Questions Without Notice – Child Care
Parliament House, Canberra
E&OE
Subjects: Child Care
Ms DOYLE (Aston) (14:56): My question is to the Attorney-General. What is the Albanese Labor government doing to ensure working-with-children checks are fit for purpose?
Ms ROWLAND (Greenway-Attorney-General) (14:56): I thank the member for her question. She knows that the first priority of government is to keep Australians safe, especially our most vulnerable. The recent reports of sexual abuse in childcare centres are horrifying. We know that its impacts have lifelong, highly damaging consequences for victims-survivors and their families. The Albanese government is committed to strengthening safeguards to give parents and the community the confidence that their children are safe in all settings.
To support this, I am working with the states and territories to implement long-overdue improvements to working-with-children checks. The facts are these. Different states and territories have inconsistent schemes covering eligibility and reportable conduct. They do not talk to each other, and there is no system of national oversight or real-time monitoring. A 2015 report of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse recommended strengthening this regime. It’s been 10 years, and those recommendations have not been implemented. This has taken too long. We need meaningful change and we need it urgently. It’s time to stop predators exploiting cracks in the hodgepodge of separate systems around the country.
I continue to engage with my state and territory counterparts, and I make clear that this is agenda item No. 1 when I chair my first meeting of the Standing Council of Attorneys-General next month. I ask my colleagues to prioritise working together to enhance consistency of all requirements to do with information sharing across jurisdictions and to develop a national solution to support continuous monitoring and access to data.
This is part of a broader suite of work the government is leading to prevent and respond to child sexual abuse. This includes work across jurisdictions by the Minister for Education to enhance safety outcomes in the early childhood education and care sector. These efforts reflect the Albanese government’s commitment to ensuring that every child and young person in Australia is safe from sexual abuse.
https://ministers.ag.gov.au/media-centre/transcripts/questions-without-notice-child-care-28-07-2025