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

Ms TEESDALE (Bass) (10:45): I rise today to support the Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers (Special Account) (Extending Support and Strengthening Safety) Bill 2026. Every day, early childhood educators help our youngest Australians learn, grow and prepare for their future. They comfort children when they are upset.

They encourage them when they're uncertain. They help them learn how to communicate, solve problems, build friendships and understand the world around them. It is skilled, demanding and deeply important work.

As a former teacher, I know exactly how much education does. It does not begin when a child walks through the primary school gates for the first time; learning begins much earlier. The experiences children have in their first five years shape their confidence, curiosity and development for the rest of their lives.

I was reminded of that recently when I visited Discovery Early Learning Centre in Launceston during Early Learning Matters Week. It was wonderful to spend time with children as they built, explored, played and solved problems together. With my background in education, it was particularly lovely to be back in a learning environment and to watch those interactions take place.

The children were, of course, having a fantastic time. Play is not simply something children do to pass time; play is how young children learn. It is how they develop communication skills, that all-important confidence and creativity.

It's how they learn to share, negotiate and form friendships. It's how they begin to understand themselves, other people and the extending world around them. At Discovery I moved between wonderfully creative play spaces.

There were blocks, a pretend dental clinic, book-making activities and even a fishing hole. To a casual observer, they might look like simple games, but educators know how much more is happening there. Those spaces do not appear by accident.

Educators have spent time considering what children need, what will capture their interest and how each activity can support their learning and their development. The dental clinic encouraged imagination, communication and collaboration. Book-making created opportunities for drawing, early writing and storytelling.

The blocks support spatial awareness, problem solving and fine motor skills. The fishing hole encouraged children to explore and work together. Every single element within that space had a purpose, even when, from a child's perspective, they were simply having fun.

That takes skill, it takes preparation and it takes professional judgement. It also takes an enormous amount of energy. Most adults forget that playing and engaging with young children for an entire day can be utterly exhausting.

Their energy is truly boundless. Anyone who has worked with young children knows the truth of this. Educators must have patience, creativity, adaptability and stamina.

They need to be attentive to the individual needs of each child while creating a safe and welcoming environment for the whole group. They build trusted relationships with families. They observe children's development closely.

They plan these meaningful learning experiences. They respond to challenges and very large emotions calmly and professionally. Yet, for too long, the value of this work was simply not reflected in what educators were paid.

Early childhood education and care is one of the most highly feminised workforces in Australia. Over 95 per cent of the workforce are women. Like too many professions dominated by women, this work has historically been undervalued.

For generations, we've treated some of the skills traditionally associated with women, such as caring, nurturing, communicating and educating young children, as if these skills somehow come naturally and therefore should not command the same recognition as other professional skills. But there is nothing unskilled about educating a room full of young people. There is nothing simple about recognising changes in a child's development, helping them regulate their emotions, supporting additional needs, communicating with families and creating an environment where every child feels safe enough to learn.

This is professional work, and the people doing it deserve professional recognition. They deserve more than our thanks. They deserve fair pay, secure employment and the opportunity to build a lasting career.

That is why the Albanese Labor government introduced the worker retention payment and funded the 15 per cent wage increase for early childhood education and care workers. For around 400 early childhood education and care workers in my electorate of Bass, that support is making a real difference. That is 400 workers across Launceston, George Town, Scottsdale, Flinders Island and West Tamar whose work is being better recognised and better remunerated.

For those educators, a pay rise is not an abstract number. It means some extra breathing room when the electricity bill arrives. It helps with the weekly grocery shop and might help cover rent, mortgage, petrol, school expenses and all those ordinary costs that the households manage every week.

Combined with increases to minimum wages supported by this government, this means a typical full-time educator is now around $255 a week better off than they were when the payment began in December 2024. For a full-time early childhood teacher, that figure is around $410 a week. Over a year, that is a significant difference to a household budget.

But this policy was not just about giving people a much-deserved pay rise; it was also about keeping skilled educators in the sector and attracting more people to join it. We now have strong evidence that this is working. Since the pay rise was announced, around 20,000 more people have joined the early education and care workforce.

Job vacancies across the sector have fallen by more than 31 per cent. More than 215,000 educators at over 11,600 services are benefiting from this payment. That makes a huge difference on the ground.

Services are better able to staff each of their rooms, educators have more stable teams around them, and more children can access that care and early learning that they need. It means experienced educators choosing to remain in the profession that they love rather than leaving simply because they need a higher income to survive. That stability matters enormously to our children right across Australia.

Our young children thrive when they can form consistent and trusting relationships with their educators. But, when staff are continuously changing, children lose those relationships and services lose experience. When educators stay, they know the child.

They know the family. They understand their strengths, their interests and their individual needs. Those relationships with parents and carers are critical, and it helps these educators to know when something might change for a child.

Providing that consistency and that security allows children to feel safe, to participate and to learn. That workforce retention is not separate from quality; it is fundamental to it. So, in June this year, our Albanese Labor government announced a further $3.6 billion to extend this worker retention payment for another two years, through to June 2028, and this bill gives effect to that commitment.

It locks in that support for higher wages. It gives educators and services greater certainty about the years ahead. It will also expand the reach of the payment.

For the first time, employees across all approved service types will be able to benefit, provided that that service meets the requirements of the program. That means more educators receiving the recognition and support that this payment provides. Importantly, we're also making sure that higher wages are not simply passed straight through to families in the form of higher fees.

Services receiving the worker retention payment must limit their fee increases. Since this payment was introduced, fees at participating centres have grown at around half the rate at the centres that are not receiving it. Over the next two years, that fee restraint is expected to save the average family around $1,500, and that is so important.

Families should not be forced to choose between fair wages for the person educating their child and affordable early learning. We can and should work towards both. This bill also strengthens the connection between government funding and children's safety.

From July next year, services receiving this wage funding will be required to meet quality area 2 of the national quality standard, which relates to children's health and safety. If a service does not meet that standard, its funding can be cut or suspended. About 95 per cent of our services are currently meeting that standard, which is encouraging, but it's not enough.

When parents leave their child at an early learning service, they should be able to do so with confidence that their child will be safe, supported and well cared for. In particular, when taxpayers are investing billions of dollars into supporting the sector, it is very reasonable to expect providers receiving that funding to meet nationally established safety standards.

Public funding comes with public responsibilities. I need to be clear that strengthening those requirements is not about diminishing the professionalism of the educators in this field. The overwhelming majority of educators that I meet and that I have worked with over the past 15 years are truly extraordinary people who care deeply about the children that they work with.

But this ensures that providers have the systems, policies, staffing arrangements and workplace cultures that allow those educators to do their jobs to the best of their abilities. Fair wages, workforce stability, quality and safety are not separate ambitions. They reinforce each other.

When workers are properly valued, they are more likely to stay. When experienced educators stay, children benefit from these consistent relationships. When services have a stable and supported workforce, they are better able to maintain their strong practices and that positive safety culture.

When families have confidence in early learning, more children can benefit from the opportunities of the high-quality early education that is provided. There's also a much bigger story here about what early education and care means for our communities more broadly. Our early learning gives children the opportunity to build skills and confidence that will stay with them when they begin school and right throughout their lives.

It gives parents greater freedom to return to work, increase their hours, undertake training or pursue other opportunities. It helps employers access the workforce that they need. In regional communities like mine, where access to workers and access to child care are often closely connected, that matters enormously.

None of this can happen without the educators that make the system work every day. We cannot say that the first five years of a child's life are the most important while treating the people who work with them during those years as an afterthought. We cannot describe early education as essential while expecting educators to survive on wages that do not reflect the skill and the responsibility that their work requires.

And we cannot build a stronger early learning system without attracting, retaining and supporting a strong professional workforce. To the educators I've met right across Bass I want to say thank you. Thank you for your patience, your care, your creativity and your skill.

Thank you for the environments that you create, the relationships that you build and the confidence that you inspire in our youngest children. Importantly, this bill is about more than just saying thank you. It is about backing those words with action.

It is about recognising that this is skilled work and paying people accordingly. It is about making it possible for talented educators to remain in a profession that they love. It is about giving families greater stability and keeping early learning affordable, and it is about ensuring that as we invest more public money into this sector the safety and the wellbeing of children remain at its centre.

The work our educators do in those early years stays with children for a lifetime, and our communities are stronger because of it. They deserve to be valued, they deserve to be supported and they deserve wage justice. I am proud to support this bill and I commend it to the House.