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

Ms STEGGALL (Warringah) (10:34): I rise to support the Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers (Special Account) (Extending Support and Strengthening Safety) Bill 2026. Last week we marked Early Childhood Educators Day. For families across Warringah and Australia, early childhood education and care is essential to how they organise their lives—whether parents can work, whether the household budget adds up and whether their children have a safe and nurturing place to learn and then attend primary school prepared.

In those early childhood years, there is an education. It prepares them for that learning environment. We need a system that families can afford, values its workforce and puts the rights of children at the centre of every decision.

This bill makes a contribution to that, but there is much more to do. The bill supports the extension of the worker retention payment to 30 June 2028. It is by backed by a further $3.6 billion commitment.

It sustains the support for the 15 per cent wage increase and enables funding conditions relating to quality and child safety. I welcome that support. Early childhood educators carry enormous responsibility.

We expect them to understand child development, support additional needs, recognise risks and build trusting relationships with children and their families. Their remuneration should reflect those skills, and as a society we must value those skills. Child care is a fundamental workforce capability and early education for children.

It is also a sector that needs to attract capable people, train them properly and give experienced staff a reason to stay. Enthusiasm for the work cannot compensate indefinitely for inadequate pay or unsustainable conditions. A stable and competent team at a childcare facility allows educators to know a child, their routines, their communication and what reassures them when something has changed.

That continuity matters to learning, wellbeing and safeguarding. We should value the experience that is built up over years. Pay must sit alongside manageable workloads, proper supervision, paid professional development and pathways to progress.

We need educators and young people to see a sustainable career ahead of them in this sector, with time and support to do the job well. There's also a clear economic connection for the future of Australia. Every educator who helps a centre to keep its doors open enables other parents to work.

Investment in this workforce supports capabilities across our hospitals, our schools, our small businesses and the wider economy. Childcare affordability should be a central cost-of-living priority. For a family balancing housing costs, groceries and childcare fees, reducing the weekly childcare bill can provide meaningful, ongoing relief.

The benefit can go further. Affordable care can make an additional day of work worthwhile, allowing a parent to resume training or help someone return to their profession. It can improve both the household budget and the opportunities available to that family.

In 2022, I spoke in this House about a Warringah constituent working as a physiotherapist in an oncology ward. She told me then that she would have to leave her job because of childcare costs, with just $55 a day before tax left from working. It's just not worth it.

Consider what that means—a parent with very valuable skills weighing up continuing in their profession while a health service risks losing someone with valuable skills. The financial settings around child care can have really significant consequences to us as a country well beyond just the family paying the fees. So whilst this bill addresses the pay for early childhood educators, we have to talk about the impact on families and parents around the affordability of child care.

I've also spoken about my own experience juggling child care while studying and practising as a barrister. Like many parents, I relied on different forms of care and help from grandparents. The system just doesn't reflect the realities of working families.

Whilst it has improved, it has not come a long way. There are still massive discrepancies in our system, especially in our tax sector. It just infuriated me how those childcare costs, which were ultimately absolutely necessary for me to go and do my work—I simply couldn't be in two places at once—were not tax deductible.

I can't tell you how many times male colleagues would joke about the fact that they could go on their surfing trips or their ski trips and organise a couple of lectures for their continuing professional development at the same time, and then the entire trip was tax deductible. Yet that expense of child care, which was essential to me doing my job, was not. This is an area that must be addressed and rectified.

When mothers reduce their hours because of care responsibilities—among parents, it is overwhelmingly mothers that end up doing that, but it is changing slowly—because care is so unaffordable, the effects can extend through career progression, earnings and then, as we know, retirement savings. Giving parents a real choice about work and care is an important part of gender equality.

So we should also examine further ways to reduce what families actually pay, including investigating making work-related childcare expenses tax deductible. For many parents, child care is essential to earning an income, and that reality deserves proper recognition in our tax settings. The government should put reform firmly on the agenda and publish modelling of a deduction for eligible out-of-pocket costs, including its effect on workforce participation and household budgets.

The objective must be a fairer and more affordable system with practical support that makes working and caring more manageable. Affordability also requires attention to fees. The worker retention payment comes with limits on fee growth.

That is an important way of supporting higher wages for everybody doing an amazing job in this sector but also of protecting families from then bearing cost hikes. However, the limit on increases does not mean fees are frozen or affordable, so government must monitor the out-of-pocket costs parents are actually experiencing. In March 2025, following the Four Corners investigation, the National Children's Commissioner called for urgent national action on dangerous practices and gaps in regulation.

Parents were entitled to expect that those protections were already working. For affected children and families, the harm can be profound, and they absolutely deserve support, accountability and a response that prevents further harm. Reassurance must be backed by changes that work in the daily life of a centre.

So I welcome the national worker register, mandatory child-safety training and stronger transparency measures introduced through the wider reform program. These are important steps. They need consistent implementation, effective information sharing and regulators equipped to act quickly.

And that implementation requires care. If a provider fails, government must hold that provider accountable while safeguarding children and safeguarding educators' lawful wage entitlements. A response that drives experienced staff away could make an already struggling service less capable of improving.

Again, we must make sure that those standards work and that they are applied consistently, with accountability. We also need to make sure that educators can raise concerns confidently, with clear reporting channels and protection from retaliation. Safety depends on a culture in which concerns are heard and acted on, including when they are inconvenient for management.

We also need to be consistent in how we approach this question around children. A national framework for the rights of the child embedded in every piece of legislation that affects children is urgently needed. I've been calling for this for a long time.

Whilst we have ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, we have not enacted it in law, and we do not have a consistent system across all our systems that actually embeds the rights of children consistently, fairly and equally across all legislation that impacts their lives. The Australian Human Rights Commission's 2026 assessment identified the continuing absence of federal legislation that adequately incorporates all children's rights and holds the government accountable for protecting them.

We need to close that gap. Australia's commitments under the Convention on the Rights of the Child provide a foundation. Children's best interests must be a primary consideration.

Children must be protected from violence and neglect, and their views must be heard in ways appropriate to their age and maturity. Those principles should guide the substance of our laws and their implementation. Every bill affecting children should be tested for its impact on their rights, with clear duties for decision-makers and meaningful accountability when protections fail.

That approach must extend across early education, health, disability, family law, crime prevention, migration, the digital environment and the justice system. A child's fundamental rights—especially those of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children—should be consistently recognised whenever they encounter government or a publicly funded service. This bill is a worthwhile step.

It supports better pay for educators, strengthens expectations around safety and helps give the sector greater stability. But our ambition—I urge the government—should go further. Families need child care they can genuinely afford, educators need sustainable careers, and children need safety and rights embedded at the heart of the system.

We should treat early childhood education and care as essential national infrastructure, supporting children's development, parents' workforce participation and the strength of our economy. So I urge the government to build further action on affordability, workforce conditions, safety, a consistent approach and a national framework for the rights of every child.