Friday, 14 August 2026

 Ann-Marie HERMANS (South-Eastern Metropolitan) (18:41): (2714) My adjournment matter is to the Attorney-General, and the action I seek is for the government to acknowledge that child sexual abuse is continuing to occur in Victorian schools and residential care. I ask the minister to clearly outline the steps that this government will take to implement meaningful and systematic change to address child sexual abuse in the services regulated by the Carroll Labor government.

Last sitting week we had the parliamentary apology to victims of historical child abuse in Victorian government schools. This was important to the victims, but what about the victims of abuses that have occurred since 1994? We need another inquiry and potentially also another apology. A law firm is investigating claims of child sexual abuse on behalf of more than 600 former students across 357 Victorian schools. Some of these allegations are as recent as 2024, and there are several schools listed that are in my region, such as Dandenong High School and Hallam Primary School. Just earlier this year a teacher at Kingswood Primary School in Dingley Village was caught. He was the perpetrator of strategically placed cameras in school bathrooms filming innocent children. Concerns arise as to whether this footage was being used to create AI pornography using the local primary school children. For every report of child sexual exploitation and abuse, there are potentially more going undetected or not reported or not acted on at all. Under the Carroll Labor government undetected perpetrators can quietly transfer between schools where they carry out horrific, life-altering criminal and sexual abuse of children. It was devastating last year when we had 2000 babies from six months to two years old who were tested for sexually transmitted diseases because of just one childcare worker. What about the workers that have not been caught and are still out there accessing our babies and our children?

Then there is the residential care system, the dark reality of which remains hidden and is awaiting its own in-depth research and report. Constituents tell me that residential care is a place where young people and children have been trafficked and sexually abused and their lives irreparably damaged. Children placed in the state’s care should be protected. But after all the parliamentary apologies, we continue to have systemic failures in this state. How many more children must face immeasurable pain and lifelong trauma before this government takes action? The public deserve to have consistent, ongoing, transparent and thorough inquiries into child sexual abuse and into perpetrators that have access to children in state care and state schools today. The public also deserves to know that perpetrators will be accountable for their crimes. Listening to my Liberal colleagues leader Jess Wilson and Shadow Minister for Education Brad Roswell make apology speeches, I am confident that a Liberal–National government will do more to look into the abuse of children that has taken place under the Andrews–Allan–Carroll Labor government’s regime.