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

Mr HUSIC (Chifley) (16:51): It is a great pleasure to follow the very thoughtful contribution of the member for Hughes. He and I are both Sydney based MPs and understand the experience of the people we're proud to represent, for whom this type of bill does have a meaningful, concrete impact. Where we find ourselves in this day and age, early childhood workers have become essential workers.

The push has been on to increase workforce participation, to increase the number of women in the workforce, to be able to satisfy the demands of businesses for more talented workers in our workforce. The way that house prices have gone, most households need two incomes being brought in, not just one. The days of being able to rely on a single income are the stuff of nostalgia.

We require both parents out working and, if they've got kids, being able to work out the type of care that will be provided for very young families. Early childhood educators are some of the first people outside the family to shape a child's life, and they are very important. Those early childhood educators are there providing such an important, valuable role in not only supporting the development of children but allowing parents to be able to go out and fulfil their ambitions.

Many of them in my part of Western Sydney are doing so while building a new home, with two parents out working. In my part of Western Sydney, they are forced to travel from the outer edge of the Sydney Basin into the CBD. That trip will sometimes take 40 to 50 minutes, but on some days it would be easier for a person to drive from Western Sydney to Goulburn—a two-hour trip—than to do the commute from Western Sydney to the CBD.

If traffic is not working or if there's a public transport snarl, that has a big impact on families and chews up a large part of their day, but they do it with the confidence of knowing that an early childhood educator is looking after their kids and giving them a great start in life. We trust those early childhood educators to set our children on the right path, to be able to care for our youngest Australians.

It's really important work, and it's work we've got to back. That's what this legislation does. For too long, that work that was not only undervalued; it was genuinely underpaid.

The bill seeks to inject a further $3.6 billion into the wage justice special account and it extends support through the end of 2029. So it locks in wage increases, it helps hold onto those early childhood educators, it improves quality and safety standards, and it helps keep pressure off family budgets. As we know on this side of the chamber, if you want quality learning for young people, we've got to support our educators, and that's what we're trying to do.

Since the worker retention payment was introduced, around 20,000 additional educators have joined the workforce, which is not an insignificant thing to note. Vacancies have fallen by almost a third. Staffing waivers have halved.

Fee growth is around half that of centres that aren't participating in the scheme. In the electorate that I'm proud to represent, Chifley, there are at least 900 educators who are benefiting from the worker retention payment, across 82 childcare service centres. This is what happens when a government deliberately backs workers, rather than simply hoping the market will sort itself out.

It's really important, again, to emphasise that early childhood educators play such an important role in being able to support the ambitions of young families in the electorate that I represent in the outer suburbs—for them to be able to do their jobs, see early childhood education of a quality standard and ensure that the workers in that system feel valued.

The reality, too, is that, as much as the economy has changed, we've gone from single-income homes to dual-income homes with kids. That isn't going to change any time soon, and we do need to take these types of steps to ensure that essential workers—because I do believe that early childhood educators, due to the nature of our society and economy, have absolutely become essential workers.

These types of direct interventions by government will actually, I think, become more of the same, not less. The reason why, as much as I've reflected on the nature of the economy changing, is that there's something else that happened, and it happened around the time of COVID. If you look at the real value of a $90,000 income back in March of 2020 and look at what happened to its trajectory over two years, the value of that income dropped considerably.

I'm not making a political or partisan point, but, when you have a global shock like that ripple through the international economy and our economy, that has a big impact. So, while this bill specifically concerns the wages of early childhood educators, it's important to recognise the impact on living standards of that type of challenge—through a global pandemic.

People are working very hard. There's absolutely no doubt about it. But in most cases they feel like they're working harder than ever, and too many feel they're running just to stand still.

As long-time economic correspondent Alan Kohler—someone I hold in high regard—has observed, Australia's real-wage experience after the pandemic has been a 'great, quiet disaster'. In looking at what's happened, he's based his statements on some of the research done by Greg Jericho from the Australia Institute. He talks about the fact that, since that time, Australians have received pay rises on paper while their purchasing power went backwards, and forecasts by the RBA suggest it will take till 2037 to get wages back to the levels they were before the post-pandemic collapse.

Greg Jericho describes it as the worst collapse in real wages in living memory. We as a government have done a lot to address that. I do remember, in the budgets of our predecessors, very confident predictions about the trajectory of real wages that never materialised.

That movement never materialised. We've had to do a lot to fix that. We have fought hard for minimum wage increases.

You've seen what we've done in terms of improving bargaining power. You've seen what we've done in terms of backing same job, same pay. These have been important measures, but it will take a lot more.

Wage growth in times past has repeatedly failed to keep pace with rising costs. Housing costs have been climbing faster than wages for decades. Real per-person disposable income has been going negative for three years.

Because of that—and I think this is something the parliament needs to take note of—the generation born in the 1990s is the first in Australian history to not be better off than the generation before them. They are the first generation in Australian history to not be better off than the generation before them. That puts a big challenge on parliaments here and moving forward, and the test is: what will we do about it?

The other thing that's worth noting is that, for a growing number of Australians, one job is no longer enough. Between 1994 and 2019, the rate of people holding multiple jobs remained roughly between five to six per cent, but as a result of the pandemic, the multiple job-holding rate has risen and it's remained at an all-time high between roughly 6½ per cent and 6.7 per cent since June of 2022.

I was startled to see the ABS show that there were nearly a million Australians holding multiple jobs in March 2026—one million Australians holding down more than one job. Some of them may be doing it for the love of it. Some of them may be doing it because they've got ambitions for themselves.

Good on them! But I think, in that one million, there are a lot of workers holding down multiple jobs because they feel like they have to. That rate of multiple job-holding is higher for women.

Think about what that means. Almost a million Australians are sacrificing time with family and friends simply to stay ahead of the bills. We should not accept a future where working harder means taking a second or third job just to maintain the same standard of living.

That's why we do need to have bigger national conversations about this type of issue. Governments have to intervene in the way that we're talking about here, and they're going to have to intervene more and more to support wage growth to ensure that we help low- and middle-income Australians lift that burden and not contribute to it. In saying that, I recognise there are no easy fixes and that it will be a challenge, because the pressures will be on.

The calls will be on to constrain the growth of budgets. There'll be pressures in terms of what we do to build productive capacity in the economy and to unleash the economy from some of the constraints it's continually seemed to face over decades, particularly around skill shortages. We need to do it in a way, as I said, to lift low- and middle-income earners' sense of confidence that they can not just keep pace with the cost of living but do better than the generation they preceded.

That is an important thing. What we're doing here with early childhood education is one example. Aged care is another.

The lesson is that intervention not only works but is critical, because when governments back workers, people stay in the workforce, skills are retained and services improve. But, importantly, the political discontent and friction that is generated when people feel like they're going backwards is addressed. That's why it's important.

Frankly, it'll be this side of the chamber, our political party, Labor, that takes this on, recognising that when it comes to the ratio between profits and wages, it will not be an obsessive focus on profits that tends to dominate the thinking of the conservative side of politics as opposed to doing what's right for wages. I don't genuinely believe that the Liberal and Nationals parties will ever have a serious concerted effort to address this.

When I talk about the fact that the value of real wages has dropped, it dropped under their watch, and they had very little to do to fix it. We have tried to move to fix it and been opposed quite regularly by those opposite in terms of dealing with that disparity in incomes. It's also important that the other conservative force that now seeks to get in government, One Nation, have repeatedly sided with any effort to oppose what we do.

One Nation believe it should be easier to sack people, and they want to water down unfair dismissal laws. They couldn't support same job, same pay and believe that contractors and people working for a wage should be on different wages, not the same. One Nation believe that wage theft should not be criminalised.

They believe that you shouldn't have strong protections against occupational health and safety breaches by employers. So that's why I say it's the Labor side of politics that takes this stuff seriously and will lean in to fix people's incomes and their sense of doing better—not just treading water but doing better. We will always do so in the face of bitter opposition by those opposite, be they Liberal, National or One Nation.

When we see wage increases for aged-care workers happen, it'll be Labor that backs that. We won't see wage increases for early educators under conservatives. It'll only happen because Labor backs that.

As I said before, since we've come to office, we've advocated for Australian workers at every single annual wage review, five years in a row. We've seen the national minimum wage increase by $6 per hour, or $230 per week or $12,000 per year, a 30 per cent increase. This is the type of stuff that has to happen not just now but well into the future.

It's the proper and right thing to do, and it's the challenge that this parliament will continually have to face for the years ahead. Debate adjourned.