Jess Walsh (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Early Childhood Education) Share this | Hansard source

This bill is incredibly important. We know that there have been really distressing allegations of abuse in our early learning services. Every child needs to be safe, and every parent needs to have confidence that they are. This bill will go a long way to ensuring that, and it's really important that we have this lever—that we're able to withdraw Commonwealth funding from those providers who are not putting child safety first.

I think you know, Senator Hodgins-May, that you don't have to tell me how incredibly important the workforce is in keeping children safe and providing quality early education because I proudly represented the early childhood educators in their union before coming to parliament. One of the really significant things that we've done to invest in quality and safety outside of this particular legislation is invest $3.6 billion in a really long overdue pay rise for our early childhood educators. That is absolutely critical to quality and safety, because what it's done is help deal with the workforce crisis that had existed over the previous decade when there was a very high turnover of early childhood educators. We know that the safest and best-quality services are services that have long-term, stable, committed, dedicated early childhood educators who know the children, the families and each other and who are committed to a child-safe culture.

Since we started to implement the pay rise, we've had a reduction in job vacancies being advertised by 26 per cent, which is huge and was unheard of over the last several years. That's happened at the same time as we've grown the workforce. So it's a really significant stabilisation of the workforce. It's a stabilisation that respects them, values them and invests in them and their ability to have a child-safe culture and provide that security to children and families.