Labor pledges new laws to stamp out childcare fraud, ensure safety after Joshua Brown’s arrest

Education Minister Jason Clare has pledged to make new laws that would allow on-the-spot compliance checks at childcare centres, after Joshua Brown was charged with dozens of child sex offences.

Victoria Police this week revealed Brown, 26, had been charged with 70 offences allegedly committed against eight children at a Point Cook childcare centre in Melbourne, with a further 1200 children who were under his care over eight years asked to undergo testing.

The Labor Government has vowed to introduce legislation in the first siting fortnight of this Parliament that, once passed, would allow fraud investigators to visit childcare centres without a warrant and without being accompanied by police.

“There’s another thing that the bill will do as well, and that gives the sort of people who work in my department, who investigate fraud in childcare centres, the ability to do spot checks, unannounced visits,” he told Sky News on Friday.

“They won’t need a warrant. They won’t need the police to come with them when they’re investigating fraud in childcare centres.”

“And the fact is, this happens. I’ve invested an extra $200 million into the investigation of child care fraud over the last few years, and it’s clawed back about $300 million for taxpayers.

“It can involve a childcare centre that claims that they might have a child there three days a week. The fact is, they’re only there two days a week, but they’re claiming three days a week. This will give powers to my department and my investigators to go in and check if the child is actually there.”

He said there were about 150 staff in the investigations team, with the government also able to rely on state-based regulators.

Separate laws would give the Government the power to strip federal funding from centres which do not meet safety and quality standards.

In addition, federal and state education ministers will consider whether CCTV should be mandatory in childcare centres to make it a deterrent to offending. Mr Clare said they had to be “in the right places if deterrence is going to work”.

“How you set them up is just as critical as whether you’ve got them there at all,” he said.

Separately, the country’s attorneys-general will next month consider streamlining and strengthening working with children checks.

Mr Clare said none of these would be a “silver bullet”.

“The truth is here there’s no silver bullet. There’s a whole bunch of things that we need to do. And this work will never end,” he said.

“There are always going to be more things that we need to do here, because there’s always going to be people who are going to try and break through the net to try to do the dastardly things that we’ve seen other people do.”

Brown will appear at Melbourne’s Magistrates Court on September 15.