The moment Emily picked up her son from child care, she knew something was wrong. The four-year-old had been sad for months, but his tear-streaked face stopped her cold. Heart pounding, she pulled out her phone and hit record.

Four Corners reveals the deep failures and systemic issues plaguing the childcare sector in Betrayal of Trust, now on ABC iview.

The rapid privatisation of Australia's childcare sector has unleashed a wave of neglect and exploitation.

The childcare industry, entrusted with the care of 1.4 million children in Australia, is increasingly prioritising profits over safety.

Parents are paying as much as $220 a day, or more than $1,000 a week, to a $20 billion-a-year sector riddled with systemic failures, a rising number of serious incidents and a troubling culture of secrecy.

Now, in a six-month Four Corners investigation, whistleblowers, workers, parents and experts are revealing the urgent need for reform.

Four Corners' analysis of national data reveals a troubling surge in serious incidents — more than 26,000 cases in 2024, a 27 per cent jump in three years.

These incidents can include deaths, serious injuries, trauma or illness, missing children and allegations of sexual, physical or emotional abuse.

Every day, at least seven children go missing, are not accounted for, or are locked out of centres — a 49 per cent increase in three years. Each year, more than 3,000 babies and toddlers are sent to hospital with injuries sustained in child care.

On average, there is one report a day of sexual misconduct or sexual offences in Victorian, West Australian and NSW childcare centres. In Queensland, the Northern Territory and South Australia, there is no reportable conduct scheme.

Little children, big money

Australia's childcare sector is increasingly dominated by private operators, where profit often outweighs care.

This shift, Professor Gabrielle Meagher warns, comes at the expense of quality. A leading expert on privatised social services, she points to the overwhelming evidence showing that for-profit providers deliver lower-quality services on average compared with their non-profit equivalents.

Of the 300 to 400 new childcare centres opening each year, a staggering 95 per cent are for-profit, with only one of the country's 10 largest daycare operators being non-profit. The rest are controlled by private equity firms, publicly listed companies and international investment groups, all driven by profit rather than child welfare.

For investors, the childcare sector is an attractive opportunity, thanks to billions of dollars in government subsidies and grants underwriting the business.

"The whole industry is massively underpinned by a secure and growing stream of government income," Professor Meagher says.

An Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) report from December 2023 found that for-profit providers paid lower wages and hired less-experienced staff than their non-profit equivalents, leading to a decline in the quality of standards.

"The bottom line to that is that quality has to suffer if you don't invest in your staff," Professor Meagher says.

For childcare workers in centres around the country, these issues are all too familiar.

Fight for transparency

NSW Greens politician Abigail Boyd has spent six months helping Four Corners expose the industry's secrets.

The former corporate lawyer says her most shocking discovery is how much is kept hidden from parents.

"Nobody wants people to know what's actually going on," Boyd says. 

In November, Boyd invoked a Standing Order 52 (SO52) — a powerful parliamentary order to force the release of internal departmental documents to scrutinise the regulator's handling of breaches in the childcare sector.

She requested incident reports that document injuries, neglect, abuse and safety hazards as well as the responses of the regulator, ranging from compliance notices to fines and closure of centres.

"I wanted to see for myself exactly how effective the regulator was in making sure that these places were fit to send our children to."

She says the NSW government and the education department fought hard to keep them secret — deploying lawyers, applying pressure, and warning that transparency itself could put children at risk.

"The worst thing is they have said to me now numerous times that … I'm putting children at risk because the regulator will somehow be distracted from their core function by me just simply asking for them to be transparent and accountable," she says.

Boyd gained access to a fraction of the documents.

She was horrified by what she read.

"To read about that abuse and the lack of action from the regulator, I cried a couple of times."

"I had this deep pit, this feeling in my stomach of just revulsion and horror. And this is just a smidgen … literally a thousandth of what I asked for," she says.

Parliamentary rules prevent Boyd from revealing specific details to the public, or naming centres, but she can describe what she read in general terms.

"There were multiple reports of inappropriate sexual touching, multiple reports of educators treating children really roughly, lots of broken elbows, broken wrists, kids being kicked, kids being verbally abused and a lot of inappropriate restraint, force-feeding, putting pillows over their heads," she says.

"This is just one little snapshot of what is going on in these centres that gets actually reported and investigated.

"It's really horrific what people do when they don't think anyone's watching."

In late February, independent arbiter Keith Mason KC ruled in an interim report that some of the documents the government and department had fought to keep hidden should be made public.

That still hasn't happened.

Some of those documents relate to Affinity.

Boyd says she was preparing to challenge the department as well as Deputy Premier and Minister for Education and Early Learning Prue Car on why critical information had been withheld from the public, when the minister announced an internal review.

Boyd says it was a political sleight of hand, to deflect scrutiny, stall accountability and bury the issue under layers of bureaucracy.

"Now, every time I ask any questions, they can say, 'oh, yes, we're doing a review'. As if that solves all of the problems, which of course, it doesn't," she says. The review had no terms of reference, timeline or assurance that its report would be made public.

Watch Four Corners's special investigation into the systemic issues plaguing Australia's childcare sector, on ABC iview now.

Read more in the full article on the ABC's website.

Source: Adele Ferguson, ABC News, "Private childcare whistleblowers' disturbing experiences inside a sector putting profits before kids", published 17 March 2025, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-17/private-childcare-centres-whistleblowers-abuse-four-corners/105058186