When a baby girl called Nanicha died at an illegal childcare centre in Robinvale, in Victoria’s north-west, in January 2022, it didn’t make headlines. But we should have been paying attention.
In September of that year, the state’s ombudsman concluded that there were flaws in Victoria’s working with children scheme and that “for the safety of our children, more needs to be done”. Again, there were expressions of concern, but our focus soon moved elsewhere.
Much of the legislation connected to the government’s commitments to improve childcare safety is scheduled to reach parliament this month.Credit: Peter Braig
It is now just over three months since it emerged that as many as 1200 children may have been allegedly abused by childcare centre worker Joshua Dale Brown, and the harshest spotlight was thrown on a sector that is so pivotal to family and working life across this country. That spotlight has uncovered cases like baby Nanicha’s – who, the ABC reported, died after being put to bed in an unsafe environment – with journalists prising appalling facts from government departments under freedom of information requests or from leaked documents.
This week, our reporter Carla Jaeger revealed that childcare giant Affinity Education had withheld for weeks information about the safety of two children from detectives investigating the Brown case. That came hard on the heels of education reporter Nicole Precel’s article on a growing black market in the sector.
It should not be this way. As Phil Doorgachurn, director of safeguarding at the Australian Childhood Foundation, told us: “This is not like selling a product on Marketplace, we are talking about the wellbeing of children.”
That fact places two demands on us. The first is, as Victorian Greens leader Ellen Sandell has said, there must be an “independent regulator with teeth”. The second is that the results of that regulation must be transparent and available to families using childcare as well as the wider public.
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We cannot and must not accept a future where the regulator, having uncovered serious non-compliance with safety regulations at a childcare centre, takes a year to launch an investigation, and in which the centre in question continues operating for more than a month after a suspension notice is issued.
After a parliamentary order compelled the New South Wales government to divulge details of cases brought before their state’s childcare regulator, thousands of pages of evidence were produced. But a similar order in Victoria, giving Jacinta Allan’s government until July 18 to comply, has yet to result in the release of any material. It is simply not good enough. Children are the ones who need protection, not the reputations of the regulator, the government or rogue operators in the sector.
