She said Mr Dutton should take an interest in the industry and be taking up the fight for workers. “He has two early childhood centres, so the fact that he has those, he has a duty to those educators to try to stand up in Parliament and advocate for fair pay,” Ms Fildes said. “At the moment we don’t have equal pay, we’ve got about $22 an hour if we’re lucky, some services will pay above that, often many don’t. Protesters outside the centre run by the company operated by Peter Dutton's family trust. Credit:Fairfax Media "We just want a fair go, we’re not here to cause trouble or anything like that.”

No workers from Camelia Avenue Childcare Centre participated in the protest and parents who were dropping their children off at the centre were concerned by the demonstration. “No one is agreeing with the policy or the politics of the situation, and the right to protest? Absolutely,” said one parent who had dropped off his four-year-old at the centre. “But the concern is, we’ve got kids going in now … we’ve seen [Mr Dutton’s] office get attacked and vandalised, we’re just worried about where our kids go. “They’re probably more than reasonable people protesting and I’m not disputing that, but it’s a bit unsettling when you’re dropping your kids off somewhere where you’ve got a focus point like that.

“[Mr Dutton’s] policies are extreme and they do rile up a lot of emotive reactions and we don’t want that where our kids are.” Ms Fildes said previous regulation changes had seen childcare centre staff workloads triple overnight with no matching pay rise. “We also now have another worrying thing coming out of Canberra,” she said. "The Australian Senate has come out with a report [Effect of Red Tape on Child Care], it was chaired by Senator David Leyonhjelm and he is calling for our qualifications to be stripped off us. “Many of us have studied for a long time … and for somebody to turn around and say 'you guys don’t need qualifications to do what you do' is so demeaning. It’s not respectful to us and it’s not respectful to the children, either.”