JENI O’DOWD: Australia must tackle its national childcare problem with a royal commission

In NSW, you can’t build a deck, chop down a tree in your own backyard or put up a fence without navigating a labyrinth of council approvals, inspections and fines.

Yet somehow, the same State allows virtually anyone to open a childcare centre, taking responsibility for the lives of dozens of children, often with minimal oversight until something goes horribly wrong.

When kids are hurt in the places they’re meant to be safest, it’s clear the regulators’ priorities are wildly out of step, and it’s our children who pay the price.

Last week, two childcare workers in South Wentworthville were sacked and charged after allegedly hitting a 17-month-old boy in their care.

Jenny’s Kindergarten & Early Learning Centre, in Lane Cove North, was suspended for six months after authorities discovered serious safety breaches — the same provider where three toddlers escaped from the Bathurst centre in March and were found near a road.

Dozens of centres operated by G8 Education, the nation’s largest ASX-listed childcare company, have faced hundreds of compliance, emergency action and show cause notices for serious safety risks, including repeated incidents in which children were left unsupervised or managed to escape. Not one incident, but dozens.

Child care, an industry where real lives are on the line, remains comparatively easy to enter.

In NSW, to open a childcare centre, you need to apply through the Department of Education’s NQA ITS portal, get the green light from the Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority, and then a final tick from the department.

Crucially, anyone over 18 with a clean record can apply to open a childcare centre. They do not need a teaching degree, and no childcare experience is required. The people working under them need qualifications; the person profiting from them doesn’t.

The NSW Education and Early Childhood Directorate has the power to license and monitor centres, but its enforcement is reactive rather than proactive. Centres are often only checked after complaints, or worse, after a child is hurt.

And it’s not just NSW. Who can forget the childcare worker in Victoria who was charged with more than 70 child-abuse offences, prompting the Federal Government to pledge yet another major overhaul of safety rules?

A NSW parliamentary inquiry is now investigating the State’s childcare sector, after Greens MP Abigail Boyd demanded answers following an ABC investigation that exposed widespread safety breaches.

“The stories that have come out are horrifying,” Boyd told the inquiry. “It’s clear the system is broken, and children have been failed.”

Although the inquiry is not due to report until March next year, the Minns Government has already announced harsher penalties, including fines of up to $500,000 for providers who breach safety rules.

But are harsher penalties enough to clean up a system this broken?

As well, a parliamentary inquiry, no matter how well-intentioned, won’t fix a national problem.

Every State and Territory operates under the same national framework and has the same loopholes.

In March, National Children’s Commissioner Anne Hollonds called for national leadership on systems reforms to keep children safe in childcare after the sexual abuse revelation in Victoria.

“This is not the first time and it won’t be the last, unless governments across the federation take urgent action to implement the evidence-based recommendations from numerous inquiries over past decades that will help keep our children safe,” Commissioner Hollonds said.

For the life of me, I don’t know why there isn’t a royal commission into Australia’s childcare system. Children abused, children dying, children smacked. Money rorted, enrolments faked and dodgy operators pocketing taxpayer funds.

About 1.4 million Australian children are enrolled in child care, with the average fee for centre-based day care about $135 a day before subsidies.

In big cities, parents routinely face bills of $180 or more a day. Child care is big business.

This is why we need the power of a commission to examine how this multi-billion-dollar industry is licensed, monitored and regulated across every State and Territory.

And yet Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has dismissed the idea, despite the sector handling some of the nation’s most vulnerable citizens.

“People call for royal commissions whenever anything comes out immediately,” he said after the ABC’s expose.

“They take years, they cost a lot of money. You do not need a royal commission to show that what was shown on TV last night was wrong.”

But that’s the point of a royal commission. Not to rehash what’s obvious, but to reveal what has been hidden.

These inquiries have the power to compel testimony, seize documents and expose systemic rot that everyday investigations can’t touch. Yes, they take time and money. So do cover-ups.

And if the Government can hold royal commissions into banks, aged care and bushfire responses, surely it can face the question that matters most — why aren’t our children safe?

Every child deserves safety. And every parent deserves peace of mind.