Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers (Special Account) (Extending Support and Strengthening Safety) Bill 2026
Senator HODGINS-MAY (Victoria) (11:48): The Australian Greens support this legislation to extend the worker retention payment, the Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers (Special Account) (Extending Support and Strengthening Safety) Bill 2026. The worker retention payment has delivered a modest but important increase to the wages of eligible childhood educators.
It recognises, in part at least, the incredible, relentless and vital work they do, and it helps retain educators in a workforce that is under enormous pressure. But I need to make it clear to this chamber that there is much, much more that needs to be done. I can't tell you how many rounds of estimates over the last couple of years I have spent asking the government the same question: what does Labor plan to do when the worker retention payment finishes?
We, along with educators, providers, unions and families were forced to wait until the eleventh hour for this answer. There was nothing in the budget, despite numerous leaks and speculation, and that uncertainty is incredibly damaging and anxiety inducing. I've heard directly from educators and providers about how devastating it was to spend months not knowing whether this government would continue funding the wages that they relied upon.
I've heard from service providers who refused to take up the worker retention payment due to the uncertainty that it was going to create for the future of the workforce once it ends. People who do some of the most important work for our families, for our children and for our economy were left wondering whether their pay would be cut before Christmas at the end of the year, whether their centres would be able to afford to retain staff or whether parents would ultimately be asked to pick up this bill if the government dropped the ball.
This extension is, of course, welcome, but this weight has not been without consequence, and it still doesn't solve the underlying problem plaguing the early education system. This bill extends the worker retention payment to June 2028. It also allows the government to make the payment conditional on services meeting quality area 2 of the National Quality Standard, which covers children's health and safety.
Of course services receiving public funding should be meeting national safety standards. I think that this is the bare minimum that parents expect of public money flowing to our early learning centres, but I'm once again here before this government asking where the investment in quality and safety before harm occurs is to prevent harm from occurring in the first place.
This government is prepared to attach consequences to funding after a service fails to meet safety standards. It's happy suspending or terminating funding when things go wrong, but where is the investment in building high-quality services before children are put at risk? We shouldn't be waiting for harm to occur before the government chooses to act.
We should be investing in properly trained, properly paid and properly supported educators. We should be giving services the resources, the staffing and the time they need to deliver safe, high-quality early education and care. We should be building a system where safety is embedded from the beginning not one where governments wait for a failure and then reach for the penalty box, and we cannot do that without the workforce.
Australia needs more than 21,000 additional qualified early childhood professionals just to meet the current demand and sustainable staffing levels. The Greens have been clear that a 15 per cent wage increase is not enough. We have consistently supported the 25 per cent wage increase sought by unions and have advocated for genuine pay parity with school teachers.
The educators I speak to are absolutely exhausted. They are doing training in their own time. They are carrying enormous administrative workloads.
They are trying to meet increasingly complex needs with too few staff and too little time, and many, too many, excellent educators are just simply leaving. The worker retention payment is a single lifeline in the middle of a workforce crisis. Quite frankly, it is a bandaid on a bullet wound.
We need a sustainable workforce strategy with wages and conditions that recognise early childhood educators as professionals and foundational educators. We also need to be honest about who is ultimately paying when governments fail to fund that workforce properly. Childcare fees are already rising rapidly.
Childcare costs increased by nine per cent in the year to April 2026, more than twice the overall inflation rate. For families of almost 1.5 million children who rely on early learning, early childhood education and care is now the second largest household expense after housing. It should be treated as an extension of education—from early childhood right through to tertiary.
I hear from parents who cannot wait for their children to turn five, because then they will be able to shrug off one of the biggest costs on their household budgets. I hear from young couples who want to start a family but are looking at the cost of early learning and wondering whether they can even afford to have a child. This is a national shame.
How have we become a country where the No. 1 obstacle to starting a family is the cost? How can we have a Labor government that says it wants to increase women's workforce participation and advance women's economic equality while failing to deliver the one thing that makes work and study possible for so many women—accessible, affordable, high-quality early learning?
This government needs to understand that child care is not a luxury. It's essential social, educational and economic infrastructure, and yet we continue to pour billions of dollars of public money into a broken subsidy model that leaves families pulling their hair out whilst navigating Centrelink, providers navigating complex administration, educators fighting for decent wages and private companies extracting profits from an essential public service.
The Greens believe there's another way. We've been shouting it from the rooftops, waiting for this Labor government to take action with that thumping majority. If Labor finally taxed gas exports at a minimum of 25 per cent, it could raise the public revenue needed to invest in the services Australians actually need.
Imagine putting that money towards a genuinely universal free early learning system, a system where every single child has a place in a high-quality service in their own community, no more postcode lotteries; where parents do not have to navigate the broken Child Care Subsidy system; where educators are properly valued and paid; and where public money funds children, educators and quality care, not profits for shareholders.
That is the system that Australia should be building and that we could be building if Labor had the bravery to finally stand up to the corporate donors and to stop sacrificing our children and our families to protect the bottom lines. They are essentially choosing them instead of us, instead of our families. Right now, far too many children are locked out of the early learning system altogether.
The Inclusion Support Program is supposed to make sure that children with a disability, developmental delay and other additional needs can participate fully in early learning. I shouldn't even need to say it. The funding is simply not keeping pace with the cost of providing that support.
The subsidy for an additional educator hasn't been indexed since 2016. That's a decade. What a shameful 10-year anniversary that is.
In the midst of Labor's barbaric NDIS cuts, this is another discriminatory system fully failing in full swing against children with additional needs. A child should not miss out on early learning because their service cannot afford the additional support required to include them. We also need to properly fund and support Aboriginal community controlled early learning organisations.
ACCOs provide culturally safe, community controlled early learning that does far more than simply provide a childcare place. They build relationships with families. They embed culture and connect early learning with broader health, wellbeing and family supports.
But the funding system hasn't been designed around the way ACCOs actually deliver these services. ACCOs need dedicated long-term needs based funding that reflects the true cost of their work. What all this comes down to is ambition—ambition to pave a world-leading early learning system, not just propping up the path that needs immediate fixing like workforce retention or to respond to the latest scandal or spot fire but building a new bold ambitious system from the ground up.
This is the work that we are demanding Labor do. The Greens are ready to support ambitious reform to our early learning system. There is a huge Labor majority in the House, and the Greens are in the balance of power, ready to get this work done without delay.
The Prime Minister has said that he wants universal early learning to be his legacy. Well, where is he? Where is the planning?
Where is the ambition? He's four years in, and all we are seeing is some reactive tinkering around the edges. Families deserve more, and the Greens demand more.
This is why we are supporting this bill whilst demanding and fighting for so much more for our kids and for our families. I want to be clear about what this legislation doesn't do. It doesn't provide long-term certainty beyond the worker retention payment.
It doesn't improve workforce conditions for early educators. It doesn't address childcare deserts. It doesn't make early learning genuinely free and accessible.
And it doesn't establish an independent national early childhood education and care commission that the Greens have been calling for, that the sector wants and needs and that Labor has now committed to consulting on. Even within the workforce, this payment does leave people behind. We need to be clear about that.
There are early childhood educators working in family day care and in-home care who, through no fault of their own, miss out on the worker retention payment because they're engaged as contractors rather than employees due to the nature of their work. These educators are doing essential early learning work, but the government's wage support doesn't reach everyone.
We support the worker retention payment, and we do not want to see the wage increases it provides to the majority of the early childhood workforce delayed, but we can walk and chew gum at the same time—something that we are urging this Labor government to do. The fact that the worker retention payment is the right mechanism for the majority of the workforce doesn't mean we must not also urgently address the gap for educators in family day care and in-home care.
I urge Labor to work with these sectors to find a solution that properly values these educators for the work they do and the complex care they provide, regardless of their employment or contractual obligations. We need a government that stops treating early learning as a problem to be managed and starts treating it as essential public infrastructure, a right of every single child and every family in this country.
It is the great equaliser in society, after all. Educators deserve certainty and value. Parents deserve affordability and access.
Our children deserve the very best start to life. They deserve a system designed around their safety, their rights, their development and, of course, their wellbeing. For these reasons, I move the second reading amendment circulated in my name on behalf of the Australian Greens: At the end of the motion, add ", but the Senate: (a) notes the uncertainty to the early childhood education and care workforce caused by the delayed confirmation of continued funding for the worker retention payment; and (b) calls on the Government to: (i) provide certainty in relation to Commonwealth-funded increased pay and improved conditions for the early childhood education and care workforce beyond this extension of the worker retention payment, (ii) include the continuity, viability and sustainability of the early childhood education and care workforce in the design and priority work of the proposed Early Childhood Education and Care Commission; and (iii) urgently progress a genuinely universal, high-quality and free early childhood education and care system that truly values educators, prioritises children and takes profit out of care".
The Australian Greens are calling on the government to provide certainty for the early learning workforce beyond the worker retention payment and urgently progress a genuinely universal high-quality early childhood education and care system that values educators, that prioritises children and that finally takes profit out of care. Headlines about billionaires making profits off the early learning system—our kids are not the headlines that families should have to read about.
Education comes first. Our children cannot wait for this Labor government to drag their heels on incremental reform. Labor's got the numbers.
We can get this done; I say it again and again. Now is the time for reform. Now is the time to be ambitious.
Now is the time to put our kids and our families first, not our corporate donors and these enormous for-profit chains that are cutting corners every single day and putting our children in danger. Only the Greens have the bold vision—no, not only the Greens. Parents and families and the Greens have a bold vision to build the system that we need, so let's get on with it.