National Early Years Policy Summit

National Early Years Policy Summit, 18 June 2025

E&OE

Acknowledgments omitted

There’s a John Dewey quote that many of you may know.

He wrote: “What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children.”

That quote encapsulates well what I feel is my responsibility as Minister.

As a mother, I think about my own children and what I want for them all the time: to be safe, to be happy, to learn and grow and succeed in terms they define for themselves.

As Minister, I see my job as working out how we can ensure those same things for all children.

And I’m reminded of a girl ...

[Personal reflection]

I think about that little girl all the time.

As a society, we have to find a way to change the life trajectory of children like her.

That’s what motivates me as Minister.

Part of making sure children like her can get the best start in life is building strong universal systems that foster early childhood development.

Last year our Government launched Australia’s first 10-year Early Years Strategy. I know many of you in this room contributed to the Strategy and I’m grateful that it could draw on your collective expertise.

The Strategy sets out important initiatives that are now being delivered.

In maternal and newborn health, there are new and extended investments in:

• Healthy pregnancies, including reducing alcohol use during pregnancy and preventing early term births,
• Healthy children, including expanded support for breastfeeding, newborn bloodspot screening and immunisation programs, and
• Healthy parents, including perinatal mental health screening.

We’re extending paid parental leave to 26 weeks and from 1 July this year we’re adding super, helping parents spend more time with their newborns.

And we’re working towards our vision of a universal early childhood education and care system that is high-quality, simple and accessible to all. I understand Minister Walsh spoke here yesterday about what we’re doing - cheaper childcare, a 15% wage increase for early childhood workers, investing $1 billion to build or extend early childhood education and care services in unserved or underserved communities, and our work to model the ‘early education service delivery price’, which will inform the next steps towards a universal system.

We’re also working on how we track the success of these interventions. Ultimately, I’d like to see linked-up data that allows us to follow children through the various services they interact with and to measure and report on the effect of those services on their development over time.   

All those investments are about building a comprehensive universal system of supports and services for early childhood development.

A comprehensive universal system is important, but it can only go so far. It might help, but not ultimately change the life trajectory of the girl that lived on my street and others like her.

A major part of improving the wellbeing of Australian children will be reducing, and ultimately eliminating, entrenched intergenerational disadvantage. Entrenched inequality most often begins in childhood and compounds over time.

There are 235 communities that, together, account for the hardest 10% of disadvantage experienced in Australia. Of those communities, 65 are estimated to be home to over half of the Australians living in the most disadvantaged conditions. These communities face complex social and economic challenges that can’t be solved by universal systems alone.

But in these communities, local people know local solutions. And that’s why place is such an important concept. Australia is a diverse country. Our people are diverse. So we need to build capacity to hear diverse community needs and respond with nuance and sophistication to those needs. Working with local communities to plan and use the resources available means we can achieve more with what we’ve got, and stand a better chance of getting it right on the ground.

Working in place is notoriously difficult. Aligning the services of government departments, layers of government and the community sector quickly bumps up against the problem that each has its own timelines, imperatives and constraints.

I think of Redfern in the heart of my own electorate. A lot of effort is going into that community. There are more than a dozen departments across three levels of government working intensively there, plus a large number of non-government organisations. There are many programs and a lot of dollars. But there’s not enough progress.

What is working, is what is being led by local people, in particular through Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisations, and through the Empowered Communities model.

When you look at communities where place-based approaches are making the biggest difference in people’s lives, you see a lot of reliance on outstanding individuals. Leaders who, through their own determination, manage to cut through the entanglement of siloed institutions and find a way to put local needs first. Logan Together is another example of this.

As Minister, I want government to work out how to do two things.

Firstly, where there are exceptional leaders, how can we support them better or, at the very least, stop making things harder for them? We’ve tried getting the most disadvantaged communities to fit in with our program funding rounds, our trials and our big policy announcements. We need to try harder to do it the other way around - get the 3 levels of government with their dozens of departments, and the community sector, to offer support and funding that better suit what those communities want. The onus shouldn’t be on disadvantaged communities to navigate our programs. The onus is on us to make our programs more readily adaptable to local needs.

Secondly, how do we make local progress less dependent on outstanding individuals? How do place-based solutions stop being something that someone needs to fight for, that someone needs to convince governments to open a whole bunch of exceptions to enable? How do we make it our default approach to help communities without clearly established existing leaders organise their voices, then ask what the community needs, and then work out how to deliver it?

These are the things that I think will make the greatest difference for young children with difficult childhoods and my priority as Minister will be to make progress on these questions.

I see the beginnings of answers to these questions in the examples of place-based approaches that are emerging around Australia and the world. To make that approach more readily transferrable to new locations, we’ll need to go further in breaking down the siloes between us than we’ve been able to go before.

And we can only do that by working together more closely. That’s why I’m really pleased to be part of the Investment Dialogue for Australia’s Children, or IDAC, a partnership with the philanthropic sector.

A shout-out to those of you here at this Summit who built IDAC from a good idea into the reality it is today.

IDAC commenced in December 2023. I see its potential not only in fostering more examples of local partnerships that benefit the communities they work in, but in teaching us more about the big challenges I just described of making our systems align and respond better to local need.

Our Government has come to the table with a $200 million package to take on this challenge.

The package includes funding to continue existing initiatives such as Stronger Places, Stronger People.

It also includes a $100 million Outcomes Fund so the Australian Government can establish new partnerships with states, territories and the philanthropic sector to tackle entrenched disadvantage.

Although early, IDAC has already agreed to:

• Align investment and efforts in up to 50 communities,
• Develop new models of integrated early years service provision, including First Nations-led approaches, and
• Collect better data on children’s sense of belonging, identity and wellbeing.

Under the IDAC partnership, the Government and 5 philanthropic organisations are also co-funding a new national, independent, non-government organisation known as PLACE – Partnerships for Local Action and Community Empowerment. PLACE’s role will be to accelerate our learning about community-led and place-based approaches and to accelerate their adoption. 

A $200 million package, a partnership across sectors and a new organisation are all great, but those things only matter if they deliver results on the ground.

It all took a step towards more concrete outcomes with the recent announcement that the Government and IDAC’s philanthropic partners will co-invest up to $100 million – $50 million from each side – to build or expand integrated early learning services in areas of need. These are centres that bring together early learning services, child and maternal health services, and family and community supports. They are the seamless, linked-up, local services that we hope will be a blueprint for the future.

I have seen some wonderful examples over the years in Victoria, Tasmania, the NT and South Australia of co-locations like this really making a difference for children and families.

Providing a beautiful, welcoming place that celebrates the strength and survival of children and parents is a way in to profound change.

I’m impatient to see these commitments materialise, as I’m sure are the communities that will benefit from them.

All of us here today share one goal: to ensure every Australian child is happy, healthy, safe, and able to learn and develop, no matter where they live or what their background is.

We’ll continue to work to build and improve our universal system, and I’m determined to advance on making place-based approaches work more seamlessly, particularly for those children who, because of the circumstances of their birth, need our support most urgently.

It’s an effort that transcends sectors, from Commonwealth and state governments to the community sector, frontline support workers, educators and teachers, researchers and philanthropic partners. In other words, it’s an effort that involves all of us in this room.

I’m looking forward to working with you to achieve real improvements in what we can do for our children – all our children.