Early Childhood Education

For the last 2 and a half years I’ve had the great honour to serve as the Shadow Minister for Early Childhood Education. During that time, I’ve spent a lot of time travelling the country, speaking with educators, with children and with parents, oftentimes with children sitting on their knees when we meet. I’ve visited numerous early learning services and preschools. I’ve also visited many communities that have no services at all. It’s about accessibility and affordability, as the good member for Riverina pointed out.

These communities are using whatever means possible to get care for their children, and in many cases that’s informal care, so they can return to work and pay their bills. Unfortunately, this problem is only getting worse, so it is a bit rich of those opposite to continue to talk about their cheaper childcare policy and their plans for universal early learning when there are families all over our great country languishing without support.

Many children are starting school developmentally behind their peers because the government has conveniently forgotten about communities living in regional, rural and remote areas. The Albanese Government invested $4.7 billion into childcare subsidies, most of which was eaten away by inflation—it just went up in smoke. It failed to deliver one single place for a child anywhere in regional Australia. That is the problem with Labor. They want to win votes. They don’t care about delivering good policy, and that’s something we’ve seen time and time again from this Albanese Labor Government. Just last week they announced a $3.6 billion wage subsidy for early childhood educators. Early childhood educators, carers and teachers do incredible work for our community—there’s no doubt about that—and those on this side of the chamber also want to see them have better pay. But that isn’t the issue. The issue is that real wages have declined by nine per cent and living standards have collapsed by eight per cent all because this Labor government can’t stop spending. What that means for educators is that, come December, they’ll find little extra money in their pockets because inflation is spiralling and they’ll end up having to spend that extra money on all of those bills that are mounting and that just continue to go up and up.

With this announcement, of course, the devil is in the detail. Labor stood up at an early learning service and said a lot of nice things, but they didn’t provide any real details. As the days pass, it becomes clear why they aren’t giving answers: this Labor government didn’t think any further than a nice, shiny headline. They’re creating policy on the run, announcing funding and then saying, ‘Don’t worry about the details.’ We’ve heard that many times from this Prime Minister and his ministers.

The biggest farce with this policy is that Labor think they can inject $3.6 billion into the sector and keep fees down using a cap. I know it’s hard for those opposite to understand because none of them have ever run a business, let alone an economy, but, when your costs are higher than your income, you have to cut costs somewhere, and that’s exactly what we’re likely to see under this policy, because many of these providers continue to watch their electricity, gas and grocery bills soar, in part thanks to the economic mismanagement of this Labor government. In fact, there’s a real chance that services already paying staff 10 or 15 per cent above the award wage won’t sign onto this. They’ll pay their staff a little bit more and then they’ll just increase their prices anyway, and that will land in families’ laps. Even if some services keep fees down this year and next year, families will still be hit with eye-watering bills when the government funding dries up because providers will then be forced to pick up the wages tab and to do that they will have to increase their fees. Families understand that, but the government doesn’t seem to.

The sector tells me a 10 per cent wage increase usually means a seven per cent fee increase. But that’s of course a post-election problem for this government, something that this Labor government doesn’t want you to think about as we head to the polls in the next eight months. If they cared about the sector like they claim to, they could have announced this in their first budget. They could have kept their policy from the 2019 federal election, but they dumped it after they dumped that opposition leader too.

To make matters worse, we’ve been hearing about another dodgy union peddling lies amongst educators. Yes, the CFMEU isn’t the only dodgy union. A union heavily involved in the early learning sector is back to its old tricks, telling educators they’ll only get this pay rise if they are a member of the union. It’s completely untrue, it’s misleading and it’s despicable behaviour from a union heavily associated with those opposite. I call on the Prime Minister to call them out.