Victorian government fails to publish details of enforcement actions against childcare operators

Australia Broadcast Center

4 days ago

Premier Jacinta Allan's government has defied Victoria's parliament by failing to meet a deadline to publish details of enforcement action taken against childcare operators.
The Victorian upper house last month backed a Greens motion ordering the government to table thousands of documents relating to Victoria's childcare industry over the past three years.
But the Allan government failed to meet the July 18 deadline, prompting the Greens to accuse it of being more interested in political damage control than the welfare of children.
In New South Wales, thousands of pages of similar documents have been tabled by the Minns government over the past few months, revealing cases of physical abuse of children — including one in which a child was used as a human mop — as well as inappropriate sexual behaviour, serious injuries to children and subsidy fraud.
Victoria's childcare sector was plunged into crisis three weeks ago when authorities revealed that 26-year-old Joshua Dale Brown, who has worked at 24 centres in Melbourne since 2017, had been charged with more than 70 offences including child rape.
About 2,000 children are being tested for sexually transmitted diseases as a precaution.
Authorities were forced to update the list with new centres and dates last week, as angry parents demanded more information about whether their children were exposed to Mr Brown.
The Victorian Greens spokesperson on childcare, Anasina Gray-Barberio, said Labor's failure to table the enforcement documents on Friday showed a lack of transparency and accountability.
"It sends a pretty clear message to Victorian parents and families that this government is more concerned and interested in political damage control than they are interested in the care and nurturing of our children in early childcare," she said.
The Greens are calling for an independent childcare safety watchdog, which Ms Gray-Barberio said was needed "because right now the government is marking their own homework".
"There is a conflict of interest," she said.
Childcare industry expert Gabrielle Meagher, a professor emerita at Macquarie University, said the documents sought by the Greens would help journalists, researchers and the public understand what was happening to billions of dollars in government subsidies paid to the private childcare providers who dominate the sector.
"Maximum transparency is really important for public oversight in the sense of government oversight, but also in the sense of the public being able to have confidence in the system because they know that it's working well," she told the ABC.
"I don't think we can have a kind of global confidence in the system when so much information is hidden and then highly unusual, but absolute catastrophes happen like this most recent abuse case in Victoria."
Centre for Public Integrity executive director Catherine Williams said there was an increasing trend for the government to ignore requests for documents.
She noted in NSW there was a different culture, where an independent legal arbiter is appointed by parliament to scrutinise claims of legal privilege.
This mechanism was used to vet the childcare enforcement documents tabled in NSW parliament after a request by state Greens MP Abigail Boyd.
Ms Williams said the centre urged the Victorian government to comply with orders, especially regarding issues of high public importance such as childcare.
Despite the 30-day deadline for the childcare documents having passed, a Victorian government spokesperson said it was "carefully considering the Legislative Council's request and will respond in due course".
The government also noted that the request could capture thousands of documents.
In March last year, the state Opposition told parliament the government had failed to fully comply with nine different document requests over the previous year and attempted to pass another motion forcing it to table the documents. The motion failed.