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

Ms KEARNEY (Cooper—Assistant Minister for Social Services and Assistant Minister for the Prevention of Family Violence) (12:33): I rise today to speak in support of the Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers (Special Account) (Extending Support and Strengthening Safety) Bill 2026. This is an important bill. It's important for the hundreds of thousands of early childhood educators who turn up every day to care for, nurture and educate Australia's children.

It is important for families who rely on early learning and care so they can work, study and participate in community life. It is important for our young ones who get the best start in life—learning, playing and growing. And it is important for our economy because we know that when early childhood education is strong, accessible and of high quality, everyone benefits.

This bill is about more than funding. It's about recognition, it's about dignity and it's about addressing the longstanding injustice that has affected generations of workers in feminised industries, generations of women. Every day, early educators help children learn and grow.

They support children's development during the most important years of their lives, they comfort children when they are upset and need help, they build relationships and trust with families, they help identify developmental concerns early and they create safe, nurturing environments where children can thrive. It's one of the most important jobs in this country, yet for far too long it has not been valued as such.

For decades, Australia has had a problem when it comes to how we value work. Not all work is treated equally, and work performed primarily by women has too often been undervalued simply because it has been seen as an extension of women's caring roles rather than as skilled professional labour. That is the truth of our history.

Whether it has been nursing, aged care, disability support, teaching, community services or early childhood education, work that involves caring for others has too often been taken for granted. The result has been lower wages, poorer conditions and persistent workforce shortages. I know this because I've seen it and I've lived it.

As a young nurse many years ago, fighting for a pay rise through my union, I was told: 'This is a vocation. You should not be asking for money. You should not be seeing this as a career'—and all this while I stood beside doctors, mostly men back then, earning a small fortune who would never in their lives be told such a thing.

Later in life, I had the privilege of leading the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation and the Australian Council of Trade Unions and I saw how this was not an individual experience. It was a systemic issue, one that plagues women and feminised industries in every community, in every state and in every country. I sat at bargaining tables, I participated in campaigns for pay equity and I listened to women explain why the work they do matters and why they deserve to be paid fairly for it.

And I have seen the frustration that comes when society says your work is essential but your pay packet says otherwise. The simple fact is this: when we undervalue care work, we undervalue the people who do it. And, when we undervalue the people who do it, we create workforce shortages that hurt everyone.

That is why Labor governments have long been at the forefront of advancing pay equity. It was the Gillard Labor government that understood this and the Gillard government, backed by strong unions, that took action. It strengthened equal remuneration laws and made significant reforms that helped workers in social and community services secure long-overdue pay increases through the Fair Work system.

These reforms were historic because they recognised something fundamental: inequality is not always deliberate, but it can become deeply embedded and ingrained in institutions and industries over time. The Albanese Labor government, a government that is over 50 per cent women, has continued that work. We've supported wage increases in aged care, we've supported pay rises for minimum wage workers in care sectors and beyond—and, to be honest, most of those minimum wage workers are women and they have been undervalued for too long—and we've backed these commitments with real funding because recognising value is important but putting resources behind that recognition is how change actually occurs.

This brings me to this bill. In August 2024, the Albanese government announced it would fund a 15 per cent wage increase for early childhood education and care workers. We did this because we knew the sector was under pressure.

Services were delaying expansion plans, rooms were closing, enrolments were being limited and providers across the country were struggling to attract and retain staff. The challenge was not a lack of commitment from educators; it was a workforce issue driven by years of inadequate pay. The worker retention payment was created to address that problem, and it has worked.

Since the payment was announced, there are around 20,000 more early childhood education and care workers in the workforce. That represents about an eight per cent increase. Job vacancies across the sector have fallen by almost 31 per cent.

The proportion of services operating with staffing waivers has fallen from 8.9 per cent to 4.3 per cent, and fees at the centres receiving the payment have grown at around half the rate of centres not participating in the scheme. These are significant outcomes—more workers, greater stability, lower workforce pressure and cost-of-living relief for families. That is why in June this year, the Albanese Labor government announced that we would lock in this pay rise for another two years.

This bill gives effect to that commitment. The bill credits an additional $3.6 billion to the wage justice special account and extends the life of that account until 31 December 2029. When combined with the government's support for minimum wage increases, a typical full-time educator will receive around $255 more per week than they did in December 2024, when these reforms began.

For early childhood teachers, that figure will be around $410 more per week. That is real money. It means greater financial security for workers, it means a stronger workforce and it means childcare services can continue to attract and retain the skilled workers they need.

Importantly, this funding continues to be tied to a commitment from services to limit fee increases. This matters because we know families are facing ongoing cost-of-living pressures. This extension is expected to save the average family around $1,500 over the next two years.

So this bill delivers benefits on all sides. It supports workers and it supports families. It also broadens access to the payments so that, for the first time, employees in all childcare subsidy approved services will be eligible.

There's another important element of this legislation. This bill recognises that quality and safety must always be at the centre of early learning. From July 2027, services receiving funding under this scheme will be required to meet the national quality standard relating to children's health and safety.

Around 95 per cent of services already meet this standard, and that is encouraging. But when it comes to children's safety, good is just not good enough. We should always strive to do better and indeed best.

The overwhelming majority of educators are deeply committed professionals who provide safe and nurturing environments for children every single day. This bill supports them by ensuring Commonwealth funding is linked to the highest expectations of quality and safety. As a parent dropping off your child at a service each morning, you should be able to trust that your child is safe.

That expectation should never, ever be negotiable. I also want to acknowledge what this means for my own community in Melbourne's north. In my electorate of Cooper there are many childcare services receiving support through the worker retention payment, with hundreds of workers benefiting from high wages.

I have been lucky enough to meet with so many of these childcare educators, and they have told me the absolute difference this has made not only to their lives but to their centres, to the parents and to the children they care for. These are educators whose contribution to our community is now being recognised finally and fairly. These are workers who can better afford to stay in a profession they absolutely love.

These are families who benefit from stable, experienced educators caring for their children. At its heart, this bill reflects a simple principle: work that matters deserves to be valued. For too long, some of the most important work in our society has been among the least rewarded.

This legislation continues Labor's proud tradition of addressing that imbalance. It continues the work of those who fought for pay equity before us, and it delivers practical benefits for workers, for children and for families right now. It says that early educators matter.

It says that caring work matters. It says that when women dominated industries have been undervalued for generations, governments have a responsibility to act. I am incredibly proud to be part of a government that has heeded that.

We support our early childcare educators, we support our nurses and we support everyone in the care economy. I'm proud to support this bill. I commend it to the House.

Debate adjourned. Ordered that the resumption of the debate be made an order of the day for a later hour.