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

Mr GREGG (Deakin) (19:07): I rise to speak in favour of the Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers (Special Account) (Extending Support and Strengthening Safety) Bill 2026. This is an important piece of legislation, and it gives me great pleasure to support its passage through this parliament. Every child deserves a safe and supportive learning environment, and we can secure that by ensuring that the professionals we rely on to maintain and sustain it are paid fairly and that we retain those important professionals to support families and communities across Australia.

Paying workers fairly, boosting staff retention and tying funding to improved centre safety are good for workers, good for our youngest Australians and good for families. Since my election and even before, I've spent quite a lot of time in various early childhood education and care settings. I've read lots of stories and put on lots of voices that I won't repeat in this parliament.

I may want to, but I won't. But what I can see is the value of strong professional relationships. What I see is those very deliberate decisions made by professional early childhood educators who observe the behaviours of every child and think critically about when to intervene, when not to intervene, when to ask guided questions and when to just let play continue.

It is a clinical practice profession. Evidence emerges and changes all the time. It is an important and intricate profession and one that we need to treat with the respect that it deserves because, as more and more evidence comes in, we realise the importance of those early years as part of the developmental continuum and how crucial it is that we create learning environments that foster the development of those social capabilities and those foundational literacy skills; make sure that that behavioural and social learning is done in a way that supports positive relationships between peers and adults; and make sure, as well, that that language acquisition can support the achievement of different developmental milestones.

I see that professional language used by educators across my electorate. My electorate has about a thousand early childhood education and care workers. Thanks to the wage increases locked in by this legislation combined with the increases to the minimum wage supported by this government, early childhood educators working full time will see about $255 a week more in their bank account.

For early childhood teachers, that goes closer to $410 per week for an average worker in that profession, making an enormous difference and making remaining in that profession financially sustainable so that they can continue to contribute over many, many years, because we know it is a younger profession than most. Retention is something that is crucial to success in an early childhood education and care setting.

The evidence is consistent. It is the building of relationships with the young people and with families that enables the delivery of effective and supportive learning environments. Years of high turnover, quick staff changes and inconsistent staff ratios and presentations meant that families were losing confidence in early childhood education and care and that the quality of that support was deteriorating with time.

And that had a cyclical effect where the motivation of workers was reducing. We were losing good people at a great pace because, as other speakers in this debate have pointed out, you could make more money from working at the supermarket, working at a pub or at another job than doing some of the most important work in our community. And that had to change.

So the Albanese Labor government stepped up. When the Fair Work Commission said that higher wages were important, they stepped up and locked in a 15 per cent pay rise. And now we stand here today extending that support, making a huge difference to those workers.

When you combine that with the other increase, to the minimum wage, this is making a huge difference to that important workforce. And we can see the importance in the lives of our young people. Early childhood education and care has a particularly profound impact for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds.

I've heard a lot of people in this House and elsewhere talk about early childhood education and care as if it's just The Baby-Sitters Club. It is not. It is a clinical practice profession.

It is important work making sure that this crucial stage in the learning journey of our young people is supportive and nurturing, that it's setting our young people up for success. As I said, that is even more crucial for our most disadvantaged. So this isn't just about providing a babysitting service so people can go to work.

Although the economic aspect is important, this is about kids. That is why it's so important that this bill also ties that additional funding to ensuring safety in our learning environments. We have national standards, reasonable expectations for safety, and it is crucial that the investment of taxpayer money is tied to community expectations, making sure that a safe, secure and supportive learning environment is provided wherever these funds are directed.

That's incredibly important and a change that I think should be welcomed across the chamber. It's time that we finally recognise that this workforce has been undervalued for far too long. It's been seen as just a simple time filler, as looking after the kids while something more important is going on.

But this is about as important as work gets. Whenever you visit a kindergarten you can almost spot straightaway the kids that were engaging in earlier learning at three years old or two years old. Their confidence is increased, and their ability to communicate, to share and to manage conflict between one another is noticeable even from a distance.

And it all comes down to the professionalism of the staff. You can walk into an early learning environment and learn a lot right away by looking at the physical environment itself and the interactions all of the staff are having with the young people as well as with the families because, as is often said—and it's a bit trite—it does take a village to raise a child.

It is that relationship—that trust and confidence between parents and other caregivers and those professionals—that makes a huge difference. It ensures that consistency of learning. It makes sure that we can share observations of those important developmental milestones.

That inclusion of a professional educator, particularly in the early years, also provides a great opportunity for interventions where things might be running a little off course. They can identify where some additional learning support will be beneficial to young people or where there might be some additional support needs that can be addressed with the right interventions.

Because these people are working with young people every day in a clinical practice profession, they will spot those little intricacies that you won't necessarily spot if there is just one child in the family. So having that professional available as a resource all of the time is incredibly valuable for families. There is an inherent value of having kids spend time with kids—building relationships with one another, managing conflict and managing compromise.

We live in a society now where not everyone has five or six siblings that they can learn these things from, so creating an environment where kids can be kids and learn from each other in an organic way is really important. Structuring it is also important, making sure that play based learning is very purposeful, delivering learning opportunities for our young people and challenging them across skill sets.

As I said earlier, the role of an educator, even in play based learning, which is so important, varies across the learning cycle. Sometimes it is allowing those organic lessons to be learned. Other times, it's asking questions or perhaps redirecting what they're doing to make sure that they're getting the maximum possible learning benefit.

Sometimes, it's joining in the play activity to build those relationships, but that, again, is a set of clinical decision-making. It's all very purposeful. When you see a great early educator do their thing, it is absolutely magic to watch.

It is also critical to make sure that we have enough educators in every single early education environment. We saw, before this 15 per cent pay rise, how often centres were applying for exemptions for ratios, which is code for staff shortages. For us to have effective learning, we cannot allow staff shortages.

That means ensuring that we have a sufficient workforce to go in every day and, if we need an additional bit of support, ensuring that there are people we can call up to help. The key in this space is ensuring that we actually have long-term staff who are happy in their jobs and show up to work all the time. It really shows when you go into a learning centre that has staff who have been there for many years and are very experienced.

They've been able to build those trusting relationships. Even when one person might be sick, you know that it's just one locum or one casual with a very experienced workforce around them. That can create safe, supportive and educationally valuable environments for our young people.

Back in the bad old days, when you go into centres and it's a different group of casuals every single day, it's a red flag. We need to make sure that we setting this workforce up for success, and, with that, have appropriate pay and conditions, respect for the workforce, learning opportunities for the workforce so they feel like they can grow in their professional capability and career opportunities, and making sure that they're receiving the respect they need to pay the bills.

That still matters; it is still work. We have to make sure that you can have a good life where you can meet your needs and still engage in this incredibly rewarding profession. There are far easier ways to make a buck than to work in early childhood education and care.

It is a great workforce; it is a workforce that cares deeply about our young people. We have to back them as well. I know the thousands of early childhood education and care workers can do a fantastic job having walked into those environments and seen the interactions they're having with kids, their parents and their grandparents.

They are doing magic work every single day. It's tiring, but it's really important work. They deserve our respect, and, more importantly, they deserve the pay that they need to be able to go about their professional life and continue to contribute all the wonderful things they do to the lives of our young people.

For too long, we allowed this industry to fall by the wayside. We had declining quality and shortages, often in really vulnerable communities—regional communities, outer suburban communities and disadvantaged areas—because those parents often didn't have the spare cash to pay for early childhood education and care, and they were missing out. What we know from the evidence is that those are the students who stand to gain the most from a high-quality early education.

Quality is key. Low-quality early education does not provide those developmental benefits. It is quality early education where we see secure relationships built, where students have the opportunity and exposure to language and are encouraged to grow their vocabulary, specific social skills and their early problem-solving skills to focus on supporting the achievement of those milestones.

This doesn't happen by accident; this doesn't happen by leaving the kids alone on the floor and hoping it will happen. It takes more than just a full day of Lego. It is a very well-curated learning experience that these professionals do incredibly well.

As I said earlier, it is a clinical practice profession. We learn all the time. More evidence emerges on ways to engage with students from different backgrounds.

Continuous learning in this profession is crucial, like it is in so many. This is always an evolving space. We have a lot of students with various support requirements, and those all need to be addressed in innovative and professionally guided ways, as well as ensuring there is a professional workforce where you can build those collegial relationships and professionals can learn from more experienced professionals and develop their capabilities over the course of their professional journeys.

It is incredibly important, and you don't achieve that in an environment full of casuals who are wishing they can get out of the profession as soon as possible because they're not paid enough to live. This is going to the very practical. This is going to ensuring that we set ourselves up to be able to have that workforce where there is retention of staff, where capabilities are developed, where learning environments are curated to be the most supportive possible and where kids are kept safe.

These reforms make specific provision for that and to ensure that there is sustainability of service provision for families across Australia. While my focus is on the experience of young people, this is a crucial service for families as well. It ensures that people can participate in the workforce, participate in their communities and pay the bills as well.

We know parents need to pay the bills and early educators need to pay the bills, and that takes time and money. We need to be investing in this crucial workforce to ensure that families can do what they need to do but also that our students, whether our most vulnerable young people in disadvantaged communities or young people who are about to enter school, are achieving those developmental milestones.

We need to make sure we're setting our kids up for success, and that means looking at learning as a continuum that we have to set. There is a range of capabilities we expect our young people to learn, and there will be developmental milestones for each of them that all need to be achieved. Having written a lot of rubrics in my time, I can tell you that that takes a lot of thought and a lot of effort.

Sometimes, when things don't go to plan, it does mean being able to adapt to environmental changes and to challenges. We know that great early childhood educators know exactly what's going on in the lives of these young people. They know what's going on in the family.

They know when there's conflict. They know when there's risk. They know when things might be going a little bit tough and a little bit of extra support is required.

They can read the behaviour and the language of young people and provide them with the support they really need. We need to make sure that those professionals are supported because building relationships cannot be done just once in a blue moon. It takes continual contact, continual effort and continual engagement to build the kind of relationships necessary to really contribute to those developmental milestones for our young people.

This bill really gets to the crux of it. It is making sure that we have a reasonably paid, consistent early education workforce; that we are backing them in; that we are backing in our young people; and that we are doing everything we possibly can as a government to set our young people up for success and to support families to cover the cost of living, particularly as times get tough.