The red flags childcare regulators may have missed in the Joshua Brown case

2 months ago 15

Childcare chains chasing fast profits are spinning complex corporate webs to evade regulators and flip centres “like real estate”, a Victorian parliamentary inquiry has been told following the Joshua Brown abuse allegations.

Government bureaucrats were grilled at the hearings on Monday, and did not explain why they had failed to act earlier on long-standing warnings that alleged predators were infiltrating childcare through gaps in regulation.

But Department of Education secretary Tony Bates said the rise of for-profit chains in the sector meant the government now had to hunt “bad faith” providers through a complicated chain of company names and holding structures as “some sought to evade” government caps on growth.

This had made regulating the sector more difficult, Bates said, as officials combed corporate records to track murky ownership, “and that has led to some increase in risk in the sector”.

When police allegedly traced a cache of child abuse material to a Melbourne childcare worker this year, it sparked urgent national reforms to the sector, led by legislation passed last week in Victoria. That includes a ban on personal staff phones in centres and a register to share information on workers.

Accused child rapist Joshua Brown had worked at 23 childcare centres across Melbourne and had been fired from at least three of them by the time of his arrest, this masthead revealed. But he attracted little notice from employers and regulators, who missed glaring errors on his resume and chose not to review his working with children check.

Internal documents leaked to The Age from the two main childcare chains where Brown worked, Affinity and G8, showed safety complaints made at the centres where Brown is accused of sexually abusing babies and toddlers were ignored by the government, even as the providers used high-pressure marketing tactics to boost enrolments.

It was a symptom of what providers called the “black box” of bureaucracy, where complaints about workers were often not shared with them, or even between departments.

Senior Victorian bureaucrat Pam White, who led the state government’s rapid safety review after the Brown allegations, told the inquiry that media reporting on the case became crucial “breadcrumbs” revealing a system “that’s not fit for purpose”. But there had also been glaring red flags.

Like other experts, she pointed the inquiry to concerns about widespread understaffing leaving staff alone with children too often, as well as inadequate training for workers to spot grooming by predators.

White said companies were allowed to hide behind a veil of corporate secrecy and must be held to account, all the way to their board of directors, when safety breaches happen, to drive out those starting businesses “for absolutely the wrong reasons … just trying to flip a property [like] a real estate deal”.

“Where something terrible has happened ... often the people who are making decisions aren’t getting the heat,” she said. Many providers were not even checking staff references “as we saw in the papers”, White said, often due to mistaken beliefs about worker privacy laws.

More than 5000 childcare services are run across Victoria, of which more than half are for profit. Fewer than 10 per cent of for-profit centres exceed required minimum standards, and many fall below. But Bates stressed that Victoria’s quality ratings were still higher than the national average, with more than 42 per cent of the state’s not-for-profit centres, such as community kindergartens, exceeding standards.

While White agreed the sector needed for-profit providers to remain viable, she said the worthy goal of getting more children into childcare should not come at the cost of safety.

The reforms mean boardrooms will now need to put the interests of children before profits, by law. “It’s worth a try,” White said.

But she said more unannounced site checks were particularly critical to lifting standards, noting inspections had fallen to once every few years in Victoria.

The government stressed that extra resources now allocated for reforms meant it was on track to inspect centres once a year.

An independent childcare regulator had also been established for Victoria, with new powers to reassess working with children checks, and child safety notifications now “automated” for sharing across departments.

Three years ago, the state’s ombudsman recommended an urgent overhaul of the working with children check system after it emerged a youth worker convicted of sexually assaulting a boy had been able to get a job in Victoria, despite abuse allegations against him outside the state.

Ombudsman Marlo Baragwanath told the inquiry the attorney-general never responded to her office when it followed up four times on why the 2022 recommendations had not been implemented, but said that the reforms now addressed them.

The state’s former children and young people’s commissioner Liana Buchanan said her office had also lobbied the government to change the law, which blocked the commission from sharing concerns about individuals with the department that reviewed checks. But their concerns were ignored.

Baragwanath and Buchanan said their resources were less than half those of regulators and watchdogs in NSW, meaning they were missing cases, but requests for help were also repeatedly ignored by the government.

Last week, Victoria Police revealed its case against Brown had widened, with 12 children now identified as alleged victims across at least four childcare centres, as investigations into his time at other centres continue. His case remains before the courts and the allegations against him are yet to be tested.

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