Statement on the Early Childhood Education and Care (Strengthening Regulation of Early Education) Bill

29 July 2025

It's been an incredibly hard month in my electorate—a month in which hundreds of families in my community have had to confront a parent's worst nightmare. Three weeks ago my community in Melbourne's west awoke to serious and disturbing allegations of sexual abuse of children by an employee at a Point Cook early education and care centre in my electorate. As investigations into the alleged perpetrator have continued, police have named a further two centres in my community among the 23 centres that the employee worked at across greater Melbourne between 2017 and this year. This was sickening news. There is deep shock, grief and anger being felt by the affected families across my community in the wake of these horrific allegations.

The childcare centre where many of the alleged abuses occurred is located in Point Cook. Point Cook is one of the largest and fastest-growing suburbs in our country. It's a suburb comprised of many young families with two working parents, who are, frankly, in many situations, forced to commute significant distances to work in order to pay the family mortgage. These families rely on child care. They have to be able to trust Australia's childcare system. Point Cook and suburbs like it in the outer fringes of our capital cities rely on it. This is modern Australia. It is incumbent on all of us to ensure the regulatory system and the laws of this country deliver what these families need in order to rely on it and live their lives.

I want to be clear in this debate that there is an ongoing police investigation and I can't comment on the specifics of this case. Police are continuing to investigate, and the judicial process will continue. Police are also working with the Department of Health, the Commission for Children and Young People, Family Safety Victoria, the Department of Families, Fairness and Housing, Gatehouse, the Department of Education and the Royal Children's Hospital, who have done important work to ensure support services are in place and that families are given as much information as possible about the process from here and the situation affecting their family.

I thank all the workers who have been marshalled to respond to this terrible time for our community. These are the hardest issues to grapple with in any workplace. Many people have had to deal with the hardest issues as part of their daily job in order to provide families in my community with the support they need, and I thank them. I particularly thank the law enforcement officers who discovered this. This is not easy work but it's vital, and I express my appreciation on behalf of my community for their work.

The job before us in this parliament is ensuring that the system ensures that events like the events alleged to have occurred can never happen. We understand the importance of doing everything we can to prevent child abuse and to keep our most vulnerable Australians safe so that responses like the ones that have been marshalled for my community are not needed. That's why we fast-tracked this legislation that was considered by the House today. I want to assure my community that our government is taking action and putting protections in place to keep our children safe, and to cut off opportunities for predators to offend, when we leave them in the care of our educators. Our laws must ensure that the small number of providers who put profit over safety and who persistently fail to meet quality standards are identified and penalised quickly and decisively. Centres that don't provide a safe environment should not be operating. This legislation is about restoring the trust of parents in the Australian childcare system. Trust takes a long time to build. I understand this is not a one-off. It's going to be a process from here for many families in my community.

Raising children is one of the most rewarding and fulfilling parts of life, but it's also one of the most challenging things that you can do. For many families, juggling parenthood with other responsibilities like work often means entrusting their children's wellbeing to early education and care operators. Parents should not have to question whether their children are safe at these centres. When we do that morning drop-off, we expect that our kids are going to be treated with the same kindness, love and dignity that we, as their families, give them every day at home. We expect that they will receive both the care and education that we have sought out for them. Above all, we expect that they will be kept safe. I'm confident that this is the case in the vast, vast, vast majority of childcare centres in our country.

I've met so many dedicated childcare workers in my electorate. They feel what has happened in our community more than most. They are good people who've committed themselves to educating and caring for our most vulnerable in our society. I've met these hardworking, caring and talented workers who go above and beyond for our children on so many occasions. While the vast majority of centre staff do their work with the wellbeing of our children at the front of their minds, it's clear that current regulations need to work better to prevent the few bad actors.

While states and territories are responsible for regulating quality and safety in childcare centres, the Commonwealth also holds levers through the childcare subsidy funding that we provide. The childcare subsidy is a significant lever that we can use to effect change and to drive quality improvements in these sectors. Informed by the review of child safety arrangements under the National Quality Framework, we have introduced this bill to take urgent action to protect kids in early education and care centres. We're giving the Commonwealth the power to cut off funding to centres when they're not up to scratch on safety. We're giving authorised officers the power to perform spot checks and unannounced visits to detect fraud and noncompliance. Authorised officers will also have the power to share anything that doesn't look right with state regulators. The Commonwealth will have the power to publish information about sanctioned providers, such as infringements, extra conditions placed on the provider for their approval or expansion, refusing approval for a new service where existing services have a poor track record of quality and safety, and the nature of any noncompliance that led to action being taken. It means that families will be able to make fully informed decisions when choosing a provider for their child or children. These measures are not intended to close down centres but to raise standards so our kids are protected.

For Victorian centres, these measures will work in step with the state government's statewide register of workers and ban on the use of personal devices in centres. We'll continue working with states and territories to strengthen and harmonise protections across the early childhood education and care sector, not just in Victoria but nationally. We know this is an issue that, regrettably, hasn't been limited to my community. I'm confident that every government in Australia is ready to act to keep Australia's children safe.

The Prime Minister knows the importance of early childhood education and care. His vision is that Australia should be a place where it's as natural for your child to have access to child care as it is for them to have access to a public school. As we work to build that system, our priority is ensuring children are safe, well cared for and receiving high-quality education and care. We have big ambitions for Australia's childcare sector. It's important to modern Australia and the kind of lives we live today. These are big changes to our system, and it's important that we get the foundations right to ensure that safety is ensured.

We've already put the work into making child care and early education cheaper for families, making the sector more sustainable and improving the overall quality of education and care. We're setting up the Building Early Education Fund to build more childcare centres in outer suburban areas and guarantee that every child has access to three days of affordable child care.

We've already delivered three consecutive pay rises for Australia's 200,000 low-wage workers, including workers in the childcare sector. In November, we delivered a wage increase of 15 per cent above award wages. We did so while capping fee increases so that workers are fairly paid without the cost being passed on to families. Wage increases for early childhood workers help retain our existing early childhood educators, help keep them in the system and help keep them in the same workplaces as a vocation. It's important that parents know and trust their educators and build relationships with them over time. Over the last three years, the early learning workforce has grown by over 30,000 workers.

We know there is more to do which is why the next meeting of education ministers will focus on options to protect children, like a national education register, additional child safety training for workers and the use of CCTV in childcare centres. Our government is driving the delivery of meaningful change to protect our kids. We know there is no silver-bullet solution to stop predators from trying to commit harm, but we can do everything in our power to ensure they are identified and prevented. That's what we're doing in this bill. This is the start of an ongoing project.