. Fair wages help attract and retain skilled educators. Strong standards help ensure quality care.
Together, these reforms help build the sort of early childhood education system Australians expect. This legislation sits alongside the Labor government's other reforms. We're delivering a stronger, fairer, more productive and more resilient nation.
This year we delivered a budget which is responsible, reforms and builds the resilience of our economy. We've been implementing cost-of-living relief, strengthening Medicare and delivering more housing and more aged care. We're dealing with the cost of living in a way that makes a real difference to families in my electorate in Melbourne's west and right across Australia.
We're implementing reforms to help children and their parents with the cost of living. Because of the major expansion of paid parental leave, 2,215 parents in my electorate have already benefited from extra support, and we're increasing the threshold for eligibility so that more parents can access paid parental leave. Paid parental leave will be expanded to a full six months, meaning families can spend more time at home with the newest member of their family.
We've boosted the pay of over three million workers by backing minimum wage increases and award wage increases. Starting on 1 July this year, the Albanese government has given every taxpayer a tax cut as part of our plan to deliver a series of five tax cuts, ultimately saving the average worker $2,800 per year. We're also continuing to deliver stronger health care.
We're delivering significant investments and reforms to secure our universal healthcare system and disability support. We're building on the significant investment in Medicare during our first term of government, making Medicare urgent care clinics permanent, injecting an additional $25 billion into public hospitals and helping more people see the GP for free—the biggest-ever boost to Medicare.
In my community in Melbourne's west, 90 per cent of GP appointments are now fully bulk-billed, and our cheaper scripts have already saved people in my community more than $13 million. We've also been helping young people into housing. Last month we announced that more than 13,000 young Australians will benefit from more than $300 million to build more than 520 homes across the country.
This builds on the Albanese government's broader investment in young people at risk of homelessness. This includes $9.3 billion over five years for the National Agreement on Social Housing and Homelessness. We're continuing to provide more essential support for the more than 200,000 older people in residential aged care.
This legislation, then, is part of a broader agenda—an agenda to deliver real change for Australians. We're ensuring that vital workers in our economy are fairly compensated for the work they do. When I visited Little Learners day care in Truganina, I saw young children being encouraged to speak up, share their ideas and build their confidence in their abilities.
I saw educators helping children develop skills that will stay with them long after they leave kindergarten. And I was reminded that behind every successful early learning experience is a skilled professional making a difference in a child's life. This bill recognises that contribution.
It helps to ensure those workers are valued fairly and are rewarded for it. It supports workforce retention, it benefits families, it strengthens safety and it continues to build a stronger early childhood education and care system for Australia. I commend the bill to the House.