Tuesday, 28 October 2025

 Evan MULHOLLAND (Northern Metropolitan) (12:17): My question is to the Minister for Children. The government response to the rapid child safety review stated that four key recommendations would be before Parliament by October 2025: establishing an independent early childhood regulator, establishing a new shared intelligence and risk assessment capability and bringing child safety risk information together in one place, changing the reportable conduct scheme to improve information sharing, and mandatory online child safety training and testing and a dedicated review process for working with children checks. While these are not in place Victorian children remain at risk. Will the government be introducing legislation to deal with all four recommendations that are due by October?

 Lizzie BLANDTHORN (Western Metropolitan – Minister for Children, Minister for Disability) (12:18): I thank Mr Mulholland for his question and for the opportunity to talk about the way in which our government is responding in relation to what were very serious child safety accusations back in July but also the breadth of work that has been undertaken across the system in relation to both individual incidents and the system as a whole not just here in Victoria but indeed across the country. When the accusations of July were first put forward this government took immediate action to do some of the things we could do immediately, such as the ban on devices and a registration system for those people who work in our early childhood settings, where indeed we have a kindergarten funding relationship, which allowed us then to set up a register, which I am pleased to report to the house now has 68,866 additional workers who have registered. What we will do this week is introduce a piece of legislation that acquits the review’s recommendation for an independent early childhood regulator. There are two more pieces of legislation that will follow that in order to acquit the elements of the review that go to setting up a new child safety regulatory framework here in Victoria that will oversee the implementation of the national law. The independent regulator legislation will be introduced this week.

What we also have is a bill that will look at the improvements to the national law. Again, when these accusations and others around the country first came to light, child safety ministers right around the country took immediate action in partnership with the Commonwealth and agreed to not just what were initially a tranche 1 of improvements to the national law but additional things which were within the 22 recommendations of our review, many of which were for us to advocate to the Commonwealth to improve things within this national system, and indeed adding into that the paramountcy of the child and the best interests of the child as core. It is something that exists across our child protection legislation when it comes to protective services for children across the board, but it was not something that existed in the national framework for child safety within early education. It is something that will be in there now as a consequence of Victoria advocating for that, post our review.

So there is the national law reform bill still to come. That national law has to be agreed by cabinets across the country – not just here in Victoria but in other jurisdictions. That process is underway, and I am pleased to advise the house that that will be here very soon in due course and able to be debated concurrently with the bill that we will introduce this week. We will make changes as well to our social services regulatory legislation, which will also allow us to bring together the reportable conduct scheme matters and the child safe standard matters. But these are complex and they all interact with each other. While this week we have been able to introduce the early childhood independent regulator bill, there are still things that have been finalised across the country in the national law bill and in that social services regulatory piece as well.

 Evan MULHOLLAND (Northern Metropolitan) (12:21): It is good to have confirmation that the government will not meet its October deadline for most of those reforms which were set out in the rapid review. Minister, the acting commissioner for children and young people Meena Singh said that they are compromised in delivering the reportable conduct scheme to its fullest benefits due to its lack of funding, despite notifications being up 30 per cent in the year 2023–24 and 136 per cent since it began seven years ago. Will the government meet its ongoing commitment to meet funding for the scheme and meet its October deadline for changes to the scheme?

 Ingrid STITT (Western Metropolitan – Minister for Mental Health, Minister for Ageing, Minister for Multicultural Affairs) (12:21): I thank Mr Mulholland for the supplementary question. There are a few matters in there, some of which are directly related and some of which perhaps would have been better in substantive questions in and of themselves. But to take the first point, the funding for the commissioner for children and young people has increased, and how the commission chooses to spend that money and allocate that money within their remit is a decision for the independent commission. That said, as I indicated in my substantive answer, we are working within the 12-month deadline to acquit all of the 22 recommendations of the rapid review. Many of those we were able to act on immediately and many of those we acted on through subsequent national forums. Both in August and just a couple of weeks ago we had education ministers meetings where these matters were given the due consideration necessary to further them through the process. We will continue to work towards both those pieces of legislation and the other things that go to improving child safety within our early childhood education settings and also wherever children are learning, playing and being cared for.