Source: Murray Darling Basin Authority
SARAH FERGUSON: It emerged today that accused child sex offender Joshua Brown may have worked at several child care centres in Victoria longer than authorities originally thought. It means more parents now face the excruciating prospect that their children may be involved and may be required to undergo health screening. On Tuesday, Brown was charged with more than 70 offences, including sexual assault, relating to eight alleged victims at a child care centre in Melbourne’s west. Authorities had also listed more than 20 other centres he’d worked at across the city. These allegations will now be tested in court. But as our reporter Adele Ferguson told us when the story broke, it’s not the first time parents have had to consider the possibility their children may have been the victims of assault while in childcare.
ADELE FERGUSON: If you look across at the data, at least one report a day of sexual misconduct comes from child care centres, which is a heck of a lot.
SARAH FERGUSON: The latest allegations put pressure on the Federal Government to overhaul the regulation of child care in Australia. Education Minister Jason Clare is the Minister responsible. Jason Clare, welcome.
JASON CLARE, MINISTER FOR EDUCATION: Thank you.
FERGUSON: Now you learnt about the allegations being made against the child care worker in Melbourne over a week ago. What action did you take?
CLARE: The first step I took was to put this on the top of the agenda for Education Ministers when we met last week. Last week, two things happened. I was informed that a person had been arrested for the alleged behaviour in child care centres in Victoria. But a second thing happened. The Wheeler Report was released by the NSW Government, and their initial response. And as you know, that was an investigation conducted by the former Deputy Ombudsman of NSW, Chris Wheeler, in response to the Four Corners exposé earlier this year, which revealed horrifying examples of physical abuse and neglect in child care centres. I thought it was necessary to put this at the top of the agenda for Education Ministers last week so we could pull together the recommendations from Chris and he briefed us, but also recommendations from Gabrielle Sinclair, who’s the head of the federal regulator, about what are the next steps we need to take to keep our kids safe in child care.
FERGUSON: We’ll come to some of those in a minute. I just want to stay with the situation in Melbourne and just repeating that these are now allegations, the man has been charged and will face trial. How is it possible that if you knew a week ago, some parents only found out when they went to the childcare centres that there was a problem?
CLARE: Let me be very clear. I was informed by the Victorian Government that someone had been arrested, I wasn’t briefed on the details of this, and nor were Ministers at the Education Ministers meeting last week. To the best of my knowledge, the Victorian Government has made sure that they’ve informed parents as soon as they possibly can. As you would have heard —
FERGUSON: Well, it’s not – it can’t be as soon as they possibly could because we had an incident of a mother on the program last night who did receive a text message. The text message was very confusing. The media were at the child care centre. She didn’t know, walked into a child care centre.
CLARE: Fair point. Let me correct that. The Victorian Government were informing parents when they believed that they were ready to do so. One of those people is a friend of mine. She’s directly affected by this. Her girls are caught up in this. I know the white-hot anger of all parents that are affected by this and the confusion that they’re facing and feeling right now. I don’t want to make any points specifically about the alleged offender because this will go before the courts. But this is serious, it’s sickening. People want to turn away from this and turn off their TVs, but you can’t. It requires serious action. I’ve been pretty blunt about this today and yesterday. We’re taking action, but not enough action has happened and not fast enough.
FERGUSON: Alright, let’s talk about that. But just in the case of your friends, and obviously we offer them all our sympathy, how did they find out, and how did they think the matter was treated?
CLARE: They received a text message.
FERGUSON: Did they understand the text message?
CLARE: Yeah, they did. They did, but then they received further details. She’s gone off to see a GP, but to be honest, she’s still confused, wanting to find out what tests she needs to get her daughters to do, whether those tests might cause more trauma than the girls. The girls don’t know about it at the moment. She’s keeping it from them, as you expect that she would. But at some point, they need to get tests done. She needs to know what those tests involve and what the potential impact of them might be on the girls.
FERGUSON: Are paedophiles targeting child care centres because they can get easy access to children?
CLARE: We’ve seen evidence of this, Sarah. We saw evidence of this in Queensland, where Australia’s worst paedophile was arrested and charged and convicted a couple of years ago. It’s why I asked the federal regulator to conduct a review into child safety. It’s why the sort of actions that are rolling out now are happening, because you have seen paedophiles do this.
FERGUSON: We will talk about what came out of that review, but there are figures that show, and these are just in the jurisdictions that have reporting requirements, at least one incident of sexual misconduct a day. And that doesn’t include any figures from Queensland, the Northern Territory and South Australia. How do you defend those statistics?
CLARE: I don’t. No reasonable person would. What those statistics show you is that we’ve got a serious problem, and we’ve got to take serious action. The honest answer to you is that this job will never be done, that there will always be bad people that try and break through the net. That doesn’t mean that you do nothing, though. That means that we’ve got to do everything that we possibly can to make sure that our children are safe. That’s why people are talking now about CCTV or about an educator register, about improving working with children checks. None of that is a silver bullet. None of that is going to guarantee every child is safe. But all of it are the sort of things that are necessary if we’re fair dinkum about doing our jobs.
FERGUSON. So, what is your view on each of those things? Just one at a time? CCTV. Should there be CCTV in child care centres?
CLARE: Yes, there should. Chris talked about this in his report that was handed down last week —
FERGUSON: When can we expect to see that?
CLARE: Hang on a sec. So, what Mr. Wheeler said in his report, based on the Four Corners investigation, is that that should be targeted to certain centres based on the fact that some centres haven’t been up to scratch. And so, Education Ministers are looking at –
FERGUSON: Just hold it. Just hold it there. You’re talking about the need for CCTV in a child care centre that is not up to scratch. Should any centre that is required to have CCTV for the safety of its – for the children attending it, should that centre be in operation?
CLARE: The short answer to that is no, and that’s why I’m going to introduce legislation when the Parliament returns in the first sitting fortnight that will cut funding to child care centres that aren’t up to scratch, that aren’t meeting the quality and safety standards that Australians would expect and that our kids deserve. This is the big weapon that the Commonwealth Government has to wield here. We fund centres, 70 per cent of the funding for these centres comes from taxpayers —
FERGUSON. So, you have all the levers.
CLARE: That is the big lever that the Commonwealth Government has. States have other levers, but that’s the big one. A centre can’t run without taxpayer funding or taxpayer support. And so, that’s why we’ve said this was something that we announced in March. That’s a major important measure to make sure that our kids are safe. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have CCTV as well. Chris gave us recommendations about that, and that’s one of the things Ministers are going through right now.
FERGUSON: One of the standards that you’ve already talked about that’s coming in in September is mandatory reporting of any physical or sexual abuse within 24 hours. Why not bring that in immediately?
CLARE: We’re bringing it in as quick as we possibly can. I’m conscious here no one is interested in any excuses here. But the honest answer to this is out of the review that we did, that we asked the National Regulator to conduct for us, they recommended a suite of changes, about 16 different reforms. Some of them are the responsibility of Education Ministers, some the Attorney-General, some building Ministers. One of them was around mobile phones, one of them was around mandatory reporting. I’ve told my department, I’ve told Ministers across the country, we need to implement these as quick as we possibly can, and that’s one of them.
FERGUSON. So, the beginning of September is the earliest you can possibly do that. There is no mechanism under which you could make that immediate because I think that’s something that people will be puzzled about. If you have an existing requirement that says you have to report within seven days, that seems extremely long. Why can’t you move more quickly on that?
CLARE: I think anyone listening would say, why is it seven days now?
FERGUSON: Yes, indeed.
CLARE: Why hasn’t this been fixed yet?
FERGUSON: What’s the answer?
CLARE: The answer is it should have been fixed yesterday. I’m determined to get it fixed as soon as it possibly can. The best advice I’ve got is the way this system works is we can get it done in September.
FERGUSON: How do you propose to fix a system that fails to punish centres that offer substandard care?
CLARE: There’s at least two parts to this. The penalties that centres cop at the moment are insufficient. This is another thing that Chris Wheeler pointed to in his report last week. For an individual that breaches —
FERGUSON: Do you need Chris Wheeler’s report to tell you that?
CLARE: No. I think any right-minded person, when they find out that a maximum penalty under the existing law for an individual is about $9,000, for a centre or a provider is about $45,000, would say, “well, that’s probably not enough to make sure that people are doing what they should be doing”.
FERGUSON: Why did it take a television program to make this an urgent matter of business development?
CLARE: It shouldn’t, but there’s a bit of a history here at the ABC of Four Corners doing the right thing.
FERGUSON: But I want to know what the Government’s been doing because this information was not held secretly from you or your department.
CLARE: No, I get all of that —
FERGUSON: So, what have you been doing for the last three years?
CLARE: The bottom line is that Ministers haven’t been doing enough fast enough, right?
FERGUSON: Including you?
CLARE: Including me, and I take my fair share of responsibility for it. I’ve been pretty blunt about that. But I tell you what, I’ve got the job now and I’m determined to act. Part of that is significantly beefing up those penalties. The other part in answering your question is about cutting off the funding to centres who don’t comply if they’re persistently not meeting safety standards. If they’re persistently not meeting the sort of quality that we expect, whether it’s for a for-profit centre or a not-for-profit community centre, then we’ve got to have the ability to cut off funding, pull the funding for them. That’s what’s going to help get centres up to the sort of safety and quality standards we expect —
FERGUSON: What should the threshold be? Is one breach of a serious safety standard enough?
CLARE: We’re working through the details of that bill that I’ll introduce now, so I won’t pre-empt that, but there needs to be stages there so that potentially we can set conditions on centres. But ultimately, you’ve got to have the power to pull the funding.
FERGUSON: The Federal Government undertook a drive, the Albanese Government, when it came into power, a drive to provide what were urgently needed childcare places across the country. Have you pushed the sector to expand too fast at the expense of children’s safety?
CLARE: No, I don’t think that’s right. We have seen the centre grow over the last three years. There’s 100,000 more children in early education and care today than there were three years ago.
FERGUSON: And we’ve got a crisis of quality. So, doesn’t that make the answer to that question yes?
CLARE: There’s about one and a half million children in the sector right now, so it’s gone from about 1.4 to 1.5. So, we’re seeing that grow. That’s good for parents because it’s an essential service. It’s good to have more children in early education and care because it’s helping to get them ready for school —
FERGUSON: Sure, but this is a debate about quality.
CLARE: I get that. I’m determined to make sure that we hit those quality standards. So, the question then is, how do you make sure you hit those quality and safety standards? What do businesses in this sector listen to? Money. And if you cut off the funding, then you end up closing down the centre. That’s going to be the real tool that we’ve got here to help boost those standards.
FERGUSON: So do you – As things stand, do you accept that there is a correlation between for-profit in this sector and low quality?
CLARE: What I would say is that in the community or the not-for-profit sector, we’re seeing overwhelmingly higher levels of achieving the sort of quality we want and expect than in the for-profit sector. But whether it’s for-profit or not-for-profit, everybody has to meet those sort of standards. We’ve got to make sure that the safety of our children is number one, and one of the ways we can do that is with the lever of Commonwealth money.
FERGUSON: Long way to go on this. Thank you very much indeed for coming in.
CLARE: Thanks, Sarah.