Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers (Special Account) (Extending Support and Strengthening Safety) Bill 2026
Ms URQUHART (Braddon) (11:11): I rise to support the Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers (Special Account) (Extending Support and Strengthening Safety) Bill 2026. At its heart, this legislation is about respect. It's about properly valuing the educators who help our children learn and grow and help prepare them to be great learners when they go to school.
Every day, they bring skill, patience, care and professional judgement to one of the most important jobs in our country. For too long, that work, performed overwhelmingly by women, was underpaid and undervalued. This matters everywhere, but it matters in a special way in rural, remote and very remote communities.
In places across my electorate of Braddon and in other rural and remote parts of Australia, an early learning service is not simply another business on the main street; it's critical social infrastructure. A small centre may be the only service of its kind for many kilometres. An entire town can rely on one service.
Parents rely on that service so they can take a shift at the local hospital, aged-care home, school, farm, factory, mine or small business. Employers rely on it so they can find and keep workers. Children rely on it for consistent relationships, learning and support.
When a small service has to close a room, shorten its hours or turn families away because it cannot find educators, the effects travel right through that community. In a large city, families may have another option nearby. In a rural or remote town, there may be no practical alternative.
The next service may be a long drive away, and that distance adds cost, stress and time to a family's day. In very remote communities, losing educators can put the future of the whole service at risk. These centres also offer good, meaningful jobs close to home.
They create career paths for local people and give workers the chance to build their skills while contributing to their own community. But the importance and responsibility of the work was not reflected in the pay. Skilled educators were being asked to stay in jobs they loved while struggling to make ends meet.
Services were losing experienced staff, delaying expansion, limiting enrolments and in some cases closing rooms because they could not recruit enough educators. We can see the importance of this in communities right across Braddon. In Queenstown, new funding for early childhood education and care will help strengthen local capacity at a time when demand is expected to surge.
The reopening of the Mount Lyell copper mine after many years is expected to bring major investment and up to 300 jobs to the West Coast. As workers and families come to the region, access to early learning will be essential if Queenstown is to make the most of this opportunity. A mine cannot build a stable workforce without the services that allow families to live and work locally.
That means housing, health care, schools and child care. But a building alone cannot care for a child. Queenstown will also need qualified educators paid fairly and supported to stay so additional places can become reliable care for local families.
In Devonport, the Devonport childcare centre Malangenna will receive $4 million through the Albanese Labor government's Building Early Education Fund to expand and refurbish. The project will provide up to 70 additional places, almost doubling the service's capacity, and create a modern early learning environment that's collated with the TasTAFE Devonport campus.
Those additional places will make a real difference to Devonport families, and the expanded centre will need workers. Labor's free TAFE places are supporting new educators to join the workforce that will be needed to staff that centre. Parents in Latrobe, just a bit further along the road, recently faced the loss of a vital local service after St Patrick's Child Care Centre closed.
The Albanese Labor government provided $334,000 from the Community Child Care Fund to Lady Gowrie Tasmania to secure an interim service which protected continuity of care for local children and families. A temporary centre opened in February this year, with capacity for those 55 children who came from St Patrick's. Instead of facing a severe local shortage, Latrobe now has a service that is operating and is on a pathway to expand, with a new purpose-built centre almost completed by Lady Gowrie.
That means more places for families and greater confidence that parents can remain in work, training and the community that they call home. Securing and expanding the building is only part of the answer. The 15 per cent pay rise will not only help retain those dedicated educators already serving Latrobe, it also creates good opportunities for new educators, who will be needed.
It means local investment can translate into dependable, high-quality care, not empty rooms waiting for staff. In rural and remote places, fair pay is a workforce and service continuity measure. Recruiting qualified educators to remote locations is difficult at any time, and losing even one worker can affect the number of children a centre can safely care for.
The 15 per cent pay rise recognises the value of educators and gives centres a stronger chance to attract and keep their workforces. These are the reasons why the Albanese Labor government funded a 15 per cent pay rise for early childhood education and care workers. Now, we're acting to lock that pay rise in for a further two years, backed by an additional $3.6 billion.
This investment is already making a difference. Since the payment was first announced, around 20,000 more people have joined the early childhood education and care workforce, and job vacancies have fallen by almost 31 per cent, which is a really good sign. That means more educators in centres, more stable relationships for children as they bond with their carers and a stronger chance that services can keep rooms open and welcome more families.
When combined with the government's support for minimum wage increases, a typical full-time educator will be $255 a week better off, and an early childhood teacher will be $410 a week better off compared with December 2024. That is a real difference to household budgets. It is also a clear message.
These are skilled professionals. Their work matters, and they deserve to be paid fairly. They look after the most precious people in our communities, and they should be recognised fairly.
A 15 per cent pay rise also sets people up for the future. It means better superannuation and a more secure retirement income. I've seen what a difference the pay rise can mean in the lives of people in Braddon.
Emma, who works at the Discovery Early Learning Centre in Ulverstone, has a husband, Jamie, who is a disability care worker in Devonport. Because of the 15 per cent pay rise that Emma received, together with their first home buyer assistance, they were able to buy land and build their very first home—a home of their own that they did not see before this 15 per cent came into play.
That is what good policy can do. When governments open the door to opportunity and when pay properly recognises the value of people's work, lives can change. For Emma and Jamie, it meant greater security, a place to call their own and a chance to build their future in the community where they work and contribute greatly.
The legislation also protects families. Government funding for pay rises is tied to a commitment from services to limit fee increases for parents. The extension of the 15 per cent pay rise is expected to save the average family around $1,500 over the next two years.
Funding for the 15 per cent pay rise also strengthens quality and safety because it's tied to national safety and quality standards, as it should be, because parents deserve to have confidence that their children are safe, supported and receiving high-quality early learning. For regional communities, workforce stability is not an abstract policy goal. It can be the difference between a centre opening or closing a room, between a nurse returning to work or staying home, between a small business filling a roster or cutting its hours and between a family remaining in a town or actually moving away to somewhere else.
When we back early educators, we back children, families, local employers and the future of our towns. We make good local jobs more secure, we help small services keep their doors open, and we give rural, remote and very remote communities a fairer chance to thrive. Child care has changed significantly.
I remember, over 40 years ago, I used to drop my twins off at the Humpty Dumpty centre in Ulverstone. Things have changed a lot since then. That was almost just an opportunity for me to go and do a few things by having a bit of a babysitting centre.
That is no longer the case. Early childhood education sets our children up for a life of good learning and great opportunities by the time they get to school. These early educators deserve more than our thankyou.
They deserve our respect and they deserve our recognition, but they also deserve decent pay. This bill delivers that while supporting affordable, safe and reliable early learning for families. I commend the bill to the House.