Maria Kovacic (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

The coalition will support the Early Childhood Education and Care (Strengthening Regulation of Early Education) Bill 2025. As the Leader of the Opposition, the Hon. Sussan Ley, has said, child safety is above politics. We are unwavering in our support for changes which better protect children in childcare settings and that give confidence to the one million families that rely on child care. The early learning workforce is a critical and valued workforce, and we acknowledge the work that they do. This bill only goes so far, and we are calling on the Albanese government to exercise leadership with states and territories to progress other measures swiftly. They need to engage the states and territories to do the things that they need to do to ensure that changes are made.

The bill amends the family assistance law to do three things. Firstly, it allows the secretary to financially penalise providers through suspension or cancellation of the childcare subsidy. Secondly, it effectively allows stronger name-and-shame powers, especially on the Starting Blocks website, by expanding the secretary's powers to publicise details about providers. Thirdly, it enables authorised officers to conduct unannounced visits to services, noting this duplicates existing powers of state and territory regulators.

But this bill goes only so far to shifting the dial when it comes to making childcare centres safer. The main levers to improve the safety of early learning centres for children are outside of the Commonwealth's legislative powers; they sit with the states and territories, who are responsible for the regulation of these services. As identified in the New South Wales Wheeler report, there is much more that state and territory regulators can and should do. This is their remit. It is their responsibility to do this, and the Commonwealth should compel them to do so, but that doesn't absolve the Commonwealth of its responsibilities.

This is why we call on the government to work with the states and territories to do three things urgently: firstly, implement a national approach to working-with-children checks; secondly, implement a national register of workers; and, thirdly, implement a mobile phone ban. The National Model Code for Taking Images or Videos of Children while Providing Early Childhood Education and Care developed by the national regulator is currently voluntary. We also support stronger targets for regulator activity and joint efforts to implement appropriate use of CCTV, which the Wheeler report recommended should be mandatory for new childcare services in the first instance.

Devastatingly, the recent allegations in Victoria are not the first of their kind in childcare settings. In August 2023, as a result of Operation Tenterfield, a Queensland man was charged and later convicted of 1,623 child abuse offences against 91 children in Brisbane, Sydney and overseas between 2007 and 2022. We have failed our children. The fact that this has happened and continues to happen clearly states that we have failed our children.

In December 2023, the Australian Children's Education and Care Quality Authority published their Review of Child Safety Arrangements under the National Quality Framework. The government has had the regulator's review of child safety arrangements for more than 18 months. The Albanese government has been slow to act on the 16 recommendations. It has taken almost two years for the government to simply enact the change in reporting physical and sexual abuse from seven days to 24 hours. That shouldn't take that long. It really shouldn't take that long. But that change will only come into effect on 1 September 2025. As Jason Clare said, those changes should have been implemented yesterday. We shouldn't have been so slow to act.

After accepting in principle the key recommendations from the review of child safety arrangements in February 2022, education ministers did not meet for a year between June 2024 and June 2025. For an entire year from when recommendations were provided, there was no meeting of education ministers. It begs the question of why that was the case. That is far too long, given the gravity of the problem at hand and the risk to our children. We acknowledge that governments of all stripes have not fully enacted all recommendations from reports, including the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, fast enough.

That includes the harmonisation of the working-with-children check system. This has long been something that governments have pursued but never achieved, and this is long overdue. The current system is deficient and does not meet the standards that Australians expect. It does not meet the standards that parents expect, and it does not meet the standards that our children deserve. There is no standardisation. Each state and territory has its own scheme. The check should be set at the most stringent in our country—absolutely the most stringent. Some inherent risk remains. This is because it only relies on an individual's criminal history as a check to see if a worker may be a risk to children. This is obviously not good enough, as people that do pose risks may not yet have been convicted.

Debate interrupted.