Early Childhood Education and Care (Three Day Guarantee) Bill 2025
12 Feb | '2025
Early childhood education is an essential service that families rely on to study, to work and to pay the household bills. That’s how the minister introduced her bill last week. And I must say, I found myself agreeing profusely with that statement, as that is exactly why this legislation should be voted down. When the coalition brought in the biggest reforms to the sector in decades by introducing the childcare subsidy and the activity test, it was because we recognised the very fact that she highlighted in her introduction: it was to strike a balance between targeted childcare support for hardworking families who rely on it, a generous safety net to protect the most vulnerable and, most importantly, ongoing support for high-quality learning.
Labor’s proposed changes are a slap in the face for working parents—parents who want to work and those who have to work because of Labor’s cost-of-living crisis. Once again, this is what they do, those opposite—they are at war with aspiration. They are removing the priority of access for working Australian families. What Labor is proposing, to remove the activity test for three days, is fundamentally unfair, and it’s divisive. It’s pitting working families against non-working families—pitting them against each other. And it’s pitting those who access early childhood education against those who don’t, whether that’s by choice or because there are no available options.
Increasing access to early childhood education in this way, without any meaningful policies to address supply, does not equate to quality education. A three-day guarantee means nothing if you can’t access a place. Labor has completely neglected this part of the equation, and this policy does not address the current cost-of-living pressures that families face all over the country. But what more could you expect from a Labor government that has been using early childhood education as a political plaything, as its political pawn in the lead-up to the next election?
Let’s face the facts. If this is such a good policy, which Labor introduced last week, they could have passed this legislation this fortnight. But they haven’t. ‘Why haven’t they?’ I ask Australians. Why haven’t they? Because it’s all just a political game for the Labor Party. Time and time again, Labor has shown its true colours. It only cares about the headlines and the spin, not the substance and not delivering for Australian families what they need. This legislation is all about Labor’s legacy, and Labor’s legacy is driven completely by this Prime Minister’s ego. What it isn’t driven by, however, is what our families, our educators and our service providers need. They need access, they need affordability and they need quality.
Labor is spending around $15 billion a year on early childhood education, and, since the election, they’ve announced around $8 billion worth of new policies. But, despite that, Labor hasn’t delivered a single new place for those families with little or no access. And get this: they’ve even used the Community Child Care Fund—created by the coalition to address gaps in regional, remote and rural areas—to fund metropolitan and inner-city seats, including, colleagues, the very regional seat of Grayndler! While they say they’ll build 160 centres, history tells us not to expect much on that front. They won’t deliver on their promise, like so many others. The reality is that there’s no point having access to three days of subsidised care if no care is available in the first place. Labor’s done nothing to address this—nothing to address access. The vast majority of families accessing the Child Care Subsidy are already eligible for 72 to 100 hours of care per fortnight. While those already in the system may be impacted in a limited way, it’s the new working families seeking to enter the early childhood education system that will be forced to compete for new places alongside those who do not meet the top activity test levels.
The coalition has always believed in choice and in flexibility. This policy does absolutely nothing for families who choose something other than child care or for families who need the flexibility. Things don’t always happen exactly the way we plan, so it’s important—so important—that our early childhood education system can offer some flexibility. But, again, Labor’s policy offers nothing for families who work non-standard hours—people like our hardworking nurses, our shift workers, our emergency services, anyone who works the night shift. There are no options for them.
Ultimately, the biggest losers of this policy are families living in those thin markets and childcare deserts. Very many members sitting behind me have communities that cannot find a place in child care because this government has not delivered any new places to them. Increasing their access to 72 hours a fortnight might sound good in a headline, but there’s no point if there’s no care available in the first place.
The member for Fenner said earlier, which brought me to a giggle, that he was standing up for the regions. This is a slogan that Labor throws at regional Australia, and regional Australia just does not buy it. Labor likes to say it’s the party for workers, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Labor doesn’t care about what workers need, and it doesn’t care about the regions. Labor only cares about what Labor needs.
We’re in a cost-of-living crisis, and families are counting every single dollar and trying to make it go as far as possible. But then they see Labor spending taxpayers’ money—their hard-earned money—like it’s an endless pot of gold. In a cost-of-living crisis, the government must be intentional with every single dollar it spends. Instead, Labor’s been on a reckless spending spree with temporary sugar-hit solutions, making the situation simply worse for families. Since coming to power, Labor has added $347 billion in spending. That’s around $33,000 per household. But families aren’t $33,000 better off—that’s for sure. In fact, a family with a typical mortgage has spent $50,000 more in interest on their home loan. Their living standards have collapsed by almost nine per cent. And we’re in a deep household recession. Added to that are the soaring out-of-pocket costs for their child care.
That’s why it’s crucial to make sure that taxpayers’ money goes to those who need the support of early childhood education the most. The activity test inherently rewards effort and aspiration. It incentivises people to contribute to society through work, through study and through volunteering. But, under Labor’s policy, families who are working hard to create a better life for their children get nothing; meanwhile, families who might spend their days—gosh!—doing an activity like yoga or going to the shops will have the same level of access. Labor continues to punish and disincentivise hardworking, aspirational Australians.
There are also serious questions about the costing on this policy. The bill says it’ll cost $426.7 million over five years from the 2024-25 financial year—even though it’s not being rolled out until January 2026. No doubt that’s a sneaky little tactic to try and make it sound better, because that’s what matters to Labor—it’s the headline and the spin; it’s not the reality. But, more importantly, the Productivity Commission said that removing the activity test completely would cost $2.3 billion a year. So, somewhere in there, something is rotten. The government wants us to accept its modelling that removing the activity test for three days will only cost $426.7 million over four years. It’s also worth noting that the vast majority of families are already eligible for 72 to 100 hours of subsidised care, meaning that this policy will barely move the dial on increasing access. Importantly—and this is so very important—exemptions already exist under the current system to assist children and families who are most in need.
Labor wants you to think that this policy is revolutionary—that it’s going to change millions of lives. But it’s simply not going to. We can’t trust the future of our children in the hands of an Albanese Labor government—that’s for certain. Over the last three years, they’ve failed to deliver for the early childhood sector.
The Prime Minister promised cheaper child care for families, and to say the government has failed to deliver on that promise is an absolute understatement. Under Labor, these are the facts. The cost of early childhood education has risen by 22.3 per cent, which isn’t surprising when you remember that, the last time Labor was in government, childcare costs soared by 53 per cent in just six years. It appears this Labor government is no better, because, at their current rate of increase, families can expect prices to skyrocket under them, if they keep going at this rate, by 124 per cent by March 2032. While Labor’s been patting itself on the back, saying parents have saved over $2,000 thanks to its changes to the childcare subsidy, the reality is that out-of-pocket costs have soared by 12.7 per cent since those changes came into effect. So affordability is a big fail for the Labor government. The very policy that was supposed to bring costs down for families has forced families to pay more. Plus, there’s been an increase in services charging above the hourly rate cap as they also struggle to keep up with soaring costs. This is more proof of Labor’s utter incompetence and their policy failures in this sector. They’re so obsessed with the spin. Australian families and educators deserve so much better.
Let’s think about Labor’s bungled worker-retention payment. Labor promised that up to 200,000 educators would have a pay rise by the end of last year. It was an early Christmas present, they said. The education minister stood up on 5 December and declared it was ‘pay day for hundreds of thousands of educators’. But it wasn’t, because we know that only around 15 per cent of educators are employed by services that have been approved for this payment. It’s just another proof point that Labor doesn’t actually care about early childhood education and is using it all as spin. Labor is failing educators and failing families.
Labor’s three-day guarantee is typical of the Albanese Labor government. It has been accompanied by big headlines and big promises by this government. Let’s think about the first promise that they still haven’t delivered: that $275 electricity bill! They still haven’t delivered that. In fact, prices have gone up by a thousand dollars when it comes to electricity. So this is just another broken promise in the litany of broken promises with no detail. Australian families and Australian educators deserve better than another three years of Labor.
The coalition’s track record in early childhood education speaks for itself. We undertook the biggest reforms in over 40 years. We locked in ongoing funding for preschool, with increased access to early childhood education for more than 280,000 children. We brought down costs, and we increased women’s workforce participation. They are all the measures we should be looking at to make sure we also maintain quality in the sector. They deserve better than a government that only cares about the headlines it can generate, not the impact that its policies will have on hardworking Australian families who need to access early-childhood education and care. That is why the coalition will vote against this legislation.