Kim O’KEEFFE (Shepparton) (18:20): I rise to stand and make a contribution to the Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority Bill 2025. This is a bill for an act to establish the Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority, to provide for the Victorian early childhood worker register, to make related consequential amendments to other acts and for other purposes. We also have two other bills before us: the Early Childhood Legislation Amendment (Child Safety) Bill 2025 and the Social Services Regulation Amendment (Child Safety, Complaints and Worker Regulation) Bill 2025. It does astound me that the house only received these bills 24 hours ago, the additional two bills. Yes, we need to act on these important pieces of legislation, but we also need to be provided adequate time for what is before us today. And when you look at this stack of papers that we have beside us here, how on earth we are expected to get through that? I do not think you would expect any other workplace to have to do that and do their job well. So we have all been scrambling to try and summarise the highest and most significant priorities of these bills. Everyone in this place owes it to every Victorian family to make the changes needed to ensure that the most vulnerable people in our community are protected from the horrific incidents that have occurred and we hope will never happen again. Everyone in this place, I know, wants to keep our children safe, and we have had many contributions today.
It has been horrific and traumatic what some families have gone through and will continue to be affected by, and I think we need to be mindful of that today. This is exactly why we are here. This is one of the strongest reasons we are here, discussing much-needed changes to legislation that need to occur to protect, as I said, the most vulnerable people in our communities and to support families. Families have to have confidence that their children will be safe and protected, not let down by a flawed system. We must see real transformation and reform that regains faith, trust and confidence. I choose not to use any names of those that have actually done the horrific things to these children. I think when we all look back at that time, we feel sick and we feel so saddened for those families. And as I said, they will continue to suffer. I had my children in child care, as many have in this place. My children are adults now, and my oldest daughter is actually a teacher. I was chatting to her just last week about this legislation coming through this place. There is no doubt that schools want a safe workplace. As the member for Frankston alluded to, we know teachers want to keep their children safe. Sometimes there are flaws and there are ways that perpetrators just do it – they get through those loopholes – and there will be schools and families facing significant issues. But as my daughter said, they constantly put safety as the top priority. With every meeting, conversation, school policy and thing that they work through, front and centre is the care of their children.
I have a friend who works in child care; she is a very close friend of mine. She worked in child care for over 20 years and now she is an educator at TAFE, and she is doing a wonderful job. But she said when these really awful incidents happened, it affected her students, her families, the whole education sector as well as childcare centres in the region. At that time families started to question if their children were safe: was that childcare facility providing protections and making sure to care for their children? People started to really question, which was really hard, as I said, on the workers and also the families. So I think it is really important that we are really strong in this place and that we let families and educators and schools know that we are doing all that we can to make improvements in this space. We know the government should have perhaps acted sooner and we have been lagging behind for a long time. The government is now playing catch-up, and it begs the question: why has it taken so long? We know that the working with children check has been a significant failing, and I know the member for Frankston also alluded to that. But I think when there are weaknesses there, we have to strengthen it, we have to revisit it and we have to make sure – it is all very well saying that this is someone that has had an offence in the past, but we need to make sure that there are also significant processes when we put people into these places. I agree with that.
It is hoped, though, that through the Social Services Regulation Amendment (Child Safety, Complaints and Worker Regulation) Bill we seek to strengthen the working with children check system by removing silos and giving the Social Services Regulator more powers as well as also fixing the siloing issue by allowing better information sharing. In addition, the Social Services Regulation Amendment (Child Safety, Complaints and Worker Regulation) Bill moves the reportable conduct scheme and child safe standards from the commissioner for children and young people to the Social Services Regulator. We do hold some concern that the government has been coy on what this means for the funding for the Commission for Children and Young People, which has currently been occupied by an acting commissioner from the department, creating a conflict with this critical government oversight body.
The Early Childhood Legislation Amendment (Child Safety) Bill seeks to strengthen laws regulating early childhood providers to make sure that the safety, rights and best interests of children are paramount by issuing suspension and supervision orders to workers who present an unacceptable risk, creating a new appropriate conduct offence, banning personal devices in services by law and establishing the national early childhood worker register.
Largely, the amendments that are contained in this bill and the others before the house follow the rapid child safety review, as previous speakers before me have mentioned, which was commissioned by the government back in July and conducted by Mr Jay Weatherill AM, former Premier of South Australia, and Ms Pam White PSM, an experienced public servant, who delivered the final report of their findings to the government on 15 August. The review itself made a total of 22 recommendations to the government to improve the regulation of early childhood services. The bill today directly addresses recommendation 9, which calls for the establishment of an independent regulator for the early childhood education and care sector, which in the current system is under the quality assessment and regulation division of the Department of Education. As the review highlights, the current regulatory framework is insufficient, is not independent from the government and needs significant reform. We know that early childhood education and care is vital in providing children with the best possible start in life. It gives young learners access to critical development experiences that shape their futures. But with that access comes the added responsibility of ensuring that the environments are safe and, secondly, well regulated and staffed by qualified and competent individuals.
I have a niece who has a family day care – she cares for children in her home – and she was telling me that to set up her business she had to go through really strict regulations. I was interested in some of her surroundings in chatting to her. She does work alone with four children, and she is so well suited. The families love her. She moved out of the town of Benalla, and the families moved with her. They basically said, ‘We will drive out to be with you,’ because they knew their children felt safe. But it is an interesting model when you think that there is one person working in their home caring for four children, as she is. She is 21, so quite young, and I think these are the times when we are starting to see where things work really well on the one hand and then where the flaws happen on the other. It is this side where we start to really think: how can that be made safer, and how do we know that things are safe for a child?
These bills do go some way in achieving some of the improvements in accountability and transparency, something that we on this side of the house absolutely support. We need to make sure of timeframes – that when we bring things to this place they are perhaps managed in a more timely manner. We also need to know whether, when we have reviews, they need to be reviewed in a shorter timeframe. We need to make sure that things are working so that there is proof when we make these changes as part of legislation that they are working and that children are kept safe.
I just also want to talk about some of the things that happen across my community when it comes to child care. We have a very large shortage. I want to acknowledge the amazing childcare workers, who do a great job. We know there are so many that will always do the right thing. It is unfortunate, as I have said, that at times they have felt vulnerable in their workplace. I also want to acknowledge the hard work that is happening in the kindergartens and the early childcare centres; they are doing such great work. We have significant shortages in my electorate when it comes to staffing. We need to make sure that we also have mechanisms in place so that we can fill these important roles, because we do need to have facilities that can accommodate the needs for our younger people.
But overall I think it is great to see change is happening. As I said, we have some concerns, but we need to just continue to make sure that the things we do put in place are working, even if that does mean we review sooner. How do we support those organisations? If it is not us, who is it that can make their workplaces better and make sure that families do not feel as vulnerable? I think there is some work to be done there. I think there needs to be some form of health and wellbeing support, because I do know that at times it is a tough job when you have got a person in charge of other people’s children and they have got staff that they have to also make sure are meeting expectations. We know that there are some things that are not being met. What does that look like when it also comes to providing the framework to meet those requirements? Because there are some changes in here, and we need to make sure that they are achievable.