In my electorate of Higgins, there are 4,400 families who are eligible for child care. In 2020, 1,365 babies were born. Those babies are now toddlers, and their mothers and their families are struggling. I heard this during the campaign, and I hear this as I walk through the electorate. In Malvern, a young mother clutching her child is paying $165 a day. In Armadale it's even higher, at $200 a day. What really shocked me was when I was in Carnegie and I met a working mum who came out from her Zoom call and said: 'Michelle, I am paying $2,000 a month on childcare, but I'm still doing it. Why? Because my career is important to me.

So I saw firsthand the effects of what neglect around this policy is doing to my constituents, and it is a terrible drag on our economic prosperity. Those opposite had messed-up, warped priorities. We in the Albanese government have got our priorities right. We do not regard cheaper child care as middle-class welfare. We see it as a nation-building economic reform. In fact, our Minister Rishworth has previously called it nation-building infrastructure, which I thought was interesting because we don't conventionally regard infrastructure as being service delivery. But this is, in fact, infrastructure. It is the scaffolding that is going to build a better future for families, for children and for our economy.

So we are now going to pull the biggest lever that we can to boost female workforce participation, and it can't come soon enough. Our country is currently in the grip of a labour and skills crisis. Our businesses are desperate for workers, and it is a constraint on our growth. So we desperately need more women in the economy as a matter of urgency, and this bill will do that. In fact, it will unlock the equivalent of 37,000 full-time workers into the economy. Just imagine—just like that. When it passes, that's what it could do.

We do not regard it as welfare. We regard this as a generational economic reform with an economic dividend. I've said previously that the worst kind of spending results in a liability. The best kind of spending is an investment, and this is an investment—close to $5 billion in investment for our children, for our women, for mothers, for families and for our economy. Under the bill, from July 2023, the childcare subsidy will increase to a maximum of 90 per cent for families with a combined taxable income of up to $80,000. With increasing family income, the childcare subsidy will then taper down until it cuts out at a combined income of $530,000. Now, that is very generous. We will retain the higher childcare subsidy for families with more than one child under the age of five, because we recognise the financial burden imposed on families with multiple children. This bill will leave 96 per cent of families better off. Basically, most families are going to benefit from this. No-one will be worse off.

With this bill, we have reshaped early childhood education and care as an economic reform. It is an investment in our children that improves their school readiness and long-term outcomes. It is an investment in women, with our nation the recipient of a pool of talent no longer sitting on a shelf, latent, but firing up our productivity.