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

Ms SPENDER (Wentworth) (13:15): I rise to speak on the Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers (Special Account) (Extending Support and Strengthening Safety) Bill 2026. This bill credits $3.7 billion to the early childhood education and care workers special account, used to make the early childhood education and care worker retention payment, and extends the sunset date to 31 December 2029.

I support the government in what it is seeking to do here. It is seeking to pay early educators more, and I think that is critical. It's seeking to reward these people, who make a huge difference to Australians and kids across our country, and ensuring that they can provide affordable care tied to enforceable safety standards.

I believe these are urgent and important goals. I particularly want to shout out to the early childhood education workers who supported my family. I remember one year I had three kids in early childhood education, so it was quite the drop-off when I got to drop off all my three kids to the same place, and I was delighted with the care that they received, the personalisation and knowing that they were in safe hands and that I could go to work and do the things that I thought were important while knowing that my kids were cared for.

They make a huge difference. We're very lucky to have wonderful organisations in Wentworth, including SDN Paddington at Fiveways and KU Rushcutters Bay, which I particularly use. I know that we have many, many great providers there, and I'm extremely grateful for them.

But I want to be honest that we have some significant challenges in the early childhood education space, and we need to be clear on them. Australia's early childhood sector, which is a pillar of our community—it is integral, and the Prime Minister has said in his own words that he would like it to be his legacy—is showing significant cracks. We've had multiple reviews of the sector.

The Productivity Commission and the ACCC have conducted lengthy investigations and demonstrated the range of issues and the fragility of the sector in terms of providing both affordable and high-quality care. Particularly in recent months, parents have been absolutely horrified to learn of widespread mistreatment and even sexual abuse that has happened to Australia's most vulnerable in their most formative years, in places where parents believe our kids will be safe.

This is absolutely horrifying, and I know the parents across my community are worried about this. I want to recognise that this isn't for lack of government intervention. The government has been active in this space.

The government has increased, for instance, childcare support, and it's grown significantly, reaching $16 billion a year, our 11th largest program in the budget forward estimates. So this is enormous. But, even as quality has been a focus for obvious and very serious reasons, the ability to provide adequate care is also beginning to fray.

Childcare deserts persist across Australia, and not just in areas we would typically expect. In my electorate of Wentworth, a few short stops from Sydney's CBD, we are having challenges in retaining the childcare providers that we have. This is a time when the state government is looking to substantially increase the supply of housing in my electorate.

We're ready to accommodate more housing, but we must have the services that match both current and future demand. Recently I met with parents while attending the Darlinghurst Goodstart Early Learning centre in my community, which faced closure. This is a not-for-profit organisation with an exceedingly good quality rating, facing closure.

These parents were absolutely devastated. They were going to be given three months notice. They had no idea what they were going to do with their kids and how they were going to continue their lives and continue to work in a time when, suddenly, they were going to lose a childcare place with very little notice, in a place where many people put their children down for childcare places or early education places before they're even born because they are hoping to get into them.

So this was enormously stressful. These parents described to me the relationships they had with their amazing staff and educators, how much trust they had in the individuals. To them, finding another provider was not just a matter of availability but also a matter of having to start again in building that trust with strangers looking after their children.

But I'll be honest, this isn't an isolated incident. In that case, we've had a good outcome, and I will come back to that, but in the past few months alone, no fewer than six childcare services have closed in my electorate, citing a range of factors from higher costs to rent to unavailable spaces, redevelopment requests and shortages of goods staff. The spaces that do remain are significantly expensive, even with the subsidy, and it's increasingly competitive.

It's placing greater requirements on informal care arrangements like grandparents, and is having this impact on decisions around fertility, family formation, employment and education. I met a young woman who is a single mother and survivor of domestic violence, who because of Goodstart has been able to get her real estate licence and find stable employment and housing for the first time.

She is proud of the independence afforded to her through her access to early childhood education and work. This woman would be forced out of work if she didn't have that support. But this is not just a story of disadvantage.

There are also families in my electorate with dual incomes, on good incomes, that are still struggling with childcare costs, combined with higher costs of living, including high mortgage costs. I met another woman in Wentworth last month who described to me how she and her husband are on a good salaries—really good salaries—but they are paying 30 per cent of their post-tax income on their child care.

That's after the subsidies. This woman was telling me about how she is sending her four-year-old to school early because of how tight family finances are right now, particularly with their mortgage payments. She was also telling me how this access to child care and the cost of child care is an issue in relation to coercive control around her peers, because if people—typically women—can't access early education for their kids, they often either go back to work less or don't go back to work.

That actually makes them more vulnerable because they do not have the ability to earn their own money and escape violence or coercive control if they need to. The childcare sector is meant to fix and address these failings, but it genuinely isn't. I doorknocked a woman and asked, 'What re the issues that are facing you?' and she said, 'We're not having a third child because of childcare costs.' This is the country that we're operating here.

To come back to Goodstart and the childcare centre closing in my area, it was great news on Friday because the early learning centre in Sydney will stay open, after Goodstart and the city of Sydney reached an agreement. It is a genuine ,win and the credit belongs to the parents who fought for it. I was proud to stand alongside them.

Their tenacity made the difference, and I was proud to advocate for them, including to the minister and to the council about why this was so important. But families shouldn't have to run a campaign to keep their early learning centres open. Parents are already juggling work, mortgages and small kids, and they don't need to be adding 'lobbying' to the list.

We need to have a system in which every child and every family who wants that early education and care can afford it, trust it and be reassured that it will still be there next year. I think we need to acknowledge that the system is not delivering at the moment on this. I want to come back to the impact that this is having more broadly in the country.

Australia's fertility rate is now the lowest on record—less than 1.5 births per woman. Australians are not turning away from family life; they are looking at the combined costs of raising families, of housing, the cost of care, and the shape of their week, and concluding it doesn't add up. Child care sets sits right at the heart of that calculation, and, even with this bill, child care costs are up 7.3 per cent to July—double the pace of inflation.

There is no single fix here, and no one level of government can deliver it alone, but there is an obligation on all of them to cooperate and to get this right. The sector requires greater stewardship. The government needs to reflect on the rules that it has brought in regarding things like the childcare top-up and the controls around raising fees, and consider actively whether they are working as intended, because that issue with the childcare top-up and the fee caps was one of the reasons that centre was going to close.

The government, in this case, did identify that and make an exception. We also need to see more not-for-profit centres enter into the childcare space because, over the last period of time, we've seen a big increase in for-profit providers and a decrease of the not-for-profit sector. I support for-profits and not-for-profits within this sector of the economy, but we need to look at the evidence to show that the not-for-profit sector have, on average, better outcome ratings in this, but they are not increasing their proportion; they're actually decreasing the proportion of the service that they're providing to our community.

We need to really ask ourselves: is that what we want? I think most Australians are saying no, it's not. We want a sector which is encouraging the best providers, not just the for-profit providers, to get into the system.

We need to acknowledge that the system as we know it is failing, and we need to be prepared to think outside the box and chart a course towards a transition of a more stable model which is affordable and universal. This could involve solutions such as greater co-location and integration of child care in the public education system. I think there's enormous merit in that, as ANU Professor Bob Breunig has suggested.

Incorporating child care into the schooling sector could also help with staff retention, as career development becomes a real option for early years educators to take on new challenges, teach different years and progress to the schooling system if that's what they would like. We also need to be unlocking capital to support the social sector. Michael Traill has done some great work in advocating how we can adjust some of the performance measures in super, such as Your Future, Your Super, to better unlock capital for the social sector while at the same time not inhibiting the returns that individuals want from the super sector.

I think this is important. I think the government should definitely be considering this because we do need to make sure that the super sector, the money that we all have in super, is not hampered from investing in areas which make a difference to the country as long as those investment returns add up. I think there is an issue over time of government cost shifting from one education program to another.

I think we need to be finding economies of scale in the system that provide lower costs, career development and stability. I think the first step is to admit that we have a systemic problem with early childhood education in this country. Over the past 2½ days, we've heard plenty from the government about the merits of various provisions made in this term and the last.

Many of them are worthy. I support what the government has done to ensure that childcare workers are paid more. I think that is appropriate.

But let's not ignore the fact that this bill merely kicks a very big can down the road. My community want to know where that road is ultimately going to lead. I ask the Prime Minister to reaffirm his commitment to making child care a defining legacy and not putting it in the too-hard basket.

Also do the hard work of looking at the sector as a whole and saying, 'What is the design of the sector that is going to be stable, that is going to be affordable, that is going to address these childcare deserts and that is going to be something that Australians can be proud of going into the future?' There are members of this chamber who will come along that journey with you, Prime Minister.

This challenge is not going to be solved in a single term, but we must be willing to consider where we would like to get to and plan out to get there. Thank you. This is an important bill, but this cannot be the last word.