QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE

Mr CLARE (Blaxland—Minister for Education) (14:23): Can I thank my friend the best-ever member for Braddon for her question. Mr Albanese: It's true! Mr CLARE: It is true.

It happens to be true. Yesterday was a very important day for childcare workers, parents and kids right across the country, because yesterday the parliament voted to lock in a 15 per cent pay rise for childcare workers. Childcare workers do one of the most important jobs in this country.

As the PM just pointed out, when we were first elected, they were leaving the job in big numbers. Something like a 40 per cent attrition rate in some places—40 per cent of the workforce out the door in any given year. In anyone's terms, that's a crisis.

But that's now changed, and it's changed because of that 15 per cent pay rise. There are now 20,000 more childcare workers today than when that pay rise was first rolled out. In some places, we've seen job vacancies drop by about 31 per cent and job applications increase by about 30 per cent.

What this shows, I think indisputably, is that, if you pay people more, more people want to do the job. What this legislation that's just passed does is lock all of this in. It's the sort of thing that the Liberal Party never did.

It's the sort of thing that One Nation would never do. It's the sort of thing that only a Labor government would do. It's good for workers because they get paid more.

For a teacher in child care, it means something like an extra $21,000 a year. It's good for parents too. It's good for more than a million parents who've got their kids in child care—because, for the centre to get the money, they have to agree to limit fee increases.

For the average family, that means they'll save about 1,500 bucks over the next two years. That's real cost-of-living help for parents. There's a third part to this too.

It's good for kids because another condition we've added here is that centres don't get the money unless they meet the minimum safety standard. Ninety-five per cent of centres do already. I want it to be at 100 per cent.

I think every parent has a right to expect that. Certainly, every child in this country deserves it. There's nothing more important than the safety of our kids.

That's why we've banned phones in centres. That's why we're rolling out the mandatory safety training across the system. That's why we set up the worker register, so we can track workers from centre to centre and from state to state.

And that's why we're doing this. This really is the trifecta. It's good for workers, it's good for parents and, most importantly of all, it's good for our kids.