Wednesday, 6 March 2024

Education and Training Reform Amendment (Early Childhood Employment Powers) Bill 2024

Second reading

Debate resumed on motion of Ingrid Stitt:

That the bill be now read a second time.

Wendy LOVELL (Northern Victoria) (17:05): I am actually delighted to be standing here talking on the Education and Training Reform Amendment (Early Childhood Employment Powers) Bill 2024 because as a former minister for early childhood, I understand the absolute importance of having quality early childhood facilities, and particularly quality early childhood learning in this state. Most people probably would not be aware of the importance of what happens prior to a child attending school, but in the first five years of a child’s life, by the time the child the child is five, 90 per cent of their brain has actually already developed, and in the year before they go to school, a further 5 per cent. So by the time they start school, at six in this state, 95 per cent of a child’s brain development has already taken place. This is the time in a child’s life where we can make the biggest contribution to their future. By having quality early learning facilities and quality early learning programs, we can really make a difference to the outcome of a child’s life, and this needs to be provided for all children in the state, regardless of their status.

Most parents in the past may or may not have sent their children to child care or to kindergarten; they sent their children along to a local primary school and perhaps started them at a local high school and then when they got to about year 10 thought, ‘We should get serious about education.’ But actually what we know now is if we want to be serious about education, we start the day they are born. We put that investment into the first 5½ to six years of their life before they start school, and that will set those children up for better learning outcomes, to be better students and to be able to have a better life, because the early years are where we make the biggest difference.

The purpose of this particular bill is to give effect to the government’s commitment to open 50 new government-owned early learning centres by employing staff and setting up a framework to allow the department to employ staff and also to set up charging fees to parents for children attending. This is work that we actually looked at when we were in government. It is work that we actually began when we were in government, because we did know that there were problems in early childhood. Local governments are increasingly looking at what the future might look like in the provision of kindergartens et cetera, and also in some country areas it is particularly difficult to attract teachers and to have class sizes that are sustainable. One of the things that we did up in the Mallee when these problems arose was to run composite classes in primary schools with prep and kindergarten to ensure that children were able to get access to their four-year-old kindergarten year. That is when we began looking at the opportunities for the state to actually run these centres and to employ teachers, and I had the department doing work on that just prior to the 2014 election. But of course we did not win that election, Labor did, and now 10 years later we are actually debating that work that we had commenced back in 2014.

These new centres, the 50 centres to be built on school sites, actually build on more work that the coalition did with the co-located centres on primary school sites. Co-located centres provide really good outcomes for families and really good outcomes for schools. A co-located centre becomes a one-stop shop for a family – an early learning centre with maternal and child health in it and a primary school co-located together. For a family that may have one child who is attending maternal and child health, one child in a childcare class or a kindergarten class and one child who is in a primary school class, it becomes a one-stop shop where they can drop all those children off and attend their maternal and child health nurse at the same time rather than going all over town to different drop-offs and different appointments.

It also produces really good outcomes for the children, because what we know is that transitions are the time when children struggle most in their education. Whether that transition be from kindergarten to primary school or primary school to secondary school, it is the transitions when the children struggle. By having the early learning centre on a primary school site, the children are much more integrated into that primary school. They are used to being on that site, they can visit the prep class a number of times in that year before school and they become much more comfortable. It makes the transition easier. It is also fantastic for the school because it becomes a feeder for students for the school and ensures that their prep numbers will remain strong. So early childhood centres co-located with schools are a win–win all around for families, for children and for the schools themselves.

The coalition does recognise the important role that child care and early childhood education plays for families in Victoria today, not only in the education of their children but also in the ability to allow for mothers to go back to work. It provides the opportunity for greater workforce participation for women if they have access to child care. According to Deloitte, a lack of access to child care takes almost 27,000 women out of the workforce in Victoria entirely. This costs our economy about $1.5 billion a year in lost earnings. Child care actually provides families with the ability to strike that right balance, and families will make choices. Some parents make that choice to stay at home and to be with their children themselves, some parents make the choice to go back to work full-time and some parents make the choice to go back to work part-time. But whatever choice that family makes we should be providing them with the ability to make that choice and providing them with quality programs for their children so that they know that their children are not only being looked after but being educated at the same time and that they are not missing out on anything by not being at home with their mothers during the day, that they are actually gaining the benefit of being in a childcare centre.

A childcare centre provides much more than just child care and even more than education, it provides socialisation for those children. We know that children who have attended early learning programs actually do have better outcomes later in life. We need a childcare system that is flexible and responsive to every family’s needs and every family’s priorities. That is something that is imperative for this state to provide.

There are many studies that have been done across the developing world that point to the importance of early childhood education and the future outcomes for children. One study from the UK found that children who had attended a preschool had higher English and maths results in high school. They had better self-regulation and social behaviour and were less inclined to hyperactivity. The research also shows that the children most likely to benefit from early childhood education are those from disadvantaged backgrounds, and I would agree with this. I remember visiting one of my local doctors one day who was telling me about a mother who had come in and the child was having trouble feeding. While he was cleaning the teat from the bottle which had congealed milk in it and explaining to her that you have to clean it and the child will then take the milk out of that bottle, he was also talking to her about how she interacted with her child, whether she read to the child, talked with the child, played with the child and sang to the child. The mother said to him, ‘What, you expect me to play with this child too?’ These are the sad circumstances that some children, very few we hope, are born into. Not every child has the opportunity to have highly educated parents or to live in a wealthy household or even a middle-income household, so we want to make sure that for those children who do not have some of the advantages that other children have we as a state can give them the best early childhood learning that they can possibly have.

There is a thing called the Heckman curve that shows that every dollar spent in early childhood returns $17 later on. That is in savings to government for different things. It is things like welfare, and it is also because we can lower the incidence of people going on to be part of the justice system. That is not to say that if you do not attend kindergarten you are going to end up in the justice system or if you do attend kindergarten you are not going to, but what we know is if we can give people better opportunities for education they are less likely to end up in the justice system. The Heckman curve shows that every dollar spent in early childhood saves $17 later on. That is a great indicator of why we should invest in early childhood.

It is an unfortunate thing that all across the country families are struggling to access child care due to a chronic shortage of childcare places. A 2022 report by the Mitchell Institute at Victoria University found that more than 9 million Australians live in an area where there are insufficient childcare places for families, with 1 million of those having no access to child care at all. Twenty-eight per cent of metropolitan and 52 per cent – more than half – of regional Australians live in areas that are considered to be childcare deserts, where three or more children under four years of age are vying for every one childcare space available. That really shows the challenges for rural and regional families in accessing child care. In Victoria the median stands at 0.41 childcare places per child, with multiple regions across our state still designated as childcare deserts, where families are unable to access child care. Unsurprisingly of course you find these deserts in regional and remote communities, where families face severe shortages of early childhood education and care opportunities.

I can remember back just before I became minister for early childhood the federal Labor government at the time removed all funding for an occasional care program that was called Take a Break. This was a program that was jointly funded by the feds and the state, but the majority of the funding came from the federal government. That caused significant disadvantage in regional areas, because many regional areas had been innovative in the way they used that occasional care to provide day care for working mothers.

What we also found when we got to government was that the Brumby government had announced that they had extended the occasional care for six months, but what they had done was spend the entire 12 months budget in that six months. There was no money to actually continue that program post December, and we had just won government in November. We continued that program on for another six months, but because of the lack of federal funding and the lack of interest from the federal government to rejoin that, we were forced to cut that program. That did cause significant problems in the state, and I acknowledge that. I lobbied very hard for the federal government to continue that program – child care of course is a federal government responsibility to fund. We were able to get a concession at the next federal election out of the coalition that if they were returned to government, they would return the funding to that program. They did, fortunately, win that election, and they did return funding to that program, which enabled it to start up again in a slightly different format. But at least it was back on the table, and some regional communities have been able to make good use of that funding.

Two recent reports from the ACCC and the Productivity Commission have outlined a role for government to help boost the supply of childcare places. The ACCC argues that some form of broad government stewardship of childcare markets across the sector is warranted. There is always a tension in early childhood because there is community-provided early childhood, there is a lot of it provided by local government, church organisations or not-for-profit organisations and there is the private sector et cetera. But the Productivity Commission is arguing that there is an argument for government to also be in this market. The Productivity Commission found that in persistently thin markets – the childcare deserts – government should provide additional funding to support the establishment of appropriate services where necessary to ensure their ongoing viability through block funding. Despite this, any government intervention must be very delicately managed so as to not distort the private sector market nor crowd out the not-for-profit providers. We need to be very careful that the government being in this sector does not create significant shortages of educators for those sectors, because we know early childhood workers are not paid the same as primary school teachers. If the government is in the market, will they be paid in parity with teachers? Will that mean that the local not-for-profit providers or the local private providers cannot compete with the government paying higher wages and taking teachers away from that sector?

We had a similar situation in my home town just with a cafe at our local gallery. When the gallery was renovated and the council reopened it, they did not get anyone applying to operate the cafe so the local government decided they would run the cafe themselves for a little while. But it meant that they had to pay at local government rates, which were much higher than the rates that local cafes were paying their staff, and the local cafe owners were very, very concerned that their staff would move over to the cafe at the gallery because the wages were going to be higher. That cafe is now being run by a group of young people who are doing an excellent job, so that problem no longer exists. But it was a real concern for our cafe owners at the time, and I am sure that the government entering the early childhood education and care space will be a real concern for many of the not-for-profit and private providers in the early childhood space.

This bill will confer upon the Secretary of the Department of Education the authority to employ the childcare workers and support staff to operate the government-owned early learning centres. The Secretary of the Department of Education has existing employment powers that are used in relation to the employment of public school teachers, and the government has advised that these powers are not suitable for use in the childcare and early child learning space. That is something that I know is correct because, as I said, we were beginning to do this work back in 2014. The bill gives the Secretary of the Department of Education the authority to employ childcare workers and other staff, such as early learning centre directors and cooks; gives the ability to the department to charge fees to parents for sending their children to government-owned early learning centres; and enables the minister to make ministerial orders setting out the employment conditions for the public sector childcare workforce and the fees charged to parents of children attending government-owned early learning centres. As I have said, these things must be managed sensitively because they will impact on other providers, and we do not want to see a shortage of staff and a loss of places because other centres are closing down.

There are some concerns that the opposition have with this bill. As I have already said, there are significant risks that this bill will exacerbate the workforce crisis and distort the market. The early learning sector is already plagued by severe workforce shortages. It will now need additional teachers – not just reshuffling the teachers but additional teachers. If we reshuffle teachers, we will have a loss of places in other centres. In 2023 the Australian Childcare Alliance surveyed over 600 childcare centres, and over two-thirds of them stated that they had already capped their enrolments because they were unable to recruit enough workers to cover their shifts. So that tells you that the government need to invest far more in attracting people into early childhood and in training teachers.

As a result of those difficulties in attracting workers, some 16,000 childcare places are currently offline due to the workforce crisis. Given we are already at crisis levels of workforce shortages, any interventions in the sector must be made with the utmost care so as not to disrupt existing service providers and distort the market. We are concerned that the government does not have a plan that will increase the capacity to support the new government-run early learning centres without taking staff away from other existing centres. It is estimated that they need some 700 educators, over 100 teachers amongst them, not to mention dozens of centre directors, assistant directors, education leaders, admin supports and cooks. They will need to source hundreds of staff for these centres from day one, and there is no plan on how they are going to do that. If the staff come from the centres down the road, as I have said, that will be detrimental to numbers in those centres. What will these existing centres do if they can no longer fill the shifts? They will have to reduce the places that they can offer, so that would not be a good outcome.

There is no plan to get childcare workers to regional and remote areas either. We know from experience of trying to attract teachers to primary and secondary schools in these locations that additional resources need to be deployed to get staff onsite. I know from what was happening in the Mallee when I was minister that it is difficult to attract early childhood teachers to remote areas of the state as well. Of the 50 new government-owned early learning centres, 17 are going to be located in regional or remote locations according to the ABS classifications, but the government has no specific plan in place to overcome the likely staffing challenges at these locations. The government has been unable to provide us with any information about the budgetary impact of the establishment of these government-run early learning centres, and that is another concern to the coalition. There is just a complete lack of detail about the budget impact. We know that they allocated $921 million to establish the first 35 of 50 early learning centres, but this money is just to cover the capital cost of building the centres and does not include any forecasting around operating expenses, including staff wages. So the government is seeking the Parliament’s support to establish a whole new public sector childcare workforce, likely under a brand new enterprise bargaining agreement, and they cannot give us even a ballpark figure for how much this is likely to cost.

This, as I said, is about more than just the cost of the build. There are a lot of other things to consider – the cost of staffing these centres et cetera – but there are a lot of other costs to consider about the schools that these are going to be put on as well, because these will put extra pressure on those schools. Will the drop-off points at those schools be capable of taking the extra traffic, or will they need to be expanded? Will the school crossings be adequate for these children and the additional families using the schools? Will the infrastructure at the school itself be able to cope with the additional enrolments from having the feeder centre onsite? These are all things that the government has not even considered. The government’s track record is of course not very good with managing anything, and once again we have a press release and an announcement, but we do not have any detail on how this is going to actually be funded.

The coalition is going to move a reasoned amendment. We moved this reasoned amendment in the lower house as well, and we are moving this reasoned amendment for a reason: we do support the measures to increase supply of child care and early learning places, but it is vital that any moves in this space are carefully considered and precisely implemented to ensure they do not distort the existing market. There is no evidence that Labor have been sufficiently diligent to ensure that this bill will be saved from the unintended consequences we have seen from so many of their other policy debacles. That is why the coalition will be moving a reasoned amendment – that the house declines to read the bill a second time until the government actually does its homework and comes back to this space with evidence it fully understands the impact of its actions on the early childhood education and care sector. I move:

That all the words after ‘That’ be omitted and replaced with ‘the bill be withdrawn and not reintroduced until the government:

(1) provides a preliminary or draft fee structure for the early learning centres (ELCs) scheduled to open in 2025 and 2026;

(2) seeks written feedback from any childcare centre, kindergarten or preschool within a 15-kilometre radius of the proposed government ELC sites regarding the likely impact of a government ELC on their workforce capacity and enrolments and provides their feedback to the house;

(3) conducts an analysis on the childcare workforce implications of the new government ELC sites, including:

(a) establishing the workforce vacancy rates around the locations of the new sites;

(b) providing the house with a comprehensive plan on how the government will ensure existing childcare centres and kindergartens are not disadvantaged in their ability to recruit and retain staff in their existing programs; and

(4) provides an estimate of the budget impact of the operating costs for the government ELCs scheduled to open in 2025 and 2026.’.

This reasoned amendment is by no means opposing this bill. This is about getting the policy right. As I was saying, the reasoned amendment is not about opposing the centres. It is about making sure we get the policy right – or the government gets the policy right, because they so often get it wrong. It is about ensuring we understand the full impact of the costs of running these centres on the budget, which is something that we do not have now and something that we see all too often from this government, where their costs just completely blow out and become enormous. We already know that the government’s policy around free kindergarten has been having some negative effects in the community, with a number of kindergartens saying that they cannot continue to operate. At Summerhill Park, their program costs them $4000 per year per child.

They now only receive $2500 a year from the government, and they cannot charge fees to cover that gap. Their president says that they will probably have enough money to sustain them for a bit longer, but certainly the way it is, it is not sustainable for them. We have also seen several local councils that are backing out of early learning services delivery, including in Glen Eira and Knox, and we know that there are a number of kindergartens, particularly in the Glen Eira area, that are now considering closure just because of the cost pressures on them. The Age did a big article on this a couple of weeks ago. This is another example of the government not getting a policy right. If you can get the policy right in the first place, you will not run into these problems afterwards. The government need to actually invest in this. The government do like – (Time expired)

Tom McINTOSH (Eastern Victoria) (17:36): I am absolutely delighted to stand here and support this bill. It is an issue that actually brings me joy every time I stand up to speak on it, because investing in future generations of Victorians, as I will go through throughout my contribution, and investing in their academic capacity and the future productivity they will bring to this state, their emotional wellbeing, what they get and what their families get through early education, and as Ms Lovell has discussed, the importance of early education in the development of individuals and in the development of our communities is vitally important.

The Education and Training Reform Amendment (Early Childhood Employment Powers) Bill 2024 is the next step in the delivery of our 50 government owned and operated early learning centres, which was a commitment from the 2022 election. What this bill will do is it will empower the Secretary of the Department of Education to employ staff, which includes cooks, admin staff, centre directors and educators – everything needed within a centre; sometimes some of us can take it for granted if we think about the workers directly working with our children, but it needs the whole team to make it operate – to enable the fees to be fixed and charged to parents of children enrolled at the centres; and to enable the minister to make ministerial orders fixing the fees to be paid for attendance at government centres and setting the employment terms and conditions for the workforce.

We need this bill to pass, and I will go through the important reasons why we need it – what it is going to mean to kids, to families, to our economy and to the wellbeing of our communities. Ms Lovell has just talked about some Australian statistics and about the need for more early education centres. My concern re the reasoned amendment is we have had legislation passed to ensure we have the land for the centres, so we need to pass this so we can employ the workforce and get on with delivering early education in areas where we need it – where children in these areas need it and where families need it. I think it is really important here today that we get this bill passed so we can get on with delivering an election commitment that is so important to so many people.

From a childhood development perspective Ms Lovell mentioned, and I completely agree, the absolute importance of the development of our kids at an early age. As I touched on before, I think the academic side of it is incredibly important – the ability to learn, learning how to learn. Those academic skills build that foundation that actually leverage up that young toddler that becomes a child, that becomes a teenager, that becomes an adult as an active participant in our society and in our economy. This work we put in to the early stages is leveraged up every single year of their life. The emotional wellbeing that they learn through being with others, through the skills they develop in socialising and through being taught by the incredible and I think absolutely beautiful workforce, again, is enabling those children to become full participants in our community as they grow older. And it is that workforce, that incredible workforce, that is delivering what our kids and our families need.

Ms Lovell talked about the required workforce, and that is exactly why we have a workforce strategy. We are attracting, we are training and we are retaining the workforce that is needed to deliver these commitments that we went to the 2022 election with, which will deliver for Victoria for generations to come. The Victorian government is investing $370 million in the workforce supports under the Best Start,Best Life Workforce Strategy. The strategy supports all kindergarten providers by attracting high-quality early childhood teachers and educators to the sector and supporting professionals to upskill. It includes early childhood scholarships to support people to study or upskill to become early childhood teachers, with over 4000 scholarships awarded so far; a new certificate III upskill support program to provide financial support for certificate-III-qualified educators working in funded kindergarten programs to upskill to a diploma; innovative initial teacher education which supports diploma-level-qualified staff to upskill to become qualified early childhood teachers while they continue to work, with up to 1700 students enrolled so far; free TAFE for a certificate III or a diploma of early childhood education and care, with students who have undertaken the certificate III as free TAFE also eligible to undertake the diploma; and early childhood educator traineeships which support students to work in an early childhood education service while completing their educator qualification, with over 200 students supported so far; and financial incentives for teachers. So I think this line being put that the government is not considering in its entirety what is needed to deliver the land, the facilities and the workforce to support those who most need early education in our community is a furphy. I think Ms Lovell went a little bit broader in her comments, and I think it is fair to say that this side for two decades has rebuilt TAFE’s training and skill capacity in this state, so we are absolutely mindful of what it takes to deliver a workforce for such a crucial part of our society and economy.

The benefits go on. They go on to parents and the families, getting people back to work – and we know it is predominantly getting women back to work. It is getting them earning an income, back in the workforce, ensuring that their peers are not continuing to pass them by and by the time they get into the workforce those opportunities of promotion, of training, of upskilling are not passing them by. And the other thing it is ensuring is that their superannuation is growing, because when they are working and their superannuation is growing it is setting them up for later in life. That is something that every single Victorian should have access to: the opportunity to build that financial security for later in their life.

We are thinking about the way we build these facilities, the locations, so that the dreaded double drop-off does not become an impediment to parents getting to work. It is about thinking about infrastructure, something that this government has done since day dot upon coming back into government, ensuring that the infrastructure of our roads, of our public transport and of our services is connected and that we can move people from A to B as efficiently as possible. It is another way that the state government is ensuring the productivity of this state. We have heard a lot recently about our workforce growth and low unemployment rates, that this state is performing incredibly well and leading the nation, and this is another example of investing in infrastructure and investing in services that enable our economy to continue to grow and to flourish. I will also just talk about the jobs that are involved in the construction. I have talked about the ongoing jobs, which of course are critically important, but construction jobs will be created through investing in this infrastructure.

Ms Lovell mentioned the Australian stats around early education and the shortages, and that is why I am so proud that in Victoria we have been getting on with supporting early education. Ms Lovell also commented on the regions. One of the best parts of my job since coming into this place 15 or 16 months ago has been getting out to our early education centres and getting out to our new centres – the centres we are building in Yarram, in Sale, in Korumburra, in Mirboo North and in Leongatha. There are so many centres just in eastern Victoria alone – in the regional areas; I will not even go into the suburban areas of the electorate – where we are putting in more early education capacity and more early education ability to deliver for local kids and local families.

I just want to come back to the point that a bill like this, work like this and everybody who has been involved in it – Minister Blandthorn and her office and team and those who have come before in developing it – are why I am Labor. This is generational change for our people and our state. It is fundamentally important, as is the work we have done since being in government around family violence and around mental health. This is the sort of work that will flow on through generations to come through our productivity and our collective prosperity. I will conclude my comments there, but I absolutely want to commend this bill the house.

Ann-Marie HERMANS (South-Eastern Metropolitan) (17:47): I too rise to speak on this bill. It is an incredibly important bill, because early childhood is important and education is important for children. Having had a mother who for many years studied for but did not quite complete her masters in early childhood education and worked in this space for a very long time, I am well aware of how important early childhood education is. I want to commend my colleague Wendy Lovell, who spoke and opened the debate on this bill for the coalition, because what people need to know – and they absolutely need to know this – is that when the coalition was in government in 2014 four-year-old kinder had a 98.2 per cent attendance rate. Under this government it has dropped to 90 per cent of four-year-olds attending kinder. That is a nearly 10 per cent drop. So when we are talking about education and what is important and the value of early childhood education and having these free kindergartens, then let us look at what the coalition did in the very short time that it was in government. Out of the last 24 years we were in government for only four years, and yet we had four-year-old kinder at 98.2 per cent.

On top of that, it is really important to understand that when the coalition came into government in 2010 only 57 per cent of Aboriginal children in Victoria were attending four-year-old kindergarten. However, under a coalition government, in 2014 that had been raised to 95 per cent. Ninety-five per cent of Aboriginal children were attending four-year-old kindergarten under a coalition government. That shows that we take the learning of children in this state as being incredibly important, and we are very much committed to making sure that when we talk about early childhood education we are going to provide the very, very best for the families of Victoria. That is why, whilst we are very interested in the bill and we want to see things being facilitated for families in Victoria, we also have major concerns.

I too wish to read out the amendment and to just discuss it a little bit in terms of what we are putting as a reasoned amendment. Number one, we are concerned in terms of this bill, and that is why we have said that the first thing that we are looking at is that we need it to provide:

… a preliminary or draft fee structure for the early learning centres (ELCs) scheduled to open in 2025 and 2026;

As a coalition we believe in responsible government. We believe that a government needs to be able to afford what it promises and not go to an election with some grandiose idea and not actually work out how to make that affordable for the people of Victoria who are already struggling to put food on the table and to pay their enormous power bills. We want to be able to see the fee structure. We want to see what the government has in place for that because we want to make sure this is going to work for Victorians and also that it is going to be sustainable, that it is going to work within our economy.

Number two:

seeks written feedback from any childcare centre, kindergarten or preschool within a 15-kilometre radius of the proposed government ELC sites regarding the likely impact of a government ELC on their workforce capacity and enrolments and provides their feedback to the house;

I happen to know, because part of my region is Narre Warren North, that there has been huge concern from locals regarding a childcare centre that was being built in a residential area. People have chosen to live in this area because it was a quiet street. It was one way in to a particular residential area, and a childcare centre has now been started and has commenced its building in this area despite the locals continually saying, ‘We don’t want a childcare centre here, we don’t need the childcare centre here and there are actually vacancies in enrolments in our area.’ This is what concerns me. We can have a government that makes election promises, and it is like they make the election promise and they have got this square peg and now they are going to somehow try and smash it into the round hole to make it work. There are actually areas in Victoria that desperately need these childcare centres, and we need to be thinking through very carefully where they go so that those who are in most need – and when we say ‘most need’ it is not always financially disadvantaged areas – of a childcare centre actually can have that childcare centre.

My colleague Wendy Lovell spoke about the regional areas. What I find surprising is that only 17 out of the 50 promised childcare early learning centres are going to be in a regional area. If you consider that we have documentation and studies that have been done that suggest there are a million people who cannot easily access a childcare centre and the government is actually saying they are going to have 50 built and only 17 of those are going to be in regional areas, mathematically that makes me wonder how many areas are still going to be without a childcare centre under this proposal.

The transparency for us as a coalition – which is part of our job, to make sure that the government is being held to account, to make sure that it is doing the very best by Victorians – is incredibly important to us. We take this role very seriously, and that is why we have this reasoned amendment. We want the feedback from other childcare centres. We want to know what their enrolment is. We want to know what the impact is going to be on these local areas, and we want to make sure that these childcare centres are not going to be putting other childcare centres out of business but are actually going into the place of greatest need.

I can say as a mother of four kids that a lot of the time I could not afford child care – I could not afford to use child care – which is just crazy. There were parents putting their kids in child care who had no intention of working, but I would have liked to have gone back to work and could not afford to use the service. On top of that, I know that, for instance, my sister, after years of working and getting this massive HECS debt, did not have the availability of affordable childcare services to her in her line of work. She was not considered to be one of those people that would deserve to be able to have a government childcare centre for her family’s use. The cost to her of her income on child care – it was unbelievable what she had to pay to find someone to look after her children. At the moment she is living overseas. If you look at what is happening in other countries – what governments are providing in other countries for children – it is incredibly different. In fact they are getting proper schooling in some countries from the age of three when they go to these English language centres, and they are getting a hot meal provided, and it is all provided by the government. It does not matter what your income is – everybody is entitled to it. Everybody is provided with that opportunity. I am not going to state the country. I am not here to plug national issues, but I think it is important that we look at this in terms of what is happening around the globe. If we are wanting to be leaders in early childhood, then perhaps we need to be taking a look at some of the other countries and what they are doing well.

The reasoned amendment continues:

(3) conducts an analysis on the childcare workforce implications of the new government ELC sites, including:

(a) establishing the workforce vacancy rates around the locations of the new sites;

(b) providing the house with a comprehensive plan –

not some sketchy thing –

on how the government will ensure existing childcare centres and kindergartens are not disadvantaged in their ability to recruit and retain staff in their existing programs …

With a young family member that currently works in this space, I can say – in fact more than one, and more than one that has qualifications in this area – that at the lower level we do not pay early childhood workers very much money. Really, they are poorly paid. People that go into this profession go into it because they love children and they want to be able to work with them. But when you have too many children to one person who is working with the child and you are not funding it adequately, it does not work. On top of that, you can have people that are actually prepared to work for these wages, but the reality is it is not sustainable in a state that has made everything so unaffordable for the average Victorian.

A member interjected.

Ann-Marie HERMANS: I am talking about the workers and their wages. It is the workers and their wages, and the workers do not get paid very much to work with young children. I am talking about the workers and their wages. This is a government that brags that it actually cares for a fair Victorian society and that they are going to look after these people. Let me tell you: people that work in early childhood are underpaid.

As I have just said, (3) is ‘conducts an analysis’. We want to look at how you are going to do the recruiting, because the reality is there are not enough staff. You are going to do your 50 kinders. It is a bit like the level crossing removal in Progress Street – the proper analysis is not done, and someone just decides: election promise, we are removing everything. Who cares if it makes their life more difficult – we are just going to do it. Well, this needs to be done properly. If you were doing it the way the coalition would do it, you would have a rise in the number of children that are using the service and you would be putting these in places where they are most needed, not where it is most politically advantageous.

Next is:

(4) provides an estimate of the budget impact of the operating costs for the government ELCs scheduled to open in 2025 and 2026.’.

We have given some thought to these amendments, and that is why we are proposing them – because we do have concerns. We are 100 per cent in favour of helping mothers be able to go into the workforce while their children are also getting the great opportunities that kinder can provide. Three- and four-year old kinder is a wonderful thing. I have enjoyed being able to have my children participate in kinder programs, and I am really saddened by the fact that this government has also defunded councils. They have not given them any additional money. They have given them a whole lot more things to do with the same amount of money, so councils are now going to have to close their doors to all these wonderful programs that they had for young children before they go to school.

We are now looking at a situation where instead of facilitating things we are making them worse. What is more, a frightening number of childcare centres have been failing the safety standards. I wonder what this government is going to do. There has been a lot of discussion and a lot of articles done in this area. This is from a couple of years ago, but more than one Victorian childcare provider a week was being shut down or censured for serious failings in their care of children.

If we are going to have the state providing 50 childcare centres, we want to make sure that they are providing exactly what is needed where it is needed, where it is not putting Victorian businesses that are currently operating and providing child care out of business, where we can afford it and where it is in the best place possible. Whilst we are 100 per cent for childcare centres and kindergartens and giving people choice and allowing mothers to go back to work after having their children, we want to make sure that this is done right. We want to make sure this is done in a way that is going to be affordable, in a way that is going to help Victorians and that is not going to make their life chaotic with drop-offs and pick-ups.

We have enough congestion in some of our suburban areas because the planning has somehow been shot by somebody who decided they were going to be allowed to do something that really did not work for the local area and the thought was not put into it. In some of our school areas in the south-east the roads are narrow. They are in suburban areas; they do not have wide roads. There are little roundabouts and hardly any parking. It is already incredibly difficult. If we are going to be putting childcare centres near these schools, I just wonder how on earth we are going to make that work without having somebody pay a price for it.

It is something that needs to be thought about, because (1) we do not want to make everybody’s life more miserable, (2) we do not want to make it unaffordable and (3) we do want to make sure we can have people working in these childcare centres if they are getting built, not just say, ‘We built a childcare centre.’

Business interrupted pursuant to sessional orders.