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Victorian government to change state's Working with Children Check system
The Victorian government will strengthen its Working with Children Check laws, but the first change will not come into effect until August, the ABC can reveal.
Warning: This story contains details of alleged child sex abuse that may distress some audience members.
On Tuesday, Victoria Police announced a childcare worker in Melbourne's south-west had been charged with more than 70 offences, including sexual assault and producing child abuse material, related to eight alleged victims at the Creative Garden childcare centre in Point Cook.
Police said the accused, who had worked for about 20 childcare centres over about eight years, held a valid Working with Children Check (WWCC).
The ABC understands the Department of Government Services (DGS) recently completed an "initial review" of Victoria's Working with Children scheme.
The review was ordered after the ABC revealed people under investigation for serious offences could still hold one of the permits.
A WWCC is a background check conducted by the government that screens people for criminal history and professional conduct findings.
Currently in Victoria only criminal charges or a regulatory finding can trigger a check being revoked.
For example, someone banned by the education department from working at a preschool for posing a risk of harm to children could still hold a valid WWCC.
The government said that from August, screening regulations would change so DGS could "take into account prohibition notices issued from the Department of Education when determining or revoking a person's clearance to work with children".
"It's clear to us that this system needs to be strengthened," Government Services Minister Natalie Hutchins told the ABC last month, after the ABC's extensive coverage of the issue.
"This is just the first step to strengthen the Working With Children Check system to ensure that awful incidents that have occurred never happen again.
"I will have more to say on outcomes of the review soon."
It has been four years since ABC reporting sparked investigations that would lead to flaws in the WWCC being exposed.
In 2022, the Victorian Ombudsman recommended the state urgently change its laws after a youth worker was cleared to work with children despite facing sexual offence allegations, including rape, in New South Wales.
The state-based changes flagged for August will still not allow the Victorian system to consider a broad range of information such as child protection reports or police intelligence.
Other states and territories can.
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It has been 10 years since the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse recommended Australia's eight separate state and territory working-with-children systems be both standardised and nationalised.
In a rare case of a former royal commissioner speaking publicly, Robert Fitzgerald told the ABC it was "shameful" this work had still not been done.
"There doesn't need to be any more reviews or any more inquiries, or any more royal commissions," he said.
"The evidence was overwhelming 10 years ago and it's even more so today," he said.
"Working with children checks are in fact the very first thing you need to do to create child-safe institutions.
"The longer we delay in fixing the system … we continue to leave children at risk."
Mr Fitzgerald, who is now the age discrimination commissioner, called for the federal, state and territory governments to urgently establish a national WWCC system and a real-time national police database.
The Australian Childhood Foundation (ACF) said the alleged abuse case announced by Victoria Police on Tuesday was "one of the most significant and far-reaching cases of [alleged] child sexual abuse ever seen in a childcare setting in Australia".
The Victorian government has established a webpage with information for affected families. Information, including details of the government's dedicated hotline, can be found here.
It called on governments across Australia to swiftly embed mandatory child abuse prevention education into the scheme, an issue it has lobbied on for years.
"We can't always stop people who want to harm children from slipping through the cracks, but governments must act to ensure that the adults around children are trained to recognise risk, respond appropriately and act to protect them," chief executive Janise Mitchell said.
Emma Hakansson, a lead advocate with the ACF, said WWCC holders continued to abuse children.
"At the moment [the scheme] is essentially a screening tool to make sure people convicted of harming children and other dangerous crimes can't work with children," she said.
"But we know that most perpetrators of child sexual abuse don't have any past convictions and they go under the radar.
"Until the WWCC has mandatory child abuse prevention training as part of it, which we are calling for, it will not work."
Ms Hakansson said embedding training into the scheme would make the community safer.
"At the moment, to receive a Working with Children Check you have to do zero training," she said.
"You just need to go through a police screening."
She said people were often trained about how to respond to a direct disclosure of child abuse, but at that point, it was already too late.
"A child has already been abused," she said.
Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan was asked on Tuesday if she supported the proposal to make child abuse prevention education training mandatory as part of the WWCC scheme.
She said the recommendation would be considered.
"This is one of a number of pieces of advice that is already being provided to federal and state ministers as they work through the national framework that sits across the early childhood sector," she said.
"Recommendations around additional training is one of those recommendation that we will examine.
"We understand that there is a need here, to look at what happened, to understand what happened, and to strengthen the regulations."
