Wednesday, 12 November 2025

 Jess WILSON (Kew) (14:50): I continue where I left off, which is around one of the more significant reforms in the bills before us today, and that is in relation to the changes to the working with children check system. You would have heard me speak about the desperately needed reforms to the working with children check system many times in this place, and there is a reason for that, because three years ago the Victorian Ombudsman made very clear recommendations to the Labor government that the working with children check screening system needed to be urgently reformed in Victoria. The reason for that was that the Ombudsman at the time identified the fact that the working with children check system in Victoria was among the weakest in the nation and as a consequence predators could slip through the system and have the ability to work with children in Victoria. That would be concerning enough, the fact that the Ombudsman identified the risk, but unfortunately the reality is that we have now seen that happen in real time. We have seen the fact that Victoria’s working with children check system was so broken that individuals who had been identified as risks, who had been identified as predators, still had the ability in this state to hold a working with children check and work with children day in, day out, under this Labor government. And why? Because the government failed to take action when the Ombudsman recommended very simple reforms three years ago – not even a response from the government at the time, not even the courtesy of a response about why the government was not prepared to implement the Ombudsman’s recommendations.

Let me speak to an absolutely horrific example of where the working with children check system was so broken but, had the government heeded the advice of the Ombudsman, this situation may not have occurred. Ron Marks was arrested in 2021 for possessing almost 1000 child abuse images. Earlier this year he was convicted. But the fact is that he retained an active working with children check for four years after his arrest. That meant that in those years following his arrest, following the fact that his house was raided by police and those thousands of images were found and taken by the police, Marks was permitted to go into childcare centres, to go into kinders, to go into primary schools and to work with children, because he still held an active working with children check despite the fact that he was under active investigation by the police for possession of child abuse images. There could not be a clearer example of the catastrophic breakdown of the working with children check system.

Further to this, the ABC reported earlier this year that a childcare educator maintained a valid working with children check despite being dismissed from a childcare centre in 2020 for sexual misconduct after an internal investigation found that he was grooming and kissing toddlers. Again the system allowed that individual to continue to work in childcare centres, with the government regulator not stepping in to issue a prohibition notice to blacklist that individual until last year. Despite that prohibition, years too late, at the time it took the government weeks to remove that individual’s active working with children check. In fact they had to rush legislation into the Parliament that would allow for that to occur. The Premier and the minister could not answer how long that individual, who had been found to be grooming toddlers in child care, who had had a prohibition notice issued against them, would continue to hold an active working with children check, because of the failure of that government to actually implement the Ombudsman’s reforms.

Let me be very, very clear about what the Ombudsman recommended in 2022:

Amend the Worker Screening Act 2020 … to allow the Secretary to the Department of Justice and Community Safety to:

a.   obtain and consider any information that may be relevant to an applicant’s suitability to work with children

b.   refuse an application for a Working with Children Check if reasonably satisfied that the applicant poses an unjustifiable risk to the safety of children (including where no criminal or disciplinary history exists)

c.   reassess a person’s suitability to hold a Working with Children clearance on the Secretary’s own initiative, and without the need for notification of a criminal charge or disciplinary outcome

d.   pending determination of reassessment, suspend a … Working with Children clearance where the Secretary reasonably suspects the person poses an unjustifiable risk to the safety of children

e.   revoke a person’s Working with Children clearance following reassessment, where reasonably satisfied the person poses an unjustifiable risk to the safety of children (including where no criminal or disciplinary history exists).

These were the recommendations by the Ombudsman at the time. We are finally seeing the government take action, three years later, to implement these reforms. That is despite the fact that when we introduced a private member’s bill into this place that would have implemented the Ombudsman’s recommendations earlier this year, which would have made sure that we were mandating training when it comes to the application for a working with children’s check and would have connected the working with children check system to the police database, the government voted it down. In a clear decision to play politics over protecting children in this state, the government voted down legislation that is included, months later, in the bill we are debating today.

It is simply unacceptable that this government did not prioritise children’s safety. Three years ago they were warned by the Ombudsman. I just outlined to the house the very simple changes and reforms required to the working with children check system that would have meant that the decision-maker could act on intelligence and make sure that risks to children were stamped out quickly. But what happened? No response – radio silence from the government. Then when the horrific allegations of child sexual abuse, the 70 or more charges, against Joshua Brown came to light and every single family in this state shuddered, what did the government do? Nothing – absolute silence on reforming the working with children check system. For months this government has delayed action, time and time again. So while we finally see these reforms contained in the legislation today, it defies belief that we had to go through the previous months and years of inaction to get to this position. The example of Ron Marks continuing to hold his active working with children’s check and visit childcare centres – the photos of him sitting with children after his home was raided and thousands of images of child sexual abuse were taken by police – is disgusting. This government could have taken action. If they had taken action and implemented the Ombudsman’s reforms three years ago, Ron Marks would not have been able to hold an active working with children’s check. It is that simple, and that responsibility lies in the hands of the Premier and this government.

Before I turn to the final bill in this package, I want to briefly address some of the measures around information sharing between regulators. As I have spoken to previously, one of the most glaring failures that has been identified as part of the child safety crisis in this state came to light as a result of the lack of information sharing. A teacher could have a reportable conduct investigation in one department and then another regulator might never know. A childcare worker might fail a safety check in one role and be hired in another because the information was not shared. With the reforms before us today, with the new regulator and the SSR to share critical decisions – like worker suspensions and prohibitions and like the fact we are seeing working with children checks needing to be rescinded – we need to ensure that that information is shared swiftly and simply between these agencies. Most importantly, the new regulator will be empowered to provide information directly to prospective employers so that prospective employers know and can understand when there are risks when they are considering employing someone to work with children and to have oversight of children. This basic and fundamental oversight should have been in place long ago. The government knew about the issues when it came to information sharing, and they knew that the regulator was failing to do its job. But once again, what did we see? Delay and inaction and a complete failure to put children’s safety first.

Finally, I will speak on the national law bill. This is a significant bill because it strengthens the existing regulatory framework by which early childhood education and care services are measured and assessed. Of note is the creation of the new offence of inappropriate conduct for workers in these services. I understand the new offence has been created in response to the feedback about gaps in the current framework and will assist the service and the regulator to identify and respond to unacceptable behaviour.

The most basic duty of care of any government is to protect the vulnerable. I will finish where I started. It is our foremost duty in this place to protect the most vulnerable, and there can be no-one more vulnerable than a child under the care and protection of an adult. When we are seeing children harmed in the very places we are meant to keep them safe, that is an absolute failure and one this government should be ashamed of. We presented solutions immediately, a six-point plan, and what we are seeing here today is that plan implemented in full but delayed, after three years of inaction from this government. We will support this bill because we will always stand up for child protection in this state.

 Nathan LAMBERT (Preston) (15:02): I rise in support of the Early Childhood Legislation Amendment (Child Safety) Bill 2025, the Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority Bill 2025 (VECRA) and the Social Services Regulation Amendment (Child Safety, Complaints and Worker Regulation) Bill 2025 (SSR). I listened very carefully to the lead opposition speaker, and I think I can summarise her contribution in this way. She agreed entirely with the substance of the three bills that we have in front of us and with the comprehensive package that the government and the minister are bringing forward. Whether other opposition MPs agree with it fully remains to be seen, but as a speaker in favour, I can only take it from the lead opposition speaker that the opposition agree entirely with what the government is doing here, and all of the disagreements she set out related to matters of process and timing. I do want to begin by addressing those points of disagreement.

There is a very good reason why these bills come today, under standing order 61(3)(b), and come concurrently, and that goes back of course to the horrific revelations of 1 July, which I have spoken about previously in this place, and the very strong expectation that there will be a comprehensive response. And that is what we have here before us today. I will, for the benefit of opposition speakers, note that it is not uncommon for governments to bring urgent legislative packages in this way in response to events where there is that strong community expectation. Everyone who was around during COVID saw of course that that was done by governments of all persuasions, including the Morrison coalition government. I worked in the federal Parliament during the period in which the Howard government brought, almost every few weeks, another piece of anti-terrorism legislation, including, if I remember correctly, some bills related to Tampa and the Bali bombings that were brought on very short notice. I did look up the Criminal Code Amendment (Offences Against Australians) Bill 2002, for instance, which was introduced to the House of Representatives on 12 November 2002 and received royal assent on 14 November, 48 hours later.

I should note that, as someone who was there, that anti-terrorism legislation was much more complex and difficult for MPs to deal with. Australia was fortunate not to have a long history of political violence. We did not have an established structure for many of those things, and the bills that we have here today are very different. They do not come out of nowhere at all, as some of those anti-terrorism bills did; rather, they come out of a very clear and comprehensive process through the rapid review and through the education ministers meetings that this government has been clear about in its detail for months.

I do want to turn to that detail and firstly deal with the first bill, the one that relates to the national law. I think it is very important to remember that our early childhood education and care sector is very substantially governed by Commonwealth and federal arrangements, and indeed those horrific revelations that I touched on occurred largely, I believe, in long day care centres, which of course operate under both those frameworks, state and federal, and where the staff working under them are the same people.

The government is implementing all 22 recommendations of the rapid review conducted by Jay Weatherill and Pam White, but I do want in addressing this package to begin with recommendation 1, which makes the safety, rights and best interests of children the paramount consideration for staff right across our early childhood sector. We see in part 4, clause 61 of the bill that it makes that important change of principle by changing the national law. I did notice that the opposition’s lead speaker came to this very important principle last, but for those of us in the Labor Party, I think it is something that we would rightfully put first. It is very close to the heart I know of the minister and is very important for the government. I will not repeat all the observations that the review had to make about the evolution of the for-profit part of the sector, particularly under the Howard government, but just say that we very strongly support this recommendation and that we implement it here in exactly the way that the education ministers meeting in August said that we would.

I will not, given the constraints of time, go through all the clauses of that early childhood legislation amendment bill but just point out that they all go back to those communiques of the education ministers meeting, which we have all been able to read for months now on the internet, and indeed the decision regulation impact statement that they put out. A big bulk action of that bill deals with increasing penalties and banning the use of personal devices, which is already in place of course here in Victoria, and then it establishes the national early childhood worker register. Critically, again, that is not something that should come as a surprise to anyone in this place who has been following the debate. Of course it is something that not only is in place in Victoria but is dealt with in the VECRA bill that we have in front of us, which not only implements that exact recommendation as a matter of national law but sets out the details of how it will be implemented here in Victoria.

Dealing with that second bill, it of course also implements recommendation 9 of the review, which relates to establishing the independent early childhood education and care regulator. The government made very clear we would do that through a standalone act, and the second bill we have before us does exactly that.

Finally, the third bill that we have before us, the SSR bill, makes a number of important and concurrent changes to services that come under the disability portfolio. I will leave some other speakers to touch on them. They are of course very important to us as the government. But I do, in terms of making the argument I am making about the substance and the process we have been through here, want to focus on those parts that originated from the rapid review and particularly to highlight recommendations in part 8 of that review, which deal with establishing a new shared intelligence and risk assessment capability. I have had some exposure in my previous life to this sort of work. It is not easy work when we are looking to predict and prevent this sort of behaviour, and it is certainly work where you look to have the widest range of data available to you, but of course you are always conscious of the principles in the Privacy Act 1988 and similar principles in state-based regulation. I think what has been done very well here in the bill in front of us is to ensure that not only are those important data sources integrated, which is very important when you are doing this work, but that, as anyone who has done it knows and as the review makes clear in part 8, that integration of your IT systems and your data goes hand in hand with organisational integration as well. That is why we see of course the worker screening unit, the reportable conduct scheme, the child safe standards and so forth. All of those bits are being moved across in that SSR bill.

I should say a great bulk of the bill deals with those changes to arrangements. Again, coming back to a point I made earlier, those are not things that should surprise anyone who is familiar with the sector. All of those things, whilst they have been brought together under different arrangements, are longstanding processes and organisations here in Victoria. In fact, looking the list, I think they are all longstanding arrangements that were introduced by Labor governments over a period of many years and indeed decades. The bill also implements those important connections to Victoria Police and the justice system. As I say, nothing in that should be a surprise conceptually to anyone arriving at the debate here today.

I just want to touch on the fact that once you have done that important job of bringing together the information and the intelligence, you have to give agencies and regulators the ability to move quickly, as per part 6 of the review. Without being disrespectful to the Ombudsman’s report or to the bill brought forward by the opposition, they largely just dealt with that component. I really want to stress this. We have here a comprehensive package. We are implementing, yes, parts that were brought forward by the opposition, but there were parts that were not comprehensive and were inadequate in their nature. There are a number of changes that deal with suspensions and the general and important power to act quickly where there is significant risk, but it is probabilistic risk. You do not know something 100 per cent, but you need to act quickly. There are, importantly, provisions that deal with the fact that, in doing that, false allegations are always possible. There are some minor differences with the opposition’s bill from July with respect to section 71 of the Worker Screening Act 2020, but I do believe that the versions that we have here in front of us today are better than the opposition’s bill in that respect and better in the fact that they are part of a comprehensive package that interlocks in the ways I have set out today.

Finally, coming back full circle to the Early Childhood Legislation Amendment (Child Safety) Bill, there are then all those measures that seek to prosecute people more comprehensively. Again, something the opposition never touched on, perhaps for good reason, is the need to prosecute those large companies with very complex corporate structures that we do see in this area as a result of the Howard-era reforms. I think the fact that those organisations and those complex structures will face more scrutiny and greater penalties if they do act in ways that are inappropriate is one of the real strengths of this bill and shows the strength of the thought that has gone into it.

I have set out, therefore, the reasons why I think that it was important to have this concurrent debate and why we support both the motion to debate things concurrently and the three bills in front of us here to help keep Victorian children safe. I thank the minister, her team and her department for their great work, and I commend the bills to the house.

 Emma KEALY (Lowan) (15:12): I rise today to speak on the Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority Bill 2025, which is being debated concurrently with the Social Services Regulation Amendment (Child Safety, Complaints and Worker Regulation) Bill 2025 and the Early Childhood Legislation Amendment (Child Safety) Bill 2025, the national law bill. I will say from the outset that a lot of work has been undertaken in a very short period of time by the Liberals and Nationals and all those on this side of the chamber, because a briefing on the latter two bills was provided to us less than 24 hours ago – in fact at about 4:30 pm yesterday afternoon. This is a substantial amount of legislation to pore over. In fact it is over 1000 pages. It is a lot of information. While I understand that there is an effort to act urgently now – it is on the back of a rapid review, as we heard – it is important that we do have the opportunity to consult broadly with the communities that we represent. This is the whole parliamentary system that we base our democracy upon.

While the Nationals and Liberals will not obstruct this legislation, because we support and want to see improvements in child safety regulation and mechanisms – all of the legislation that provides those aspects that make our children safer in the community – I also understand there will be some additional time to read through this legislation and identify if there are any shortfalls. There may be drafting issues as well. I urge the government to be cooperative if any matters are identified that are flawed or if there is an error or a loophole that would inadvertently allow for somebody to put children at risk – cause harm to children – or that could be exploited by people who are, quite frankly, depraved in their behaviour.

As I said, while the Liberals and Nationals have not had a huge opportunity to be briefed appropriately on the other two bills and to consult with our communities, we will be supporting the passage of this legislation through the chamber today.

The matters surrounding child safety, particularly around working with children checks and protection and supports for the good workers and identifying those people who should not ever be allowed to work in childcare, kindergarten or primary school settings, have been a serious issue for my community in Lowan and particularly around the Horsham community. Those in the chamber would be well aware of the serious offending of Ron Marks, somebody who was at the time well respected and trusted in the community. But the failures of the working with children check system and the information-sharing system resulted in Ron being able to access children for a prolonged period of time even after police had seized thousands of depraved images of the sexual abuse of children, including very young children, who appeared that they were dead, who appeared to be covered with mud and even blood. It is something that weighs heavily on my community that somebody who police knew was prone to a sexual appetite of such a depraved nature would still be allowed to provide education sessions within childcare centres, within local kindergartens and within local primary schools.

Police did their utmost, though, to keep our community safe. It is understood that Ron Marks’s offending took place between 2012 and 2021, and the reason it stopped in 2021 was because police seized a large number of electronic devices, including hard drives, which contained these horrific images – and they contained thousands of images. I say that police did their best because when police raided Ron Marks’s property, when they seized these devices, they also made the effort to seize Ron Marks’s physical working with children check card – the card that is I guess the analog way of checking whether somebody is appropriate to work with children. Police also did their job in that they notified the appropriate working with children check unit that somebody had been found with these disgusting images in their possession and that they were known to provide cultural awareness training and education to very young people in our community. That information was never acted upon by the working with children check unit, and his digital working with children check remained approved until he was found guilty only earlier this year. That means for four years, according to Victoria’s working with children check system, Ron Marks was appropriate to be entering childcare facilities, entering kindergartens and entering primary schools to sit with children, to share stories and to have unprecedented and open access to children, even though the working with children check unit knew that he was not a fit and proper person to undertake that work.

I know that it is not only the parents of the children who are captured in photos of those early years education systems, whether it is primary schools, kindergartens or childcare areas, that are still grappling with the risk that surrounded that. The operators of these centres are still grappling with their concern that, while it was known to the working with children check unit, they let their families down because they could not act upon information they could not even access. It is very unfair for those childcare operators, it is unfair for the kindergarten operators and it is unfair for the primary school principal and the educators there as well. They did their best, but it is the government system that let them down.

I would also like to make note of Goolum Goolum, which is an Aboriginal community health organisation, who do an incredible job in the community. Understandably, this sent ripples through their community which are quite unique. They do such a good job around that – they really do an outstanding job in the community – and they were not informed about this serious breach, which would have required revocation of a working with children check in any other reasonable government operating system. They have been let down as well.

This legislation does address some of those matters. There will be the opportunity for information sharing and coordination. One of the most glaring failures identified by the rapid review was the lack of information sharing between agencies. A teacher could have a reportable conduct investigation in one department, and another regulator might never, ever know, which is exactly what we saw in the Marks case. A childcare worker might fail a safety check in one role and then be hired in another because the information was not shared. These reforms will finally allow the Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority (VECRA) and the Social Services Regulator (SSR) to share critical decisions, like worker suspensions or prohibitions, and provide information directly to prospective employers. That is the basic oversight that should have been in place a long, long time ago. I reiterate my concerns about the delays in this process to put this into place.

Another important feature of the reforms is that regulators will now be able to act on unsubstantiated intelligence and cumulative risk data instead of waiting for something to be proven or for harm to occur. This is a major shift towards prevention rather than reaction. If this had been in place years ago, then potentially our children in Horsham would never have been put at risk and exposed to Mr Marks.

The Nationals and the Liberals support these legislative changes that will make children safer. They are changes which should have happened a very, very long time ago. I acknowledge the workers within our early years system who have been fighting for these changes and have not felt protected in the absence of these changes. I certainly put my heart out to the families who found out that their child was with a worker who should not have been there through the media. I commend this bill to the house.

 Mathew HILAKARI (Point Cook) (15:22): I rise to support this concurrent debate and legislation on child safety. Profit and care, in my view, are like oil and water; by themselves they simply do not mix. High-quality regulation can be the emulsifier that brings them together. That is some of what this bill seeks to do. But I should say at the outset, with consideration of how the large-scale for-profit sector has operated nationally, exposed particularly through the ABC and the reporting of Adele Ferguson, I do question whether they are fit and proper to be providing this education and care. In the meantime we will need to regulate. I do question whether the industry, which should have safety as a priority at its heart – the safety of children, rather than profit – has the social capital at all to continue in this sector. I do question that.

The toll on the community that I represent has been extraordinary. We heard from the previous speaker the toll on the community that she represents. The toll on so many communities across this country has been extraordinary. I have spoken with parents, with educators and with doctors from across the community that I represent, so I know the toll that they are undergoing. Actually, I say I know it, but I do not really know it; only they can really know it. That is why I say some of those in the industry should question their continuation in the industry. They should look at themselves and not look at the profit that they seek to make.

Many of the alleged crimes in the community that I represent and committed across Victoria will have an ongoing and lasting consequence for the people in the community that I represent. They will manifest in the years ahead in many different ways, and they will profoundly affect people’s futures. Crimes against children, our most vulnerable, are the worst of crimes. I think that is something that we agree on entirely in this place. Crimes against children and crimes that strike at the heart of trust in services that people rely on are also the worst of crimes. Services like child care are relied on. For many in the community that I represent, and in communities that many people in this place represent, their economic circumstances mean that child care must be used. It is not actually a service of choice, it is a service of necessity. Even out of necessity, there are many benefits of child care. Of course there are many benefits of child care, even though it is a necessity for many people. I see this in my own children, both of whom are in child care currently. With them being in child care, I remember the drive to child care after hearing of the alleged crime. Like many that morning, in the following days, weeks and months and even today I continue to feel sick at the idea that those who we place our trust in may well misplace and abuse that trust in such a profound way – people who have so little regard for the welfare of others, the welfare of children. For many who work in this system, in particular men who work in the system, the crimes committed cause unfair distrust and unfair suspicion. For many of the early childhood educators who bring their passion, their effort and their care, I know the hurt that they have been in, being in a system where others are causing abuse. I thank those many wonderful childcare workers who turn up each day, particularly in the wake of these events, and who educate and care for our children and improve their wellbeing in such an important way. I thank also the workers at my children’s child care who have cared for and educated, some of them, both of my children. I appreciate the efforts that they go to every day, and I thank them directly.

The system of for-profit, large-scale child care has appropriately been brought into question, and rightly so, and we should continue to question it. We should continue to bring in bills of regulation while that exists. As a government, there is more to do on this legislation, but I will outline some of the immediate action we undertook in the wake of these alleged crimes that came to light in July of this year. We banned the use of personal devices within childcare centres. We set out that failure to comply with this could result in the cancellation of a service and fines of up to $50,000. We established a register of early childhood educators, and the bill before us today of course enhances that register. We commissioned an urgent review into child care and early childhood education, and I thank Jay Weatherill AO and Pamela White PSM for the work that they undertook. This no doubt was extremely difficult work, and they set out that the care settings and the working with children check in Victoria as it relates to early childhood education need to be of course improved. Some of that is in the bill today. In response to the rapid review there were 22 recommendations that were set forward. The government has released a response and an implementation plan to each and every recommendation, as we should. The bills before the house today of course acquit some of those recommendations, and I am expecting that we will see more in front of us. The opposition have indicated their support for these bills, and seemingly their largest critique so far of the bills has been that we did not adopt their media releases in the wake of these horrible allegations. I appreciate that they are supporting these today. I appreciate also that the member for Preston outlined some of the bills in his contribution earlier and how we will continue to engage in this space in improving what has been actually a bit of a failed system. We would not be here discussing these matters if it was not.

I want to just outline a few of the matters related to the Social Services Regulation Amendment (Child Safety, Complaints and Worker Regulation) Bill 2025 and go through some of those matters relating to working with children checks and how they will come under the Social Services Regulator. That is mainly by consolidating those key child safeguard functions that were in the working with children check, the reportable conduct scheme and the child safe standards. Bringing them together is an appropriate thing. We should have our systems always talking to each other. That they were not was a real miss. It was a real miss, and it has had enormous consequences.

Strengthening the working with children check and broadening the range of information that is available is certainly an important thing in terms of the granting, the refusal, the suspension or the cancellation of working with children clearances. Some of the previous speakers have gone through some of the real-world effects of those systems not talking to each other and those systems not being strong enough. Like the first speaker on this bill, the member for Preston, I will go past the elements related to disability entities and the establishment of complaint functions in that space as well. I know that other speakers will be speaking to those matters, importantly, later in their contributions.

The enhancements of the working with children check mean that a number of workers will be excluded from working in childhood settings, and I understand that that is actually a really challenging thing for workers and for the people who represent workers. But we need some of these protections in place because of course the priority clearly needs to be children’s safety. I do acknowledge that there will be finessing over time of every bill that we bring to this place, and we should keep looking at the regulations that we put in place to make sure that they are fit for purpose. So I expect that we will continue to look at those over time, to look at those elements related to workers and their ability to have some fair processes in relation to this, but erring on the side of the children and erring on the side of a cautious approach to this is certainly something that I agree with. The risks are just too strong otherwise.

This bill requires mandatory child safety training and testing for people applying for a working with children check to support applicants to have a base level of child safety literacy to equip them to recognise, identify and adequately act to protect children from abuse. Certainly for me, my observation of child care is that child care is best delivered with many workers in the same place, because that is the best protection for children in childcare settings; I observe that in the circumstances of my own childcare situation.

I do not have long, so I want to thank the ministers associated with these bills and also the advisers and everybody who has been working thoroughly on them. They are enormous bills for those reasons. I commend this bill to the house.

 Roma BRITNELL (South-West Coast) (15:32): I rise today to speak on a matter that should be a cornerstone of any government’s priorities: the safety and wellbeing of our children. Yet the Allan Labor government has shown time and again that when it comes to protecting our youngest and most vulnerable, it is slow to act, chaotic in its response and fundamentally lacking in a child-centred approach. The suite of bills before us today includes the Early Childhood Legislation Amendment (Child Safety) Bill 2025, the Social Services Regulation Amendment (Child Safety, Complaints and Worker Regulation) Bill 2025 and the Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority Bill 2025. We only received two of these bills a couple of hours ago. The government issued a press release before they even tabled the bills – it just sounds so insincere.

These bills are necessary and they are overdue, and they are a direct response to a crisis that the government was repeatedly warned about and that could have been prevented. Those 2000 babies and their families could have avoided the trauma of the abuse and of having to be sexually transmitted infection–tested – absolutely disgraceful. On this side of the chamber, we support these bills. We have called for stronger oversight, we have called for tougher penalties and we have called for the creation of the independent regulator all way before the latest crisis struck. But we do not support the way this government has handled this process with delay, with disregard for proper scrutiny and with a disturbing lack of urgency.

These facts are quite confronting.

Earlier this year a childcare worker who had worked across 20 centres in Melbourne was charged with over 70 sickening offences, including sexual assault and the production of child abuse material. There is also the case of Ronald Marks, arrested in 2021 for processing nearly 1000 child abuse images, yet who retained his active working with children check for four years – four years after his arrest. During that time he was allowed to walk into childcare centres and walk into kindergartens. That is not just a bureaucratic error; that is a catastrophic failure of the very system designed to protect our children. It is beyond belief to me that the working with children check was not connected to the police system. That failure meant these individuals were able to move freely between centres even after being arrested.

Rather than act on strong recommendations already presented to the government, the government commissioned a rapid review – a review of a review, a review that unsurprisingly confirmed what many in the sector, including us on this side of the chamber, had been warning of for years: that the Victorian early childhood education and care system is marked by fragmented oversight, weak regulation and uncoordinated workforce tracking. The review on the review made 22 recommendations, and yet, despite the urgency of the findings, the government has dragged its feet.

These bills were meant to be tabled by October – that was the government’s own commitment to its response to the rapid review – but instead they were only passed through the cabinet yesterday and available at 12:20. It is now just after 3:30, and we are looking at these in the Parliament today with barely 2 or 3 hours notice. They are being debated concurrently, giving the opposition and the stakeholders, who need to have the time to understand what is in the bills, little time to consult. There are hundreds of pages to scrutinise to ensure that these reforms are strong and effective. It is not possible to do that level of scrutiny. Already we are hearing from the disability sector, who are quickly clearly looking through this and showing disappointment, but the Shadow Minister for Disability, Ageing, Carers and Volunteers, my colleague, will elaborate further on that. But it just shows how ill-prepared this government is and how it has not succeeded in protecting our children. It is just disgraceful.

This is not how you govern when children’s safety is at stake. The Premier is always ready to put on a hard hat and pose for cameras, but when it comes to the hard work of building a system to protect our children, she clearly has not prioritised delivering on her promise and having this bill delivered in a timely manner. This government has consistently put politics and publicity ahead of policy and protection.

The Early Childhood Legislation Amendment (Child Safety) Bill seeks to strengthen the regulatory environment around the childcare sector. It aims to provide better oversight, stronger penalties and improved protections for children, and these are very welcome changes. But they are reactive, not proactive, and they are the result of the public outcry and the media scrutiny, not of a government that was listening to the sector, implementing the Ombudsman’s recommendations or putting children first.

The social services regulation amendment bill is similarly important. It aims to strengthen the working with children check system by removing the silos and giving the social service regulator more power. It allows for better information sharing, something that should have been in place long ago and is a no-brainer to many of us. But again, the timing is deeply concerning, and the government has been coy about what these changes mean for the Commission for Children and Young People (CCYP), an oversight body that is already under pressure and currently led by an acting commissioner. The Allan Labor government’s failure to appoint a new commissioner to the Commission for Children and Young People during this time of crisis is a dereliction of duty. It is deeply troubling to me that the government has left this critical leadership role vacant while Victoria’s most vulnerable children continue to suffer under a very broken system.

The CCYP has repeatedly exposed horrific failures: children dying under the state’s care, rampant sexual exploitation in out-of-home residential care and ignoring of recommendations that could save lives. Yet instead of acting decisively, Labor have chosen inaction. This is a pivotal moment for reform. Accountability and safeguarding children’s futures should be paramount. Leaving the Commission for Children and Young People without a commissioner is a signal that this government is unwilling to confront its own failures. Vulnerable children deserve leadership, not silence.

This raises serious questions about independence and resourcing and the government’s commitment to transparency.

Perhaps the most significant of the three bills we debate today is the Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority Bill. This bill implements recommendation 9 of the rapid review: the creation of an independent early childhood education and care regulator separate from the Department of Education. This is critical reform, because for too long the department has been both the operator and the regulator, a clear conflict of interest that has been undermining trust and accountability. The government has announced a $45 million investment in these reforms, including 100 new staff and 60 new compliance officers. That has got to be a significant commitment that really does indicate just how under-resourced the system was and an admission of failure of the minister, who stood by the regulator despite the fact that they were clearly failing, and now they are recognising that by putting on 60 compliance officers. It is a tacit omission that the previous regulatory framework was not fit for purpose and that this failure directly contributed to the abuse of children in early education settings.

While we welcome the establishment of an independent regulator, we remain concerned that this government is already missing its own deadlines, with two of the bills not being released until today, the process rushed and the sector and educators, providers and families having been left scrambling to understand what these changes mean – no time to look at them. This is not good enough. The safety of children should never be an afterthought, it should never be delayed and it should never be compromised by political convenience or bureaucratic inertia. What we needed, and what we still need, is a government that puts children and children’s safety at the centre of its decision-making, a government that listens to the sector, a government that acts swiftly and transparently when failures are exposed and recommendations made and a government that understands that child safety is not just a policy issue, it is a moral imperative. Instead we have a government that has failed to meet its own deadlines – a government that has prioritised spin over substance.

Only the Liberal–Nationals are committed to delivering the fresh start for Victorian families that they deserve, and we will continue to fight for a system that is child-centred, transparent and accountable. We will continue to hold this government to account for its failures, and we will continue to advocate for the reforms that our children and our community so desperately need, because nothing is more important than keeping our children safe, and nothing is more damning than a government that has failed to do that for our children.

 Lauren KATHAGE (Yan Yean) (15:42): Allegations of harm to children shook us to our absolute core. Our worst fears were realised but also in some cases worse than our fears had ever been. When you take your children to child care for the first time as a mum – often the first time you have ever had your child in the care of someone that is not your family – that first walk down the hallway away from your child is really, really difficult. The things that are going through your head at that time are not the grotesque things we have heard about; they are things that are much, much simpler, like: will my child be okay? Will someone care for my child if they cry? Will someone care for them at all?

I have been very lucky in my childcare journey; I have had Kylie, Dakota, Kelly, Harpreet, Rachel, Inderpal, Kira, Emma, Jess, Sonia, Amy, Kathy, Brooke, Amanda, the other Amanda, Gurpreet, Louise, Rhonda – so many fabulous people that have cared for my daughters, putting sunscreen on little noses and teaching the alphabet. They care for our kids and they deserve the best, and we have been very pleased to see additional support for our childcare workers from the federal government and increased funding and pay rises. It is very important. They work in that industry because they love kids, they care for kids, and I have had the privilege of seeing some of them become mothers themselves, which has been really special. My family has relied on them, and my broader community relies on them too. They are a really fundamental part of our communities.

I think of Doreen early learning centre, where in talking to the assistant manager there, she spoke about all the supports they were looking for to wrap around a new mum who was having a hard time with motherhood. I think of Guardian Childcare and Education in Laurimar and the way they have the Nanna’s Home Basics crew up there with them. Deb was there leading the strong focus on Remembrance Day and Anzac Day for the children who attend. Rebecca is at the Orchard Road YMCA, and their early intervention work makes sure that kids have wraparound supports before they get to school. We love childcare workers, early learning centre workers, and we rely on them.

From talking to workers and managers in my community, I know that they have been just as gutted as everybody about what has occurred. I think about one of my centres in Donnybrook, where the male worker there offered to step back in the wake of what happened and the families there wrapping around him to demonstrate how much they love and value his work. Other centre managers told me that families had asked for male workers not to care for their children during nappy changes. It has been a really, really difficult time for workers and for parents as well as obviously the children. Everyone is dealing with the shock and grief in different ways.

This government is dealing with it by strengthening and simplifying protections for children, and they have been set out in these three bills which we are discussing concurrently. I want to assure parents that the work that we are doing means that we will have the most rigorous inspection regime in the country, by authorised officers. We will have more unannounced compliance visits – more than double. We will more than double the unannounced compliance visits on centres, and we are doing this work now, we are putting these bills through together now, despite the complaints of those opposite, because we want this system ready and in place for the start of next year. I know in my community families are receiving their second-round offers for kindy places, and we want them to know that when they take their child to kindy for the first time next year, they will have these additional protections there ready for them.

We also reassure parents that we are implementing all 22 recommendations as quickly as possible, and part of that is around the timely tracking and tracing of workers in the sector. That is something I have spoken to childcare centre managers in my community about the need for, and how there had been an assumption that there was automatic updating and following of workers. So I am glad that we are meeting the expectations of the sector by putting this in place. I think anybody who has been looking around for child care or kinder for their child knows that the centres often spruik their standing in the national quality standards around things like how they are integrated with the community, the health and safety, the food, the different things like that. But what we are doing is making sure that not just those things are clear to parents but also any compliance or enforcement activity at centres is easily found by parents so that when parents are making a choice about where to place their child, about who to place their child in the care of, they have access to information about that centre.

We also have some improvements around complaints for people with disability and disability oversight bodies as part of this work, including the worker regulation functions into the Social Services Regulator. I know that is certainly something that I welcome. In speaking to disability workers, they have also sought to have that combination and streamlined approach, because we know that workers often move between those sectors. So we want to make sure that there is not a gap there, and I look forward – I hope, in the future – to aged care workers also being part of that, because we have seen that people do seek out the most vulnerable, and they do seek out where there are gaps.

You might be shocked to know that following the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, Australian Federal Police stopped 20 registered child sex offenders at the airport trying to get to Asia because they knew that people who were vulnerable would be easier victims. It was following instances like that that the then AusAID implemented the child protection policy – that was in 2008 – and Australia’s international development program is the world leader in child protection. There is a lot that domestically we can learn from what has happened internationally, because there are very strict standards in place. These predators seek out weaknesses in systems and they seek out the most vulnerable. So it is our duty to strengthen systems, to look for gaps and to make sure that they are filled. I really welcome the changes that we have before us in these three bills that we are discussing concurrently.

The new Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority means that this is not just a one-off improvement that we are making in the sector and to the safety of children but that there will be continual work, continual strengthening and continual support for the sector to make sure that the children who are placed in care receive the best possible care, because when it comes time for you to place your child in child care for the first time, as I set out explaining at the start of my contribution, when you are walking down the hallway back towards your child after that first day away from them, you want to find your child as happy and as well as you left them. We know that in nearly all instances that is the case, and so I want to acknowledge the great work of our early learning sector workers. I want to reassure parents that we are working so hard to make sure that we can strengthen the system to make sure that we can keep predators far, far away and that we are ready to pounce on any cases that need to be fixed.

 Nicole WERNER (Warrandyte) (15:52): I rise to speak on the Early Childhood Legislation Amendment (Child Safety) Bill 2025 and the Social Services Regulation Amendment (Child Safety, Complaints and Worker Regulation) Bill 2025. From the outset, I know that across both sides of the aisle, we would agree that in this place, protecting children is one of the most important things that we can do as legislators. It is our duty as legislators – we would all agree to that. That is why on our side it is so mind-boggling to us that the government has allowed less than a day for the opposition to scrutinise the bill. If we were serious about our democracy and its functions and if we were serious about keeping children safe, then the government would have done its due diligence and allowed the opposition to have the time to look at the bill, read its contents, examine it, go out to stakeholders and undertake the typical democratic process that our children deserve in order to be kept safe.

Instead what the government has done is give us less than a day to go through all of these changes. As the opposition, our job is to scrutinise these bills so that we can have the best outcomes for Victorians, the best outcomes for our children and the best outcomes for those that we in this place have a duty to keep safe. A day’s notice to go through all of these details – it is impossible to do. If the government was really serious about working together in a bipartisan way to keep children safe, then there would not have been less than a day to go through all of this. The truth is that we are here debating these three bills today – three bills, all together – two of which, these that I have held up, we have had less than a day to see because the government has failed to act when it mattered. Our priority as legislators must be putting children first and keeping children safe, something that this government has failed to do. Now they are trying to pick up the pieces and introduce measures that should have been implemented years ago.

No-one disputes the importance of these reforms. Everyone remembers the case of Joshua Brown, the childcare worker who, sickeningly, was charged with over 70 offences, including sexual misconduct and producing child abuse material. Indeed parents across my community and in fact from across the state contacted me in grief and dismay. How could this have happened? Why weren’t our children protected? Why weren’t they kept safe? And if the government knew, why didn’t they act all those years ago? If the government knew, why didn’t they do anything to keep our children safe? This is case of too little, too late. The government knew for years that the system was broken, and they did nothing.

In 2022 the Commissioner for Children and Young People warned the government that ‘children will be abused, or continue to be abused’ by people who should have been stopped from working with children if more funding was not given to the very agency that investigated inappropriate behaviour in childcare centres. The Victorian Ombudsman warned the government in 2022, again, that Victoria had the weakest working with children check system in the nation. The Ombudsman called for reforms, and the government ignored every single recommendation. They have known about these weaknesses and they have known about these issues for three years plus. The government were told exactly what would happen and exactly what they needed to do in order to better protect Victorian children, and they did nothing. They did nothing, and now the children of Victoria have had to pay the price.

Steve Dimopoulos: On a point of order, Acting Speaker, even the member for Warrandyte, despite her TikTok and Instagram following, has to be factual. And on this, everything she has said in the last 2 minutes – literally, I quote, that we have ‘done nothing’– is an outrageous lie. I wonder if what I say will make it onto her social media.

The ACTING SPEAKER (Meng Heang Tak): I will rule on the point of order. There is no point of order. But I would like to ask the member to come to –

Nicole WERNER: Thank you, Acting Speaker. To the point of parents across my community that have contacted me in grief and dismay, can I raise a story from a family that contacted my office and have asked me to raise it in the Parliament. I wonder if Minister Dimopoulous at the table would allow for this to be read, because this is actually a truth from a family that has written to my office. It is a truth from a family who asked me to raise this issue, and I would like to read this in the house.

[QUOTE AWAITING VERIFICATION]

Dear Ms Werner,

We saw your Parliament speech about the childcare scandal, and we need your help. We are another family. We are living proof that the government’s failure to act in 2020 destroyed more children’s lives. If the system had listened to Goodstart’s substantiated findings in 2020, if they had done their job when the perpetrator was caught grooming and kissing toddlers, he would have never been able to have touched our children. This is not our fault. This is theirs.

They speak of their child who was three years old and their other child who was one year old. They say:

The system made a choice to provide our children to a predator they knew was dangerous. But we did not know. Goodstart knew, the police knew, the department knew, working with children check knew – they all knew in 2020, and they let him keep working with children.

Then they detail the changes that they saw in their children at the hands of this alleged perpetrator – with a three-year-old becoming terrified of going to the bathroom alone, who then started to make sexual comments about using his mouth, who then tried to kiss with an open mouth, and their one-year-old, barely walking, waking screaming, becoming clingy, needing to be held constantly, with both children withdrawing into themselves. This family has asked me to raise this in our Parliament on their behalf. As of last week, when they wrote to me in August, they said:

When the Premier called this unacceptable, this person still had his working with children check. Five years, Ms Werner, 2020 to 25. How many families …

they wrote to me –

If they had acted on Goodstart’s report, none of us would be here – not us, not the 2023 family, not whoever else is out there.

They wrote to me and said,

We’ve spent thousands on therapy. We’ll need years more. The government’s response is not good enough. Ms Werner, you’re not our local member, but you’re the only one fighting for families like ours that we have seen. When we saw your speech, we felt seen for the first time.

They said:

Goodstart did their job. They caught him, fired him, reported him. If the system had done its job, our children would be safe. This is not our fault. The Premier says this is unacceptable. That word does not give us back our children’s innocence.

I raise it in this place today because again, in 2022, the government was warned that children will be abused or continue to be abused by people who should have been stopped from working with children if more funding was not given to the agency which investigates inappropriate behaviour in child care. We know that to be true. The Victorian Ombudsman, in a publicly tabled report, warned the government in 2022 that Victoria had the weakest working with children check system in the nation.

While we welcome these reforms on this side of the house, what we do not welcome is the delay. What we do not welcome is the lack of transparency, to read through a bill this size in less than a day. What we do not welcome is the failure to act to keep Victoria’s children safe. This neglect has allowed child sex offenders to go from child care to child care, to continue abusing children, exactly as the Ombudsman told the government would happen years ago. But the government has delayed action time and time again, and the consequences have been sickening and our children have paid the price.

Today, while the government introduce these bills, I think back to July, when they opposed our policy that we took to the floor of Parliament. We called for – and they voted this down – allowing immediate action on credible information, linking the working with children system check system to the Victoria Police database, maintaining suspensions during appeals, reducing working with children check validity from five years to three and mandating training in child safety, reporting obligations and abuse awareness. The government voted these changes down. They voted down this suite of reforms that would keep our children safe – not after a rapid review that did not even get followed when it said it was going to be tabled in October. Here we are in November, acting rapidly to keep our children safe. They voted that down, and now the government is finally taking action after ignoring warnings from the experts and ignoring cries for help from families like I have raised here today. After initiating this not so rapid review, now they finally come to the floor. We will support these reforms, but they are too little, too late.

 John LISTER (Werribee) (16:02): As I start, I would just like to recognise the contribution by my neighbour and colleague the member for Point Cook. This issue, and particularly the events that we saw around July, hit quite hard for my community given the majority of the centres involved were across Werribee, Wyndham Vale, Point Cook and Tarneit. Every day hundreds of families across my electorate drop their children off to these early childhood centres and place a huge amount of trust in the workers there to keep their children safe. As someone who has worked with children as a schoolteacher, you always have this responsibility at the front of your mind.

The vast majority of our workers in early childhood settings have the best interests of the children they care for at the heart of what they do. However, we know there is a risk that some people target children in these settings to satisfy their twisted and horrific feelings. In my community we have seen this manifest in the most horrific way through the alleged offending by a creep who I shall not give the satisfaction of naming here in this place. This is why I thought it was important to speak on this package of bills today that go further to protecting our children. While, yes, they are quite lengthy, and yes, there is a lot of detail in them, it does form part of a whole process that we have been following along the way here in this chamber. I stayed up until very late going through these bills, I was there at the briefings and I read through the notes, and I think it is really important that we do spend that time on such an important issue.

There are two particular parts of this collection of bills that I want to reflect on, particularly the one concerning the national law bill, and some of those concerns the member for Point Cook raised around private for-profit operators in these contexts, as well as looking at the early childhood register. We owe it to families in Werribee and Wyndham Vale who faced that horrific offending to get this right.

What families in my electorate did not want to see was the blatant politicking by an increasingly irrelevant opposition. It was irresponsible to bring a bill to this place that was half-baked and not in line with necessary national approaches, only to then have Liberal staffers, probably in a dank office in Exhibition Street, push out graphics plastering the faces of good people on this side, implying that we did not want to look after children. I got a rise out of that.

Bridget Vallence: On a point of order, Acting Speaker, the member’s opportunity is not to attack the opposition but actually to speak to the contents of this bill.

The ACTING SPEAKER (Lauren Kathage): What is your point of order?

Bridget Vallence: I am coming to that. I would ask you to ask the member to come back to the bill package.

The ACTING SPEAKER (Lauren Kathage): There is no point of order.

John LISTER: I think it is particularly important, because there has been a wideranging discussion on the process behind where we get to with these three bills along the way, and unfortunately the process that we have seen from those opposite is to disparage people on this side for voting against a half-baked bill in this place, rather than wait for the review and work with our colleagues across other jurisdictions in Australia to get this right. It is despicable, that kind of behaviour, because we on this side understand –

Bridget Vallence: On a point of order, Acting Speaker, members are required to be factual, and the fact of the matter is the Ombudsman put out these issues three years ago.

The ACTING SPEAKER (Lauren Kathage): That is a matter for debate.

Bridget Vallence: It did not require any rapid review three years ago, and I would suggest that he is being disparaging to members within this chamber in his contribution. I would ask you to get him to come back to the bill.

The ACTING SPEAKER (Lauren Kathage): As I said, there is no point of order, and members are to be seated once they have been told there is no point of order.

John LISTER: It is particularly important every time I look at that little blue card in my pocket that says that I am a registered teacher and that I am held to those high standards of child safety, something that I take seriously not only in my role as a teacher but also in my role as a parliamentarian, because we understand that the work to further strengthen protections and worker screening requires that national approach and methodical approach – an approach that takes into account the complicated regulatory and funding frameworks of this sector, which I will go to. As teachers, we are held to high standards and registration requirements, and it makes sense – and I am getting to the bill here – to ensure other workers who have a child-facing role are also held to a high standard, beyond just the working with children check. What we are looking at with these bills builds on the work we have already done to strengthen our system. We have banned the use of personal devices in childcare centres. Failure to comply with this can result in the cancellation of service approval. We have established a register of early childhood educators, and we are going, with one of these bills, to enhance the provisions in that register. We have commissioned that urgent review into child safety in early childhood education, and we are also, with these bills, responding to the recommendations. These bills acquit a number of those key recommendations.

I want to talk first about the idea of the Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority Bill 2025. In discussing this with some people in the department and with my colleagues, it is important to remember the regulatory environment that a lot of these early childhood centres sit in and why, although we have already established an early childhood worker register, it is important to have this legislation to set out some provisions to strengthen how that register can operate. We have these foundations that we have already put in place over this year, but recent events, including the events that happened in my electorate, have made it clear we can do more to keep children safe. We have seen that it is particularly critical now to do this, as we have seen an expansion in the early childhood education and care (ECEC) sector. As the member for Point Cook put it, profit and child safety tend to mix like oil and water, and regulation, particularly when it comes to making sure the people working in these for-profit centres are registered and monitored as well, is really important. We have seen, as a result of an increase in funding in the sector, more of these centres, but we have also had the floodgates opened to private operators by the former Liberal–National government, with very little regulatory environment around it.

At the moment these services are regulated by the quality assessment and regulation division, and as I come to understand it, this really goes towards the programs that are offered there and the space that is there and not necessarily to the workers themselves. It is a little bit like saying that the Victorian Registration and Qualifications Authority, which manages schools, needs to also be responsible for the registration of teachers at those schools. We know that having a registration scheme for those employers means that it can be transferred across, and there is more of that insight to it. This particular bill is going to establish a new independent ECEC regulator called the Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority and create the position of the early childhood regulator, which will report directly to the minister, which I think is particularly important when we see these cases where it requires rapid decision-making at that high level. Transferring these functions from a regulator to an independent body led by the early childhood regulator and directly accountable to the minister will ensure effective regulation in this increasingly complex system.

It will also make sure that we have that register of workers, we require those private operators to submit information to that register and we create offences and penalties for not doing that.

In the time I have left I did want to talk to the idea of a national approach to tackling this issue of registering workers and other issues across the sector. This bill addresses the Australian education ministers’ commitment to introduce legislation to implement the recommendations of that child safety review and other national reforms. Having this national law means that we will enhance the safety, health and wellbeing of children in early childhood centres and improve the quality of education. It will lead to improvements and really fill a lot of those gaps in the regulatory environment that we have seen.

Key areas in the reform agreed to by all those ministers across jurisdictions mean that there will be a national application of a statutory duty for the safety, rights and best interests of children to be the paramount consideration for all persons involved, because we know that for-profit centres are run as businesses and there is not necessarily always that principle that the safety, rights and best interests of children are at the heart.

Something that those opposite have missed in this entire discussion is that, yes, government plays a role in this and, yes, the federal government plays a role in this, but the operators and the workers themselves also play a role when it comes to child safety. We always used to go through modules when I was teaching at school around looking at child safety policies. As you clicked through those modules and you had those discussions in your staff meetings, it was made really clear that child safety is a shared responsibility. It is also on these operators to be making sure that they are doing everything possible, regardless of whether or not it affects their bottom line, to keep children safe. Having that statutory duty across the entire nation makes it very clear, especially as we see increased funding for these services as communities like mine grow and we need to provide more early childhood services. I commend all three lengthy but well-considered bills to the house.

 Tim BULL (Gippsland East) (16:12): I want to make some comments in relation to the Social Services Regulation Amendment (Child Safety, Complaints and Worker Regulation) Bill 2025, as one of these three bills we are concurrently debating. This bill merges the disability services commissioner, the Victorian Disability Worker Commission and the Disability Worker Registration Board of Victoria into the new Social Services Regulator. The bill has 455 pages, and we received that bill of 455 pages and have to debate it on the same day. That is an absolute disgrace. Shame on the government for lumping it in with two other bills to be debated concurrently, when it knows we are probably going to support the other bills but have issues with this one. This is appalling and not how this place should work. Given we had no time to read the bill in full, we will consider some amendments potentially in the other place.

The Social Services Regulator, as outlined in this bill, is not what the disability sector wants. They want a standalone complaints service and have made that crystal clear in multiple pieces of correspondence to both the minister and the Premier. The Victorian state disability plan states, as one of the principles at its foundation, ‘nothing about us without us’. Well, I ask the Minister for Disability: what happened here? Yes, there were a couple of meetings. The disability sector raised its concerns very clearly, but it was ignored, and this government has pushed on to put this structure in place without their support. How is this possibly listening? How does that align with ‘nothing about us without us’? This proves it is simply a slogan and nothing that this minister and government lives by.

Disability Advocacy Victoria and Disabled People’s Organisations Victoria, which represent a very large cohort of disability groups – over 20, I believe – made their wishes very clear. They said they had not been consulted – so much for ‘nothing about us without us’. They made it very clear that they did not want the regulator – the oversight agency – absorbed into the Social Services Regulator.

They wanted a standalone disability complaints service, not something lost in a bigger umbrella group. When the royal commission recommendations were released, this is what the government said:

The Victorian Government welcomes the opportunity to work closely with people with disability throughout the implementation of our response to the recommendations of the Disability Royal Commission.

You have not worked with them and you have not listened: they are not my words, they are the words of the sector.

This is the second try we have had at this. First off, we had this incompetent minister last year introduce the Disability and Social Services Regulation Amendment Bill 2024. Embarrassingly, having got it so wrong, the minister had it sitting between houses for over a year and then withdrew it just a few sitting weeks ago. However, while it was sitting between houses I got all the correspondence, the minister got all the correspondence and the Premier got all the correspondence pleading with the government to listen – that they did not want an overarching regulator, they wanted a standalone service. Not only that but none of these disability groups were invited to sit in on the government’s taskforce – not one. The taskforce looking at restructuring the disability sector oversights contained nobody from the disability sector – incredible. Let us consider for a moment the relevant royal commission recommendation. It is recommendation 11.3, and it is to:

… establish or maintain an independent ‘one-stop shop’ complaint reporting, referral and support mechanism to receive reports of violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation of people with disability.

This implies a standalone entity. It does not recommend merging the complaints service into a bigger umbrella entity. The royal commission went on to state, and have a listen to this:

The mechanism should be co-designed with people with disability …

What the hell happened? This did not occur. We asked in the bill briefing the last time around what disability groups were consulted with. I think the answer we got was the Victorian Council of Social Service. No actual groups representing the disability sector or people with a disability were included on the taskforce, and the vast majority of them were not widely consulted. The royal commission also said:

The mechanism should be placed … within an existing independent organisation which has appropriate expertise and relationships with services to perform its functions.

This is not occurring. The disability minister is ignoring the recommendations of the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability. Disability Advocacy Victoria and Disabled People’s Organisations Australia have both said in follow-up letters to the minister and the Premier, which I was cc’d into, noting that Disability Advocacy Victoria is the peak body for independent disability advocacy organisations in Victoria:

[QUOTES AWAITING VERIFICATION]

We restate once again that what the disability community requires is a standalone disability-focused regulator led by people with disabilities in line with the relevant recommendations of the disability royal commission.

That correspondence also said:

The disability community/disability advocacy community is united in its perspective that the proposal to incorporate disability-specific regulators into the Social Services Regulator is both destructive and harmful.

Let us just have a think about that. Two overarching umbrella groups that represent more than 20 disability organisations say to the minister and say to the Premier that this structure they are putting in place is destructive and harmful to the disability sector, and the minister does not respond and forges on with that same program but will stand up when we have a disability function in Queen’s Hall and say, ‘Nothing about us without us.’ What a load of rubbish, speaking with a forked tongue.

If you are going to say, ‘Nothing about us without us,’ consult properly with the disability sector. Twenty groups not spoken to – hopeless. There is no evidence that a super-regulator will be able to effectively protect people with disabilities in Victoria. In the long second-reading speech, which I just read before coming into the chamber, it does not say in any passage that there has been broad consultation with the disability sector. The reason it says there has been no broad consultation with the disability sector is because it did not occur; it is as simple as that. It does not say in the second-reading speech that the structure has the broad support of the disability sector. There is a reason for that: it does not.

The correspondence, co-signed by two organisations that represent more than 20 groups, says they do not want this. They have made it crystal clear over more than 12 months that they do not want this. I met with a number of these groups over the past 12 months, and they said to me that if they could just talk to the minister and get their own specific shopfront, agency or office they could go to that primarily dealt with only complaints to the disability sector, they would be happy. And I said surely the minister would accept that. And they said, ‘Well, we can’t get in the door to have a discussion – will not talk to us.’ Nothing about us without us, but you cannot talk to the minister – go figure how that works.

This bill should not be debated within 24 hours of it coming into this chamber. This bill should not be debated concurrently with two other bills that this government knows we will support because they do make improvements to child protection and childhood safety that all in this chamber, I am sure, would strongly support. But we have being concurrently debated this bill that puts forth a reform the sector does not want and protects a hopeless minister who has not spoken to the disability sector and has not listened to or answered their concerns in relation to this structure that is being put in place. Now, we will be having some discussions with the crossbench between houses to see what avenues are available to us, but the fact that we are having to do this so quickly and in such a rushed situation is just a shame on this government.

 Iwan WALTERS (Greenvale) (16:22): That contribution was long on emotion but deeply, deeply short on fact, and to suggest that the Minister for Disability or indeed her office have not been consulting exhaustively with the disability sector in the context of the reforms contained within these bills and particularly the Social Services Regulation Amendment (Child Safety, Complaints and Worker Regulation) Bill 2025 is simply untrue and a profound mischaracterisation of the process that has led to this bill coming to this place. One of the reasons I know that is that I have been involved deeply and intimately in those consultations myself. As the former co-chair of the Social Services Regulation Taskforce I worked closely with National Disability Services and other disability stakeholders through that prism as well as a multitude of stakeholders through very regular consultations about the proposals in this form and previous forms but also the effective regulation of disability services in Victoria more broadly.

As the Shadow Minister for Disability, Ageing, Carers and Volunteers said, there has been some concern in the community about the nature of regulation – whether it is fit for purpose and whether people with a disability in this state know where to go if they have a concern or a complaint – and the reality is that the feedback to me through that consultation has been very clear that they do not. That was also the conclusion of the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability. It was also the conclusion in fact of the rapid review looking at the way in which children engage with government services and regulators. At the moment, we have a circumstance in which we have regulators with the word ‘disability’ in their name – the Victorian Disability Worker Commission and the disability services commissioner – but the remit of those is very limited. The Victorian Disability Worker Commission regulates disability workers on a voluntary basis, in effect – workers who have voluntarily registered to be within the orbit of that regulator. But the number of workers who have done that in this state is very small as a proportion of all of those who work in the disability space. Therefore, by definition, its capacity to regulate and to respond to complaints is limited. Much of the disability services commissioner’s role has been, in effect, superseded and absorbed as a consequence of the growth of the NDIS and services which were formerly within its umbrella having been transplanted to the NDIS, Commonwealth regulation and NDIS regulation, leaving only a very few forms of services – forensic disability and others – within the orbit.

So we have a circumstance where we do have regulators but their remit is limited. It has also changed. It is not, as it stands, fit for purpose. It is not clear for a Victorian with disability where they should go if they have a concern or a complaint. And we know – Acting Speaker Kathage, your own contributions in this place make it very clear – that notwithstanding the work of the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability, there are too many instances of abuse of Victorians with disability and others with a disability in our country. And there must be no wrong door. There must be no wrong door for those who are at risk of abuse or have experienced harm and abuse in the context of their care. It is imperative that there is clarity for consumers and those involved in service delivery and experiencing service delivery but also for our society more broadly and for a regulator to be empowered to have clarity, to have access to the right information and to be resourced to do the job.

Yes, I understand, and I have heard very loudly and clearly in the consultation that I have had and I know the minister has had, there is some concern in the community about the perceived loss of disability sector specialisation arising from merging disability oversight bodies into a broad-based regulator, but there will remain an enormous focus on disability within the Social Services Regulator (SSR). There will be no diminution of the focus on disability in the context of the system that these bills seek to create. An additional associate regulator role is being established in legislation, and these roles are flexible to enable the regulator and the system to adapt to sector needs.

I will return to these issues later in my contribution, but I did want to take exception to some of the things which the shadow minister put about in his speech at the start to suggest that there had not been consultation, to suggest that there was a uniform position among the disability community about what the government and what the minister have been proposing. I also do understand that Disability Advocacy Victoria chose not to engage in a consultation process, as is entirely their right, but to suggest that there was not that opportunity I do not think is a correct representation of what occurred.

On that note, the disability dimensions of these bills are incredibly important, specifically the disability dimensions of the social services regulation amendment. Others have spoken at length about why we have got to this place and the need to react rapidly to preserve the safety of children. As you, Acting Speaker Kathage, said and as others have said, nothing is more important in our community and our society. The rapid review made 22 recommendations for improved child safety in response to utterly abhorrent revelations and allegations earlier in the year. We want to see children safer across all settings, and children with a disability are a particularly vulnerable cohort, both in registered social services and in schools and early education. They deserve to be safe. They deserve and their families deserve to know where to go and to whom they should raise complaints and concerns when issues do arise. A fragmented system in which there is a lack of information sharing does them a disservice, and I think it is something that this Parliament needs to correct through the legislative proposals on the table.

I will not dwell upon all of the bills individually. Suffice to say that the social services regulation amendment transfers responsibility for the working with children checks, the reportable conduct scheme that currently is with the Commission for Children and Young People and the child safe standards to the SSR. It makes changes to the working with children check and the reportable conduct scheme as recommended by that Weatherill Rapid Child Safety Review, and it merges disability oversight bodies, including worker regulation functions, into the Social Services Regulator. The national law has been well described by others, and I will not dwell upon it here, but it is an important legislative change that gives effect to the things we know need to happen to keep children safe. We also will be establishing the Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority.

The ultimate intent of all of this is to improve the focus, efficiency and effectiveness of regulation. Regulator roles, once these bills are enacted, will see the SSR take charge of the regulation of social services, working with children checks, the reportable conduct scheme and overarching child safe standards, as well as disability oversight and worker regulation, making it clear for Victorians with a disability and their families that the SSR is the port of call and that there will be a very strong, specific focus on disability within that regulator. The Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority (VECRA) of course will take charge of regulation of early childhood education and care services, the early childhood worker register and the early childhood education and care (ECEC) sector regulation of child safe standards, crucially with extensive sharing of information between the two. Collectively, the three bills will work together to strengthen information sharing, allowing for immediate action to be taken based on a broader range of information to provide more regulatory tools and actions for regulators.

The SSR amendment bill, as I have said, substantially amends the Disability Service Safeguards Act 2018, with extremely good reason, and seeks to consolidate disability oversight functions in the Social Services Regulator. Similar to the early childhood sector, the location of different responsibilities and different sources of information in the disability oversight area leads to the risk and has led to the reality that no one agency has a holistic focus on consistent protections and safeguards for children and adults in high-risk settings. We know many locations of delivery, such as specialist disability accommodation, day services and all of the breadth of services that Victorians with disability may rely upon, are high-risk. We have seen it through the royal commission, and we have heard about it in the context of Ann Marie Smith in South Australia, who I have spoken about previously. These are not abstract risks, they are real. They require better information sharing and a dedicated focus within a regulator that works and that has an expansive focus. That is what the SSR has. I have been on that taskforce. I have chaired that taskforce. I have seen the deep consultation that this government has had with community, with organisations providing valuable services across our community and with people with disability and their advocates in our society. I know that there are differences of opinion. There are concerns about the risk that the loss of some regulators which currently exist will mean a diminution of focus on disability. That is not true. I am here to rebut the contribution of the member previously. The focus on disability within the SSR will be paramount. It will be strong, it will be clear and it will provide a resource for Victorians with a disability.

 Ellen SANDELL (Melbourne) (16:32): On behalf of the Greens, I rise to speak on the government’s legislative response to the rapid child safety review and the bills that it has put forward as an urgent matter. Currently early childhood education and care is in crisis, and we have seen that play out in our communities in the most horrific way with the recent allegations that came to light of childhood abuse in the sector, but we know that the sector had been in crisis for a time before that. These bills come to this Parliament following the really important work by New South Wales Greens MP Abigail Boyd, who uncovered serious regulatory failures and alarming rates of harm in the early childhood care sector in New South Wales, which led to the ABC investigation which blew this whole thing open.

Following her incredible work and those revelations, the Victorian Greens and our spokesperson in the other place Anasina Gray-Barberio acted swiftly, requesting that the Victorian state Labor government produce the same documents here that were provided by the New South Wales government to their Parliament and to the New South Wales Greens. We asked for the same documents – documents that showed the extent of harm and abuse happening in our childcare system. But to date the Victorian state Labor government, nearly six months later, has not produced a single document here in Victoria – not one document. It really beggars belief, and I think it is quite shameful. It means that the state Labor government is leaving tens of thousands of Victorian parents with kids in childcare, including myself – I have kids in child care right now – completely in the dark about the true scale of the harm that is happening in the early childhood education sector. All we are asking for is the same level of transparency that the people of New South Wales have been afforded.

While the Greens pushed – this was before some of the allegations came out – what the Greens were pushing for was basic transparency for parents. Then these horrific reports of child sexual abuse across Melbourne childcare centres came out in the news. These were every parent’s worst nightmares come to bear, and it was exactly the situation that we were warning could happen.

My own kids are in child care. I have had three kids go through child care, and I am so fortunate to have been able to place them in a wonderful little centre in my neighbourhood, a co-op that is overseen by a volunteer parent board, a non-profit centre. There are incredible, incredible educators there, some of whom have been there for many years, if not decades, and I absolutely could not do this job without them. That is very clear. But many parents in my electorate, particularly those in Kensington, were absolutely shocked when the horrific allegations against Joshua Brown came to light because he had worked – for a very short time, thankfully – at a centre in our neighbourhood. That, I think, sent an absolute chill through every single parent who had kids at that centre or other centres where he had worked.

The thing is that this is urgent. This does need to be addressed, but these bills are coming to us after governments have ignored dire warnings for years and years, in particular from the commissioner for children and young people, and there is a lack of resources and holes in the child protection and working with children schemes that have existed that the government has been warned would lead to child abuse. There have been years of these warnings. Almost three years ago to the day the commissioner explicitly warned the government that children would be abused or continue to be abused by a person who would have otherwise been prevented from working with children as a result of the current scheme. So the state Labor government was explicitly and very publicly warned that children would be abused or would continue to be abused in childcare centres if something was not done. That was three years ago. And what did the state Labor government do in response to these repeated and increasingly dire warnings? Very, very little. For three years those warnings were ignored and action was not taken, which begs the question: what has the government been doing for three years? If they say that protecting our children is a highest order priority, why hasn’t action been taken in the last three years on these warnings? Labor sat on their hands until it was too late, and unfortunately the dire warnings of the children’s commissioner played out in the most horrific fashion across our news media. It is horrific to think that potentially they could have been prevented. We do not think it is acceptable to wait three years to act on these dire repeated warnings of systemic child abuse.

Once the issue hit a political crisis moment in the media – and I think the state Labor government realised that they were very late to the party and that they were very exposed now, having not acted for three years – there was a political and media crisis. And what did the state Labor government do? They did what they are very good at doing, which was to announce a review – a rapid review, in fact, is what they called it at the time. This urgent legislation that has come before us, we have been told, is responding to some of the recommendations in that so-called rapid review. But the thing is this morning we were given this document with these bills responding to this review and they are a thousand pages long. They are reforms to child safety standards, the working with children check scheme and also to areas of disability regulation and oversight. Labor has waited three years to act, and now we get a 1000-page bill that we are supposed to deal with in one week and that nobody had seen until this morning. It is pretty remarkable, actually. And because the sector has not had time to look at the bill, other members of Parliament have not had time and stakeholders have not had time, we are being asked to rush through a bill that is urgent, in one week, when the government has had three years to act.

It just means that this bill will be much less considered and effective than it would be if it had proper scrutiny and oversight. And because we have only had a couple of hours with this bill, it means that I can really only comment generally on the details that I have seen of the bill, because we have not had a chance to read all the thousand pages yet.

The Greens have been calling for a strong, well-funded and independent agency with real power to investigate abuse, audit childcare centres and hold the sector and the government accountable. Instead the changes appear, as far as I have seen, to be quite superficial. This government has simply renamed the quality assessment and regulation division, the current regulatory body, and shifted it from sitting within the Department of Education to sitting outside of it. It appears it will have the same staff and the same workload and will be accountable to the same minister. So we are giving a new name to the regulator, but what good is a new name if the same government will continue to ignore its warnings and the system is not fundamentally changed to put the protection of children at its heart and have effective tools and teeth to do that?

It brings us back to what is really at the heart of the problem here: years of chronic underfunding and underprioritisation by governments into the early childhood education sector. As far as I can see, there are no minimum legislative requirements forcing the government to adequately resource the regulator for it to be effective in monitoring childcare centres or any legislated minimum benchmarks for inspection and compliance checks of centres. It seems that the regulator may proactively release information such as detailed compliance reports and allegations in childcare centres, but it is not mandatory under the act.

Victorian parents do deserve full transparency. This is about the safety of our children. We have the right to know what is happening in centres, what risks exist, what allegations have been made and what steps are being taken to protect children, and without that openness, trust in the system right now is really broken, and we want it to improve. We want that trust to be rebuilt, but that needs to be done properly.

The bill fundamentally also fails to address the true causes of why we are here today, which is that the for-profit model of childcare is broken and it fundamentally does not work. Good governance and an emphasis on child safety, all of which cost money, seem to be mutually exclusive with profit-making. Providers can literally profit from cutting corners on child safety and from cutting corners when it comes to sufficiently resourcing educators. And then we have the commercial childcare landlords, where rent for these properties is often calculated per child, meaning that they are trying to jam as many children in as possible, treating each child like a dollar sign, not a person. When we are turning the care of children into a commodity in this way, exploitation and neglect thrive. When profit is the motive, exploitation and neglect thrive, and when market forces dominate, non-profit and community-run centres that put children first are pushed aside or shut down in favour of these for-profit providers, who try and do things as cheaply as possible to make the most profit.

G8 is the nation’s largest ASX-listed early childcare company, operating more than 400 centres across Australia under more than 20 brands. In 2024, last year, G8 reported a net profit of more than $67 million from revenue exceeding $1 billion. I do not think that is okay. I do not know if anyone else in this place thinks that is okay. I do not think it is okay for these huge often overseas corporations to be making these kinds of profits off our children and having a profit motive that is driving down standards of care and putting safety at risk. Some of the G8 centres charge families around $170 a day, or more than $850 a week, yet it appears from all of the reports that we have seen that the most profitable centres – the ones that are for profit, that are giving dividends to their shareholders – are also the ones that are most frequently not meeting national quality standards and where we are seeing repeated reports of neglect and physical and sexual abuse.

This keeps happening, so something is fundamentally wrong with the way that the sector is set up in the first place – not just the way that it is regulated but the way it is fundamentally set up.

We need systemic change, not just legislative bandaids to try and make a political problem go away. We actually want to fix the problem, and I hope everyone would agree with me. I think we need a public universal childcare system. We would never accept in this state or this country big overseas for-profit corporations running our primary schools. We just would not. We would not accept that, so why do governments of both stripes accept this for early childhood education? These are the same kids. We know that so much – I think it is 90 per cent – of a child’s brain is developed before the age of five, and early childhood care is some of the most important care that our children get, yet we are happy to outsource it to big overseas for-profit corporations. I just do not think that that is right.

I want to talk a little bit about one other provision in the bill that the Greens are worried about. It looks like, from having had a look at the bill, Labor have also taken the opportunity – which they say is the response to the rapid review, which they say is urgent to fix the crisis in our childcare system – to take this bill and put in a section that removes dedicated oversight of disability service providers, including abolishing the disability services commissioner. The Greens have opposed this in similar legislation that has come before us. It looks on the face of it like they are the same reforms which Labor were previously unable to get support for through Parliament – we will take a closer look at that. But I think it is pretty awful form if Labor uses this urgent childcare bill to try and tack on and ram through changes to disability sector regulation and oversight and try and hide that under the guise of acting on the crisis in the childcare sector. I think that would be very cynical and a very disingenuous move from Labor, and I am sure that disability service providers and stakeholders would not appreciate it. I am sure that the disabled community here in Victoria would not appreciate it, and if this is what has happened in this bill, what a disrespectful way to treat the disabled community. We heard a government speaker before me say that the government thinks these changes are very much necessary. But if that is the case and the Labor government actually believe that, why have Labor hidden them in the middle of a bill that they say is about addressing the urgent need in the childcare sector? That just seems very tricky. It seems disingenuous and it seems disrespectful, and it makes me wonder what Labor are playing at and whether they have any intention of actually fixing the problems here or whether they are just using this as a political moment to get through a bill that they could not get through otherwise and sideline the disabled community here in Victoria.

We will be having some talks about that to try and fix what I think is a pretty egregious act, and we will spend some time – the little time we have over the next week – wading through the thousand-page bill. We will continue the conversations with the government. I thank the minister’s office for the briefing that we received yesterday, but there are more conversations that will need to be had. We in the Greens will continue to push for reforms that actually strengthen our childcare sector. We want reforms that are fair, that are carefully planned and that are shaped by the people who know the system best and have our kids’ education and safety as their top priority, that actually require full transparency from regulators, governments and centres and that place children’s safety over company profits. We will continue to push for a free public universal childcare system that actually looks after our kids and sees them as humans, not as objects that they can make profit from.

 Daniela DE MARTINO (Monbulk) (16:49): There is much to be said here today about the three bills that have been put before the house and are being dealt with in cognate: the Social Services Regulation Amendment (Child Safety, Complaints and Worker Regulation) Bill 2025, the Early Childhood Legislation Amendment (Child Safety) Bill 2025 and the Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority Bill 2025. These are all very important bills, and they are tackling an issue which is at the heart of all good societies.

The intention of us all, basically, is that we treat and take care of the most vulnerable in our society as well as we can, and as a government that is what we seek to do as well when other systems sometimes fail. Nothing was more upsetting, I do not think, than hearing the allegations, and they have been traversed in here. There has been much said in the media, and I really do not want to go into the details of them, because taking a trauma-informed approach, I would like to avoid going back over and covering that. But suffice to say, and I have said it in here before, we all had a very visceral response when we heard about those allegations, and communities across the state of Victoria felt it very deeply, none more so than the families of the children who had been abused. There were a multitude of parents out there who were in fear that their child had been as well, so there was trauma for those involved. For all of us who have had children or know children or who have loved children, there is nothing more horrendous than the thought of harm being done to them.

As a result we did conduct or instigate the rapid review, and the result of that only a few months later is some significant pieces of legislation which we deal with here today. At the heart of them is trying to ensure that the systems not just here in Victoria but also nationally are bolstered and are enhanced and give power to regulators to ensure that this just simply does not occur again. That rapid child safety review, which was led by Jay Weatherill AO and Pamela White PSM, delivered 22 recommendations to strengthen child safety in early childhood education and care (ECEC) settings. As a government, we accepted every single recommendation and committed to implementing them in full, and these bills deliver the legislative recommendations within the remit of our Victorian government. We are leading the nation with the Education and Care Services National Law Amendment Bill 2017 as well. I am very proud that we are doing that and that we are the host legislature doing that work.

I want to pick up on the Social Services Regulation Amendment (Child Safety, Complaints and Worker Regulation) Bill 2025 before I discuss some of the other elements here, and I note 10 minutes is not enough time for all the things I do want to go to and say. But I want to just look at the consolidation of disability entities and the establishment of a complaints function to ensure a more efficient safeguarding framework for children and adults with disability and people accessing social services. There is a real need for this to occur. According to the 2024–25 disability services commission annual report, the commission received a total of 69 new complaints in that year. This is the concerning part: of the 69 new complaints, only seven were assessed as being in scope. Sixty-two were assessed as out of scope, which means 90 per cent of the complaints made to them had to be referred elsewhere, including to the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission and the Social Services Regulator. The VDWC, the Victorian Disability Worker Commission, has also reported that a significant number of matters need to be referred elsewhere. That is absolutely indicative of confusion. That is what this bill seeks to remedy. We want to be able to provide disability service users with a straightforward system where issues can be dealt with under one roof. It is hard enough when you are in a situation that you need to make a complaint. When you get to a point that you need to actually raise a complaint about the treatment of someone with disability and things are already difficult for you, to then go down a pathway and be told, ‘Sorry, we can’t assist you here; you need to go somewhere else’ adds and compounds to the trauma for those people in the first instance. So to deal with that, which this bill seeks to do, is incredibly important.

Actually, the Social Services Regulation Amendment (Child Safety, Complaints and Worker Regulation) Bill is generated out of recommendation 8.1 of the review, which also noted that children in out-of-home care settings and with disability may be more vulnerable, and it is incredibly important that we focus on this too. This bill establishes that common foundation across social services so that all children have the same oversight and therefore are afforded all of the protections. That is incredibly important, and I really want to just highlight once again that statistic, that out of 69 new complaints made to the disability services commission only seven were in scope – a sobering one indeed.

That in and of itself speaks to the importance of passing this bill here before us today.

On the package, the other two bills, I want to just quickly touch on some of the other elements amongst those, noting that there are only a few minutes left on the clock. The Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority Bill 2025, the VECRA bill, is establishing a new independent regulator to oversee early childhood and education services under the national law and the Children’s Services Act 1996. VECRA will also maintain a Victorian early childhood worker register, which is designed to align with the future national register, and that is incredibly important. I was listening to the member for Werribee before talking about his Victorian Institute of Teaching registration. I too am VIT registered, but my card is no longer blue. It is a glaring red, which means I am non-practising. However, I still have my national criminal history record check done on the five-yearly cycle, and that is such a high standard, that check. It is national, and that is important. As the member for Werribee was talking about, we understand the importance of that national overview, so I do think that the more here that we can develop through a national lens, the better for all involved. It is incredibly important, and child care is regulated – it generally sits within the federal domain, but we are doing our bit here in Victoria to ensure that Victorian children are in settings which are safer for them.

I do want to say, though – and I should have mentioned this earlier – I want to express my thanks to the early childhood educators who work so hard to take care of our children. My children were in early childhood education settings too, when I was working and they were younger, and those educators there were fantastic. They did so much good work with my children, and we were so thrilled that we had them as an option and I was able to get back into the workforce too. I do want to just acknowledge that, because I know that everything that occurred really affected the wonderful workers in that sector too. So I just want to thank them for the work that they do, because they are the vast majority out there.

The VECRA bill, which I was just touching on, responds directly to recommendation 9 of the rapid review, and that is the establishment of an independent ECEC regulator. Up until now ECEC services have been regulated by the quality assessment and regulation division within the Department of Education, and that arrangement has actually created potential conflicts of interest, as the department has been both regulator and operator of services. That is what VECRA will change. It will be a standalone authority, led by an early childhood regulator, reporting directly to the Minister for Children. VECRA will regulate ECEC services under the national law and Children’s Services Act and act as the integrated sector regulator for the child safe standards, and it will maintain the Victorian early childhood worker register, requiring providers to submit worker information and creating offences for noncompliance or misuse of data. I think that is critical. The register is absolutely critical. It will allow VECRA to track where individuals have worked. It is going to close dangerous loopholes, and it is going to share information with the Social Services Regulator to join up all those breadcrumbs of risk intelligence.

I think strengthening the working with children check is also a very important element of the Social Services Regulator bill. It needs a major overhaul, and this is what this will do. It is going to allow a broader range of information, including unsubstantiated allegations and Victoria Police intelligence, to inform working with children check decisions.

I just want to quickly note, with the few seconds on the clock, that the opposition’s bill was most concerned with giving regulators the ability to move quickly where there is a suspicion of risk, but critically, our work here in this bill has introduced the sharing of information for those decisions to be made. You cannot make a rapid decision in a vacuum of information. That information has to be at your fingertips in order for you to then make a rapid decision, and that is what this legislation does – the legislation put up earlier by the opposition had not actually gone to that. So that is a key difference, and I commend the bills to the house.

 Brad ROWSWELL (Sandringham) (16:59): I also rise to address a suite of three bills which are being debated concurrently principally related to the safety of some of our most vulnerable Victorians. I know that there have been for some time serious concerns about child safety and workforce matters within the early childhood education and care sector in Victoria. I further note that this came to a head in the middle of this year when a childcare worker in Victoria who had worked across 20 childcare centres around Melbourne was charged with more than 70 offences related to sexual assault and producing child abuse material.

I would like to commence by thanking those Victorians who are darn dedicated – those early childhood workers and educators who give of their selves and their expertise and who nurture our most vulnerable, who assist children to be their very best to learn and to grow in, not arguably but factually, the most formative time of their lives and who help parents to have an assurance that their children are being looked after while those parents are, given the economic state that we face at the minute, most often off at work earning a crust and providing for themselves and for their families. I want to say at the outset just how grateful I am, and I believe the alternative government here in Victoria is, for the work of early childhood workers and educators.

The second thing I would like to note is, frankly, the size of the bills. It is unparliamentary to draw attention to props, which I most certainly will not do. But I do hold those bills in my hands at the minute, and there are a lot of pages; there are a lot of words. There are a lot of reforms being proposed by the government in these bills, some of which the opposition – the alternative government – and some of the crossbench only received yesterday afternoon or yesterday evening. I think that that is a very unfortunate circumstance, and the contribution from the member for Gippsland East in this matter is noteworthy. The member for Gippsland East drew attention to the fact that he has concerns with the Social Services Regulation Amendment (Child Safety, Complaints and Worker Regulation) Bill 2025 specifically in relation to the disability sector, specifically in relation to the consultation, or the lack of consultation, that the member for Gippsland East, who is also the Shadow Minister for Disability, Ageing, Carers and Volunteers, has had with the government’s efforts in that regard. I also note the response in the contribution from the member for Greenvale, who provided an alternative view to the member for Gippsland East. But I also think that when the government rushes such detailed legislation to this place – late, I might add, because this was promised to be delivered last month in October and it is now November 2025. Specifically in relation to this bill, the social services regulation amendment bill, it goes to quite literally hundreds of pages. I would propose recycling this bill by using it as a weight to keep a door open – a very heavy door, for that matter – at some point in the future, such is the weight of the pages of that bill and no doubt the complexity of the nature of that bill as well.

I think it is also important to draw the house’s attention to just some of the timeline that has led us here. In 2018 complaints to the quality and regulatory division about childcare provisions began to increase. Indeed from 2018 to 2023 complaints rose by some 45 per cent, while enforcement actions declined by 67 per cent. In 2018 there was one enforcement action for every 20 complaints. In 2020 a childcare educator was dismissed from a childcare centre for sexual misconduct after an internal investigation found he had been grooming and kissing toddlers. Despite this, the educator’s working with children check remained active, allowing him to continue working in child care. The government’s own regulator did not issue a prohibition notice to prevent him from working until 2024. In 2021 Ronald Marks was arrested for possessing nearly 1000 child abuse images. Despite the arrest, he retained a valid working with children check for four years after he was arrested. This allowed him to continue entering childcare centres and kindergartens. In 2022 the Victorian Ombudsman released findings warning the government that Victoria’s working with children check system was among the weakest in the nation.

The Ombudsman recommended several reforms, including allowing the regulator to act on credible risk information without requiring a conviction or charge, permitting the secretary of the department to access and consider any relevant information to determine suitability and ensuring suspensions remain in force until appeals are resolved. The government did not respond to these recommendations in 2023. By this year enforcement actions by the regulator had dropped to one per 88 complaints, indicating a severe decline in regulatory response compared to 2018. In 2024 the regulator finally issued a prohibition notice against an educator dismissed in 2020 for sexual misconduct. However, the individual’s working with children check remained active until at least August 2025.

In July 2025 childcare worker Joshua Brown was charged with more than 70 offences, including sexual assault and producing child abuse material relating to allegations involving eight alleged victims. The government introduced new regulations in response to these shocking allegations. In early August 2025 the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, a journalistic organisation, reported that the educator dismissed in 2020 still held a valid working with children check despite being prohibited from working with children.

In mid-2025, before August, the government launched their rapid review into child safety following public and media pressure. In August 2025 the Liberals and the Nationals, Victoria’s alternative government, introduced their own Worker Screening Amendment (Safety of Children) Bill 2025. This bill proposed reforms based on the Ombudsman’s 2022 recommendations, including allowing immediate action on credible information, linking the working with children check system to the Victoria Police database, maintaining suspensions during appeals, reducing working with children check validity from five years to three and mandating training in child safety, reporting obligations and abuse awareness, and the Allan Labor government and members of the government in this house on the occasion of the introduction of the coalition’s bill voted that bill down. In October 2025 the government missed its own deadline in response to the rapid review, which identified, for example, the provision of this legislation that we are discussing now to the Parliament. And here we are in November 2025 considering the government’s bill.

Throughout this process, throughout these many years, where there have been issues uncovered and exposed, whether it be through the interrogation of government ministers, whether it be through the FOI process, whether it be through committee reports or whether it be through the Ombudsman’s consideration of these very, very important matters, the government have maintained that they have full confidence in the regulator. The government have maintained throughout that entire process that they have full confidence in the regulator. Riddle me this: why have the government outlined in their briefing to the opposition a $45 million investment in these reforms, including 100 new staff and including 60 new compliance officers for the new Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority? If everything is so hunky-dory, if everything is just going so swimmingly well, if everything is pointed in the direction of doing what this government should have been bloody doing for as long as this has been an issue and has been identified as an issue, why have the government been backing in their regulator? And now, after media pressure, after report after report, after pressure from the opposition, the government finally acknowledges that the system is stuffed and that it needs serious reform and serious investment. Why has it taken children to be vulnerable, children to be put in positions where they are vulnerable, children be put in positions not just where they are vulnerable but where they are abused and where they are exploited? Why has it come to that? Shame on this government. Shame on this government for not doing more earlier. If there is one obligation of any government, it is to protect our most vulnerable. By all accounts, up until this point, this government has well and truly failed, and Victorians know it.

The ACTING SPEAKER (Wayne Farnham): Before I call the next speaker I would like to acknowledge the former member for Narracan in the gallery Ian Maxfield. And I remind members not to punch up the furniture. The furniture has not done anything to you.

[The Legislative Assembly report is being published progressively.]