Sally Sitou (Reid, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I welcome the member for Nicholls' desire to reach across the aisle and work together on this because we can all agree that early education is really important for kids, for parents and for our society. So I say to the member for Nicholls: get on board. Get on board with our call for a minimum wage increase. Get on board with our Secure Jobs, Better Pay bill to ensure that we can have multi-employer bargaining. I say to him: get on board with our fee-free TAFE places and get on board with our 20,000 additional university places for those jobs in critical skills areas. We do have a plan and we think that the coalition should get on board.

I want to thank the member for Moncrieff for this bill because it gives us an opportunity to talk about the critical reform that the Albanese Labor government is bringing in to ensure that child care is more affordable for more families. It is a plan and a strategy that the then opposition leader committed to at the very beginning when he spoke in his budget reply speech about how important this piece of policy is for us. We just want to remind those opposite about the increasing costs of child care that they oversaw—41 per cent in eight years. That meant that it was more expensive for families. They were having to make decisions about the number of days that they would work and whether or not to go back to work at all. We want to make sure that we are making child care more affordable because we know it is good for kids, because they get access to that great early education. It's good for families because parents can decide to go back to work or pick up additional days. It's good for our economy because of the increased productivity. Early educators are absolutely critical to that.

I do welcome the coalition's recent desire to make the industry more attractive to our early educators. It's just a shame that they didn't show that interest when they were in government. They are right; we are facing a workforce shortage in the early education sector. But it's not something that has come about in the last six months since we've been in government. This is a workforce shortage and it has been brewing for quite some time. If we look at the qualifications that are required to be an early educator, a bachelor of early childhood education takes four years full-time; a cert III in early childhood education and care takes one year full-time. So even if, on 22 May, we did everything we could to attract more early educators to the sector, we still wouldn't have them in there at this point. The reforms needed to attract more people into this industry needed to happen years ago. Some of those key reforms that would have made it more attractive to early childhood educators would be to increase their wages. You would think that's a simple proposition—an increase to the minimum wage—but they refused to back that. You would think that having multi-employer bargaining to ensure that early educators were able to bargain for better pay and conditions would be a simple proposition for them to back but, again, they failed to back that. When they want to talk about the workforce shortage in early childhood education, where are the actions that match their rhetoric? They've gone missing.

But I do want to thank them for some of the plans that we have now started to put into place to attract early educators to the sector—some of the plans that they created but never implemented. They are now part of our National Children's Education and Care Workforce Strategy Implementation and Evaluation Plan. Part of that will be practical steps and action to support the attraction and retention of staff and to improve the quality and sustainability of the workforce in this sector long term. We are also delivering almost 1,500 additional university places for early education teachers as well as fee-free TAFE places. This is going to make a real practical difference to the sector.

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