Jess Walsh (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Early Childhood Education) Share this | Hansard source

This bill gives the Commonwealth the power, and gives the secretary of the department the ability, to apply sanctions to providers who are not doing a good enough job of keeping our children safe, and that includes suspending or cancelling funding for existing services that they may have if safety standards are not being met. It also includes giving the secretary the ability to ensure that any future services of those providers who are not putting children first will not be approved, so it the prevents their expansion. There's a number of criteria that the secretary will consider when making those decisions, and one of those is a criteria that you've mentioned, which is a failure to meet our National Quality Standards, particularly as it pertains to safety and quality.

The secretary also has the capacity to look at serious incidents and the nature and frequency of those serious incidents. Also the secretary has the capacity to look at providers' legal compliance on a range of related safety legislation, look at complaints and also look at the work with the state regulators, including conditions that they may have already imposed on early childhood providers. So there's a range of criteria that the secretary can look at when considering whether to use this powerful lever. Meanwhile, we continue to work, shoulder to shoulder, with the states and territories. We have a strong and significant package of reform that we're working through with the states and territories. We'll have more to say about that after we hold our urgent, standalone early childhood education ministers meeting in a couple of weeks.