Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Education) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Flinders for her contribution to this debate. I also thank the opposition leader and the shadow minister for education and their teams for, as I said last week in question time, the professional, constructive and bipartisan way in which we have worked together to get this legislation to this point. We're about to pass it and send it to the Senate. The faster we pass this legislation, the faster we can use it and the faster we can use this legislation to do what it's intended to do, which is to make sure that our early education and care centres—and not just them but also in-home care and out-of-school-hours care—meet the sort of quality and safety standards that mums and dads expect and that our children deserve. We need to do everything here to make sure that our children who walk through or are carried through the doors of our early education and care services are safe. This legislation is just one part of that, as the member for Flinders pointed out. She's absolutely right: this is just one part of that.

There is a lot more work that we need to do to rebuild confidence in a system that parents need to have confidence in. The member for Flinders mentioned the work around working-with-children checks and the Attorney-General mentioned yesterday in question time the hodgepodge nature of working-with-children checks as they apply and operate in different states. Fixing that is at the top of the agenda when attorneys-general meet next month. But we also need to address issues like a national register of early educators so we can properly track workers moving from centres to centres and from state to state. The alleged offender in Victoria and the way in which information was released to the media are a demonstration, if we need it, about how the system is not working properly at the moment.

We also need to make sure that we arm the people who work in our centres, our early educators, with the sort of mandatory child safety training that they need to help to spot somebody who might be in their midst who's seeking to either groom children or groom them. That happens. These early educators, in a sense, are our best asset. The Queensland government is doing some good work on behalf of other states at the moment in the design of what mandatory child-safe training can and should look like for that workforce that are in our centres now. It rests heavily with me that over the course of the last few weeks, as we've focused on this legislation and what comes next, we also can't forget the hundreds of thousands of people who work in our early education and care system, who we entrust our children with and who are just as broken, just as hurt and just as angry with what they see and hear in the media as everybody else.

My older cousin has worked in the system for 35 years and dedicated her whole life to it. She's proud of what she's done to help raise the quality of the services that she's operated in. She feels broken at the moment too about what it has all been for. As I said on the telly last week, there've been people spat on in the streets wearing their uniform and told by employers not to wear their uniform. We need these people, not just to educate our kids but to keep them safe, and we want more people to become early educators as well. As we focus on this and on making sure that we keep our children safe, we've also got to be champions for those good people because the truth is they represent 99.9 per cent of the people who work in our early education and care service. Let's never forget them. We need them.

We also need to look at CCTV and how it works. It's already in some centres; other centres are intending to roll it out. But, if you talk to operators and talk to parents, they'll tell you that we've got to make sure we get the way it works right so that where the information is stored cannot be used by people who might want to use it for the wrong purposes. But, if used properly, it can be something very helpful in deterring bad people from doing bad things and helping police to investigate them when they do it. All of these things and more are being worked on by the states right now. Yes, there is a meeting of education ministers that's going to come next month, but we're not standing still until then. All of the states and territories are working together right now, at a ministerial level and a departmental level, on what comes to us and on what to decide and to do when we meet next month.

I know the shadow minister understands that. As she pointed out in her concluding remarks, the truth is this work will never end. The horrible truth is bad people will always seek to try and do bad things, and we've got to be up to the task to make sure that we do everything that we possibly can to help to keep our children safe. This bill's one part of it, but it's an important part of it. I thank the House for its support of it. I commend the bill to the House.

Question agreed to.

Bill read a second time.

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