Thursday, 20 November 2025

 Evan MULHOLLAND (Northern Metropolitan) (15:57): I am pleased to rise to speak on this this cognate debate of extremely important bills: the Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority Bill 2025, the Social Services Regulation Amendment (Child Safety, Complaints and Worker Regulation) Bill 2025 and the Early Childhood Legislation Amendment (Child Safety) Bill 2025, which amends the national law. These bills are being debated together. They represent some of the most significant changes to childhood regulation that this Parliament has considered in many, many years. They will shape how hundreds of families, early childhood educators, operators and, most importantly, children experience the early childhood system in our state. That alone should compel the government to provide this Parliament with proper time for scrutiny, yet once again this government has rushed them through both in this chamber and the other place without giving parliamentarians the proper opportunity to read, review and carefully understand the detail. I think this practice undermines transparency, it undermines accountability and it undermines the very idea that parliamentary scrutiny matters. It contributes to the growing belief that governments make decisions behind closed doors without the level of openness that Victorians expect.

I would like to thank the minister’s office in particular for the proper briefing on the Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority Bill 2025, which was tabled in the usual manner. It met its deadline by October tabling, it was held over and we were given a significant amount of time on three of these bills to be able to review these bills properly, to be able to reach out to stakeholders properly and to be able to form a decision and position on these bills. The same cannot be said of the other two bills. We saw with the national law bill and the social services regulation bill – and again I would say these are bills which contain reforms, things like the reportable conduct scheme, working with children check, child safe standards – that these are reforms which we have called for, and the crossbench have too. These are reforms that we support. But when you give us less than 12 hours to form a position on 1159 pages of legislation on the most serious and complex legislation that affects every child in our state, reforms that are required to address some of the most horrific abuses in our childcare system, that is not being fair dinkum, that is not being serious – it is not. It is because of the government’s shambolic, crunched legislative agenda that our children will continue to remain at risk – because this government cannot manage its legislative agenda and it is not being serious. I will come to the elements of the SSR bill later in my contribution, but I think it is incredibly disappointing. It is treating the opposition and the crossbench with absolute contempt. We want to support and pass these bills, by and large, except for one part, as quickly as possible. In fact we introduced our own bill, which the government blocked, down in the other place. We want to pass this as quickly as possible, because while these are not passed our children remain at risk.

I know members of the government are tearing their hair out – we are too – trying to find a pathway to pass these bills as soon as possible. But it is the government that failed to meet its promised timeline of October in the so-called rapid review into our childcare settings here in this state. It is the government that missed the October timeline for reforms to the reportable conduct scheme, to the working with children check and for information standards and sharing for child safe standards. It did not meet those deadlines. And while it does not meet deadlines and while it rushes and skips through proper democratic legislative process, that is failing our kids. When the government crunches its legislative program and puts ramming through bills over proper scrutiny of very serious bills, that is a problem, and it exemplifies the problem with this government.

The bills before us today are not sudden responses to new information. They are not emergency measures prompted by a discovery of fresh risks. We have known for years that the child safety system in Victoria is fractured, slow to act and lacking in proper oversight. The government have had countless opportunities to intervene and update the framework, but at every turn they have delayed, ignored advice or sought to downplay problems, even when experts, families and workers have sounded the alarm. Over recent months we have seen the shocking failures within our childcare centres and within the child safety system more broadly. The public has become aware of horrifying case after case that reveal deep structural problems in how risk is identified, how regulators respond and how agencies share information. These bills only reached the Parliament because children have been failed. They have been failed by systems that should have protected them. Warnings, like the Ombudsman report warnings, have been ignored year after year after year, and the government has failed to act; it only acts when there is a crisis to respond to. They have been failed by a regulator that lacked the independence and authority needed to act decisively, and they have been failed by a government that has for years resisted reforms that might have prevented these harms.

When we are elected to this place, it is our foremost duty to protect those who cannot help themselves, and no group is more vulnerable than children in the care of adults. Every parent in Victoria should be able to take their child to a childcare centre or a kinder with complete confidence that the system overseeing those environments is robust and is capable. They should be able to trust that the government has ensured strong safeguards and that the regulator responsible for enforcement has the independence, the resources and the powers required to take action before the harm occurs. That trust has been severely damaged. As a parent, I took this fundamental truth, so what we have learned over the past few months has shaken me and many other parents that I know. Instead of careful, considered reform, the Parliament is once again being asked to pass hundreds of pages of legislation with limited opportunity for detailed examination.

The government has presented major structural changes, including the creation of two new regulators, the establishment of a statewide early childhood register and amendments to the national law that introduced new offences and increased penalties. These changes deserve thorough debate. They deserve proper line-by-line consideration, and they deserve the full attention of this Parliament. So I will begin with the Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority Bill 2025. This bill creates a new independent regulator for the early childhood education and care sector. On this side of the chamber, we have long argued that Victoria needs an independent statutory authority focused entirely on early childhood regulation. For months, we have called for the replacement of the existing quality assessment and regulation division within the Department of Education. It was never an appropriate structure. It was never transparent, it was never independent, and it was compromised by an obvious conflict because the Department of Education is both a regulator and an operator of childcare services.

The allegations against Joshua Brown, relating to the sexual abuse of babies and toddlers, demonstrated in the clearest way possible that the system is not working, and it is a case that shocked the entire state and the entire country. Families were terrified and devastated, and thousands were told to have their infants tested for sexually transmitted diseases. The public asked a simple question: how did this happen? How did a regulator within a major government department miss the signs, miss the warning indicators and miss the risk that this individual posed? On 24 July, four months ago, the Liberals and Nationals released the Safe from the Start plan to strengthen child safety from the earliest stages. I want to acknowledge the tremendous body of work done by my friend the member for Kew, now Leader of the Opposition, who as shadow minister led our policy development in this space.

One of the central elements of the plan was the creation of a fully independent early childhood regulatory authority. We also argued that the new regulator must be properly resourced. The government has now confirmed that the new authority will require 100 new staff and 60 new compliance officers at a cost of $45 million. The size of that investment is important, because it highlights how under-resourced the old regulator was. Even as complaints increased by 45 per cent in 2018, enforcement actions fell by 67 per cent. That is not a regulator keeping pace with rising risks; that is a regulator overwhelmed, ineffective and unable to carry out its basic responsibilities. Because of this, the minister repeatedly insisted that the regulator was doing its job. The government stood by a structure that was not fit for purpose. With this bill we finally see the government concede what we have been saying from the start: the regulator needed to be independent, it needed stronger powers, it needed more resources and it needed to exist outside of the Department of Education.

The next significant change in this legislative package is the Victorian early childhood worker register. This register will finally create a central source of information about anyone working in an early childhood setting who holds a relevant qualification. Again, this is a reform we called for months ago; it is essential because the absence of a proper register has allowed individuals to move between centres without clear visibility of their history. In the aftermath of the Brown allegations, families learned that police had had to painstakingly piece together his employment history from photographs, from scattered records – there was no centralised source of information. That gap created confusion and delayed communication. It increased risk, and it should have never existed. The government delayed establishing the register while conducting its so-called rapid review, yet when that review was released it was clear that it largely restated recommendations that had already been made in previous reports. The review was not new research; it was a consolidation of known issues. Despite promising the legislation would be introduced in October, the government is now pushing it through in November and demanding the Parliament approve it immediately. Every delay has consequence, and in this case the consequences are that children remained in environments that lacked proper oversight.

I now turn to the Social Services Regulation Amendment (Child Safety, Complaints and Worker Regulation) Bill 2025. This bill shifts important child safety oversight functions to the Social Services Regulator. In doing so it creates a single independent body responsible for the working with children check system, the reportable conduct scheme and child safe standards. This mirrors another part of the coalition’s Safe from the Start plan. For years the child safety landscape in Victoria has been cluttered with overlapping responsibilities and unclear lines of accountability. Business units in separate departments held different pieces of the puzzle, and no agency accepted full visibility of risk. That fragmentation allowed serious breaches to slip through the cracks.

The Victorian Ombudsman warned in 2022 that the working with children check system was amongst the weakest in Australia. The Ombudsman recommended straightforward changes that would allow authorities to act on risk information even when no formal conviction had occurred, yet the government just did not respond. It was a clear recommendation, and the government just did not respond – not even a basic acknowledgement – and while the recommendations sat idle, real harm occurred in our state’s childcare settings. One of the most disturbing examples is the case of Ron Marks. He was arrested in 2021 for possessing almost 1000 child abuse images. Police raided his home, they seized his devices and they began a significant investigation. Yet for four years after that arrest Marks continued to hold a valid working with children check. That means he continued to enter childcare centres, kindergartens and primary schools. He continued to interact with children even though he was under active police investigation for offences that should have triggered immediate suspension of his clearance. The fact that this could happen in Victoria in the 21st century is nothing short of a catastrophic system failure that this government is responsible for.

Another case revealed that a childcare educator dismissed for grooming and kissing toddlers was able to retain a valid working with children check and move through other centres for years. The regulator failed to see a prohibition notice until long after the conduct had been substantiated. Even when the prohibition was issued the government had no mechanism to quickly cancel the working with children check. It had to rush separate legislation into Parliament simply to give itself the power to remove the clearance.

The Ombudsman’s recommendations in 2022 were clear: the secretary should be able to use intelligence, the secretary should be able to act on risk assessments and the secretary should be able to suspend or revoke clearances when a person poses danger even without a criminal conviction. These recommendations were simple, reasonable and practical. But the government did nothing for three years. When the Liberals and Nationals introduced a private members bill earlier this year to implement these reforms, the government voted it down. Now those reforms are in the very bill before us today. That is the clearest evidence the government chose politics over safety. Only after widespread outrage did they shift their position.

One crucial part of this legislative package involves information sharing. The failures of the last year have shown that child safety cannot be guaranteed if regulators do not share information. A teacher might face a reportable conduct investigation in one department while another department remains completely unaware. A worker might be prohibited in one field yet hired in another because information never reached the employer or relevant regulator. These breakdowns were predictable, they were preventable and they were repeatedly raised by experts. With the changes in these bills the regulators will be required to share decisions, suspensions, prohibitions and clearance revocations, and they must do so quickly. Prospective employers will finally be able to access the information they need to make informed decisions. This should have been the standard practice,

I do want to raise concern that we have in the opposition about one aspect of this bill that the government is trying to rush through. The 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 merger of the disability complaints services into the SSR is not what the disability sector wants. While they support reform, they want a standalone complaint service, and they have made their views crystal clear to both the minister and the Premier.

The opposition, as I said, received the bill with about 12 hours notice before having to make a decision on our position. Usually we would get one week or two held over, which would enable us to engage with stakeholders. From the Tuesday of the last sitting week we have received a deluge, as have crossbench colleagues, of emails and phone calls from the disability community. Again, 1159 pages of legislation, 12 hours notice. And what the government has done with its disability mergers is copy and paste a bill that was sitting between chambers for 18 months and copy and paste it into a bill almost 500 pages long, and it thought we would not notice. But we have noticed, and as I believe my colleague our Shadow Minister for Disability, Ageing, Carers and Volunteers has said, these changes are about as popular as a fart in an elevator.

The disability community is up in arms. Several stakeholders have expressed their concern about these changes, particularly to my colleague Tim Bull in the other place. What the government has done is completely fail to consult with stakeholders. Their mission statement for their disability portfolio – it is on the website – is ‘Nothing about us without us’, yet they completely failed to consult with the disability community. They knew this did not have support. They knew it did not have social licence. It is true. And then the government – I assume the Premier and the cabinet – sought to slip it into this very important bill. That is what they did, and now they are stuck. So we have drafted an amendment to split the bill so that we can get rid of this shocking element and immediately pass the rest of the bill. I call on the government to support that amendment or find a process and find a way through. We are willing to work with you to fix the government’s stuff-up, fix the government’s homework and immediately pass this today. Not next week – today. So I have tabled that amendment. I am not sure if I have asked for it to be circulated, but I think it already has been. Yes, all good.

This just goes to show the chaos of this government’s legislative agenda – absolute chaos. Maybe if this government had met the deadline for its rapid review by tabling it in October, we might not be in this situation. We might not be in the situation now where a bill is in the upper house that does not have the support of the chamber – a section of the bill – and the government is scrambling to fix it. These include very important reforms. The government should have known, the Premier should have known and the minister should have known it was too important to slip in a bill that had failed and mix it with important reforms that are supported by everyone for the sake of politics, hoping no-one would notice this very sneaky attempt to slip in mergers of disability regulators, which do not have support.

Michael Galea interjected.

Evan MULHOLLAND: I note the interjection, and I note we were talking about the Labor state conference yesterday and about different groups within the Labor Party. I note that the Labor Enabled Victoria group of people with a disability in the Labor Party absolutely oppose this section of the bill – absolutely oppose it. The unions absolutely oppose this section of the bill and have condemned the minister and have condemned the government. Again, the government’s own legislative agenda is keeping children at risk. Its rushed legislative program is keeping children at risk. The longer we delay in passing these bills – which the government will probably have to do now – the longer we are keeping children at risk and the longer the authorities do not have the powers to suspend the working with children checks of people that are putting our children at risk, and for that the government should be condemned.

The Early Childhood Legislation Amendment (Child Safety) Bill strengthens the national law framework, updates assessment processes and introduces a new offence of inappropriate conduct within early childhood settings. It addresses gaps that have existed for far too long. Workers who behave in ways that are unacceptable but not covered by existing offences have been able to continue working without sufficient consequence. This new offence gives the regulator and services a clearer basis to act.

I close by returning to what should have been a guiding principle for this government: it is the most basic duty of the government to protect the vulnerable. There is no group more vulnerable than children, who rely on adults for safety, care and protection. When a system designed to keep them safe fails, the responsibility rests with the government that ignored warnings, delayed actions and dismissed expert advice. We will support these bills again on the proviso that the sneaky disability mergers are taken out. We will support these bills because children cannot afford another postponement. Let the record show that these reforms have come far later than they should have. They have arrived only after profound failures came to light and only after families across Victoria learned that the system had not protected their children. As a parent of two kids in child care, and knowing many other parents my age, I do not know any parent that did not check those websites for the childcare centres where there was abuse. I think every Victorian, every Australian, was completely and utterly floored by the failures that led to this systemic abuse – the failures of government authorities to share information such that when an accusation is made at one childcare centre it should follow that person. This is too important to get ignored like the 2022 Ombudsman’s report was ignored. It is the failures of information sharing and it is the failures of bureaucratic processes that have failed our children. This Parliament has a responsibility to learn from these failures. It has a responsibility to ensure that the protections created today are strong and enforceable and will be implemented without delay. Most importantly, it has a responsibility to remember that every statistic in these debates represents a child. Children must always come first, and it is our duty in this place to ensure that they are never again left exposed by the systems that are meant to protect them.

 Anasina GRAY-BARBERIO (Northern Metropolitan) (16:27): I want to begin by honouring the children who have survived harm. I want to acknowledge the violation of their innocence and vulnerability and recognise their right to healing, safety and justice. I also want to honour and thank the families and parents of these children. Their advocacy and their response to this crisis have been nothing short of admirable. Supporting a child through trauma is a heavy, painful and ongoing responsibility, and I want to assure them that the Greens will continue to stand with them not through one-off, reactive measures but by advocating for sustained long-term support for them and their children as survivors of systemic and policy failures by this government.

I speak today on the cognate debate encompassing the three child safety bills introduced to this place by the government: the Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority Bill 2025, the Early Childhood Legislation Amendment (Child Safety) Bill 2025 and the Social Services Regulation Amendment (Child Safety, Complaints and Worker Regulation) Bill 2025. As legislators we hold significant power – power that comes with an obligation and responsibility to scrutinise legislation with integrity. Recent horrific events in child care have made it difficult to trust this Labor government at face value, especially with child safety. This government have failed to heed the many reports and inquiries telling them and other successive governments before to take urgent action to protect children now. They failed to bolster their child safety laws to be fit for purpose and meet the changing needs in the community and in the early childhood education and care (ECEC) sector. We are here because no government has made it their moral and political imperative to prioritise safety of children from harm. While this Labor government may be eager and motivated to move on and tick off its rapid review recommendations, it is important to remember how we arrived here after previous inquiries repeatedly urged governments to take urgent action on child safety.

Let us go back to 2011 and the protecting Victoria’s vulnerable children inquiry. It gave 90 recommendations to address the safety, protection and wellbeing of children, including the need for reforms and a strengthening of the regulatory and oversight framework. In 2013 the inquiry into the handling of child abuse by religious and other organisations revealed institutional abuse by trusted adults. In 2013 we also saw the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. In 2024 we had a board of inquiry into historical child sexual abuse at Beaumaris Primary and other government schools – historical abuse in public schools. Now we have the select committee inquiry into early childhood and care settings, which I am chairing. According to the national commissioner for children, there are 3000 recommendations – repeated in inquiries here and across the country between 2010 and 2022 – that are gathering dust on shelves. And we wonder why systemic failures continue to persist. The fact of the matter is we know what needs to be done. We are here as a Parliament to make sure that we get it right. The early childhood education and care sector is integral to any society’s wellbeing and prosperity, a view that we know has been backed by consistent research and evidence that when children access early learning they gain the foundations for academic achievement and social success later in life. Access to quality early childhood education is a key foundation of a child’s social, emotional and cognitive development. This is further backed by the United Nations sustainable development goal 4.1, which emphasises that children should have equal access to quality early childhood development and care. So it is clear even at the global scale that the benefits and value of investing in early childhood are critical. But I will tell you what also is critical alongside quality care: explicit child safety policies, standards, benchmarks and legislation that protect children at their core, and also giving essential resources to our early childhood educators.

Speaking of our early childhood educators, I want to acknowledge the many educators and professionals in the sector who are doing the right thing every day and putting the wellbeing and safety of children at the centre of their work. We all recognise that it takes a village to raise a child, and early childhood educators face challenging and uncertain times. We appreciate their dedication to working in partnership with parents to nurture and create strong building blocks. We hope that this government ensures the sector has ongoing resources to provide quality care and safety mechanisms to protect children, because we know that this sector right now is in crisis. It has been stretched to its limits for quite some time with chronic underfunding, a shortage of skilled educators and a model that focuses on profits over the wellbeing of children. And let us talk about how this government has been politically reluctant to intervene and ensure the early childhood sector is not ruled by for-profit model centres – the same centres that we see on the stock exchange market making millions of dollars while families try to budget between paying bills and accessing quality education for their little ones. If profit is allowed to outweigh safety, well, of course we are going to create blind spots – blind spots that predators are waiting to exploit. Right now they are seeing early childhood settings as hunting grounds, and we simply cannot let that happen or continue. We have seen it already happen in Victoria this year.

The Greens recognise the need for free, secular, high-quality and well-funded early childhood education. We have long been fighting for better salaries and conditions for educators and support staff, the expansion of government-run early childhood education services, the elimination of waitlists and an early childhood education sector that is culturally safe and supports all children. This Labor government has failed to deliver this. They have failed to deliver important services that build the foundations for success for every child in Victoria, and now we find ourselves rushing through legislation without the time to appropriately scrutinise it or have meaningful consultation. I would like to note that they have missed their deadline of October to present to the Parliament the legislation that we are debating right now. We need the time for proper scrutiny to ensure that we are making good laws, that we are not creating blind spots – that we are getting rid of them – and that we take the time to fully understand the impacts on communities, fix mistakes and make sure legislation does what it is intended to do. In the current systemic crisis that we find ourselves in, which is absolutely shameful, parents in Victoria have had enough. They want their governments to take action – but considered action, not rushing through. It is not the role of this Parliament to pile failure on top of failure when it comes to scrutiny of legislation. We are committed to shaping legislation that genuinely gets it right. We owe it to Victorian families and children to push for laws that will address the root and systemic causes of harm. The Greens do have concerns that these bills are not strong enough to address these issues. We are concerned this Labor government is papering over cracks in a system that puts profit over children’s safety.

I am now going to talk about the Social Services Regulation Amendment (Child Safety, Complaints and Worker Regulation) Bill 2025. This bill is almost 500 pages long. It is a bill that this Labor government knows is controversial and which they received mixed feedback from stakeholders on, in particular very strong opposition from the disability sector. I am going to firstly speak on the child safety aspects of this bill. I want to make it clear I welcome and support the child safety aspects of this bill. Bringing the working with children check scheme, the reportable conduct scheme and the child safe standards under one entity will allow for consistency and stronger oversight, and we hope that this will lead to faster response to risks and quicker protective action for children, an element that had gaping holes for predators to exploit.

The Greens recognise the need for a panel with specialist child safety expertise to review the working with children check decisions, and we recognise the importance of balancing protection of children and risk for educators against vexatious claims. The Greens support the clauses in this bill related to the rapid child safety review. However, we do have concerns that establishing a super-regulator that is not strictly all child focused and instead extends across disability worker regulation and complaints across social services might dilute its child safety focus and not be as effective.

The rapid child safety review also did not mention incorporating the Disability Services Commission, the Victorian Disability Worker Commission and the Disability Worker Registration Board of Victoria into the Social Services Regulator. To bring this bill in and abolish all these statutory bodies representing disability-led organisations without meaningful consultation is absolutely shameful of this government. It is hard enough for people with disabilities to navigate ableist societies and ableist government policies, but now this government wants to diminish their lived experiences, which is both reckless and self-serving, all the while trying to do it under the guise of urgent child safety reforms. This bill is a ‘Trojan Horse’, as Deaf Victoria describes it, sneaking in destructive and unwanted changes to disability regulation inside what should be incredibly important child safety legislation.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the disability advocacy groups, unions and legal centres whose clear, repeated advice to strongly oppose this shift has grounded our position. We have heard from so many disability-led organisations, such as the Victorian Mental Illness Awareness Council, Disability Discrimination Legal Service, People & Culture, Equality Australia, Women with Disabilities Victoria, Inclusive Rainbow Voices, Deaf Victoria, Brain Injury Matters, Disability Justice Australia, Disability Rights and Culture and the Health Services Union and many more on top of this – all in chorus, appalled and genuinely terrified by this government’s move to abolish representation that represents them. They have highlighted that this bill misreads the disability royal commission’s recommendation 11.3, which calls for an independent, accessible, co-designed, one-stop shop for complaints, referrals and support for people with disability. The social services regulation bill before us today consolidates regulation into a monolithic body rather than establishing a specialist mechanism designed with people with disability. There is no clear guarantee that complaints will be handled independently, safely and inclusively. Without oversight, specialist knowledge and meaningful consultation to co-design the regulator, how can this government ensure the rights and safety of vulnerable Victorians? The changes proposed in this bill could increase the risk of abuse and neglect, undermine trust, accessibility, cultural safety and accountability and ultimately leave vulnerable people with disabilities exposed.

In a joint letter from the Disabled People’s Organisations Victoria, a collective of disability-led organisations and groups, the disability community are urging against the abolition of disability-specific regulators. Here is some of the stuff that they said. They think that the merging of these disability regulators does not reflect the wishes of the disability community, who have not been consulted with on this decision. They say it is the right of people with disabilities that they have representations and are involved in matters that impact on their lives. The closure of disability-specific regulators is supported only by bureaucrats and some service providers, which for them they say there is a clear conflict of interest which leads to less specialism and less scrutiny. They also say that the current Social Services Regulator is currently failing, saying that the Community Visitors Annual Report 2024–2025 has shown that the six standards currently used under the Social Services Regulator are already struggling to protect vulnerable people, that the regulator is strained, and rather than addressing its failures it is forcing more people onto its plate, which will only further strain it and come at the expense of the specific needs of people with disabilities. They also say that the Victorian Disability Worker Commission and Disability Workers Registration Board are already effective, so there would not be any need to merge them. It has the trust and confidence of the disability community. Eighty per cent of the sector agreed that their work protects vulnerable people from harm and neglect, and 81 per cent of the sector agreed that the worker registration scheme improves the standard of services provided by disability workers.

The disability community in Victoria needs our support. They deserve strong, disability-specific, independent regulation and need to be afforded respect – the respect of being meaningfully consulted and actively involved in the process of building and maintaining the systems meant to protect them. We know that improving disability rights and services should be a priority for all governments but that too often people with a disability are denied the same rights as non-disabled people and continue to experience higher rates of discrimination, violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation. The Greens share the goal of preventing abuse and neglect, and we are concerned that bringing disability services into the SSR risks undermining the very protections that it seeks to strengthen. With the risk being so high, the Victorian Greens cannot support the disability aspects of this bill.

I would now like to talk about the Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority Bill 2025. The new Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority, to be known as VECRA, replaces the quality assessment and regulation division (QARD), which sat within the Department of Education. We all know this conflict of interest could not be clearer. When the regulator sits inside the very department overseen by the minister, its independence is inevitably compromised and so is its freedom from political influence. The Greens have been calling on this government to establish a truly independent body, one that can properly carry out its core responsibilities of compliance, enforcement, investigation, sector improvement and, most importantly, protecting the safety and wellbeing of our children. The rapid review recommended that a new early childhood education and care regulator had to be made a priority in the government’s urgent childcare reforms and ‘be made independent from government’, with powers to monitor, audit and investigate how the Department of Education regulates safety standards in childcare. We all can agree that this is important for real scrutiny over how our centres are operating and whether children are safe. While we welcome the introduction of VECRA and moving the regulator outside of the department, we do not feel it has enough teeth to fully address the systemic structural issues that have led to this crisis. Instead, Labor seems to be just giving the regulator a new name with no new powers – the same staff, the same workload. We need to make sure that it does not have the same problems.

Overall, this bill is a step in the right direction, but the Greens would like to see it strengthened with greater independence and oversight, greater transparency and accountability and a legislative mandate for resourcing so child safety standards cannot slide. The bill also establishes the early childhood worker register. This will allow for appropriate vetting and accountability and will build public confidence in the sector again. The Greens welcome this bill’s role in tightening up the system, but we remain steadfast in our commitment and belief that further work needs to continue and that it does not end with this legislation. The Greens support this bill and commend it to the house.

The final bill I will discuss is the Early Childhood Legislation Amendment (Child Safety) Bill 2025. The Greens support the introduction of a requirement that paramount consideration be given to the safety, rights and best interests of children by those who work in early childhood education. The change is long overdue and should always have been legislated. We also welcome new rules around the use of personal devices. It is so important that as technology advances, legislation keeps up to prioritise wellbeing and safety. Limiting the use of phones to take images of children is a sensible safeguard. We also welcome mandatory training. We know that most of the reportable conduct scheme reports in the early childhood sector involve people who were not registered teachers with the Victorian Institute of Teaching. Upskilling and training educators will only seek to further professionalise the sector and is a sensible step toward harm reduction.

While the Greens are supportive of the regulator having strong powers to take action against providers, we have had some stakeholders raise concerns around penalties being proportionate to the crime. Penalties imposed on educators in early childhood settings generally should be similar to penalties imposed on teachers and educators in primary and secondary schools. We must also recognise that penalties do not disincentivise malpractice, abuse or serious offences related to child safety. This bill is good and sensible, and the Greens are happy to support it and commend it to the house.

Before I finish up, I just want to speak to my amendments. Now that I have outlined our position on these three bills, I will be moving a number of amendments that seek to strengthen them. I ask that these please be circulated.

Regarding the Social Services Regulation Amendment (Child Safety, Complaints and Worker Regulation) Bill 2025, the Greens amendment seeks to remove all parts of the bill that relate to disability, along with the associated consequential amendments. It is clear we need more time to consider this on its own merits, and considering the serious concerns from the disability community, we cannot in good faith pass this bill as it stands without having sufficient time to review the disability section of the bill in detail.

Regarding the Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority Bill 2025, we have two amendments. The first amendment seeks to provide Parliament, through the Integrity and Oversight Committee, with veto powers over the early childhood regulator. The intention around this is to allow for an additional layer of oversight. The amendment proposes the requirement of the minister to first tell the Integrity and Oversight Committee who they want to appoint and why. The committee will then have 30 days to block or allow this appointment.

The second amendment that we have seeks to legislate the proportionality of authorised officers. The safety, wellbeing and education quality of children in early childhood settings depends on effective oversight and regulation. Authorised officers are essential to ensuring early childhood education and care settings are compliant with the national quality framework and the Children’s Services Act 1996. The bill in its current form does not legislate a minimum requirement for the number of authorised officers employed or appointed by VECRA, so we feel without a mandated baseline of resourcing and proportional oversight there is a risk of inadequate monitoring, delayed investigations and reduced support for services, particularly as the number of approved providers continues to grow. A minimum threshold and proportional approach will help ensure that VECRA remains adequately resourced to uphold quality and safety standards across all early childhood education and care services. Our amendment requires VECRA to employ or appoint no fewer than 60 authorised officers and to maintain an appropriate ratio of authorised officers to approved ECEC service providers, ensuring regulatory oversight remains effective and responsive to sector growth. It also requires the minister to publicly report annually to Parliament on (1) the number of authorised officers employed or appointed by VECRA, (2) the ratio of authorised officers to approved ECEC services and (3) the actions taken to maintain adequate regulatory coverage. I think they are in the process of circulating those amendments.

My next amendment is in relation to the Early Childhood Legislation Amendment (Child Safety) Bill 2025. We have one amendment in relation to this bill, and this is to strengthen public reporting. We believe that transparency is essential to protecting children and restoring public trust. By requiring detailed, regular public reporting we can make sure that families, educators and the wider community have clear information about what is happening in early childhood education and care. We have seen in Victoria and New South Wales that allowing only internal reporting or government discretion can lead to delays, cover-ups and a lack of action until it is too late. Clause 120 in the bill amends subsection 270(5) of the Education and Care Services National Law Act 2010 to provide that the regulatory authority may publish information about a range of enforcement actions taken. But the regulatory authority is not required to publish this information, and there is no requirement that the information is published in a way that is timely, particularly for parents who are thinking of sending their children to a childcare provider. The Greens amendment changes clause 120 to make specific, proactive and timely reporting of information on enforcement actions mandatory. Parents deserve full transparency, and we have the right to know what is happening in childcare centres, what risks exist, what allegations have been made and what steps are being taken to protect our children. Without openness, trust is broken and the system will not improve until it is too late.

These bills and their intention to solve child safety are a step in the right direction. I just want to conclude by recognising everybody contributing to this really important piece of legislation before us, recognising the urgency but also healthy debate around it. It is important that we continue to have proper scrutiny and for due process to be followed so that we can have the time to ensure that we are not here in a couple of years trying to fix it again. Taking the time to get this right ensures that we are putting children at the heart of our work and that we are using Parliament well to ensure that children’s wellbeing and safety are centred and that the work of early childhood educators and professionals in the sector that are doing the right thing continues to be supported. It has been a horrific time for so many in our community, who will be traumatised for a very long time following these horrific abuse incidents. I think it is very clear to see that this is not isolated to Victoria. We have seen a sharp, accelerated rise in abuse of children. What has transpired in Victoria in the last few months is only what we do know. There is a lot that is unknown in this sector, and my hope is that the reforms that we are debating in the house today will uncover and close the gaps and the gaping holes in the sector that allow for-profit providers to exploit families and prioritise profit over the safety of children. Our hope is that at the very core of the legislation that has been put forth before us today is the safety and wellbeing of children. We owe it to Victorian children to get this right – this is so important – and to ensure that we are representing their experiences in the process.

We are at a crossroads right now. I listed the inquiries in my speech at the very beginning – too many inquiries, 3000 recommendations, sitting on a shelf for governments that have chosen not to do the right thing. It is important now more than ever that we centre, we prioritise and we make it our paramount priority that we do get all parts of the legislation before us right. Before I finish up, I want to once again honour the children and their families that are trying to overcome what has happened.

 Jacinta ERMACORA (Western Victoria) (16:57): I am pleased to speak on these bills, these child safety bills, and I would like to acknowledge the contributions that we have heard so far, which have been very interesting to listen to. I thought I would start with a bit of context of the history around child care and the role of women and caring in our society. Historically and traditionally, the daily care and upbringing of babies and children has been women’s work. This role has tied women to the home and excluded them from full participation in the broader workforce and, in many regards, from the social life of our society. The work that women do in the home has also been undervalued – those caring roles of catering, administering, cleaning and parenting. To be frank, those parenting roles, whoever does them, male or female, are still not paid roles in our society. Ironically the same occurs for women in the workforce. Occupations taken up predominantly by women have historically been less valued: cleaning, catering, administration and the caring industries – aged care, child care et cetera. Their lower value is expressed in lower rates of pay in these sectors but also culturally lower value as well. Although we are seeing changes in some sectors, how we value certain roles in our society still says a lot about our biases.

It says a lot about our perceptions and experiences of women and the undervaluing of their contributions – who it is acceptable to exploit and who is more likely to be overvalued. There are more Andrews who are CEOs than there are women in some sectors. No-one would argue that by choosing the name Andrew, the talent, merit and capacity of a worker become so extraordinary that they reach the highest position and are the highest paid in an organisation. That is an incredible coincidence. Conversely, roles like cleaning, home help, child care and aged care are mostly still occupied by women and undervalued and have historically some of the lowest paid workers in our economy and lowest valued in our society. It is unsurprising that child care has long been undervalued, because it has historically been seen as women’s work. That is why workers in the sector have traditionally been underpaid compared to those in male-dominated sectors. They are often treated as lower skilled despite requiring training, patience and empathy and fulfilling a critically responsible role. As a consequence, the childcare sector has not been funded or professionalised in line with its social importance. One example is that early childhood workers have always been paid less than schoolteachers despite similar qualifications, and they often work part-time or casually. This is a direct hangover from that perception that child care was not seen as a real profession at all but as a mother’s job done by just another woman.

In Australia our childcare systems were originally designed on the assumption that women would stay at home. Our childcare systems were not originally built for two-income households, single parents, women working full-time or women in careers. Instead child care has been patchy, privatised, often delivered through faith groups and charities and treated as a backup or not an essential service. Today we still see limited hours – closing at 5 or 6 pm – a lack of oversight or weekend options and systems still built around historically the 9-to-5 workday. Even long day care often assumes a parent – usually mum but not always – can do pick-ups and drop-offs, manage illness and take time off work, and that there is always one of the parents that is available to do that. This gendering of domestic roles has not just shaped who works in child care, it has shaped how governments fund child care, how societies value care work, how childcare systems are structured and how families, especially mothers, balance work and care. It has also shaped how child care has been regulated. That is why it is so important that the childcare workers receive the pay rise they were recently provided by the Albanese Labor government which was much appreciated, I believe.

Parents should be able to feel confident in the quality of care their children receive in child care. They want healthy food, qualified and safe educators and safe and fun spaces in which to play and learn. They want to be confident that the systems in place are there to check the care that is being provided, that it meets all the standards, that the carers are qualified and accredited to provide that care and that there is somewhere to lodge a complaint if there is a need for improvement. We know that the first five years is very influential in a child’s development. That is why this government is undertaking the Best Start, Best Life reforms. The Allan Labor government is building 50 early learning centres on government primary school sites to provide kinder, childcare and maternal and health services. We want all children in Victoria to be able to access the best possible learning opportunities in their first five years, and we are establishing a Victorian department that will oversee the government’s new childcare system – not in question in this bill.

This leads me to the childcare safety bills before us today. Due to the horrific allegations of abuse in our childcare system revealed this year, the Allan Labor government has acted swiftly and concisely to reform child care in our state. We have already banned personal devices in childcare centres with non-compliance risking approval cancellation and fines exceeding $50,000. We have established a register of early childhood educators, and the bill before us today enhances this register. We commissioned an urgent independent review led by Jay Weatherill AO and Pamela White PSM into child safety and the working with children check. The government has accepted all 22 of the rapid review recommendations, and the bills before us deliver on key reforms to strengthen protections and restore public confidence in early childhood settings. They represent a suite of reforms that together strengthen our safeguarding systems. They protect our most vulnerable Victorians and build public confidence in services that families rely on every day. This marks a significant change in the trajectory of childcare services from its historic origins, as I mentioned earlier. It represents a major step forward of professionalising this work. I think that word perhaps understates it. It is valuing the work that women do; valuing mothering, valuing caring for children and educating children, and doing so by investing in it, regulating it and giving weight to the kind of care that children receive in childcare centres and in early learning environments. There has been a lot going on in the early childhood space under the Allan Labor government, and this forms another step in the journey towards respecting what has historically – but is not now – been seen as ‘women’s work.’ There is no doubt it is women who give birth to children, but it is now so much more often that men and women, mothers and fathers and parents – non-binary included – play a parenting role with their children.

The significant changes going on in this state are not just about the 50 early learning centres and the Best Start, Best Life reforms, but also, as I have just said, the reforms here in these bills are tightening up the accountability, the working with children check and the regulatory environment under which these systems will operate. I believe there will be some challenges in the private sector. I do feel sad that over recent decades the previous federal government allowed child care to be privatised. I do not see that child care is an area for profit, but alas, that is what we have got, so we need to work with the federal government to make sure that we are playing our role at the state level to regulate what we need to regulate in partnership with the federal government for them to regulate what they need to regulate. I do think that there will be some challenges for the private sector, but I really hope that they can meet that so that there are not massive waiting lists for community- run and government- run childcare centres and smaller lists for private centres, which is essentially what happens in some areas in the community.

By consolidating key regulatory functions, including working with children checks, the reportable conduct scheme and the Child Safe Standards, the reforms create a clearer, more consistent framework for safeguarding. This means organisations and workers are supported by a single specialised social services regulator that sets expectations, monitors compliance and provides a stronger oversight across the sector. Critically for workers, the reforms elevate child-related roles from being seen as informal, low-value care work to being recognised as professional practice. Stronger screening, training expectations and accountability standards ensure that the workforce is skilled, trustworthy and respected with professional safeguards in place, just like in teaching and nursing. For families, this system provides confidence that any person working with their children has been rigorously assessed, including through access to wider information about risks and misconduct.

A clear, stable regulator makes it easier to raise concerns and ensure organisations respond swiftly and appropriately. Most importantly, children and families will be all the better for this. With the stronger protections, the quicker action on risks and a system that prioritises wellbeing, education, safety and accountability, these reforms will build a safer, more valued early learning system in Victoria. This will benefit children, parents and the educators.

I want to close by saying a great big acknowledgement of all of the early learning educators across Victoria, especially the ones that I have met in the community at childcare centres. Many of them are undertaking the next step from certificates III or IV to the diploma in child care and then moving on to early childhood, and some of the grants that we have been able to provide from the Allan government for these workers have been greatly appreciated by those childcare workers. It all bodes well for the future of our Victorian early childhood sector that these reforms will tidy up and strengthen the integrity and accountability of the childcare system in Victoria. I commend this to the house.

 Trung LUU (Western Metropolitan) (17:12): I too rise to speak on the Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority Bill 2025, the Social Services Regulation Amendment (Child Safety, Complaints and Worker Regulation) Bill 2025 and the Early Childhood Legislation Amendment (Child Safety) Bill 2025. While the opposition is not opposing these bills, I want to reiterate that we cannot afford to have a child at risk for a minute longer. On this side of the chamber we want to make sure we prevent and eliminate all the risks when a child is under the care of an adult. I want to say that we are very disappointed in this government for providing such a short, small window of opportunity to properly scrutinise the biggest fundamental change to the sector for many decades. It will bring about profound change for hundreds of childcare workers, the operators of centres, the families who send their kids to these centres and of course the children who these bills are designed to protect. We know how important it is to get this legislation right. In fact we have been calling for this reform for months now. We have done a lot of consultation, but we want to ensure that what we are debating will provide the best possible early childhood system, free from the issues and free from the risks which have plagued the system for many, many years. As parliamentarians we should be allowed to scrutinise legislation and have ample opportunity to question what is about to be put in place.

I am particularly frustrated for the families and residents in my electorate who have felt this issue personally, given what has come to light this year in many childcare centres in Melbourne’s west, in my electorate. These dreadful alleged crimes have shaken my community to its core, and it is why they are looking to us in Parliament to fix this mess and make childcare centres safer for young Victorians. These children, who we want to protect and keep safe, have been failed – failed by definition in so many ways, failed by the system that is supposed to keep them safe. I am a father of five beautiful children, and like many parents in my electorate and in this chamber and the other chamber, I am sure I can speak confidently when I say the report of alleged child abuse in these centres in recent months sickened me to the core. These are places where we leave our children to be cared for every day, a place to which we as parents entrust our most vulnerable things in life, our children, only to be informed that trust has been broken and then later learn that the system that is supposed to oversee, govern and regulate these deeply troubling centres did not communicate between departments and that regulators lacked the authority and power.

We will not be standing in the way of these bills. Like I said, we cannot afford to have children at risk any longer. We know that there are some good things in these bills to better the system. But before we put a solution, we must identify, recognise and acknowledge what has happened, and then it is possible good solutions will come out of it. I do not like pointing fingers at government, but I thought I would read out the failures, basically to outline and acknowledge what has happened, so we can address the problem, we can move forward positively and we can cover all possibilities and all angles to make sure risks are minimised or risks are eliminated to protect our vulnerable.

The failure we mentioned was about complaints to the quality assessment and regulation division about childcare providers that began to significantly increase from 2018 to 2019. The complaints rose 45 per cent, while enforcements declined 67 per cent. In 2020 a childcare educator was dismissed from a childcare centre for sexual misconduct after an internal investigation found that he was grooming and kissing toddlers. Despite this, dedicated working with children checks remained active and allowed him to continue working in child care. This should have sent alarms. Alarm bells should have been ringing, and yet the Victorian Ombudsman released findings two years later warning government the Victorian working with children check system was among the weakest in the nation, outlining certain areas and recommending several reforms, including allowing the regulator to act on credible risk information without requiring a conviction or charge and ensuring a suspension remains in force until an appeal is resolved. The government did not respond to these recommendations.

It festered and it continued in recent years until July 2025, when everything blew up in our face. Childcare centre worker Mr Brown was charged with over 70 offences. I believe my colleague Mr Mulholland outlined the various incidents regarding what happened with sexual assault on these children. Over 200 children were the victims of this dreadful crime – vulnerable children. Most of them were in my electorate. This is why we have come to where we are. On this side of the chamber we realised the risks going on for children. We put amendments forward, we put a bill forward based on recommendations of the Ombudsman, and yet they were voted down by those opposite. We are at the stage now where we need to get this bill and address all the issues which this has put in front of us.

The first measure, which is something we on this side have been calling for, is the establishment of a new regulatory regime of two new regulators, the Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority and the Social Services Regulator. The creation of an early childhood worker register is another sensible new initiative, and of course there are changes to the national law that regulates early childhood education and care services. The bill we debate today affords new offences and brings in higher penalties for compliance breaches, which should provide some more peace of mind for those parents, those Victorians, who want the system to improve and justice to be served for people failing to comply.

I will quickly speak on the establishment of a new independent regulator for the early childhood and care sector, because it really is a measure that should and could have been implemented straightaway, and it has had bipartisan support. My colleague in the other place Ms Wilson, now the Leader of the Opposition, called for a new independent regulator for months when she served in the education portfolio – to establish a new regulator and watchdog. The previous regulator, which sat inside the Department of Education, was failing. It failed to keep children safe, and for that reason alone we support this regulator and watchdog, which will be independently governed. We believed then and do now that a fully independent statutory regulator and one free from conflict of interest is vital.

What alarms me – and this has been noted by many in this chamber – is the evidence that in 2018, as I mentioned earlier, there was a 45 per cent rise in complaints while enforcement declined by 67 per cent. We must remember that there is a child and a family behind each of these alarming statistics. When I quote 45 per cent and 67 per cent, there are children and families behind those numbers. That should send shivers down the spine of every Victorian, and it is a reminder that a regulator is necessary. So I just want to say we fully support the establishment of a register which oversees the workers in these sectors – again, something my colleague Ms Wilson called for back in July. This element of the bill is essential because it creates a central base that will keep track of all registered childhood workers and track worker movements and their ability to move around various places. It is so important. It also gives police the power to access information promptly and act immediately to prevent any further incidents that could occur.

Finally, the changes to the social services regulation amendment bill transfer significant oversight for children’s safety measures to an existing independent authority, the Social Services Regulator. This change makes sense. It establishes a regulator in a single body responsible for all functions, including the working with children check system, the reportable conduct scheme and the child safe standards.

I will keep it short. I want to thank the government for finally coming to the table. Of course, there are a few amendments we need to address before we finally let this bill go through. Although somewhat delayed, these measures are important to minimise the risk when our children are in the care of adults. We are ready to support the government on this. My thanks to those in this chamber involved in taking part in this bill. It is a priority that we address this bill urgently and we make sure every box is ticked, because children are our future. They are our most vulnerable, and we need to protect them.

 Michael GALEA (South-Eastern Metropolitan) (17:23): I rise to speak on three important bills this evening in cognate which will implement reforms to Victoria’s early childhood education sector, those bills being the Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority Bill 2025, the Social Services Regulation Amendment (Child Safety, Complaints and Worker Regulation) Bill 2025 and the Early Childhood Legislation Amendment (Child Safety) Bill 2025. The bills before us represent a power of work which has been undertaken by the Minister for Children to respond to some extremely challenging and disturbing events that were uncovered and revealed to have occurred in Melbourne childcare centres earlier this year.

It would be improper to comment on the ongoing legal proceedings of that particular matter, and in any case, any comments that I would make on that individual would no doubt be ruled unparliamentary. However, I will make note of the fact that swift action was taken by government in response to this horrific alleged offending. This included the immediate banning of personal mobile devices in early childhood education centres, the establishment of a register of workers and the commissioning of the rapid child safety review, which was undertaken by Jay Weatherill and Pamela White. The bills before us today will acquit the legislative changes proposed by the Weatherill–White rapid review, including the establishment of a truly independent watchdog to regulate the industry.

As was the case with many contributions on the other bill which this chamber dealt with earlier today, I am struck by the fiendish difficulty that is presented to us when we try to adequately legislate against what can only be described as pure evil in any context in which it arises. Nevertheless I am confident that with the legislative changes in these three bills before us today we will be significantly strengthening the protections for children in this state to the maximum reasonable extent. It will foster a culture in early childhood settings that Victorian families will be able to place their confidence in. Noting of course the compressed timeframes in which this bill has been prepared in order to respond to the rapid review’s recommendations in that timely manner, I am also conscious of the extensive consultation which has been undertaken by the minister and her office with all manner of stakeholders to ensure that this bill is as robust and strong as it can be. I further note that the measures within these bills have drawn wide support, with the majority of children stakeholders expressing emphatic support for the measures within them.

Taking each bill in turn, I will start with the Social Services Regulator bill, which will effectively coalesce two of our most valuable child safeguarding functions into the Social Services Regulator, those being the reportable conduct scheme and the working with children check. Under these reforms the SSR will be empowered to both consider a wider range of factors, including unsubstantiated allegations, and also apply a more stringent threshold on who may be granted a working with children check. As well, the new interim barring provision will enable the SSR to respond in a rapid manner to new information that comes to light. It will also include mandatory child safety training as a requirement of all applications for working with children checks as well as consolidating those appeal pathways to within the SSR to ensure that that agency has singular responsibility for child safety through the working with children check system. These measures will meet recommendations 6 and 7 of the Weatherill–White review. In rebalancing child safety with procedural fairness principles the government has, quite rightly, taken the view that the safety of vulnerable children in Victoria must be absolutely paramount.

This bill will also incorporate disability oversight functions into the Social Services Regulator, which responds to both the NDIS review and the disability royal commission, which found the current safeguarding systems to be far too often too inaccessible for people to access. This also meets recommendation 8 of the rapid review, which advocates for a shared intelligence and risk assessment capacity. I know that is something that also many advocates have been calling for for a long time. It means that the protections that cover children in out-of-home care will also apply to Victorians who make use of a disability support worker. Indeed I also note the strong words of support for this measure, that of incorporating the disability oversight functions into the SSR, by the now Leader of the Opposition in her contribution on these bills in the other place just last week when she spoke glowingly of this reform, saying:

… this is overdue reform. Families have been calling for a consistent approach to worker regulation across disability and social services for many years.

So I was surprised to hear Mr Mulholland oppose this measure, but I do trust that members opposite will support this part of the bill in accordance with the remarks from the new leader of their party which were made just last Tuesday.

Moving to the early childhood regulatory bill, this is a bill that will establish a new early childhood education and care regulator as well as a register of early childhood workers. The rapid review was very clear on the need for these reforms, and they are indeed perhaps the most central and key reforms of this package. This bill acquits the measures within recommendation 9 of the Weatherill–White review. The need for a robust, independent regulator has also been made clear by many stakeholders in this debate and has been the topic of much conversation in this chamber in the lead-up to these reforms.

This bill will create a new independent regulator, the Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority – or VECRA, as it will be known – with the role of early childhood regulator reporting directly to the Minister for Children. VECRA will assume the regulatory functions from the existing unit, which is the quality assessment and regulation division, otherwise known as QARD, which is currently a unit of the Department of Education. As has been raised by other speakers in this debate, this change, this new authority, will effectively address the potential conflicts of having a single department both operate and regulate early childhood education services. But it also responds to the reality that we now have a significantly changing landscape in the sector. Many legislative bases for childhood regulation – not just in Victoria but in other states and federally as well – in many cases are based off systems which had seen much greater public involvement. However, we know that the liberalised reforms that started with the Howard government in the 1990s federally have seen the private sector play an ever greater role in the provision of Australia’s early childhood education. It is important that VECRA will be resourced to effectively regulate and monitor this industry to ensure that child safety is the paramount consideration in this sector, and that is something that should be paramount whether it is public or private. Where there is that profit motive, it must never be allowed to come at the expense of child safety.

As I indicated, this new authority, VECRA, will also manage the new register of workers, with several and various new offences and penalties included within this bill for those providers that fail to meet the obligations to update their register or whose employees misuse the register in any way. This register is already in effect. It was one of the first reforms undertaken as a result of those early actions that were announced by the Minister for Children and the Premier. This register has been in effect since late July. However, what the VECRA and the SSR bills will do is give this new agency more powers to effectively and robustly administer the register, including with regard to the timely sharing of critical information from VECRA to the Social Services Regulator. I note that the existing legislative framework already provides the SSR with the ability to share information with VECRA, but in terms of that information sharing from VECRA to the SSR, those reforms are achieved both through this particular bill and through the early childhood regulatory authority bill and the social services regulation bill, underscoring the importance of all these bills as a collective package.

Finally, I turn to the Early Childhood Legislation Amendment (Child Safety) Bill 2025, which is otherwise known as the national law bill, largely for the reason that it acquits legislative changes that were agreed to by all Australian education ministers at the state and federal levels at a meeting on 7 November, which I note was 13 days ago. This bill makes a number of enhancements to the regulatory tools and information-sharing powers for regulators, as well as enhancements for the statutory duties imposing those higher standards of duties on childcare workers. Importantly, these new measures, which are nationwide and are being implemented in each and every state and territory of the Commonwealth, will also provide more powers for regulators to deal with these offences, including a threefold increase in penalties that regulators can apply to providers that do the wrong thing, which will apply under the act.

In saying that this is the national part of the bill, there are other aspects of this bill which will apply only to Victoria. These acquit further recommendations of the rapid review, including giving regulators additional enforcement powers, the ability to impose higher penalties across a wider range of areas and an enhanced ability to keep bad providers out of the sector. It also provides for enhanced transparency of all of these actions, which will help to give the Victorian public the confidence that they are entitled to have in our state’s early childhood education sector.

We have seen, as I have said, some very, very disturbing things come to light in the media, indeed both in this state this year and in other states of the nation previously as well. It is, as I said at the start of my remarks, in so many ways a fiendishly difficult thing to adequately legislate against the actions of those who are pure evil, but it is important that the systems that we have in place are as strong and as robust as they can be. I know in responding to these it is really important to note, as other speakers have already noted, that this in no way, shape or form should be seen as any sort of attack on or undermining of our childcare workforce, because we know that the vast, vast majority of early childhood educators in this state are dedicated, passionate people who want to see the best for our children, no matter their own background, their gender or what drove them to be in childcare and childhood education. These are people that go to work every day, if I may quote my colleague Ms Gray-Barberio, to fulfil the words ‘It takes a village’. These are people that go and do this every day and take great pride in their work. Nothing in these reforms should be seen as any sort of indictment of them.

But this is the response that we have crafted in response to that very, very narrow worst of the worst group, the people that can inflict such intolerable damage on our children and on our society – damage that we will not accept, and we will not give them any possible opportunity to do that. That is why we have taken these rapid measures right at the outset, including the new register, the ban on phones in these settings, as well as that rapid review, and it is why we are implementing each of those recommendations of the rapid review in full where they pertain to state responsibility. A number of those recommendations extend to the federal space and to the Commonwealth level for action, and this government has been absolutely determined and forthright in pursuing action from other states through those forums, such as what I mentioned before, but also direct reforms and legislative reforms from the Commonwealth where they are needed as well. This is something that we need to work together on. It is also a very important thing to note that the industry has a major role to play in ensuring that it is not just meeting minimum standards but exceeding them as well.

These bills represent a thorough and considered response to the distressing issues that we have seen. They acquit the recommendations of the Weatherill–White review, and most importantly, they will make vulnerable Victorian children safer. I commend these three bills to the house.

 Gaelle BROAD (Northern Victoria) (17:38): I am pleased to be able to speak today about these three bills, the Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority Bill 2025, Social Services Regulation Amendment (Child Safety, Complaints and Worker Regulation) Bill 2025 and the Early Childhood Legislation Amendment (Child Safety) Bill 2025. At the government’s request we are considering these three bills at the same time, but I do want to make note that we have really got an avalanche of legislation as we approach the end of the year. We have had an extra sitting week put in. I am on the Scrutiny of Acts and Regulations Committee, and our meeting this week took twice as long because of the volume of legislation that is coming through. This is very important legislation that has been put forward today, and we acknowledge that. It is why the Liberals and Nationals back in July put forward a bill that was blocked by Labor, and it was to address many of the issues that we are looking at today.

Parts of this legislation introduce reforms that should have been introduced years ago. Through these bills there are over 1000 – actually 1159 – pages of legislation, and our side was given 12 hours to make a decision on this legislation. We acknowledge that, as I mentioned, some of this legislation should have been addressed a long time ago. In 2022 the Victorian Ombudsman released findings warning the government that Victoria’s working with children check system was amongst 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, and the government did not respond to those recommendations.

Now, the government did a review, and as I said, this legislation is overdue. We are aware, and it has been referenced in this chamber today, of a worker that was found to have impacted 20 different childcare centres, and he was charged with more than 70 offences. What we heard sickened families across the state and across the nation, but I will not speak further to that, for the reasons that have already been referenced. The legislation that we are reviewing today was due in October – parts of it – but it has certainly been rushed in now. The government has known for years that the system was fragmented, that information was not being shared between regulators and that serious incidents were slipping through the cracks. The result has been a system where red flags could be raised in one corner of the government and completely missed in another.

Together, these bills will – finally – consolidate the working with children check, the reportable conduct scheme and the child safe standards under the Social Services Regulator, give regulators better power to act on risk, even before harm occurs, strengthen penalties for providers that fail to meet their obligations and improve transparency and information sharing between agencies. These are very important and sensible measures. They were all recommended by the rapid child safety review months ago, and we are only now seeing legislation to bring those into force, as I said. So the government has had the recommendations, it has had the evidence and it has certainly had the public support to see the change, and we are concerned that child safety has remained unaddressed for too long. I know from my own experience as a parent just how important it is to have places and child care that you trust, because your children are just so precious and you are leaving them in someone else’s care. There needs to be such strong oversight, and we cannot afford to wait for basic safeguards that protect our children. Reports of child sexual abuse in Victoria’s child care have revealed serious problems in the state’s child protection system, and as I said, we need urgent change to rebuild that trust in the system.

Since 2018 complaints to the regulator, the quality assessment and regulation division (QARD), have increased by 45 per cent, while enforcement actions have dropped by 67 per cent. We know the government in their briefing talked about the new Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority. They talked about 100 new staff, including 60 new compliance officers, and another $45 million investment in these reforms. It just shows how understaffed and under-resourced the Department of Education has been, and that should be a concern to us all.

I think it is important to highlight one of the big issues that has been brought to my attention. The minister’s second-reading speech for the Social Services Regulation Amendment (Child Safety, Complaints and Worker Regulation) Bill 2025 says:

This Bill will bring all the current Victorian disability oversight functions under the roof of the Social Services Regulator, creating a more efficient and effective system that is easier for people with a disability to navigate.

That has set off alarm bells for many in the sector. Of course this is the minister’s second attempt to introduce such changes. Last year the minister introduced the Disability and Social Services Regulation Amendment Bill 2024, but it was wrong and had to be withdrawn just a few sitting weeks ago. It sat between the houses for 12 months, and the minister received considerable correspondence urging her to listen to the disability sector and retain a standalone disability regulator, not an overarching one. Disability Advocacy Victoria and Disabled People’s Organisations Victoria, the peak bodies for advocacy organisations in Victoria, have both stated in letters to the minister and the Premier:

The disability community and advocacy community, led by DPO Victoria and Disability Advocacy Victoria, are united in their perspective that the proposal to incorporate disability-specific regulators into the Social Services Regulator is both destructive and harmful.

It is a big concern that this proposal has been put forward without co-design with the Victorian disability community, and we have certainly received a lot of correspondence on this. The Rights Information and Advocacy Centre say:

The Government has claimed it has “consulted” with the disability community, but Dr Ross said the claims do not satisfy the pub test: “There has been some limited communication but no meaningful consultation, and that was only after the Government developed and announced the model as decided. People with disability through their representative organisations have been clear and consistent that they do not support the changes. What we’re seeing is not the product of consultation, but a predetermined outcome pushed through despite strong opposition.”

They have raised concerns about the impact of these proposals on people in regional Victoria, where fewer service providers increase vulnerability for people with disability to a poorly regulated service sector.

I have also received correspondence from the Mental Health Legal Centre. It says:

The Disability Workers Commission and Disability Services Commissioner have played a vital role in championing the rights of people with disabilities, ensuring that their voices are heard and that their unique needs are met with tailored solutions. The proposed takeover risks diluting the focus of disability regulation and undermining its ability to provide dedicated advocacy and oversight. The Social Services Regulator, while important in its own right, does not possess the same depth of specialised knowledge nor the direct connection to disability communities that the current regulators have carefully built over the years.

That correspondence goes on to highlight the short turnaround time for Parliament:

… to consider the Bill, and the inclusion of the reforms in an extensive Bill that is aimed primarily at ensuring the safety of children. People with disabilities deserve protections that are the subject of careful and specific consideration, and they should not just be an afterthought or footnote to other matters.

I also received correspondence from Disability Rights and Culture. They say:

… the government are making the case that some demographics eg children with disabilities may fall through the cracks whilst separate regulatory bodies exist. As we all know, there are many intersections in government and there are other models for information sharing and collaboration that increase scrutiny and offer better service. Scooping up all specialisms under one roof is the least effective of them all.

They also said that they are:

… extremely concerned about the proposed amendments to disability regulation … to be voted upon … These have been tabled as part of the Child Safety Amendments, which are non controversial, but wrapping the regulatory amendments up in child safety is very poor indeed.

So yes, I guess they are very keen for us to vote against these amendments.

It is interesting, that concept of not being consulted, because I sit on a parliamentary inquiry that has looked into community consultation. Disability Advocacy Victoria chairperson Julie Phillips was a witness before our inquiry. I want to quote what she said from the transcript, which was taken from her appearance in front of the inquiry:

I just want to refer quickly to the state disability plan, in which the government has included terms such as ‘Nothing about us without us’ and talks about co-design. We do not find any evidence of that. We find a few advisory committees here and there where people have to sign non-disclosure agreements. They do not represent the disability community, and that is a constant source of frustration which is building within the disability movement with these decisions being made about us without our input, except at the end. And then having to read claims such as in the response to the disability royal commission recommendations, where it says we are going to be worked with closely – we have not been, and indeed the first recommendation that we know of which has been considered by government is to do with the social services regulator and contradicts the recommendations of the disability royal commission on that point. So we are struggling to see how the word ‘consultation’ applies to our sector at all. It is frustrating and it must change …

It is interesting. I was listening to contributions on the previous bill that was debated in this house today, and a Labor minister said that non-disclosure agreements can silence people and disempower people and that they erode trust and transparency, yet in the government’s consultation with stakeholders they used non-disclosure agreements.

When we look at the social services regulation amendment bill, there are several elements to this bill that relate to improvements to the working with children screening and clearance, improving child safety safeguards and improving the rights of people with disabilities in disability accommodation. But as I said, it merges the disability worker commissioner, the Disability Worker Registration Board of Victoria and the disability services commissioner into the Social Services Regulator. In short, the opposition supports the elements covered in those first few points but certainly has issues with the merging of the disability complaints sector into the Social Services Regulator. We have put forward amendments, and we appreciate their consideration by the chamber.

 Georgie PURCELL (Northern Victoria) (17:51): I rise to contribute to this debate. We have had the enormous task of simultaneously considering three bills in a pretty short timeframe. Those bills are the Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority Bill 2025, the Social Services Regulation Amendment (Child Safety, Complaints and Worker Regulation) Bill 2025 and the Early Childhood Legislation Amendment (Child Safety) Bill 2025. I will do my best to speak to each of them. I know we have quite a bit to get through so I will try to keep my remarks brief.

Collectively these bills make important and desperately needed changes. Recent cases have shown that Victoria’s ability to keep children safe is not up to scratch. That is completely unacceptable. Although these changes are squarely based off the government’s recent rapid review, many of them are not new. Changes to child safety laws were raised in the 2015 Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. The Ombudsman also recommended changes to Victoria’s working with children check scheme in 2022. It is great that the government is acting on its rapid review, but they never should have needed it in the first place. I am really glad that we are here today. The review and the actions taken since are the same things that advocates have been calling for for years. These bills will strengthen information sharing and allow for stronger, faster actions to be taken to address child abuse concerns. They also propose significant changes to the Victorian regulation and oversight ecosystem. Some of these changes are positive and some less so, and I will go into detail on those in a little bit.

I did want to reflect on the fact that well over a year ago I joined with my wonderful friend and former staff member Emma Hakansson, who represents the Australian Childhood Foundation as well. Together we called for mandatory education and training on child sexual abuse prevention within the working with children check program. Emma is a wonderful friend of mine and a survivor of childhood sexual abuse herself. It has been her mission over many, many years to get mandatory training in the check system, so we are really, really glad to see it happening. The change found in the social services regulation bill is particularly welcome. When it does happen, I do remind the government and the minister of the importance of ensuring that that training is co-designed alongside survivors and that their voices and stories are heard in that process to ensure that it is as effective as it can possibly be to work in practice. It is absolutely essential that adults who work around children are trained to recognise and respond to risk in order to protect children, and I implore the government to listen to those experiences and to the Australian Childhood Foundation moving forward from today, and to anyone else with lived experience to share.

The Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority Bill, as it states in the title, establishes the Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority. This new independent statutory authority will be directly accountable to the Minister for Children. The bill will also establish the Victorian early childhood worker register in law, to be maintained by VECRA. This too is something advocates both inside and out of this place have been calling for for quite some time now. For the Early Childhood Regulatory Authority to really succeed, it needs to be independent and well resourced. As such, I will be supporting the Greens amendments to help do just this. I really want to extend my thankyou to Ms Gray-Barberio and her office for their work and engagement with my office on this piece of work and helping us understand and consider a lot of these changes, given our significantly less resourcing on the crossbench and having to get across these issues really quickly.

On the less positive changes, the government at the same time as establishing a new independent regulatory authority proposes to abolish two of them. The social services regulation amendment as it is currently drafted includes the abolition of the disability services commissioner and the Victorian Disability Worker Commission, with their functions to be merged into the already large Social Services Regulator (SSR). The government have argued that this is in response to the rapid review, which recommended greater coordination and information sharing between regulatory bodies. It is a move which they have argued is intended to recognise the intersectionality between issues of abuse within the disability and childcare sectors. These things are not untrue. It is clear there is a need to improve coordination between regulatory bodies. It is clear that abusers move between the childcare and disability sectors, and often those two sectors can be intertwined. But what is less clear is whether this is the best move that still ensures the safety of Victorians with a disability. I mean this authentically, and I have communicated this to the government; it truly is unclear. The government’s rationale for this move is sound, but in the short timeframe and with the lack of ability to consider it, it has been really difficult to make a decision before today.

There has been a lack of consultation and engagement with the disability sector, who have unanimously said a move like this will do considerably more harm to people with a disability than it will do good. For those of us in the chamber who have voiced these concerns to the government, it has felt like we have been made out to be delaying essential changes to protect children, and I cannot help but feel like this is wrong. We as parliamentarians receive a lot of correspondence and feedback, and particularly for us on the crossbench it can be very hard to consider them in a short timeframe and in good conscience make a decision of such significant magnitude without ample time to engage, to consult and to consider the repercussions, especially considering the alarming things and differing opinions in such a short time period. If the government want to make sound improvements to the structure of the disability regulatory authorities, they should do so in a way which is centred on the experiences of the disability community and bring Parliament on the journey based on the evidence. I think this is something that many of us on the crossbench can relate to. This is not the first bill where we have felt this has happened, where a decision has been made first and the community notified second, and perhaps we would not be in the situation that we are in today had that communication and consultation work gone on with the sector in the first place. It would have been a much smoother process for all of us in here on the crossbench and in the opposition to make this decision. There have been many in the disability community who have advocated for the merging of the disability regulators to create one single, independent disability regulator, just as the royal commission recommended. This crucially, though, would ensure there is a body whose focus remains solely on protecting those with a disability. I do understand that this bill is likely to be adjourned, and I implore the government in doing this to make these considerations before they return it to this place.

As well as the changes to disability regulators, the bill will also bring a range of functions from other government authorities into the Social Services Regulator. This bill includes the regulatory functions of the Commission for Children and Young People, the worker screening unit in the Department of Government Services and the decisions under the working with children check. Although these changes are important in ensuring broad access to information and holistic risk assessments, there have been concerns raised by the community about the current functioning of the SSR, which has only been described at best as already strained. I obviously understand the need to swiftly pass this legislation, and I think everybody in this place does, in light of recent events and the crisis that has occurred in Victoria. I know that many in this place have worked with the government as much as possible in order to do so this week, and sadly, we have often found those conversations difficult.

The early childhood legislation amendment bill will update the national law and create new offences. Victoria will go further than the rest of the nation in this and create new infringements and protections, which should have been made long ago, and I reiterate that I am really glad that that is happening. These changes are important, because we have an obligation to protect children in this state. I have spoken about this already today, but I am soon to be a mother myself, and I deeply understand the want to feel trust that children will feel safe in childcare settings and for all parents to feel the same way. So in doing that, I commend the bill to the house, and I am really hopeful that we can learn from the difficulties that we have had along the way with this legislation and do everything we possibly can to work collaboratively and proactively to get the best possible outcomes to address all of the concerns that have come from the rapid review and the issues that have arisen within child care in this state.

 Sheena WATT (Northern Metropolitan) (18:01): Thank you very much for the opportunity to rise and speak on the cognate debate on the Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority Bill 2025 and the Early Childhood Legislation Amendment (Child Safety) Bill 2025. The Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority Bill 2025 establishes the new Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority. Until now, early childhood services have been regulated by a division within the Department of Education under the delegation of the secretary. With more children in care, a wider range of service types and increasing expectations around child safety, the system needs a regulator built for this purpose alone. VECRA will take on that responsibility. It will be an independent early childhood regulator and accountable directly to the Minister for Children. It will oversee the full suite of regulatory functions. It will monitor patterns of concern and step in when risks emerge. This is the kind of regulator the sector needs to identify issues and respond in a way that centres the safety and wellbeing of children.

This bill also establishes a statewide register of early childhood workers. The register currently in place only captures those working in state-funded kindergarten programs. The new register will cover workers across long day care, sessional kindergarten, outside school hours care, family day care and occasional care. Approved providers already hold this information. The bill simply brings that information together into a single system maintained by VECRA. This allows the regulator to identify quickly and confidently where a person has worked if concerns arise. The register comes with proper safeguards: providers must submit accurate information, VECRA is responsible for maintaining the register and misuse or unauthorised disclosure of information will carry penalties. These protections matter, because the register is there to strengthen safety, not create new risks. It ensures that when there are concerns about a worker, the regulator has the information needed to act without delay.

The bill also supports information sharing with the Social Services Regulator. It ensures that when concerns arise across different settings, regulators are able to see the full picture, not isolated fragments. Information will also flow the other way, with VECRA able to receive relevant information from working with children checks and the Social Services Regulator to support its early childhood functions. This level of coordination has been recommended for years. It is a practical and necessary step to keep children safe.

These reforms carry the weight of the rapid child safety review commissioned earlier this year. The government committed to implementing all 22 recommendations of that review. The recommendations in that review were clear: the sector needs stronger oversight, clearer accountability and better tools for identifying risk. This bill delivers the foundations for that work.

The Social Services Regulation Amendment (Child Safety, Complaints and Worker Regulation) Bill 2025 strengthens the role of the Social Services Regulator and brings key safeguarding functions into a single place. For too long child safety responsibilities have been spread across separate schemes. This bill consolidates the working with children check, the reportable conduct scheme and the child safe standards so they sit with one independent regulator. That change provides clear oversight and reduces the gaps that have allowed information to sit in those separate systems. The bill also strengthens the way the working with children checks are assessed. It allows the regulator to consider a broader range of information, including matters that have not yet met a criminal threshold but still raise legitimate concerns about risk. A new interim bar will allow the regulator to act quickly and prevent someone from working with children while a full assessment is carried out. These are practical tools that reflect what reviewers have pointed out for years: decisions about a person’s suitability must take into account the full picture, not only what appears on a criminal record.

The bill changes how appeals will operate. Instead of decisions going to VCAT, the regulator will use a strengthened internal review process supported by an independent expert panel. This ensures that the people assessing these matters have specialist knowledge in child safety, disability and work conduct.

People applying for a working with children check will be required to complete mandatory child safety training and testing. This is a real, straightforward expectation. Anyone seeking to work with children should understand the fundamentals of recognising harm and effectively responding to it.

This bill also places responsibility on employers to verify the engagement of their workers in the working with children check system. This will build a stronger record of where workers are employed and allow the regulator to notify employers if a clearance is suspended or cancelled.

The bill also responds to findings from the national disability insurance scheme review and the disability royal commission. Both have highlighted how inaccessible the safeguarding landscape can be for people with disability. To address this, the bill merges disability oversight functions into the Social Services Regulator. It brings the complaints function of the disability services commissioner into the new regulator and creates a single avenue for raising concerns across the full range of social services. This is important for people with disability, many of whom have said that the system as it currently stands is difficult to navigate. A single regulator creates a clearer path for complaints.

The bill also aligns, where practical, worker regulation for disability and out-of-home care. At present, these two sectors have separate schemes with different powers. The bill brings greater consistency across them and gives the regulator additional tools that already exist in one system but not the other. These include the ability to place conditions on a worker’s engagement in response to lower level conduct that does not meet the threshold for exclusion and the ability to recognise worker prohibition decisions across both those sectors. These matters are absolutely critical because we know that predators do not keep themselves in the one system; they move between systems to avoid scrutiny and detection. Aligning these schemes closes those gaps. Penalties and offences for disability workers and providers will also be updated to match those in the out-of-home care area, and this ensures that the same expectation applies across sectors and that vulnerable people have the same level of protection regardless of the type of service they access. The bill introduces an out-of-home care worker and carer register, which will record where workers and carers are providing services and enable the regulator to inform providers if someone is subject to regulatory action.

Throughout these changes, it is a balance between safety and fairness. The bill gives the regulator significant powers, including the ability to prohibit a person from working in certain sectors. Importantly, these bills come with safeguards. The regulator must provide reasons for decisions. Interim bars and interim prohibitions must be reviewed regularly. There is a clear separation between an initial decision and an internal review. The use of independent experts ensures that the decisions are informed by the right expertise.

This bill also makes amendments to the Residential Tenancies Act 1997 to clarify the status of certain specialist disability accommodation agreements and improve the way the framework operates. These updates help ensure that tenancy arrangements for people with disability are legally sound and better reflect the reality of how these homes actually function.

Going now to the Early Childhood Legislation Amendment (Child Safety) Bill 2025, which provides for updates both to the national law and Victoria’s own responsibilities as the host of the Education and Care Services National Law Act 2010. These reforms were agreed to by every education minister late last year, and they respond directly to the child safety review and respond to the failures that have been identified within early childhood services. The sector has changed. More children are enrolled. Services operate in more complex ways and expectations around child safety have rightfully risen, and the law needs to reflect that.

The government have heard from the crossbench that they need more time to consider the reforms contained in the Social Services Regulation Amendment (Child Safety, Complaints and Worker Regulation) Bill 2025, and we look forward to, and will keep working towards, this reform passing the house next week following further consideration of the bill.

In relation to the consultation undertaken to date, it is important to note at the outset that Disability Advocacy Victoria declined to take part in consultation. In addition to working with the social services reform taskforce and consultation with the national disability advisory council, which is made up of members with lived experience, the Minister for Children has met with National Disability Services, Health and Community Services Union representatives, the Victorian equal opportunity and human rights commissioner, the Social Services Regulator, the Victorian Council of Social Service and Disability Advocacy Victoria. In addition, the Department of Families, Fairness and Housing consulted with impacted entities across DARU, which is the Disability Advocacy Resource Unit, which I understand is connected with VCOSS, from my time there on the board. They have also consulted with Yooralla, Scope, Anglicare, the Centre for Excellence in Child and Family Welfare, MacKillop Family Services and the Victorian Aboriginal Child Care Agency. Can I take the time to acknowledge and thank them for their significant work. The government looks forward to continuing these important conversations in the coming fortnight.

A central feature of this bill is the new statutory duty that places the safety, rights and best interests of children above every other consideration in the delivery of early childhood education and care. It sets a clear standard for the sector and for those who regulate it. The bill requires child safety training for all people working in services and child protection training for those who work directly with children. This creates a consistent baseline so workers understand risk, recognise harm and know how to respond. It also introduces new regulatory tools, including an offence for inappropriate conduct, and powers to issue suspension directions and targeted training requirements. These tools allow for early intervention when behaviour raises concern but does not yet meet the threshold for more serious action. Information sharing will also become more effective. The regulator will have clearer authority to pass relevant information to providers and to work with recruitment agencies. These powers reduce the risk that a worker with a really concerning history moves between services without detection.

The bill also establishes a national educator register, supporting safer recruitment across jurisdictions. The reforms recognise that child safety issues are not always confined to a single service and that they can emerge across provider groups. The bill gives regulators greater access to respond to systemic noncompliance and strengthens oversight in family day care by extending compliance and investigation powers to residences and other locations where care is delivered. It also introduces restrictions on personal digital devices within services, responding to concerns rightly raised in the rapid review.

Alongside the national changes the bill introduces Victorian-specific measures that reflect the seven recommendations of our own rapid review and are consistent with reforms recently introduced in New South Wales. These include stronger controls to prevent unsuitable providers entering the sector through licensing approvals, higher penalties for larger providers and additional disciplinary powers for the regulator. The bill expands the amount of compliance information that can be published so there is a clearer picture of a service’s history. Once passed here the national amendments will be adopted by other states and territories through their own application acts.

These reforms strengthen the foundation that sits underneath early childhood education and care. They give regulators the tools they need to act clearly, they clarify expectations for the sector and they close gaps that have allowed concerning behaviour to go unnoticed. Families want early childhood environments that respond quickly and with seriousness when concerns are raised. This bill before us helps deliver that. When consulting with the sector, one message was abundantly clear: everyone wanted clearer structures, everyone wanted earlier intervention, everyone wanted a system that pays attention to patterns when they escalate. These bills before us help deliver that.

With this set of reforms Victoria is building a system that is more responsive, more transparent and more capable. It supports early intervention and it strengthens accountability. These changes are meaningful, they are practical, they are necessary and they directly respond to the rapid review. With that, I will leave my remarks there on the cognate debate on the child safety bills. I commend these bills to the house.

 Melina BATH (Eastern Victoria) (18:17): I am pleased to make a contribution on the cognate debate of three bills, the Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority Bill 2025, 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. This is a long time coming for some of these bills. The sector is in dire need of an overhaul. Indeed I am on the select committee of the inquiry into the early childhood sector. I note that as soon as Parliament finishes for the year in December we will be starting up our investigations, which will take some months, and I look forward to delving further into this with my colleagues in the select committee getting to the bottom of many issues.

The reforms in these bills today, particularly two, are necessary and they are overdue, and they arise from catastrophic failures in Victoria’s child safety system. The Liberals and Nationals support any measure that makes Victorian children safer. But these measures only come after a long time of warnings, of rising complaints, of collapsing enforcement, of ignored Ombudsman recommendations and of horrifying cases that have made the hair on the back of every decent Victorian stand up through the implication of what that has meant for children at the tenderest of age in a system that should be nurturing and looking after them.

Certainly we know that these cases should have been prevented. There has not been scrutiny, there has not been transparency, and this is a government that has been hiding behind failures of its own making. The three bills before the Parliament today, the rapid child safety review and the Ombudsman’s reports in the past – and I know we have had quite extensive discussion on this – reveal that there were systemic failures. There was a fragmented system where the regulators would not speak to each other, there were dangerous individuals who were slipping between agencies and between the cracks and there was intelligence not being shared across departments – and we hear that regularly; we hear about silos in departments. Red flags were being ignored. The failure of the working with children checks combined with weak enforcement and understaffed regulators is a recipe for the most disastrous times for vulnerable children and their families.

From 2018 to 2023 Victoria saw complaints increase by 48 per cent. We saw enforcement actions fall by 67 per cent and we saw actions taken by the quality assessment and regulation division drop from one per 20 complaints to one per 88 complaints. These are failures, and what we see is that educators dismissed in terms of sexual conduct kept holding onto working with children checks for years. We saw that a man arrested with a thousand child abuse images retained a working with children check for four years. How is this happening? Please, it needs to stop. We saw a childcare worker charged with 70 offences resulting in 2000 children needing STI tests.

The Nationals and the Liberals will always support practical steps that make children safer. But we also need a government that stands up for what is right. Very soon, toward the end of my contribution, I am going to read in a document. It is a public report by the Guardian, and it is a case that I have sincere and tender knowledge of because the parent, the mother and the child have come into my office and sat down over years in my electorate – and with a disability school in my electorate. The torment, the frustration and the concern of parents for their children, particularly in the disability sector – not only is it in the education sector, it is in the disability education sector – really is heartbreaking for them. You wonder how they do not get so exhausted belting their heads against the wall, both at the school sometimes but also at the police force sometimes. And there are complications, particularly when children with disability may be non-verbal, but parents can often read their children beautifully well, infinitely well. They know when something is wrong, they know the signs, but when the Department of Education does not take them seriously, that is when the huge pain, frustration, and injustice occurs. I digress slightly, and I will come back to that shortly, on the implications of these new bills, one passed earlier on this year, and these two more that we fully support.

The Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority Bill will hopefully and overwhelmingly provide a pathway for more sanity for not only parents in the disability sector but parents of children in the early childhood sector and also in our state system of education. This bill is triggered by years of failure. It establishes an independent early childhood regulator with 100 staff and intelligence sharing – let us hope there is intelligence sharing – and the ability to act on unsubstantiated intelligence and cumulative risk. That is exactly what the case that I know well, that has been reported in the Guardian recently, goes to. I thank those parents so strongly for their continued advocacy on this. We support an empowered watchdog. We support parents who deserve to know why warning signs were ignored for all those years and the differences that this could have made.

I want to go to the third bill in this trilogy, which is the Early Childhood Legislation Amendment (Child Safety) Bill, which strengthens child safety measures. It has a new inappropriate conduct offence. It triples the maximum penalties and provides for infringement motions, notices for breaches and power to suspend or supervise workers – again, very, very important – in certain circumstances. It establishes the national early childhood worker registration scheme. It bans personal devices in services. This is very much mimicking the great work that the Liberals and Nationals have done in the Safe from the Start plan. I commend the now Liberal Leader of the Opposition, Jess Wilson, who did a power of investigative work and very responsible policy planning that the government has finally caught up to. The pattern of this delay and neglect and political convenience we see is highly alarming. For years, as I have said, the government ignored the Ombudsman. It allowed unsafe individuals to move between childcare centres and disability sectors. It left regulators understaffed and underpowered, and it rejected the coalition’s Worker Screening Amendment (Safety of Children) Bill 2025 in August, only to bring it in a few weeks later.

I want to spend some time on the second of the trilogy, which is the Social Services Regulation Amendment (Child Safety, Complaints and Worker Regulation) Bill, noting that this bill that is in here today that we look to carve out and send off for improvement merges the disability services commissioner, the Victorian Disability Worker Commission and the Disability Worker Registration Board of Victoria into the new mega regulator called the Social Services Regulator. We are sincerely concerned in relation to this.

My very good colleague and friend the Shadow Minister for Disability Tim Bull has been a huge advocate in this area, and I commend all the work that he has done. He has not only lived experience of this but a wealth of knowledge that the government would be served well to tap into and listen to his very sensible approach. And I have now realised he is in the chamber, so I wish I had not said such kind words about him because I do not want him to get too big an ego.

But anyway, the key model about this is that it directly contradicts the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability recommendation 11.3, which calls for an independent, co-designed and one-stop complaints body. It does not call for a mega regulatory amalgamation all lumped in together. Indeed the social services bill is over 400 pages long. Mr Mulholland and Mr Bull had about 12 hours to read through it and make some decent comments and gain an understanding of it. One of the key things about this was that there is no genuine consultation, and particularly Disability Advocacy Victoria and the Disabled People’s Organisations Australia, representing more than 20 disability groups, said that they were not consulted. This is not good enough, and we will certainly hope that the good work that Mr Bull has done in terms of discussing the carve-out with the crossbench and the remodelling comes to fruition.

Quickly in the last 4 minutes that I have I want to hail and say thank you to a huge advocacy advocate, and that is Julie Phillips, the CEO of the Disability Discrimination Legal Service. She spoke to us when we had our education inquiry. I know she has also spoken in terms of the further inquiry that is going through on communication and consultation, so she is there at the very forefront. She says it how it is, and she has written to me in response to the Minister for Disability, Minister Blandthorn in this house – I asked some questions at a question time – and she said, Julie Phillips:

There is no evidence that a “one size fits all” regulator will benefit or protect people with disabilities.

I note that you –

‘you’ being me, Melina –

did not receive a dignified response when you asked whether the Minister had consulted with Disabled Persons Organisations Victoria. I repeat, there was no consultation about this decision with any representative body of people with disabilities in Victoria, an omission also in non-compliance with the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

Well, thank you very much, Julie, and I could go on, because she is very prolific in her commentary and her advice to government.

I just want to spend a couple of minutes reading in something that has come from Adeshola Ore from the Guardian. This parent, whose name is named in there but is not her real name, speaks about a bus chaperone who was allegedly sexually assaulting a non-verbal child, who I have also met in the past. Part of this article says:

The apology came after investigation by the state’s child safety regulator - the Commission for Children and Young People … which said the conduct of the school’s principal and assistant principal in response to the allegations “amounted to neglect” of their students’ safety.

The article goes on to explain that the parent was alarmed because the bus chaperone was still engaged by the school to be in the environs, to be at the school, while there was an allegation and a charge was being investigated. The parent, Beth, said:

My heart sunk. I couldn’t believe that they allowed him access to her …

‘Her’ meaning her daughter. The article finishes off:

Years later, Beth received a letter from the then department of education secretary, Jenny Atta, expressing “sincere apologies that the school did not adequately or appropriately respond” when she reported that the bus chaperone allegedly sexually assaulted her daughter.

“I apologise that the school and the department failed to implement adequate risk mitigation strategies while the allegation was being actively investigated by Victoria police,” the letter seen by Guardian Australia said.

The point I make with this is that when we deal with children – our most vulnerable and precious resource, the most precious beings that we have in this state, the future of our state – and when there is a concern, when parents are going not only to the schools and to the principals but to the police, they should be believed at a primary level. If not, if there is concern – and there is always an alleged situation – the utmost care should be taken. These sorts of bills that we are agreeing to pass today, which mimic ours from August, are of paramount importance. Children and families should be protected. As I conclude, we support elements of this combination.

Sitting suspended 6:32 pm until 7:33 pm.

 Ryan BATCHELOR (Southern Metropolitan) (19:33): I am pleased to rise to speak on these bills in cognate debate. The recent allegations of abuse in multiple childcare centres across Victoria have been extremely distressing to many of us, not only those of us who are parents but also those of us who know families with children, who know children. I acknowledge the lasting impacts this is going to have on children, their families and the Victorian community.

The government acknowledges the need for an overhaul of the child safety system here in Victoria, and the government is acting on that overhaul to ensure we have the most robust and effective systems in place to keep Victorian children safe and to rebuild community confidence in the early childhood education and care (ECEC) sector. That is why the government moved quickly in July – when these allegations, particularly the most recent of these allegations, were made public – to commission the rapid child safety review led by Jay Weatherill and Pam White. The review, in its short but effective timeframe, made 22 recommendations to drive improvement in child safety. The government accepted all of those recommendations and has committed to implementing them. The legislation before us today is part of that implementation, an important part of the implementation of the recommendations of the rapid review into child safety here in Victoria.

The reforms before us today in this legislation are comprehensive and significant and put child safety at the heart of every decision. The key objectives of these bills are to improve the safety of children in early childhood education and care services, because protecting children in this state is of paramount importance to the Victorian government. The rapid review identified key actions for the government to improve child safety, including actions Victoria can take to accelerate the child safety reforms that are being considered nationally. This is going to strengthen safety standards in early childhood education and care to keep Victorian children safe.

We understand how many parents are feeling, and we understand the expectations of the broader community, because no parent should be concerned about dropping their child off at their day care or early learning centre in the morning. That is why these bills are part of a suite of measures intended to safeguard our children and protect the most vulnerable in our community. Obviously, in this cognate debate we are debating three bills to achieve these outcomes. They will implement the recommendations of the Victorian rapid child safety review, respond to recommendations from the review, make some changes to the Social Services Regulator and establish the Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority and the Victorian early childhood worker register. Together these three bills will make a comprehensive, practical change to the sector and meet the expectations of the community.

It is very clear that the early childhood education and care sector has expanded rapidly in recent years, driven largely by policy settings put in place by the federal government. All governments need to stay ahead of the expansion to address future risks. The bills before us today send a very strong signal about the importance of putting children’s safety ahead of financial incentives, and it is critical that we pass these bills because they will enable the implementation of the national child safety review and other agreed national child safety reforms. This is very critical for a number of reasons. Firstly, passing these bills ensures that we put the safety, rights and best interests of our children at the centre for all people who are involved in the early childhood education and care sector, because the safety of children should be the most important motive driving everyone involved in this sector.

The Early Childhood Legislation Amendment (Child Safety) Bill 2025, one of the three bills included in the cognate debate here today, allows the confidence of parents, carers and the community in that sector to be restored, and this confidence will be built upon strengthening compliance and improving regulatory authorities. It is going to introduce new offences for inappropriate conduct and new mandatory training requirements for child protection and child safety. Predators’ use of technology as a means of sharing abuse materials has become evident, and we need to make sure that our laws are moving with the modern lives we live and are fit for the technological environment we live in. To counter the nefarious means by which criminals use technology, this bill increases the regulation of that technology and the safety of the early childhood service environment. It will also increase the information-gathering and information-sharing powers between regulators. This will lead to improvements in educator practices, qualifications and understanding of child safety obligations. It will also increase the transparency of information about compliance of providers and individuals, and the bill expands the powers of regulatory authorities and the minister to take action to address compliance issues at the individual, provider and system level.

One of the other bills as part of this cognate debate and suite of reforms before us today is the Social Services Regulation Amendment (Child Safety, Complaints and Worker Regulation) Bill 2025. This bill consolidates key child safeguarding functions – the working with children check, the reportable conduct scheme and the Commission for Children and Young People’s current oversight of the child safe standards – into the Social Services Regulator. This is going to result in a strengthened, independent authority to regulate child safety. It is going to overhaul the working with children check, enabling the regulator to consider unsubstantiated allegations and exclude workers from receiving a clearance on the basis of a lower threshold.

The Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority Bill 2025, the third of the three bills being considered in the cognate debate, establishes an independent regulator for ECEC services and a register of workers within the sector. By establishing the register, the bill brings together into a single system the details of all staff working with children in the early childhood education and care sector. This will enable the Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority to quickly track and trace individuals working in the sector if required; a capacity that puts Victoria in a nation-leading position. It also makes explicit provision for the new authority to share information on the register with the Social Services Regulator for the purposes of that regulator performing its functions or exercising its powers. The reforms in this suite of bills are significant, and given their size, scale and complexity, they will be introduced progressively to enable a smooth transition. This will be supported by targeted communication to impacted entities and social services stakeholders.

It is very important that we underscore that the safety of children in early childhood education and care settings is fundamental. It is fundamental to ensuring that they can turn up to child care – or any other type of early learning or care service – and immerse themselves in play and play-based learning, receiving the full, rich developmental experience most workers and services strive to provide for every child in their care. I know that as a parent, but also as someone who in the course of being an elected representative travels to and talks with many services and also many educators involved in the early childhood education and care sector. From the engagement that we do as elected representatives with those who work in these settings – whether they be in childcare settings or in kindergartens – we do know just how dedicated so many workers and so many educators in the early childhood education and care sector are to delivering this rich, play-based early learning environment. We can see how significantly the children who receive that high-quality early learning and care thrive in those environments. They are at a time in their lives when they are developing at phenomenal rates. Their brain functions are developing, their social functions are developing, and the way they engage with the world changes, often on a daily basis. The commitment that so many in the early childhood education and care sector provide to the children that they are charged with the responsibility of not only caring for but also helping to develop is remarkable. I want to take this moment to pay tribute to all of those who work in these settings and who are doing such an incredible job for our children and for our community as a whole.

Sadly, the bills before us today and the reforms before us today – the imperative that we see to do what we need to do here – are being driven by the actions of a very small few. But given the importance of the task that they are entrusted to perform and given the importance of keeping our children safe, these reforms in the package of bills that are before us today are incredibly necessary and they are incredibly important. They are part of this government’s determination to make sure that all Victorian children are educated and cared for in settings that are as safe as we can possibly make them. If we can provide these settings that deliver on that promise, we can provide those children with the rich educational experiences that are so important to them and deliver the best start in their lives. We can assure the families – the parents, the carers and the wider families – of those children the peace of mind that when their children are in the early learning education and care settings that are regulated here in the state of Victoria, they are receiving the best possible care in the safest possible environment. We recognise it is critical to ensure that for everyone who works in this sector, at whatever level it be – from the floor of the services through to the boardrooms of the committees of management or the boards who govern those services – the interests of those children are what is most fundamental and of highest priority in their service. Children deserve to be safe wherever they learn, wherever they play and wherever they grow. That is what these bills are designed to achieve, and I commend these bills to the house.

 Ann-Marie HERMANS (South-Eastern Metropolitan) (19:45): I rise today to enter into the debate on the three pieces of legislation which are being debated concurrently: the Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority Bill 2025, 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. This is incredibly important obviously in the area that I represent in the South-Eastern Metropolitan Region because it is a very large family region.

When I have spoken to parents in recent times and throughout the year, especially when the allegations were known to most of Victoria, there were parents saying to me that they were taking a week off work because they were afraid to take their children to child care. There were mothers that were so distressed that they simply did not know what to do. Another one contacted me to say that their child was undergoing medical treatment, but they did not get back to me. I understand that it is a very distressing time for all those involved.

In the South-Eastern Metropolitan area that I represent, according to the Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority national register there are between 360 and 380 childcare services, and I can say that this sector is continually growing. This is just across five of the local government areas; I represent seven. It reflects both the rapid population growth in Casey and Cardinia and the dense urban demand in Monash and Frankston. The scale of this sector underscores the importance of getting reform right. It also underscores the importance of acting quickly. I have to say that I was a little perplexed, dismayed and shocked to discover how different this sector is compared to the teaching sector, which is highly regulated, and I was really, really distressed to think that little babies and children, who do not have the ability to communicate what they have suffered adequately in words, could be taken advantage of. Even more distressing has been that parents of adults that have a disability, who are constantly fighting for special services, have mentioned to me that some of the behavioural issues that they have with their adult family members that require special school services are because of abuse that has taken place. I find the whole issue really, really distressing.

We have reforms before us today, but they are incredibly overdue. They are necessary, but they should have been implemented when the government’s rapid child safety review highlighted how important and how urgent they were. We have a government here that talks a lot about accountability, but it acts when it is politically convenient. We should not have had to wait such a long time for bills like this to come into the house. We know that child safety is something that needs to be acted on immediately, especially when we have information that suggests that our children in child care are being abused. The distress of that for parents – words cannot explain what these parents would be feeling. Even for those whose children have been safe there are the additional fears when they realise that the childcare centres that they have do not have some of the safeguards in place to protect their children. We are not going to be opposing a lot of these necessary safeguards, but we are concerned with the way this has happened as a triple drop.

I want to go through for you the timeline of the early childhood policy failures. As far back as 2018 there were complaints to the quality and regulatory division about childcare providers, and they began to increase significantly. Between 2018 and 2023 complaints rose by 45 per cent while enforcement actions declined by 67 per cent. In fact in 2018 there was only one enforcement action for every 20 complaints. I am sorry, but that in itself is negligence; it is abuse. 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. That was 2020. Despite this, the educator’s working with children check remained active, allowing him to continue working in child care. I simply do not understand that; that would not happen in schools. The government regulator did not issue a prohibitive notice to prevent him from working until 2024.

Let us look at 2021. A man named Mr Marks was arrested for possessing nearly 1000 child abuse images. Despite his arrest, he retained a valid working with children check for four years after his arrest. This allowed him to continue entering childcare centres and kindergartens. Once again, this is abuse, it is negligence, and this government is responsible. 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. This is all after we have this information about paedophiles and abuse of young toddlers. The Victorian Ombudsman released findings warning the government that Victoria’s working with children check system was among the weakest in the nation and recommended several reforms, the first of these being to allow the regulator to act on credible risk information without requiring a conviction or charge; secondly, to permit the secretary of the department to access and consider any relevant information to determine suitability; and thirdly, to ensure suspensions remain in force until appeals are resolved. We see this being built into one of these bills, but this is just a little bit too late. Thousands of children have had their lives totally devastated because the government did not respond to these recommendations in a timely manner. That was way back in 2022.

Let us go to 2023, when this Parliament was in place – the 60th Parliament. By that year, enforcement actions by the quality and regulatory division had dropped to one per 88 complaints, indicating a severe decline in the regulatory response compared to 2018. What was going on? 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. How could this be? Well, this was the one that actually started to bring about and highlight the need for massive changes and the fact that there were different groups not talking to each other so that this sort of information could not be tracked properly or was not tracked and was not being looked at and we were having these sorts of things happen. When July 2025 came about – this is the incident that most people are familiar with in recent times – the childcare worker Mr Brown was charged with more than 70 offences, including sexual assault and producing child abuse material relating to allegations involving eight alleged victims. There could be so many more; 2000 children have been identified as requiring sexually transmitted disease testing. Two thousand children are implicated in this. It is simply not good enough. The Commission for Children and Young People was aware Mr Brown’s employer had investigated and substantiated two complaints that he was aggressive towards children in the two years before his arrest, and yet Mr Brown was still being employed. The government introduced new regulations in response to these shocking allegations, but these regulations did not get fully implemented in terms of the Ombudsman’s 22 recommendations. The loopholes have been allowing dangerous individuals to work with children, and these loopholes need to be closed.

Let us fast-forward now to early August 2025: again, the ABC reported that the educator dismissed in 2020 still held a valid working with children check despite being prohibited from working with children. This revelation prompted public outrage and questions about the government’s inaction. By mid-2025 – this is before August – the government had launched its rapid review into child safety systems following public and media pressure. It should not have required public and media pressure, and I want to thank the media and the journalists out there who took these stories up and made sure that the public were aware of it. We need you to speak up for the families and for the children. It is important that the public know the sorts of things that are not being dealt with adequately.

The review was criticised as being a review of reviews and duplicating prior work which had already been ignored by the government. The government appointed former Labor Premier of South Australia Jay Weatherill to oversee it, a figure linked to child abuse controversies in that state, and crucially, the regulator was explicitly excluded from the review scope, limiting its effectiveness. In August 2025 the Liberal and National coalition introduced the Worker Screening Amendment (Safety of Children) Bill 2025, and I want to congratulate and thank our now leader Jess Wilson for the work that she did on this. She is a young mum. Can you imagine having a 12- or 14-month-old baby as she does now? And this baby was even younger when she was working on this. You can imagine how personal this is – the thought that she has to work and needs a carer for her child and that there were other mothers out there whose babies were at risk.

The bill proposed reforms based on the Ombudsman’s 2022 recommendations, including the following: taking immediate action on credible information linking the working with children system to the Victorian police database; maintaining suspensions during appeals; reducing the working with children validity from five years to three; and mandating training in child safety, reporting obligations and abuse awareness. I will just say that that mandated training takes place in schools for teachers. They all have to do it, and they do it regularly; they do it every year. That is what the Liberal–Nationals put up in August 2025. We could have had some reform if this arrogant government had been prepared to act immediately and listen to the work that we had done. Keep in mind that Jess is a young mum, so this is personal for her, yet the Allan Labor government voted down this bill. Why? Because it was not their bill. They do not want to do anything that is not theirs, and yet they needed to have the reform.

In October 2025 the government missed its own deadline in response to the rapid review, which identified three key changes: changes to the reportable conduct scheme, establishing a new shared intelligence and risk assessment capability and bringing child safety risk information together in one place, and thirdly, the third change, the establishment of an independent regulator. As a result of this delay, in November here we are rushing three pieces of legislation through the Parliament, allowing the opposition and the minor parties in some cases less than 24 hours to properly scrutinise two of the bills – that is, the social services regulation amendment bill and the early childhood legislation amendment bill. I do want to mention too, as my time finishes, the situation with disability, The bill states that it merges the disability services commissioner, the Victorian Disability Worker Commission and the Disability Worker Registration Board into the new Social Services Regulator, but the issue that we have here is that there have been a number of people that have not actually been allowed to have any say in this. The bottom line is that the Social Services Regulator has been established without co-design with the Victorian disability community. This is simply not good enough, and we have some amendments for this. We hope that the government will support us, because we do not want to get it wrong – our children are too precious. All children deserve to feel safe when they are being looked after by childcare centre workers and in childcare centres.

 Moira DEEMING (Western Metropolitan) (20:00): Here we are again, talking about the child safeguarding crisis in Victoria. Every government claims to care about child safety, but it is not something that can be achieved by renaming regulators or updating definitions or endless reviews. Child safety actually does have a benchmark in this country. It was set by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, a five-year national investigation drawing on 8000 survivor testimonies, 1.2 million documents, 57 public hearings and the most rigorous forensic analysis Australia has ever undertaken into how children are harmed and how to prevent it. There is no government in Australia, no other level of government, that has produced work of that calibre. It is the gold standard because it does not flinch from the truth; it names the patterns, it names the causes, it names the cultural structures that predators exploit and it actually prescribes the remedy.

Today we are going to be debating three bills that the government insists will strengthen child safety in Victoria. This government has claimed multiple times across the years that it has honoured the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, that it has implemented it through the Victorian child safe standards. Again we are being told that these three bills go further, but that claim really just cannot withstand the evidence, can it? Clearly, Victoria never, ever implemented the royal commission findings. Clearly, they inverted those findings, and that is why we have had over a decade-long child safeguarding crisis that has only ever got worse: a 32 per cent rise in early childhood abuse and neglect, a 136 per cent rise in reportable conduct notifications, child-on-child sexual assault escalating in schools, porn-fuelled aggression in children too young to understand what they are even imitating and a regulatory system admitting that it just cannot cope.

What the royal commission required is the same thing that Victoria erased. It begins with a very uncomfortable truth for some in this state: child sexual abuse is not random; it is patterned and, crucially, it is sexed. It is overwhelmingly perpetrated by males. I say this openly because prevention requires naming reality. The final report, in volume 10, says that understanding sex-based patterns is essential to prevention. That was not bigotry, that was not outdated ideology; that was the sum of 8000 survivor testimonies. The commission warned that when institutions hide the sexed nature of child abuse, they blind themselves to grooming, to escalation and to risk clustering. The Victorian child safe standards barely mention the words male and female. The incident categories, which this bill imports directly, reduce behaviours to abstract euphemisms, like inappropriate behaviour, boundary breaches, voyeurism – all stripped of the sex-specific patterns that make them identifiable. That is not increasing safety; that is disarming everybody who wants to enact child safeguards.

Voyeurism: think about that – unwanted watching of people when they are supposed to be in private situations. Well, isn’t that just exactly what is going on when women and girls are told that they are not allowed to say no when they have a person of the opposite sex who is allowed to come in and supervise them and when they have got boys allowed to come into their change rooms and male teachers who say they are females allowed to supervise them in their change rooms? We have put into the law the opposite of what the royal commission said was so important.

Think about the Joshua Brown case. For more than two years staff documented aggressive boundary-testing behaviour, but because the system has no mechanism to track male pattern escalation, those early red flags never converged, so many children were harmed. Nearly 2000 children had to go for STI testing, which will go down in this state’s history as one of the most disgraceful child safeguarding failures ever. But it is a predictable outcome of a framework that forbids institutions from naming the patterns that the royal commission told us must never be ignored.

Then there is record keeping. The royal commission found that abuse persisted because institutions failed to keep records, buried complaints or refused to join information together. The final report said records of complaints and concerns must be kept permanently so that patterns can be identified. Of course we know Victoria has done the opposite. They do not mandate record keeping in mature-minded decisions, in identity interventions in school, in pornography-exposed behaviours, in repeated boundary issues, in early grooming indicators or in patterns of harmful sexual behaviour. The Commission for Children and Young People, as we have heard, reported a 136 per cent increase in reportable conduct notifications followed by another 30 per cent increase, and yet the regulator was chronically under-resourced.

Of course the cost is not just money, is it? A child educator dismissed in 2020 for grooming and kissing toddlers retained a valid working with children check until 2025. There was no record that triggered cross-agency alerts, no prohibition notice and no integration between what the centre knew and what the regulator needed to know.

We have heard about Ronald Marks, arrested with nearly 1000 child abuse images. He kept his working with children check for four years after his arrest. He continued entering early childhood environments while under criminal investigation. I mean, how on earth? You cannot possibly just call these bureaucratic errors. This is a structural issue. It is an outcome of a system that is designed to be blind to the very patterns the royal commission told us must never, ever again be allowed to be invisible. Everybody in Australia knew. These bills before us tonight consolidate some functions, but they do not mandate the core record keeping that would have prevented both of those scandals. A system that cannot remember cannot protect, cannot prevent.

Then there are boundaries. The royal commission said that it was essential to have boundaries. Children must be protected from sexualised adult environments. Clear boundaries save lives and prevent abuse. But Victoria has actually dismantled boundaries left, right and centre. Let us go through a few. Under section 11A of the Sex Work Act 1994, retained in the 2022 reforms, infants under 18 months may lawfully be present inside brothels. Under the 2022 decriminalisation reforms, children of any age may be present while sexual services are provided in private homes. There is no valid reason to have a child anywhere near sex work ever – ever. And we have got sex work in public spaces. You can put sexualised advertising in public spaces. You can have nude activism if it is for some trees or a bike ride or something. You can just go out there naked in front of children if you have got some kind of – I do not know – cause. No. Put your clothes on in front of children – end of. There is no excuse for ignoring the royal commission and for forcing everybody in this state and our children to be less safe because of it. Safeguarding experts describe this kind of cultural environment as a boundary-eroding ecosystem. Children absorb sexual cues earlier, adults become desensitised, as do children, and early warning instincts – which is what we need; the human firewall – are weakened.

Predators need to stand out from the background. It needs to be very easy to distinguish when someone is crossing a line. That is why when I was a teacher, if kids were crying, I would say, ‘Look, I can see you’re sad and I can see you need a hug, but I must not give you one, because then you will not know the difference between a predatory teacher and a good teacher.’ There are certain things you cannot do because it is confusing to children. Consider the staff in the early childhood services who told reviewers that they no longer knew whether certain behaviours were worrying or just what kids pick up on the internet. It is that kind of hesitation that is the door that predators go through. Educators said things like, ‘Oh, I didn’t want to overreact. It’s hard to know what’s normal anymore.’ It should be very clear. It should be very, very clear to everybody involved in child safeguarding exactly what is and is not reasonable, normal or beyond the line.

Harmful sexual behaviour and pornography: this is the emerging crisis that Victoria refuses to name. The royal commission foresaw that harmful sexual behaviours among children would become a major safeguarding challenge, and the Australian child maltreatment study found that adolescent males are now the highest offending group against younger children. Did you hear that? Our teenage boys are now the highest offending group against younger children. The New South Wales pornography inquiry heard that violent porn is driving choking, coercion and peer sexual assault. Teachers nationwide report harmful sexual behaviours in primary schools. I have had so many cases referred to my office, and they are linked to pornography. But in Victoria the child safe standards do not mention it. We have curriculums that teach children to analyse pornography. They do not warn them about it; they teach them to analyse it, to look at it, to judge it and to use it if they like it. That is ridiculous. That is negligent. It is also one of the steps in grooming.

Then you have got the fact that paedophilia, which I like to call paedosadism, is not allowed to be called a mental illness and treated until after the person acts on it and commits a crime. What on earth. Sexual attraction to children is not a legitimate sexual orientation. It has nothing to do with normal sexual orientation. It is not legitimate. It is a mental illness and we should treat it. We should try to eradicate that. And if you look for help, you cannot get help before you commit the crime. I mean – ridiculous.

Then parents – the royal commission’s most important partner and the one Victoria erased. The royal commission said children are safest when institutions work with families and parents, not around them. Of course we have all heard here many times now that Victoria has erased parental rights. They can do whatever they want, basically, behind parents’ backs. They do not have to tell them anything. They do not have to keep records about anything. Parents cannot protect children from danger that they are not even told exists. None of these bills restore parental notification or parental primacy despite the commission’s clear requirement. These bills are all about administrative tidying; they are not about safeguarding reform. This government wants credit for reorganising regulators, but administrative consolidation is not safeguarding.

After everything the royal commission taught us, after everything survivors endured to give this Parliament and every Parliament in this country the truth, the Victorian government has built a safeguarding system that contradicts the evidence at every turn. It has erased sex, even though the commission said that it is vital for safeguarding children. It has ignored pornography, while the evidence shows it is driving unprecedented harm. It has dismantled boundaries, while predators depend on that same boundary collapse. It has failed to keep records, when the commission had already said that is the only pathway to justice. And it has created laws that affirm every sexual orientation – which would be fine if it excluded paedophilia – whilst telling children that the system is safe. That is not safeguarding. It is state-sanctioned risk, actually, and today’s bills do not correct that failure. It is just another self-congratulatory missed opportunity to look after children, and it is a disgrace.

John BERGER (Southern Metropolitan) incorporated the following:

President, I rise to make a contribution for this cognate debate discussing the Allan Labor government’s reform agenda for child safety with the Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority Bill 2025, the Social Services Regulation Amendment (Child Safety, Complaints and Worker Regulation) Bill 2025, and the Early Childhood Legislation Amendment (Child Safety) Bill 2025.

In doing so I would like to first thank my friend the Minister for Children, Minister Blandthorn, for her work in helping put together this comprehensive reform package to ensure that every Victorian can have the assurance that their child will be safe and looked after.

President, nothing matters more than the safety, dignity and wellbeing of children.

Early this year, allegations, nothing short of horrifying for many communities, arose of abuse in the early childhood setting.

Those events made one truth painfully obvious: we need to strengthen protections so they are more connected and more responsive than ever before.

That is why the Allan Labor government commissioned a rapid review of child safety in July.

I would like to acknowledge the critical work of Mr Jay Weatherill and Ms Pam White in leading this review into child safety law.

The rapid child safety review, which was provided to the government in August this year, aimed to identify key actions that we can take to improve child safety in Victoria.

Their work set out 22 recommendations aimed at improving every facet of our child safeguarding.

The government has accepted every single one of these recommendations and is committed to implementing all of them.

And these bills are part of the Allan Labor government’s plan to adopt all 22 recommendations.

President, Victoria’s early childhood education and childcare network is a vast network of various centres situated all around Victoria, delivering quality care for all children.

However, it has become apparent there is urgent need for reform.

Every parent deserves to know their child is safe and supported when they walk through the doors of a kinder or childcare centre.

These reforms will first establish a new Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority.

Currently, early childhood education services are overseen by the Department of Education’s quality assessment and regulation division, also known as the QARD.

This division is responsible for the child safe standards in Victoria.

However, the Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority Bill will establish a new body to replace it, with more powers and broader reach.

This is consistent with recommendation 9 of the child safety review.

The bills will also establish in law the Victorian early childhood worker register as well as the necessary powers for the new Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority to maintain this register and share information as necessary.

The establishment of this register is a key reform derived from the recommendations of the child safety review.

The safety of children in early childhood education and care settings is paramount.

It is where young children can immerse themselves in play-based learning and be looked after.

These early education centres play a crucial role in children’s lives and development.

They help provide Victorians with the best start in life, educating and caring for them, while their parents can enjoy the peace of mind while at work that their children are being looked after.

That is why we need to act now to introduce these new reforms, which will go far in strengthening the protections in place for these centres through a stronger oversight and regulatory system.

And it will meet the recommendations set out in the rapid review.

President, these bills follow the review’s recommendation to introduce legislation to help aid in establishing an independent regulator for ECEC services and a register of workers in the sector.

This register will bring together, into a single system, the details of all staff working with children in the early childhood education sector.

Through this register, the Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority, which will be established into law with these bills, will be able to quickly track and trace individuals working in the ECEC sector if required.

This would be a nation-leading reform.

It would set in place a new system which will do away with any inefficiencies in the current model.

The past few months have shown us the mismatch in employment information concerning some childcare centre workers – some records incomplete, some incorrect.

It was not up to scratch.

If we want a regulatory system which is effective and can keep our children safe, we need to have a framework which can trace and track this information on its own, without having to chase up various centres for their records.

That’s why we are strengthening and consolidating the operations of the Social Services Regulator by bringing the working with children check, the reportable conduct scheme and child safe standards all under their jurisdiction.

This will be in place by early 2026 and will empower the regulator to act quickly and decisively in their capacity to reassess, refuse, suspend or revoke a WWCC when credible information is received to justify it as such.

Specifically, these powers will ensure that anyone banned from child-related work interstate will be banned in Victoria.

For childcare and early education workers, they will require a WWCC clearance to be immediately suspended while it is under reassessment for intended revocation, with no exceptions.

They will ensure that a WWCC clearance can be cancelled if it was obtained using false or misleading information or if the individual is prohibited from applying for a clearance to protect children from those who try to deceive the system.

And they will extend the time limits for laying charges where false information has been provided to obtain a WWCC clearance from 12 months to five years and six months.

The bills also allow for the Social Services Regulator and the VECRA to exchange information.

President, the bills create an offence and penalty for approved providers who fail to submit the required information to the new early childhood regulation authority.

There will also be offences and penalties in place for unauthorised access to the register and furthermore for inappropriately using or disclosing information from the register.

This is principally to protect the privacy of our early childhood education workforce while ensuring our children remain safe.

The maximum penalties for these offences are 60 penalty units for a natural person and 300 penalty units for a body corporate.

We’re taking privacy seriously, and it’s crucial that with a register or database of this nature we keep the appropriate security measures in place to protect our workforce’s information.

Alongside this, however, it is important to ensure that the system is transparent and we can keep people accountable.

The regulation of early childhood education services, children’s services and child safe standards for the sector will all be brought together with the visibility of employment for every worker in the sector.

That will be done under the responsibility of the newly created office of early childhood regulator, who will oversee that network system and ensure its orderly operation.

The importance of transparency cannot be understated.

When considering any potential investigation, it is incredibly important that we have accurate records of someone’s employment history, where they may be working, and so forth.

President, child care is one of those few sectors that does not neatly fit within the purview of either the state or Commonwealth governments.

Like many ventures, this is a sector that takes governance direction from both levels of government.

Childcare and other early childhood education reforms cannot be done by Victoria alone.

They are a national effort.

President, by giving more powers to the Social Services Regulator and bringing the working with children check, reportable conduct scheme, and child safe standards together, we are ensuring we are keeping our information secure and our kids safe.

For too long, the relevant information needed in these cases has been unnecessarily spread across different systems and databases that do not communicate.

It is highly inefficient and ineffective to keep sensitive information like this as separate between entities, rather than collated as one.

President, the new Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority is likely to double the number of compliance checks and strengthen oversight.

It is a key part of our reform agenda from the rapid child safety review and builds on the immediate action we’ve taken to strengthen the working with children check, restrict personal devices and establish an early childhood worker register.

From 1 January 2026, it will begin operations and deliver a more streamlined yet effective regulatory system for early childhood education.

With more applications processed and twice as many compliance checks conducted, Victorians can expect a safer system that weeds out bad actors.

Nothing is more important than the safety and wellbeing of our youngest Victorians.

Children deserve to be safe wherever they learn, play and grow.

It is critical that we work to ensure the safety of all children who attend early childhood learning centres across Victoria.

The Allan Labor government has long been committed to the idea that every Victorian, no matter their background, deserves the best start at life.

And for our youngest Victorians, a vast portion of their early years is spent at these centres.

The principle of every Victorian having the best start in life in our early childhood education system is built on everyone having a safe and secure space to learn, play, and grow.

And these bills are building onto our existing record on strengthening these protections.

Whether it’s the reforms to the working with children check embedded in these bills or to the regulatory oversights with the system, the Allan Labor government is committed to further reforms to make sure we have a world-class early childhood education system.

The new Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority will be headed by the early childhood regulator, who will report directly to the Minister for Children.

That additional layer will provide even more oversight over the regulator’s operations and provide for more transparency and security.

This is better for our oversight and regulatory bodies, as they will be under greater scrutiny to perform, and it is better for Victorian families, who deserve a safe childcare for their children.

President, this reform builds on the Allan Labor government’s past record of delivering critical reforms for the early childhood education sector.

Many in this chamber will remember the amendments to worker screening, which in effect strengthened our screening laws around workers with a working with children check.

That legislation sought to support the protection of children by screening the criminal history of an applicant and provided information of relevant regulatory and disciplinary findings of people who work with children.

In the same spirit as that important and crucial piece of legislation, this one also moves towards greater flow of information between agencies.

Both of these are key elements in the 22 recommendations from the rapid child safety review, which as I have mentioned already, President, the Allan Labor government is committed to urgently enacting in full.

The goal is for a complete overhaul of Victoria’s child safety system of checking and enforcement.

Reforming early childhood education and care in Victoria, including new and strengthened independent authorities to regulate the system, is of the utmost urgency.

The Allan Labor government has set out its pathway towards achieving all 22 of these recommendations, as well as the timeline.

It included reforms to require best practice for recruitment, induction, and training of new staff in the sector.

This government moved to update the statement of expectations for the ECEC regulatory authority to embed this requirement alongside clear guidance on recruitment and induction, as set out in the rapid review.

This Allan Labor government has set out a timeline for the rest of the recommendations from this review.

We’ve committed that within the next 12 months we will commence the development of a new modified ratings certificate, ahead of them being issued for services.

We have pledged to boost the frequency of publication of compliance and enforcement activity on the QARD website for public viewing, an activity which will soon be subsumed into the new authority.

We will also start a consultation process with parents and stakeholders on prevention education, signs of grooming, and how to raise concerns.

We also will move to commence consultation on how to provide better training and clear guidance on how staff in the early childhood education space can report concerns, allegations and complaints, as part of a ‘speak up’ culture shift.

And subject to further developments across the country on the national framework, there will be a new safety and safeguarding program, developed in conjunction with Early Childhood Australia.

As I have pointed out earlier, President, it is not just a Victorian task but a national reform agenda.

The National Cabinet and the various ministers overseeing early childhood education in the state and territories have all agreed to and have signed up to this new national reform strategy.

It is aimed at creating and providing more certainty and consistency between the various state and territories in the Commonwealth.

It’s great to see that there is a path forward to achieving and enacting all 22 recommendations from this report.

It will take some time for these to all come into effect, but Victorian families, and in particular parents, can rest assured that we are committed to keeping our youngest ones safe.

This new system will be in full force very soon and will do the work necessary to make our childcare system safer.

President, every parent deserves to trust that when they drop their child off at child care, they will be safe and protected.

They are entrusting our hardworking early childhood and education staff to look after their children for the day, and it is important we respect that trust given.

It is deeply unfortunate what has happened in the various childcare centres across Melbourne.

For so many families, it was one of the most traumatising days of their lives.

If we hope to maintain the trust those families have given to our ECEC system, it is vital that we act as quickly as possible to give our children the best protection possible under this new system.

And the Allan Labor government has taken to that task with urgency.

From the rapid review into child safety in these centres to the enactment of these pieces of legislation to build up and enforce the new system, this government has been acting decisively to deliver the necessary reforms to give parents and children that security.

I am proud of these reforms, and I would like to thank everyone who has put countless hours into this reform agenda for early childhood education.

I commend them to the chamber.

 Lizzie BLANDTHORN (Western Metropolitan – Minister for Children, Minister for Disability) (20:15): At the outset, I acknowledge the contributions of members in this place to the cognate debate. This cognate debate speaks to three bills, to a package of reform, a whole package which is currently before the Parliament. It follows the events of July earlier this year, when the government commissioned the rapid review into child safety and the working with children check, which was conducted by Jay Weatherill and Pam White and which included extensive consultation, whilst being a rapid review, with our sector and experts. They developed a report that they delivered to government; it included 22 recommendations, and the government indicated it would accept all of them. The whole package – all three bills, not just elements of the package – is required to enact every single recommendation of this review. We are doing that because that is what we said we would do. We commissioned a rapid child safety review, a review that considered child safety provisions and the working with children check, and we committed to implement every recommendation, and that is what we are doing.

I acknowledge in relation to the discussions that are ongoing on this package of reforms that there is an amendment in my name, which I ask to now be circulated. The amendment is to the Early Childhood Legislation Amendment (Child Safety) Bill 2025. In substance it is to modify the application of the proposed new sections 178A, 178B and 178C in the bill as they apply in Victoria to provide for the show cause process under those provisions to include the staff member or volunteer affected by the relevant direction to the approved provider. This amendment reflects good-faith consultation and matters raised with me as to the importance of workers and not just the provider receiving a show cause notice under these provisions. I thank the United Workers Union for their constructive engagement on this matter.

It is important that we put a few facts on the table in summing up. I will refer to each of the bills in turn. Firstly, I will deal with the Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority Bill 2025. In relation to this bill, it is a very straightforward piece of legislation, making the regulator independent and providing the legislative authority to administer the Victorian register of workers in early childhood settings and services. The purposes are to acquit the government’s response to recommendations 4 and 9 of the rapid child safety review. As Mr Mulholland said, this bill went through the usual process, and I acknowledge Mr Mulholland and his colleagues for their engagement on the content of this bill.

In relation to the bill that provides for the national law and also the bill in relation to the Social Services Regulator (SSR), before I return to those two bills in this package, I want to address the criticism that these bills are being rushed. Mr Mulholland spoke to the need for proper time to consider this legislation. At the outset I would say that Mr Mulholland’s party opposite are the very same party that called for the recall of Parliament to pass child safety bills on 5 July, which was only four days after our first press conference acknowledging the awful, evil allegations in relation to the accused that, if you like, set in train the events which led to the child safety review and whatnot. Indeed those opposite released glossy documents at that time, and they said they:

… stand ready to work constructively with the Government and Parliament to ensure all necessary support is provided to those affected, and that the strongest possible safeguards are in place to prevent such tragedies in future.

Indeed Mr Mulholland asked me a question in this chamber about where those bills were up to and seeking for them to arrive. The necessary time was taken to draft those bills and for them to be adequately consulted on both following the review and in their implementation, but then they say they are rushed and there has not been enough time – it cannot be both.

Evan Mulholland interjected.

Lizzie BLANDTHORN: Mr Mulholland, I note your interjections there, but you have also had briefings with my staff and the department about the bill. If Mr Mulholland had been doing his role as Shadow Minister for Education – I know it is a role he has not had for a lengthy period of time – he would also know that the changes that are proposed to the national law were well developed and broadly consulted on with stakeholders around the country for a lengthy period of time. They have been passed through every jurisdiction’s cabinet to get to this place today.

While we would have liked, as I said when you asked me the question in the chamber, Mr Mulholland, to have brought this bill in October as we acknowledge we committed to, the process of national law being agreed to around the country necessitates that it pass through every jurisdiction. We thank the other jurisdictions for the way in which they engaged with us in a constructive manner to truncate those processes so that we could as quickly as possible bring this legislation here. As Shadow Minister for Education, had you been reading the education minister’s meeting communiqués and following the journey of reform – it has not appeared out of nowhere, but as I have said in a number of press conferences over recent months, in many senses it has been frustratingly slow, but it has indeed been fulsome and well developed to get us to this point today – you would know that with the consultation, the work, the development and the journey of the national law bill to this place, it has actually been one that has taken some time, been well consulted on and well drafted and is in its final stages. We thank other jurisdictions for the quick way in which they worked with us to bring those things here. Another clue, Mr Mulholland, if you are a bit confused about where we were heading, would have been watching the New South Wales Parliament as similar reforms were being made in that jurisdiction in relation to early childhood regulation.

I also want to deal with the comments that have been made in this place in relation to disability in particular, and I also want to reference points on the recommendation from the child safety review in relation to disability specifically, because there seems to be some misconception in the house that the parts of this bill that relate to disability are unrelated to child safety and have just been dropped into this bill. But if people in this house want to actually take the time to read the review – to actually read the report of Mr Weatherill and Ms White – they will find that page 72 of the child safety review states that we need to:

… recognise some children may be at higher risk of sexual abuse – including children with disability …

I want to be clear that it seems that, regrettably, it is only this side of the house that supports every recommendation of the review. If you take the comments that have been made here today, many on that side of the house seem not to support recommendation 8.1, which speaks specifically to the vulnerability of children with disability. Recommendation 8.1 speaks to what we are seeking to do through the Social Services Regulator bill, which is to bring common foundations together. The review stated that there was a need to join up information and create a common foundation across social services and disability. Again, for the benefit of the house: have a look at recommendation 8.1. If you do not support the disability elements of this bill, you do not support recommendation 8.1. Contrary to what some people here tonight have said, this is also consistent with the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability report, and I would ask those who want to stand here and quote the disability royal commission report to actually read it in full as well. I urge you to read the disability royal commission report and the Rapid Child Safety Review, because what they both call for is a joined-up, connected system with no cracks in it for predators to get through, where we can keep children and people with vulnerabilities safe right across our regulatory systems.

What we are proposing to do to implement the recommendations of the royal commission and recommendation 8.1 of our child safety review: encouraging child safety issues in disability services – and out-of-home care, for that matter – being brought to the attention of the regulator through the establishment of a single complaints function. If you do not support the disability part of these bills, you do not support that. NDIS worker screening moving into the SSR – the same enhancements as for the working with children check, but we need the information there to be able to act. Alignment of worker prohibition schemes across disability and out-of-home care – if you are banned from one, you should be banned from the other. Information received in the SSR on lower tier information being actioned and followed up rather than what we have seen, where there has been no further action on issues, as is evidenced in the annual report of the VDWC, the Victorian Disability Worker Commission. Too many things go unactioned, and we want to see that they go actioned so that we keep children safe. And we want to see the establishment of a carers register for out-of-home care.

The proof as to how the current fragmented system of regulation for children and adults with disability is working, or rather not working, is showing, as I said just a moment ago, through those agencies’ recent annual reports. The Victorian Disability Worker Commission’s most recent annual report shows that only five prohibition orders were put on workers in the past 12 months. This constitutes regulatory action for 0.003 per cent of the approximately 150,000 Victorian disability workforce. I wish I could truthfully tell you that this was the extent of conduct in the disability service system in Victoria, but sadly, the latest Commission for Children and Young People annual report states, as I reported to this house in a ministers statement, there has been an increase in the substantiation rate for allegations in the disability sector, rising from 15 per cent in 2023–24 to 44 per cent this year. As Minister for Disability, when I see this rate has risen this significantly and we have a fragmented system of safeguards, this is an environment already being exploited by predators. There are currently four different regulators for disability services working with children. As a result, 90 per cent of the complaints received by the disability services commissioner, and this again is in their own report, had to be referred elsewhere, including to the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission and to the Social Services Regulator. Most importantly, the new Leader of the Opposition backs our proposal to fix the issues in this bill. Despite the comments of Mr Mulholland – I am sure on behalf of the Shadow Minister for Disability, Ageing, Carers and Volunteers mind you – indicating that they now oppose implementing this recommendation of the rapid review, Ms Wilson in the other place has stated:

I also note that the bill merges disability oversight bodies, including the incredibly important disability worker registration and regulation, into the Social Services Regulator as well. Again this is overdue reform. Families have been calling for a consistent approach to worker regulation across disability and social services for many years.

And she was right. So last week this recommendation of the rapid child safety review was urgent reform and something that families had been calling for, according to the new Leader of the Opposition. But today the opposition in this place has rolled their new Leader of the Opposition and done away with that position. They have decided that children with disability in Victoria should be second-class citizens. As I did in my ministers statement last week, I refer members to the statements of Dr Michael Bourke, a global authority on child sex offenders, who stated on ABC’s Four Corners program:

The predators are going to look for any prey-rich environment, any environment in which there’s children, and then there’s a decreased chance of being detected, right? And they also trade information online with each other.

So once they find somewhere where the rules are not enforced – and if the opposition have their way, that is children’s disability services – that information immediately goes out and it is shared with like-minded individuals, and they start gravitating to these places.

The proposal from those opposite is: let us ensure that there can never be predators in early childhood, but let us throw open the door and roll out the red carpet for them in disability settings. Those opposite have had the time to review and question and receive answers on every single part of these bills, but when it comes to non-mainstream kids, it seems others cannot find the time.

Can I turn to Ms Gray-Barberio’s comments and Mrs Broad’s comments and others’ comments in this place in relation to Julie Phillips from Disability Advocacy Victoria. I refer to Ms Phillips’s own evidence in a parliamentary inquiry in this place when she stated:

… Disability Advocacy Victoria should not be speaking on behalf of the disability community either.

These are Ms Phillips’s own words.

It should be speaking about disability advocacy issues, but it is not appropriate for it to be being consulted on other things that the disability community should have a say in.

These reforms have been supported by, to name a few, the Association for Children with a Disability – they do not want children to have less safeguards, they are very clear about that; Melba and the 13 co-signatories that we have discussed in this house previously; Yooralla; Berry Street; Down Syndrome Victoria; the Centre for Excellence in Child and Family Welfare, who I might say have a brilliant exhibition in Queens Hall this week if you would like to speak with them; and the Victorian Council of Social Service (VCOSS).

I am advised that Ms Phillips at Disability Advocacy Victoria – if that was indeed the hat she was wearing at that time, because Ms Phillips seems to also wear the hat of Disability Discrimination Legal Service and Disability Rights and Culture, so whichever hat it was that she had on, and all roads seem to lead back to Ms Phillips – declined to take part in the consultation. She was invited and she declined.

In addition to work with the Social Services Regulation Taskforce and consultation with the Victorian Disability Advisory Council, there has been consultation in relation to those groups and with those people, who are made up of members with lived experience, to go to the point that someone raised before about ‘nothing for us without us’. I have also met with National Disability Services, the Health and Community Services Union representatives, the Victorian equal opportunity and human rights commissioner, the Social Services Regulator, VCOSS, Disability Advocacy Victoria, the Association for Children with a Disability and Early Childhood Intervention Australia Victoria/Tasmania. In addition to that, the Department of Families, Fairness and Housing consulted with impacted entities: the disability advocacy resource unit in VCOSS, Yooralla, Scope, Anglicare, the Centre for Excellence in Child and Family Welfare, MacKillop Family Services, the Victorian Aboriginal Child and Community Agency and the Office of the Public Advocate. The department also undertook consultations on maintenance of disability specialisation in the SSR, including with the HACSU, CPSU and the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission.

So, as minister, how could I possibly stand here and say – and I am surprised that anyone in this place can – that one group of children deserve more protection than another? I will not say that. I will not ever say that. And whilst those opposite feel that they have not had enough time to progress these rapid reforms in their entirety, in a way that acquits every recommendation, including recommendation 8.1 of the Rapid Child Safety Review, I will continue to be putting forward the same protections for children with disability as for all children. The public reasonably expects that all recommendations, including 8.1 from the rapid child safety review, will be acquitted, and one of those recommendations is particularly important in bringing together the disjointed regulatory framework.

Indeed there has been a lot of discussion about needing time to consider the disability elements of this bill. Time is of the essence. Those opposed to these safeguards for children with disability say that they do not have enough time to read it, but for safeguards aimed at kids who do not have disability, they can find the time, as I said. When these matters came to light, the Leader of the Opposition put out a media release, which I will reiterate, saying that she was:

… ready to work with the Government and Parliament to provide all necessary support to affected families and to take urgent action to strengthen Working with Children safeguards and child safety regulations.

Clearly, when referring to child safety, these references did not include kids with disability or those in out-of-home care. Under the priorities of the new opposition leader, those children are on their own, but this government stands by them. I commend the bills to the house.

The ACTING PRESIDENT (Michael Galea): Thank you, Minister, that concludes the debate. The question that the second reading be agreed to will be put separately for each bill, and any committee stages and third readings will also occur separately after this. We will consider the next steps of each bill in the order they appear on the notice paper.