Willis NicolaNICOLA WILLIS (National): This bill is not about pay parity. If it were it would include those words somewhere in the text. It does not and the reason that it does not include those words is that it has a far broader purpose which the Minister of Education has tried to hide from view but which the early childhood sector are very alive to. This bill gives the Minister of Education the power to set employment conditions in privately owned businesses. It gives the Minister of Education a much wider power than he has ever had before which is to set conditions in early childhood services in order to and—I quote from the bill—help achieve employment relations aims". While we have this bill progressing through this House I want to summarise some of the key questions that have been asked and the key themes that have been raised that remain unaddressed as we have this its final reading. The first question that members asked was why this bill was necessary at all given the Minister already has the ability to require attestation rates for those receiving grant funding—that is he already has the ability to set minimum pay rates. That remained unaddressed. We had a whole lot of technical explanations that really did not get to the heart of that. The second thing we asked was if this is actually about pay parity then where is the funding to make that possible because the questions that early childhood centres have asked are very fair and very reasonable. They have said "Well if the Minister is now going to have the power to specify the conditions relating to a broad range of employment matters including when we step people up in their pay and what the pay levels are at different levels of experience then can we be confident that the Minister will match that power with the funding to make those things possible?" and the Minister has at no stage engaged in that debate. Instead he's said that it's not relevant. Well I put to this House that if this is a bill about pay parity as members opposite have harped on about then it is absolutely about funding because that is at the core of why early childhood services today are unable to pay their staff as much as kindergartens: because they are funded at a lower rate than kindergartens. So if the Minister is not addressing that fundamental issue then you do have to be cynical about what this bill is doing.The second issue that has been raised by services who will be affected by this bill is why so quick? Why so rushed? The discussion about pay parity has been ongoing for a number of years. The Minister has had multiple opportunities to engage with the sector on it and yet this bill was introduced under urgency. It was rushed through. Only 14 days were given for submissions and only two days for oral hearings two days of which were days when actually early childhood service owners and teachers across the country were operating those services and so found it pretty difficult to come and have their say and were left feeling that actually the Minister of Education didn't want them to know about this bill didn't want them to examine it and didn't want them to raise their concerns. But more than 550 entities and individuals were so concerned to hear about this bill that they did share their views and what were their concerns because it is pretty important. The member speaking before me—Camilla Belich—raised this issue of equity. Well the question that they put was: "If the Minister imposes employment conditions that we cannot afford how do you expect us to pay for them because really we have two choices. One we can increase fees"—and by the way Minister Sepuloni that is not good for the lower-income families who need to access early childhood education in order to be able to return to work; that is not good for them—"or actually the other choice we have is to lower quality in early childhood services by increasing the ratio of children to teachers." So if employment conditions are imposed by a Minister but they are not funded that does not improve affordability or accessibility of early childhood education. This bill is a Trojan Horse. It is not about pay parity. It is about the Minister increasing his control over the early childhood education sector."