Those who profit from childcare must put safety first, or get out of the industry
This is the best news from the child safety review commissioned by the Victorian government in response to allegations of abuse by a childcare worker in 24 centres across Melbourne's west.
To get there, however, requires a rebalancing of questions of personal privacy and presumptions of innocence with the need to make sure the wrong people are not caring for our children.
It will rely on the state and federal governments implementing, with urgency, reforms that have been on the table for years, others newly proposed and the removal of bureaucratic barriers that keep concerns about childcare workers hidden from their employers and parents.
As Alison Geale, the chief executive of child protection advocates Bravehearts, puts it, 'for too long warning signs have been ignored, systems have failed to communicate and predators have slipped through the cracks'.
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The familiarity of some of the review's findings also raises a question that should be tearing at the conscience of Victorian ministers who ignored former ombudsman Deborah Glass's 2022 report exposing serious flaws in the state's working with children check system.
Premier Jacinta Allan, in vowing to implement all recommendations from this review within the next 12 months, said her government had acted with urgency from the moment Victoria Police made public allegations of child sex abuse in daycare.
But why does it take such allegations – allegations Allan said sickened her as a premier and a mother – to convince her government to repair what she now describes as a horribly broken system? 'I'm taking action today,' was her response.

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