STATEMENTS

Ms CHANEY (Curtin) (19:14): This bill, the Early Childhood Education and Care (Strengthening Regulation of Early Education) Bill 2025, is a response to the shocking revelation earlier this month about the Victorian man who has been charged with more than 70 offences of child sexual abuse while he was a childcare worker. Putting your child into child care can be a very emotional decision for parents.

Entrusting your precious kids to strangers, especially when they're too young to communicate clearly, is a huge leap of faith, and stories like this one really touch a nerve. My heart goes out to all the parents whose children are connected to this incident in any way. I can only imagine your horror.

Parents want to know that the government is doing everything it can to make childcare centres safe places. State government regulators can already shut a centre down if they think that there's a serious threat to children's safety, but this bill deals with centres that may not pose an immediate threat but are failing to meet the National Quality Standard under educational and care services national law.

State government regulators are responsible for rating centres and enforcing standards, and most centres do meet those standards, but not all of them. About four per cent of centres are working towards the National Quality Standard, or, in other words, they're not actually meeting them yet. This could be a technical breach; it doesn't necessarily mean that bad things are happening, but we have these standards for a reason.

Under this amendment, the federal government will be able to take into account a provider's quality, safety and compliance history when deciding whether a centre is approved for the childcare subsidy. The government will be able to issue a notice and give the centre a set time, as short as 28 days, to comply with the standard or fix the problem if they're not currently complying with the standard.

If they don't, the federal government will cut off the centre's funding through the childcare subsidy, which represents about 70 per cent of most centres' funding. So losing this funding would probably mean the centre would have to close. This should be an effective big stick.

It's worth about $16 billion a year, and centres are likely to sit up and take notice. The bill also creates new powers for unannounced spot checks for safety issues, and the issue of these notices can be made public to warn families and hold centres to account so you know what's happening in the centre that your child goes to. The effectiveness of this amendment will depend on cooperation with the states so that the federal government knows which centres are not meeting standards.

I'm generally a bit wary of kneejerk reactions designed to show the public that the government's coming down hard after a horrible incident, but I was actually surprised that the government didn't already have the power to stop funding if safety standards were not being met. It seems pretty reasonable to me. There are other reforms that need to happen and are apparently progressing in discussions with the states.

They include a register of workers so anyone with a dodgy record can't just get another job at a different centre, mandatory training so childcare workers know what to look out for and when to report suspicious behaviour, a coordinated national model for working-with-children checks and possibly CCTV, although I'm concerned that that might raise as many issues as it solves when it comes to protecting video footage of children.

The rapid review being undertaken by Jay Weatherill and Pam White in Victoria this month is also likely to inform further reforms. I note that some stakeholders have pointed out that there are deeper systemic issues, like persistent workforce shortages and misaligned incentives from a market driven system. Keeping kids safe is a fundamental priority for the country, and we need to keep fixing the laws as holes emerge.

As the world changes, the dangers change too. This week I introduced a private member's bill to prohibit the use of AI tools that are designed to generate child sexual abuse material. I urge the government to, as well as responding to this horrific incident in a Melbourne childcare centre, act as nimbly, look at other dangers that are emerging and address them proactively so we can keep our kids safe.

I commend this bill to the House.