Federal budget 2023: Childcare companies demand taxpayers fund a pay rise for workers

Daycare centres are demanding that taxpayers top up their workers’ wages, warning that staff shortages will wipe out the benefit of cheaper childcare.

Childcare centres want taxpayer-funded pay rises. Picture: iStock

Daycare centres are demanding that taxpayers top up their workers’ wages, warning that staff shortages will wipe out the benefit of cheaper childcare.

A crippling shortage of workers in daycare has forced the government regulator to bend the rules to allow one in six centres to care for and educate children without the required number of qualified staff. The Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority has doubled its staffing waivers since the start of the pandemic.

A record 16.2 per cent of long daycare centres now have a staffing waiver, compared with just 8.6 per cent at the end of 2019.

A quarter of centres have been granted temporary staffing waivers in Queensland and Western Australia, while 18 per cent of centres in NSW and 15 per cent in Tasmania and South Australia are operating without the usual number of qualified staff required by law.

The Australian Childcare Alliance (ACA), representing private centres, has warned that staff may leave to work in the higher-paid aged-care sector, where workers will cash in on a 15 per cent government-funded pay rise from July.

The aged-care wage top-up will cost taxpayers $11.3bn over the next four years.

ACA vice-president Nesha Hutchinson said childcare operators hired from the same pool of workers as aged-care centres.

“We have a critical workforce shortage affecting the number of places available to families,’’ Ms Hutchinson said.

“Two-thirds of centres across Australia have capped enrolments because they don’t have enough staff to cover the extra places. If the aged-care sector is getting a funded pay rise of 15 per cent, we know more of our ­workforce will be migrating in that direction.’’

Ms Hutchinson said it was “magnificent’’ that the federal budget had boosted funding to cover 90 per cent of the cost of daycare fees for each family’s oldest child in care, saving 1.2 million families an average $1700 per year.

But she warned that staff shortages could further reduce the number of childcare places, wiping out the benefits for ­working families.

“It doesn’t matter how cheap you make childcare if places aren’t available because we can’t find staff,’’ she said.

Listed childcare company G8 Education, which made a $36m profit from its 428 daycare centres last year, also called for taxpayer-funded wage rises on Wednesday.

Spokeswoman Andrea Christie-David said G8 would petition the federal government to “fund a wage increase for all educators in a way that doesn’t see overwhelming costs passed on to families and providers’’. “I believe there is more that can be done to improve accessibility by addressing sector-wide workforce shortages. A shortage of educators means a shortage of care available for working families.’’

Education Minister Jason Clare said multi-employer bargaining had already increases the wages of workers in 70 early childhood education and care centres by 16 per cent.

He said the government had backed last year’s increase to the minimum wage.

“That increased the pay of up to 113,000 early childhood educators by 4.6 per cent,” he said.