Transcript - Press conference
JASON CLARE, MINISTER FOR EDUCATION: Today is a fantastic day. First of all, happy birthday to Atticus Clare, he turns three today, and he's probably not watching, he might be on his way to early education and care, but I'll see you later today, buddy, I promise.
Secondly, today we introduce this piece of legislation to help transform the lives, change the lives of early educators right across this country.
Now our early educators do some of the most important work in this country, but you wouldn't know it from what they're paid, and that changes with this legislation that we'll introduce today, a 15 per cent pay rise for around 200,000 early educators right across the country, a 10 per cent increase from this December followed by another 5 per cent increase from next December.
That means an extra $100 in their pockets from this December, up to $150 extra from next December. It means for somebody on the award rate of around about 60 grand a year, that's about $7,800 more once this is fully implemented.
Our early educators, as I said, do such important work. This isn't babysitting, this is early education. What the people behind me do, some of them have done it for a couple of years, some of them for 30 years; shape, change, make the lives of people that we care about, just like you, little Archie.
Everything that our children see, everything they read, every meal they have, every smile they see, all the love and affection that they receive in our early education centres helps to shape and change and make the people that we become.
And I know all the mums and dads that have their children in early education and care, they entrust the men and women in our early education care centres with their most precious gift, their children, and they know that those people deserve a pay rise. And so do we. And that's what this legislation that we'll introduce in the Parliament today is all about.
Can I pass over to the woman that has helped to make all of this possible today, Anne Aly.
ANNE ALY, MINISTER FOR EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION: Thanks, Jason. Look, you guys have heard from me before about how wonderful and how valued our early childhood educators are, you've heard from me before about how in 2016 my colleagues and I here in the Albanese Labor Government at the time signed a pledge to value early childhood educators for the work that they do, the professionals that they are, the ways in which the contributions that they make to the trajectory of our children's lives, and today is an historic day in announcing this much deserved pay rise for early childhood educators.
You don't need to hear any more from me, you don't need to hear any more from me. I want to hear from these guys. I want to hear from Cass and Jess about what this means to them. So I'm going to hand over to them.
JESSICA MARTIN, EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATOR: Thank you. This pay rise has been a beautiful life jacket thrown to a sector that was [indistinct] drowning, and I feel like it's definitely going to make a change. It's still not the end picture for us, but it's definitely a step in the right direction, and it's helped the sector so much to not only retain staff members, but to attract new staff members wanting to enter the sector and actually making it financially viable for us to do so.
It's such an important job that we do, we create beautiful, upstanding confident young citizens to be able to go out into the world and without this, this sector wasn't going to last. So really thank you, we appreciate it.
CASSANDRA BARATT, EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATOR: Absolutely, I don't think I can say it much better than what my sister said, but as a director here in the ACT it's been heartbreaking watching really passionate amazing educators leave in droves, but now I think they've got a really great reason to say. They have a living wage, a wage that may afford them a small holiday or a mortgage, just, you know, pay bills online. It's really it's pretty basic for a lot of Australians, but it's going to be a really big and impactful change for educators in Australia. So thank you.
JOURNALIST: When you were having those conversations with people who were leaving the sector, what were the primary reasons?
BARATT: Financial, a hundred per cent financial. We had educators that [indistinct] would find essentially that they could go to other jobs where they haven't got those responsibilities, didn't need a qualification for, and were earning a lot more.
JOURNALIST: And will the pay rise help retention issues in this sector?
BARATT: Absolutely. Educators work in education because they love what they do. Primarily people were leaving because of money. We're also hoping this will attract people back into the industry that they love.
SPEAKER: As an educator that was considering leaving if this pay rise was something that couldn't go through, I'm the ECT for where I work and also a mum of two beautiful little children, and I was having to choose between my passion supporting children to be confident young evolved learners and being able to pay my weekly bills day in day out and that's just to get by. And so, this has been something that now that this pay rise is coming through, I can actually stay and do what I love and teach children.
BARATT: Absolutely. It was definitely a factor for me as well. My little guy, Archie, and again without this increase, it was a very [indistinct] that it wouldn't have been viable for me to go back and pay fees and get paid [indistinct].
JOURNALIST: Minister Aly, we've heard that for centres and childcare workers to be eligible for this pay rise have got to prove that they won't jack up the fees [indistinct] for parents
ALY: That's right.
JOURNALIST: ...more than 4 per cent since August. The Opposition is concerned that that ends next August. Can you guarantee that it won't end next August?
ALY: Look, this is a... this pay rise, the reason that we've done it in this way is because we recognise just how critical it is to retain the staff that are leaving the sector and attract new staff to the sector.
The price cap that we've put that's attached to this, is also an interim measure. We've got an ACCC Review, and we've got a Productivity Commission Review. The ACCC Review has told us that we need to put some form of price capping on the cost of Early Childhood Education and Care.
When we first came into Government we reduced the cost of early childhood education and care by around 11 per cent in out of pocket costs for over a million families across Australia.
You know, if the Opposition is so concerned, they would have done something in the nine years that they were in Government, and they did nothing. We're at least taking action.
JOURNALIST: Why is it only an interim measure?
ALY: Because it needs to be done now in order to fix the workforce crisis. As you've heard from both of these early childhood educators and an early childhood teacher that were thinking about leaving, we needed to have a wage increase in August, we needed to have the wage increase in place to retain the staff that we have, and to attract more staff, more workers into the sector.
I think that's a given. I think that there's nobody here that would argue that having a wage increase in place now is absolutely critical to the reforms that we want to make to the sector. It's the basis that we need to make the reforms to the sector.
But we also know from experience that when we increase the childcare subsidy, prices go up. That's why we've tied this, that's why we've tied this to a price cap to ensure that every cent of that 15 per cent goes to these educators.
JOURNALIST: But why does the price cap end in August, why not
CLARE: That's simple. What the Opposition's telling you is wrong. The price cap of 4.4 per cent is from August to August for the next 12 months, then there will be another price cap, and it will be set by the ABS. We said that when we announced that. If the Opposition had bothered to read the press release they would know that, so don't listen to any of the rubbish the Opposition put out...
JOURNALIST: So you're saying that the price cap would then just be ongoing year by year
CLARE: It will be ongoing. Now that number will be informed by the ABS. This is about making sure that the people behind us get a pay rise and that we keep downward pressure on prices for parents, and the Opposition, if they'd bothered to check, saw prices go up by 49 per cent under their watch, double the OECD. We've managed to cut the price of childcare already for more than a million parents across the country through the legislation we've already introduced.
If you're a family at the moment with a combined income of 120 grand, two parents on 60 grand each, then you're paying about $2,000 less for childcare today than you otherwise would because of the measures we've already put in place.
We want to make sure that we keep prices down, that's what that cap is all about, and it's not just for 12 months, so don't be conned by anything the Opposition's saying as some sort of excuse not to vote for this. That's for 12 months, and there will be another cap after that.
JOURNALIST: Really good that you've got a mechanism for funding this, but how much is it actually going to cost in total?
CLARE: It's about $3.6 billion. This is a significant investment, but it's about respect for the work that people behind us do. It's also about helping to build a truly universal early education system where more children can get access to affordable early education and care.
What the Productivity Commission said in their interim report is if we want to build a bigger and a better early education system, then the first thing we need to do is build a bigger workforce.
We've got about 30,000 more early educators in the system today than when we were elected two years ago, but we need at least another 20,000 more. That's what JSA said last week.
And what we're hoping, and what we were talking about just a moment ago is that it will encourage more people to want to be an early educator, that it will help to keep people who are maybe thinking of quitting from staying in the job. I know, and I mentioned my little guy having a birthday today, Kerrie, his educator that looks after him, when I told her about this, she said, "maybe I won't have to quit".
And what we're also hoping is that some people come back, because a lot of people have come back, and I remember when we first announced this you said that the “early educators love this job, but love don't pay the bills".
And the truth is people have gone off to work at Woolies and Coles because they could get paid more there than doing the work they love.
And so, what we're hoping is people that have done the TAFE course, done the university degree love this work but have left it because they couldn't afford to keep doing it will come back and help to make sure that we've got more early educators in the system than we have today.
JOURNALIST: More money in the economy, are you worried it will add to inflation?
CLARE: If you've got more early educators, that means more mums and dads can get their children into care. That means they can go back to work. That means the economy is more productive. And if you've got a price cap to keep prices down, that puts downward pressure on inflation.
So that's another one of the con jobs from the Liberal Party, don't believe that either.
JOURNALIST: What's your message to parents who are excited by the prospect of universal childcare? What's the timeframe for the Albanese Government?
CLARE: Very, very soon, I'll release the Final Report of the Productivity Commission into Early Education and Care and how we build a universal system.
The truth is we need to reform our entire education system to make it better and make it fairer. That includes reforms in higher education, in school education and in early education.
The Universities Accord Report that I released at the start of this year said that by the middle of the century, we'll need a workforce where 80 per cent of people have a TAFE qualification or a university degree.
Now if we're going to get there, we can't just reform our universities and our TAFEs, reform needs to happen in our schools to help more people finish schools. We're going backwards at the moment; we need to turn that around. That requires reform at primary school to help children who fall behind to catch up and keep up and to finish school.
We've also got to do something about the children who start school behind, you know, little fellows I'm sure Archie's going to get a chance at early education, but not every child today does, and the Interim Report of the Productivity Commission told us that it's kids from the most disadvantaged families that are least likely to go to early education and care, and the most likely to benefit from it.
Now I know the debate for the US Presidency was on yesterday. The current US President often says that a child that goes to early education and care is 50 per cent more likely to go to university or to college.
So the reforms that we make here matter. It's not babysitting, it's early education, and if we get this right, we'll help to build the country of our imagination.
JOURNALIST: A lot of people voted for Labor at the last election because of what you were saying about childcare. There might be concern that, you know, there's still no universal childcare, and another, you know, term of Parliament has passed. Why should they support you again?
CLARE: For the more than 1 million Australian families who've benefitted from Cheaper Child Care, they would say that's a good start. For the more than 1 million Australian families who benefit from the work of our 200,000 and more early educators, they would say paying them more is the right thing to do, and I think they'll look forward to the blueprint for reform of early education that the Productivity Commission sets out that I will release very soon.