Interview - SKY News
CHENG LEI: The Prime Minister has just unveiled a $3.6 billion package to give childcare workers a pay rise, making the announcement at an early education centre in Sydney. Joining me live is Education Minister Jason Clare. Hi there, Jason. Thank you for joining us. So, what measures will be in place to ensure that those childcare centres don't hike their fees?
JASON CLARE, MINISTER FOR EDUCATION: What we're doing is we're also setting a cap of 4.4 per cent. We're going to require centres, require providers, to sign a legally enforceable agreement that in order to get the extra funding for their workers, they cannot increase their fees by more than 4.4 per cent. So, this is a cost-of-living win-win. It means more money for workers, more money for the childcare workers, but it also helps to keep prices low for parents as well.
LEI: To what extent do you think this will help ease the staffing shortage that we see in the childcare sector?
CLARE: We've got 30,000 more early educators in our centres today, but the truth is we need tens of thousands more. If we're going to build a universal early education system where more children get access to early education and affordable early education, then one part of it is cutting the cost, and we've been able to cut the cost of childcare for more than a million families with the legislation that we passed just over a year ago.
But we also need more workers, more early educators in our centres. We hope that this will help to see more people stay in the sector. When I drop my little guy off at his centre this morning, I told the team there and Kerrie who looks after my little guy, said, "well, maybe I won't quit then, after all." The truth is, there's a lot of Kerries out there. There's a lot of people who love this job but can't afford to keep doing it. Hopefully, it'll encourage more people to want to be an early educator too. We've got a lot of people in TAFE and uni at the moment studying to be an early education teacher or an early education educator. We hope that this will encourage more people to want to do this crucially important job.
LEI: You know, Jason, I have a friend who's a childcare worker and let's call her Kerrie, and she says that one of her biggest challenges is the amount of compliance, the amount of forms she showed me on her phone that she has to fill out. You know, there's a lot of people complaining about being overworked. Do you think there is too much red tape?
CLARE: It's one of those things I hear in early education but also in school education to be honest. It's about work life that can sometimes make people leave the job that they love. You become a teacher, you become an educator because of the kids. Because you know that the work you do changes their lives. You don't go there to fill in the paperwork. We've got to get that balance right to be honest, because you want to make sure that this is a safe place. You want to make sure that our kids are getting access to the best quality education that they possibly can.
In all of the work that I do, and I do this hand-in-hand with State Education Ministers as well, is making sure that we set a system up which is quality, which is affordable, but try to make sure where we can, that we reduce as much as possible all of that paperwork.
LEI: Great stuff. Thank you so much, Education Minister Jason Clare.
CLARE: No worries at all.