Wages: Early Childhood Education

Last year, the Prime Minister promised Australia’s early childhood educators—200,000 of them—that they would receive a pay rise by the end of the year. But, in typical Labor fashion, it was just another broken promise. On 5 December, the education minister declared it was ‘payday’ for hundreds of thousands of early childhood educators. But this was yet another misleading headline, because we know that, by the end of 2024, fewer than 30,000 of those educators had received the promised pay rise, and, as of last month, only 19 per cent of eligible educators had received it.

I’ve spoken to countless service providers and educators who say they feel cheated by this government. Many of them have found themselves tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars out of pocket because of this scheme. It’s an absolute debacle.

Labor’s worker retention payment has no transparency and is way too complicated—so complicated that, in fact, Labor has paid $11 million in grants to third-party groups to help services apply for the grant. And of course, among the groups who got a share of this grant are—unions!

Labor must apologise to hardworking educators for their absolute failure and broken promises to early childhood educators and to all of those educators across the sector as well.