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

Senator MARIELLE SMITH (South Australia) (11:38): I also rise to speak on the Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers (Special Account) (Extending Support and Strengthening Safety) Bill 2026. In my very first speech to the Senate, I said the following: In early childhood education, we have to be bold in our vision, broad in our approach and brave in our means of delivery, and we need to do so in partnership with our early years educators, in whose hands we place our youngest and most vulnerable minds and yet whose critical work we choose to undervalue and underpay.

Again, this is a choice—a policy choice and a values choice—and we must change our path. Today, almost seven years to the date of saying those words, I could not be more proud to stand here, as a member of the Albanese Labor government, in support of a bill that locks in the 15 per cent pay rise for early childhood educators for another two years. This is a bill that changes our path.

My passion for early childhood education would be of no surprise to anyone in this chamber. I have spoken here often about its transformative power. We know that, when we get the early years right, magic happens.

In those critical years, when 95 per cent of a child's brain connections are formed, we can change the course of their life. When we get it right, we can smash intergenerational disadvantage and we can set our country on a different, better and fairer path. But none of this is possible without the early educators, who deliver that early education and all of its transformative potential.

They are the most important piece, and they deserve to be fairly paid for the life-changing and nation-building work that they do each and every single day. In 2024, the Albanese Labor government delivered a 15 per cent pay rise for early childhood education and care workers through the worker retention payment. We know that, before the payment was introduced, services were struggling to attract and retain staff.

They were delaying planned expansions. They were closing rooms. They were limiting enrolments.

The sector urgently needed greater workforce stability, and, since our government introduced the worker retention payment, the results have been significant. We've seen the workforce grow, while keeping costs down for families, and there are now around 20,000 more early childhood education and care workers. We've seen job vacancies fall by almost 31 per cent, while the proportion of services operating with a staffing waiver has declined from 8.9 per cent to 4.3 per cent.

These are substantial achievements, and what they show is that the policy is working. That's why we're backing it in, locking in the 15 per cent pay rise for a further two years and ensuring that these benefits continue for workers, for services, for children and for their families. The bill credits the special account with an additional $3.6 billion and extends the sunset date for the Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers (Special Account) Act 2024 to 31 December 2029.

Funding will continue to be tied to a commitment from services to limit fee increases for families, which is important to continue easing those cost-of-living pressures and ensure we're still able to deliver quality early education. As we work towards a universal early childhood education and care system, safety, of course, must remain our top priority, and that is why the bill introduces a new object and condition of funding.

From July 2027, services must meet quality area 2 of the NQS, or their funding may be cut or suspended. Earlier this month, the Senate Education and Employment Legislation Committee, which I chair, tabled its report on the bill. Our inquiry ran for just under a month and received some 31 submissions.

The evidence that we received over the course of that inquiry was clear: since the worker retention payment was introduced, staff retention has improved and vacancy rates have fallen. Submitters overwhelmingly supported the bill's passage, recognising it, on the one hand, as an important cost-of-living measure for parents and families across the country and also as critical for the workers delivering early education and care.

Submitters warned that, without the bill, early education and care workers would face a reduction in pay, creating uncertainty and increasing the risk of further workforce attrition. Our government is committed to building a stronger, more accessible and higher quality early childhood education and care system. We're investing $1 billion through the Building Early Education Fund to deliver new and expanded services where they are needed most, particularly in regional and rural communities.

Our three-day guarantee ensures every child can access at least three days of subsidised early childhood education and care each week, with First Nations children eligible for up to five days. This bill continues our work in building a universal early education and care system that puts quality, opportunity and children at its heart. By investing in the educators who nurture the next generation and in children from the very beginning, we are giving every Australian child the opportunity to thrive.

I want to thank Minister Walsh, who's brought this bill to our chamber, not just for her work in this place as minister for early learning but for her service over many years before entering this place, standing up for workers in early childhood education. I want to commend her on how she has now used her position as a minister to continue that advocacy, to continue standing up for those workers and to deliver for them through this bill.

I know those workers know that the minister has their backs, and I want to commend her on this work. There are few more exciting areas of public policy that we have the chance to deal with in this place than early childhood education. We know that, when we get it right and when quality early education is delivered in the first five years of a child's life, you change the way a child's brain grows and develops.

And, when you change the way their brain grows and develops, you change every opportunity before them. You give them every chance at having the best possible future education, learning potential and learning opportunities, going forward. Of course, when you don't, the opposite is true.

When we don't provide children with a quality early education and when we don't provide those critical early interventions and get those children support when they need it, especially children from disadvantaged backgrounds and especially children with extra needs and extra learning requirements, it's too late for many of them to catch up when we send them off to school at the age of five.

The opportunity to intervene in a child's education in order to have the most transformative impact is in the early years. There is absolutely no way in hell that, if we were designing our school education system today, we would design it to start at age five, because the evidence is simply so compelling that, if you have a child exposed to a quality early learning environment, the simple acts of singing songs while counting fingers and toes, reading books and playing games in engagement with a qualified educator can transform the way that child's brain works.

It is extraordinary. It's here in this chamber and this parliament that we have every opportunity to influence the policy settings to get more children having opportunities to engage in play based learning which could change the course of their life and also the course of our country. This is about our nation's future.

It's about the potential of children, and therefore it's about the potential of our nation. That's why I call it nation-building work. Play based learning in the early years is nation-building work.

We have an extraordinary workforce across our country delivering early education in a whole range of settings and sectors, all of which are important and all of which play an incredibly important role. It is well overdue that those workers are adequately valued for their role and their contribution in building a nation that is better, fairer and more productive and which gives every single child an opportunity to thrive, to meet their fullest potential and to succeed in our education system.

I am very excited about this bill. I am very excited about what it will mean for that workforce. I'm very excited that it means we will lose fewer brilliant early educators who simply haven't been able to afford to continue to do the work that they love and the work which matters to all of us—not just to families with children in early education but to all of us.

It's about the nation we want to build. I'm very proud of this bill. I commend it to the Senate.