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

Mr ZAPPIA (Makin) (11:22): I add my support to this legislation and also endorse so many of the comments that have been made by my colleagues who have spoken in support of it as well. In fact, when I stand here after listening to all of them, it is difficult to add anything further that hasn't already been said. Even just now, the member for Braddon, when she was speaking about her experiences, again summed up why this legislation is indeed so important, and why this whole sector—that is, the childcare sector—is so important to our society and our economy today.

As other speakers have pointed out, this legislation also delivers on another Albanese government commitment that was made earlier on this year. Importantly, it locks in the worker retention payment for childcare workers for another two years. that is critical because, for too long, what we were seeing was people working in this industry having to leave the industry because they were not being paid fairly, as so many other speakers have said.

The reality is that we do live in a very much changing society. When I look at what was happening many years ago and at what I would refer to as the workforce participation numbers of women, say, 50 years ago, I see that around 50 per cent of women aged between 15 and 65 were what I would refer to as in the labour force some 50 years ago, compared to today where the figure is around 77 per cent.

What we have seen over that period is an increase of women in the labour force of around 50 per cent, and that has arisen for a number of reasons. It dates right back to the days of the Whitlam government, where the Whitlam government recognised the importance of increasing women in the workforce both for their own ability and because it was good for the national economy.

In doing so, one of the things that was recognised at the time was the need to increase support for how children would be looked after if their mums were going back to work or entering the workforce. That initiated what I would call the support for the childcare sector, more broadly, right back then. Over the years, that has continued to change.

I understand that around the country today we have some 15,000 or more childcare centres. That includes 9,700 long day care centres and a workforce of around 268,000 people in the sector. I can say from my own experience that was not the case when I was at school and growing up, because childcare centres were almost non-existent.

It just demonstrates how much society has changed, and again it's a change for the better. I say that because, as so many of the other speakers have made the point, children in those early years are very much at a critical stage of their lives, but they're also at a stage where, if we set up a centre that provides them with every opportunity not only to be cared for but to increase their knowledge and to begin to educate them, it makes an incredible difference to their years ahead.

We've seen that in initiatives by previous governments, where the people who work within these centres are now not only simply caring for them but actually educating them along the way. Over the years, I have visited several of the childcare centres, and I have seen the kind of work that the childcare centre workers do. I've also seen the pressures that they come under.

Unfortunately, in years gone by, we had a situation and a system where there were too many operators that were not only running their centres on a shoestring and providing inadequate staffing levels, which meant that the children were not getting the support that they were needing. The workers were also being underpaid. That has changed as a result of initiatives of particularly past and present Labor governments.

So today we have a much better system in place. That doesn't mean to say that it is perfect. Again, from my experience, I know that the turnover of staff in many of those centres a few years ago was incredibly high and even the sector itself was somewhat insecure because of that.

Other speakers have referred to the fact that during the COVID years it was incredibly difficult for some of the centres to continue to provide the services et cetera. This Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers (Special Account)(Extending Support and Strengthening Safety) Bill 2026 now tries to ensure not only that there is security within the sector and the workers are paid fairly and commensurate with the work that they are doing but that there is stability across society more broadly to enable the mums and perhaps even the dads, in cases where there is shared responsibility, to get back into the workforce if they want to do so.

If they're going to do so, we need to ensure that the centres are properly resourced and supported, and that's what this legislation does. I note that the legislation provides a 15 per cent pay rise for the next two years, and I believe that will stabilise the sector for that period. I also note that there has been an incredible amount of support for those childcare centres, particularly by the United Workers Union, which has campaigned over the years for better remuneration for the workers that that work in the childcare centres.

I believe it is largely because of those campaigns that we have got the support for them that we now have. As other speakers have said, this now means that, over the next two years, parents will be on average some $1,500 better off because of the increase that the government has provided to the childcare centres per se. Having said all of that, I am concerned that there are still some centres that do not provide the level of care that most parents would expect.

In recent weeks in South Australia, we saw several centres closed because of that. That is a concern because parents entrust their little children to these centres, and there is nothing more precious to them than their little children. We need to ensure, as governments and as a society, that when those children are entrusted into a system, they are properly cared for and looked after and that parents can get on with their work without having to worry about what is happening to their children.

So I simply make the point that in this sector it is not simply about wages; it's also about ensuring that there are standards and that those standards need to be adhered to. As I said earlier, over the years I have visited several of the centres, and I commend not only the people that work there but also some of the operators who go out of their way to ensure that the children are looked after.

The workers that I have spoken to over the years genuinely care for those kids. The level of care that I have seen gives me confidence that we do have a sector out there that is doing what we would like them to do. But we also need to ensure that there is proper oversight of how those centres are run.

We saw over the years an explosion in the number of childcare centres around the country. I've seen centres open and I've seen centres close. It is essentially because there have been changing trends.

We're now seeing parents that are working from home a lot more than in the past. Again we are seeing changing trends. One of the other things that has occurred as a result of more women participating in the labour force is grandparents looking after kids a lot more than we might have seen in years gone by.

I've heard of requests from grandparents that maybe there should be some level of compensation provided to them for providing the very service that the childcare centres are providing. That tells me that we live in a society that is constantly changing. When the Rudd and Gillard governments came into office, we also instituted policies whereby we expected childcare workers to also increase their own education so that they were then considered to have additional qualifications.

It was also important, if we're going to ask people to be more highly qualified, that they also be properly compensated for that in itself. I believe that this legislation is in keeping with the faith that if you're going to be more highly educated, then of course you should be compensated appropriately. We all talk in this place, almost on a daily basis, about cost-of-living pressures.

They're real and they're out there. We know that that has a number of effects on families. The first effect is that, particularly where there's a husband and wife and children in a family, it almost compels both parents to go out and work.

It also means that those families are having to pay out money for child care or whatever other services they need for their children. For them to be able to go out and work, they need support. It's not going to happen unless families are supported through legislation like this, which effectively provides income to the centres which are providing the service so that, in turn, they can keep their own costs down a little.

As a result of the Albanese government's legislation, which provides additional payments to those centres, we have seen that those centres have managed to keep their fees down. If they do that, that in turn allows more parents to go out and work and try and cope with the cost of living. There is another important element to all of this.

It allows both parents to enter the workforce. For too long, our country and many other countries were missing out on the contribution those parents would be able to make to society, to our economy, by being in the workforce. We now have, certainly in this country, opportunities for women to get into the workforce that simply did not exist in years gone by.

That is a good thing for the nation, it's a good thing for the individual and it's a good thing for the families. By supporting early childcare centres through this support to the people that work within them, we're providing not only stability within the centres but opportunities to get the best out of the people of this country by enabling them to enter the workforce and pursue the careers and opportunities that they would otherwise not be able to.

With those remarks, I commend the legislation to the House.