Australia's Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) sector has struggled to meet the needs of families and staff for some time. Fees are expensive and rising faster than inflation. The sector is dealing with long waitlists and a shortage of workers.

These challenges are particularly acute in our electorate, where parents are paying up to $200 a day in fees. This has impacted social equity, childhood educational outcomes, and female workforce participation, costing the nation an estimated $167.8 billion in potential economic gains per year.

The North Sydney Deliberative Democracy forum on Early Childhood Education and Care brought together a randomly selected, demographically representative group of local residents to help improve the affordability and availability of ECEC.

The full-day forum was held on Sunday 27 October. It was our community’s second major exercise in Deliberative Democracy — where relatively small but representative groups of people engage in well-informed and robust discussion to make judgements on specific issues.

A total of 40 North Sydney residents were invited to attend. Participants spent the day reviewing community submissions alongside advice from sector experts to ultimately come to a consensus on the reform that we in North Sydney should be fighting for.