Source: Murray Darling Basin Authority

PATRICIA KARVELAS, HOST: Let’s get some immediate political reaction, not just to this story, but of course the broader child care crisis too and go straight to the Education Minister Jason Clare. 

Jason Clare, lovely to have you on the show. 

JASON CLARE, MINISTER FOR EDUCATION: Thanks, PK, great to be here. 

KARVELAS: Two child care workers have been charged with assault of a toddler in Western Sydney. New South Wales Police have said the child sustained significant bruising and injuries. Of course, this is one case being handled now by the legal system, as it should be —

CLARE: Yes. 

KARVELAS: — but does this latest case show that we have a broader crisis? 

CLARE: What it underlines is if you don’t care about our kids, you shouldn’t be there working in early education and care. 

In that report you mentioned that those workers are no longer there, that’s a good thing. But we do need to put in place the sort of measures to help to weed people out that aren’t there for the right reasons, whether it’s the sort of penalties that you impose on centres that don’t act when this evidence comes to light, or naming and shaming centres, giving information to parents about the conditions that are in the centres where their children are, or putting in place things like CCTV. 

I want to make the point if I can, PK, that 99.9 per cent of the people who care for our kids every single day in these centres love them, they care for them, they educate them, they’re great people that are doing really, really important work, and at the moment they’re as shocked and angry as everybody else in Australia. Their jobs are on TV for all of the wrong reasons. They want to make sure that we do everything we can to weed out the people that shouldn’t be there too. 

KARVELAS: We also learnt today that the alleged Melbourne paedophile, Joshua Dale Brown, worked at an additional daycare centre that has not been listed by authorities online. That brings the total number of centres he’s worked at to 24. I mean, Minister, why – I know this a state issue in terms of the investigation, but why are we still finding out about child care centres several weeks after the first allegations? 

CLARE: It’s a bloody good question. This is a nightmare for hundreds more parents, mums and dads who now have to go through the wringer of working out whether their kids are sick or not. And for their little kids, they’ve got to go through the trauma of testing – blood tests and urine tests – to find out whether they’ve got an infectious disease or not. 

It strikes me when I saw this yesterday that this is another reason why we need an educator register, a database that tells us where people are working and where they have been working. The company responsible here should know this at the click of a button. But so should we. This shouldn’t be the sort of information that comes out in drip feed form, it should be information that’s easy to access quickly. 

KARVELAS: It seems that there might be more centres. I mean, have you been briefed about whether there are even potentially more that we might find out about? 

CLARE: No, I haven’t. The Victorian Police would be briefing the Victorian Government specifically on that. But I just make the general point, this is the sort of information that police should have at their fingertips, it’s the sort of information that we should have right now. We don’t have it, but we should do. 

KARVELAS: Is your legislation on child care changes that you’ve been talking about ready to table into the Parliament and have you briefed the Opposition? 

CLARE: Yeah, the legislation is almost finalised. I’ll introduce that legislation into the Parliament next week, and we held our first briefing with the Opposition on the legislation today. I want to take this opportunity to thank Sussan Ley, the Opposition Leader, and Jonno Duniam, the Shadow Minister, for the really constructive way in which they’re working with us on this legislation to make sure we get it right. You know, it’s not always the case that Labor and Liberal work together the way we should. We are here, and that’s really important with legislation like this. 

So, as I said, I’ll introduce the legislation next week. What the bill will do is give us the power to cut off funding to child care centres where they’re not up to scratch when it comes to safety. 

At the moment a state regulator can shut a centre down tomorrow if they think there’s an imminent threat to safety. But where they’ve identified centres that aren’t meeting the standard and repeatedly they’re not meeting that standard, this will give us the power to issue a condition to that centre, and say that if you don’t meet the standards that we’ve set for you as a nation over the course of, it might be a couple of months, then we will suspend your child care funding or we’ll cancel it. 

And there’s nothing more important in running a child care centre than the taxpayer funding that runs it – it’s about 70 per cent of the funding that runs a child care centre, it can’t run without it. This is the biggest stick that the Commonwealth has to wield here, and putting a condition on a centre that we would provide publicly, so parents know about it, I think is the sort of thing that hopefully will lift standards to where they need to be. 

If we get this legislation right, it won’t mean that we’re shutting centres down, it will mean that we’re lifting standards up where centres aren’t meeting the standards at the moment. 

KARVELAS: Okay, that’s really interesting. So, you’ll issue essentially a warning that will then be publicly shared, would that be like on a central website where people can look to see ‑‑ 

CLARE: That’s right. 

KARVELAS: ‑‑ if this has been – and what’s the timeframe? ‘Cause that must be all articulated, it has to be in the legislation, for which they have to respond ‑‑

CLARE: Yeah. 

KARVELAS: ‑‑ before that money is suspended?  

CLARE: The legislation won’t set out the specific timeframe. There will be discretion provided to the Secretary of my Department, but we’re anticipating, depending on circumstances, you’re talking about a couple of months. 

But let me just make the point again, if we’ve identified a centre where there’s a threat to kids right now, state regulators can shut it down. This is about centres where over a period of time they’re just not meeting the National Quality Framework standard to say, unless you get there soon, the centre is not going to be funded by the taxpayer. 

KARVELAS: So, at the moment “Working Towards,” as you know, is a rating given to a centre that doesn’t meet quality rating standards. I’m just confused about how that will work still. These centres, are they allowed to keep operating? For how long will you be able to keep operating if you’re just “Working Towards”? 

CLARE: At first instance what we’re intending to do if we get this legislation passed is to work with the state governments and the state regulators on the centres that they’re most concerned about, that are under that category that you’ve just described where they’re concerned that they’re repeatedly not working hard enough to get to the standard they need to be under the National Quality Framework. 

So we’ll work with states and territories on the centres that we think need to be the subject of this legislation first and set those conditions for them, set a timeframe for them, and if they don’t meet those conditions within that timeframe, then suspend the child care subsidy payment that helps that centre to operate or cancel it altogether. 

KARVELAS: And you said this is about lifting standards rather than shutting child care centres down. Of course that would always want to have that aim, because you need children in care —

CLARE: Indeed. 

KARVELAS: — or the system would collapse, right? 

CLARE: That’s right. 

KARVELAS: But do you envisage that inevitably some child care centres will have to close down? You would think that would have to be an inevitability of a tough system.  

CLARE: It is a tough system, and that may very well happen. We’re not putting this legislation into the Parliament as an idle threat. But these centres run – 70 per cent of the funding is based on the child care subsidy that the taxpayer provides to help child care centres run. This is the biggest stick we have to wield, to say to centres that if you want to continue to receive this support from the Australian taxpayer, then you have to meet that standard, and if you don’t, then funding will be suspended or cancelled. 

And what I’m hoping is that that threat is going to be strong enough to get the boards of these companies or the investors in these companies to sit up and listen and realise that we’re serious here and if you don’t meet the standard, then the funding will be cut off. 

KARVELAS: Spot checks by your Department is another issue that you’ve raised. Are they only going to be deployed for fraud, or will it be child safety as well? 

CLARE: Principally fraud but not exclusively fraud. At the moment I’ve got a team of investigators in the Department of Education that can do checks on child care centres for fraud. Unfortunately it’s the case that this exists, that child care centres might claim a child is there for three days but they’re only there for two days, and they’re claiming funding from the taxpayer for three days. This legislation will give my officers the power to be able to go in without a warrant or without the AFP to do those checks. 

But while they’re there, they’ll be able to also examine the safety of centres and share that information with state regulators that do the lion’s share of this work. 

The Federal Government sets the standards, the state governments do the lion’s share of the work in terms of regulating the system and making sure that it’s safe. 

KARVELAS: Should there be a national regulator though? Because that’s part of the issue, isn’t it, that we’ve got state-based regulation, it’s quite inconsistent across states. Is there an option for a national regulation? 

CLARE: There’s a national authority at the moment, ACECQA, that helps to set that standard, and they work closely with the states and territories in the work that they do. 

There’s a separate question that’s posed by the Productivity Commission’s report last year about whether we set up an Early Education and Care Commission that would look at how we reform the system over the next decade and beyond. That recommendation wasn’t principally about safety; it wanted government to look at a steward for the system to make it more accessible and more affordable. I’ve got an open mind to that recommendation, Patricia, it’s something that we’ll look at over the medium term. It wasn’t intended to be something specifically about safety, but that’s something that it could potentially include.

KARVELAS: Oh, that’s really interesting. So, you think you could take the Productivity Commission’s recommendation and sort of morph it into something broader?  

CLARE: Potentially. It’s the sort of thing it’s my job as a Minister to sit down with smart people and pick their brains about how this would work best in practice, people like Georgie Dent at The Parenthood I spoke to the other day about this. 

I want to make sure that we get this right, I want to make sure that our system is affordable for mums and dads, that it’s accessible everywhere around the country, but most importantly that it’s safe. That’s what this legislation is fundamentally about. But it’s not the only thing that we need to do. 

The other things that have got to be on the table here are this register so we can track people across the system, identify when people are moving from centre to centre to centre and whether that should be a red flag that something is wrong here, that people are just moving people on rather than reporting them to a regulator or to the police. Proper mandatory child safety training for everybody who works in our centres. 

I said a moment ago that 99.9 per cent of people who work in our centres are fantastic people. We’ve got to equip them with the skills they need to identify the bad person that might be up to the most horrific of crimes in our centres. And then CCTV as well, which can potentially play a role in deterring somebody from getting up to no good but also help police with their investigations as well. 

KARVELAS: Minister, if I could just ask you about the Antisemitism Envoy’s report, which of course has been handed to the government. You’ve been talking about this as well. As you know ‑‑ 

CLARE: Yeah. 

KARVELAS: ‑‑ your colleague Ed Husic is critical of some parts – not all – but some parts of the report, including the very definition of antisemitism that it’s using. Are you troubled by this definition? 

CLARE: No, I’m not. I had a quick look at what Ed had to say. I think Ed was fundamentally making the point that any definition of antisemitism shouldn’t stop somebody from criticising the Government of Israel, and I think he’s right in that respect. I don’t think the definition does, by the way.

But I’ve been critical of the Government of Israel. I think as long as you can make that point very, very clear, you’re on pretty good ground.

KARVELAS: But it does actually, and I’m just looking at the words here, it does actually refer to the State of Israel by claiming that the existence of the State of Israel is a racist endeavour. Do you think that’s antisemitic? 

CLARE: No, I think what Ed was saying is it’s a little bit different to then be called an antisemite for criticising the Government of Israel. That’s the fundamental point I think ‑‑ 

KARVELAS: The existence of Israel is really at the heart of the question, isn’t it? That’s what some people criticise. 

CLARE: You know my view, the view of the Government, the view I think of the overwhelming majority of people watching the tele today is that we want two countries in the Middle East that sit side by side, one’s called Israel, one’s called Palestine, and they can live together in peace and security behind secure borders and have the sort of safe life that we take for granted here in Australia and in many other parts of the world. 

KARVELAS: How did the part of the report – this is something that Ed Husic definitely mentioned in relation to younger Australians holding views that are antisemitic. Do you think that – are you witnessing that younger Australians have higher rates of antisemitism? 

CLARE: I was asked this question today. I said certainly social media plays a role here, and I’m hoping that the ban on access to social media for young people under 16, when that comes into force later this year, is going to have a positive impact on that, but also the mental health and wellbeing of younger Australians. 

I was also asked about the recommendations in the report about universities. We’re considering those at the moment. We’re not making any announcements about that at the moment. But antisemitism is real, it’s a poison that we’ve seen infect parts of the community. There’s no place for it in our universities, there’s no place for it anywhere in Australia, but it’s just one type of the sort of racism that we see in our community and in our universities. 

I made the point today that we’ve established a Student Ombudsman that provides a vehicle for students to make complaints, whether it’s about antisemitism, Islamophobia or sexual assaults, or any concerns that they’ve got about the way their university has dealt with them. 

TEQSA, which is the federal regulator of our universities, has certain powers to intervene here and works closely with universities on this. It has the power to put conditions on universities or to go to court and issue fines. I think there’s an open question there about whether TEQSA needs more powers in this area. 

And I also made the point today that we will shortly receive a report from the Special Envoy Combating Islamophobia, and we want to see their report as well, as well as the report that we received a few weeks ago. 

KARVELAS: So, will they be considered together? 

CLARE: I think that’s the way in which we should consider it, that’s probably the best way to go about this. I’ll also receive a report in a couple of months’ time from the Race Discrimination Commissioner about racism in all its ugly forms in our universities, and I’m sure there’s Indigenous Australians and Asian Australians and international students watching today that are saying, “Don’t forget about me, this affects me too”.

We don’t necessarily need to wait for that report before we take action. You can do this step‑by‑step. But I just flag, I want to see that report from the Special Envoy on Islamophobia, and there’s also a piece of work that I’ve commissioned around the governance, improving the governance of our universities, that I’ll receive too. And I also want to think about what more powers we should properly give TEQSA, the Tertiary Education Regulator here. 

KARVELAS: That’s really interesting. Jason Clare, Minister, it’s been great to speak to you. Thanks for joining us. 

CLARE: Thanks PK.

MIL OSI News –