00:00Education Ministers are calling this the biggest investment in child safety in Australia's
00:07history and they're putting up hundreds of millions of dollars to back it. As you said,
00:11the centrepiece really is this National Register of Workers which will give regulators real-time
00:15monitoring of who's working in a childcare centre on any given day. And also as it develops
00:22importantly there's a plan to put in either substantiated findings or serious allegations
00:27against workers so they can be tracked across centres and we can stop the kind of things
00:31we've seen where pedophiles have worked across at times dozens of centres and have just simply
00:36moved from either state to state or centre to centre to avoid accountability. There's
00:41a bunch of other measures as well. There's extra compliance checks, tougher penalties as
00:45you said, a limited trial of CCTV as well as mandatory child safety training. Here's what
00:51the Education Minister Jason Clare had to say about that.
00:55This is a team effort. Australia expects all of us to work together. They're not interested
01:00in excuses. They expect Labor and Liberal, State, Territory, Federal all to work together.
01:07The private sector, the for-profits, the not-for-profits. They don't give a damn about the difference
01:12or the breakdown or who's responsible for what. They just want their kids to be safe.
01:16And I hope that you see in the decisions that we made today that we're serious about that
01:20as well. We're serious about making sure that the paramount, the most important thing in
01:26our early education and care system is making sure that our kids are safe. This is not the
01:31end. But it's the next thing that we need to do.
01:36No mobile phones in centres as well. That's another measure. But what have experts said is
01:40missing?
01:41Look, Education Minister Jason Clare did say that this was just the first step. But a lot
01:46of experts have said this is only really starting to get Australia up to par to where it should
01:50be. I mean, the fact that mandatory child safety training wasn't happening, that gives workers
01:54the power to identify abuse. People are asking why that hasn't been happening, given those workers
01:59have a legal obligation to report abuse and to be able to identify it. Experts have said that
02:05there's bigger structural problems that are unaddressed, like poor staffing levels, loopholes
02:10that allow centres to avoid ratios. For instance, childcare centres are required to have one worker
02:16for every four babies in a centre. And that's been a longstanding ask. The Minister did say
02:22today that that was considered, and that the Ministers have asked the national regulator
02:27to come up with a plan on that by the end of the year. So we know that childcare centres,
02:32you know, is often for profit driven businesses, and there have been concerns about how they
02:37balance their responsibilities to their shareholders. But obviously, at times they haven't put their
02:43most important obligation to the children in their care, where many people think it should
02:47be. We also had heard from the National Children's Commissioner, Anne Hollands, who said
02:53that there should be a bunch of other reforms really that go to protecting children in areas
02:58outside of day care. And here's what she had to say.
03:01Today we're talking about the childcare sector, and the children in the childcare sector. But
03:06of course, that's not the only place where you find children. And I think it's important
03:11to remember that right now, there are still decades of recommendations from previous Royal Commissions
03:19and enquiries that are designed to help children in other sectors, like the child protection
03:26systems and the youth justice systems, which are failing right across the country, that have
03:33not been implemented because we're not working together across the Federation.
03:37That was Anne Hollands there putting some of her concerns about what else needs to happen.
03:42So I think the broad view across the sector is that they see today as an important start,
03:47one that also reveals just how much work there's still to do, Lorna.
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