Today in Parliament, Abigail secured 20 Greens amendments to the Children (Education and Care Services National Law Application) Amendment Bill 2025 and spoke on the bill, supporting its intentions but criticising the Government’s rushed and politicised process and lack of consultation.
Abigail said:
On behalf of The Greens, I speak in debate on the Children (Education and Care Services National Law Application) Amendment Bill 2025. I say at the outset that The Greens welcome the good intentions behind the bill and the work that has gone into it. But I share the frustrations of so many others in relation to the rushed manner in which the bill was brought to the Parliament, and the Government's failure to consult with workers, academics, advocates and others in the sector who stand ready and willing to donate their expertise and knowledge to work with government in reforming the early learning sector.
The process that the Government followed in introducing the bill and, as much as I hate to say it, the way in which it resisted and sought to politicise a relatively routine bills inquiry procedure, has not earned it any friends in the sector. It also caused me personal distress about an issue that means a great deal to me. I do not think there is room for that kind of politicking and attempting to background the media. But the work that the sector is involved in, of restoring the sector to one in which both workers and children can thrive, is far too important for political games. Despite our disappointment with what has preceded this moment, The Greens are keen to work with the Government and the Opposition and all members of Parliament to achieve meaningful reforms in the sector.
I am grateful for the more collaborative approach that has resurfaced between members this week. Before I discuss the detail of the bill, it is worth recapping some of the history. The early childhood sector is regulated under the Children (Education and Care Services) National Law (NSW) and the Education and Care Services National Regulations. Those laws were passed, after national agreement, through legislation first passed in Victoria, which was then applied in each State and Territory with minimal variations. The National Quality Framework [NQF] commenced in 2012 and was intended to improve education and care across long day care, family day care, preschools or kindergartens, and outside school hours care services, which have not received as much attention but which The Greens will focus on in the coming years.
The Australian Children's Education and Care Quality Authority [ACECQA] is the independent national authority, which assists governments in administering the NQF, governed by a board accountable to education Ministers across the country. Each State and Territory has its own regulator for the early childhood sector operating within its jurisdiction, which in New South Wales is the Early Childhood Education and Care Regulatory Authority, currently sitting within the Department of Education. Services are assessed and rated by their regulatory authority against the National Quality Standard [NQS] and given a rating for each of the seven quality areas—educational program and practice, children's health and safety, physical environment, staffing arrangements, relationships with children, collaborative partnerships with families and communities, and governance and leadership—as well as an overall rating for the service based on those results.
A service can be rated in each of those quality areas or overall as "meeting" or "exceeding" the NQS, or it can be rated as "working towards" NQS, or even "significant improvement required". Whereas each service is assessed and rated on a relatively infrequent basis—for example, every three or four years, and sometimes longer—the service will be in more regular contact with its regulator in relation to everyday compliance with the national law and regulations. Every year, the regulatory authority will issue hundreds of directions and notices instructing services to comply with various sections and rules of the NQF. These include relatively minor breaches, such as unsuitable facilities, repairs needed, minor hazards to children and failures to display notices correctly.
However, they also cover more serious breaches, such as failing to keep accurate staffing records, not sighting Working with Children Check documents, failing to follow child medical plans and breaching staffing ratios, as well as incidents in which children have been injured through lack of supervision or neglect, or physically, emotionally or sexually abused. The regulator will issue emergency action notices and prohibition notices to participants in the sector and may ask them to show cause to prevent them being shut down or prohibited from the sector.
My call for papers under Standing Order 52, which the House passed in November last year and again in March this year, has provided access to a rich trove of information contained in the regulatory notices that our regulatory authority issued to New South Wales early learning services over almost three years. The 150,000 or so pages returned so far provide a clear insight into the operations of those services, the regulator's approach to compliance issues and the interactions and relationships between the two. There is also a relatively clear pattern, particularly when put together with what workers, families, academics and whistleblowers have shared with me, and aggregated statistics of systemic issues in the sector and what drives them.
As just one example of times a child was harmed or exposed to significant risk of harm, I have lost count of the number of incident reports I have read where an investigation by the regulator found a lack of supervision and staffing at the time of the event. That is common sense. If a child is being adequately supervised, how could they climb a gate or fence and leave the premises unnoticed, only to be found later by a parent or a passerby on the road or in the carpark? I have read about that kind of incident literally hundreds of times in documents produced under Standing Order 52. If a child is being supervised, how could they climb a bookshelf before falling off—one of a litany of incidents involving children getting hurt while unsupervised at Community Kids Cessnock—or break their arm without any staff knowledge, as happened at Milestones Early Learning South Grafton?
How can a child cut their forehead, requiring an ambulance and five stitches, without staff seeing it happen, as happened at Only About Children North Parramatta? If there was sufficient supervision, how could one child try to strangle another on two separate occasions, as they did at Milestones Early Learning Swansea, or eat playdough on eight separate occasions without educators noticing, as they did at Only About Children Surry Hills? In those regulatory documents, the finding of inadequate supervision was often coupled with a finding of a breach of staffing ratios at the time of the incident. Centres where children are simply not being watched or looked after are routinely understaffed. An Affinity Education centre in Elderslie breached ratio requirements when a two‑year-old suffered serious injuries.
At another Affinity Education centre in Rosebery, a child slipped and suffered a face injury during a period of breaching ratio requirements. A child was accidentally left outside for 50 minutes at the Only About Children service at Warriewood during a time when ration requirements were breached. I could speak for literally hours detailing all the incidents I have read about where children were harmed or exposed to the risk of serious harm because of centres having insufficient staff and inadequate supervision. It does not take a genius to then work out why some of the most horrific things are able to occur in those premises without anyone knowing or seeing.
The public has been rightly shocked by the revelations this year of child sexual abuse occurring in early learning services across the country. In New South Wales people will have read about the high-profile cases in the media. But there are so many more that they have not read about yet which are known to the Regulatory Authority and the police. I also have the unfortunate privilege of knowing about them. The documents are littered with cases of staff being sexually inappropriate with children—touching children's genitals, making sexualised comments towards children or tickling and kissing them in an inappropriate way. There are cases in the courts of staff penetrating babies and of the most disgusting acts occurring in those centres, the very places where their parents thought their children would be safest.
There are numerous accounts of children coming home with sore genitals, displaying sexualised behaviour or attempting to reproduce the events that have happened to them during the day. The other day I read about a baby trying to penetrate themselves with their thumb on a nappy change table, saying only the name of an educator by way of explanation to their parents. Another was fingering themselves and explaining that it was on instruction from a person who is now a known perpetrator. My colleague Kobi Shetty, the member for Balmain, spoke powerfully on Tuesday in the other place on the bill, relaying the words of the parent of a toddler who had been sexually abused and the impact that it has had on her and her family's life. I have spoken with too many parents of babies and toddlers who have suffered through the most unspeakable acts in our early learning centres.
In some cases sexual abuse has occurred at the hands of another child, an issue we are even more reluctant to talk about as a society but that we need to start having a far more mature conversation about. Children who hurt other children are often themselves the victims of abuse. At the end of the day, they are just children themselves, but that does not make the damage they cause to their victims any less damaging. I have heard from parents of the ongoing trauma their toddlers are going through after being sexually assaulted by other children and the difficulties they have faced in trying desperately to repair the psychological damage that it has caused.
Those cases of sexual abuse in early learning centres are just the ones we know about. Where staff have been perpetrators, the connection is usually made by the police. The perpetrator is found well before the victims of their crimes are located. That is important to note because it is not the Regulatory Authority catching those people. It is not the management of the services the perpetrators are working at that is weeding them out; it is usually a disconnected investigation, where the dissemination of child pornography leads to the finding of a perpetrator.
That is incredibly worrying. What about all those perpetrators who are not recording their abuse, posting videos on the dark web or storing images on their computer? Again—and I cannot say this enough—abuse of this kind by a staff member at an early learning centre happens only when no-one is looking. In the same way that children do dangerous things and hurt themselves when unsupervised, and children hurt other children when unsupervised, those adult sexual predators get away with those crimes because they too are unsupervised. That should not be allowed to happen. There should be sufficient staff for no educator to be left alone with a child.
At the core of all of those safety issues is the inadequate number and experience level of staff. That is a systemic issue in the sector, which has become dominated by corporations intent on cutting costs and maximising profits at all costs. Despite having some of the highest rates of compliance breaches—often two to three times more than average across the sector—those large providers also have the most waivers for staffing. The regulator in New South Wales has been doubling down on the problem. It has been directly complicit in bad child safety outcomes by reducing staffing and experience requirements for the services where there are the most harmful outcomes.
We hear time and again that even when services do get a waiver, they flout the ratio anyway. The United Workers Union Early Childhood Education and Care Quality Safety Census in June 2025 surveyed 2,100 workers. Some 77 per cent of educators said that they were operating below minimum staffing requirements at least weekly, and 42 per cent said that it was happening daily. Why do members think the problem is so widespread? It is because it is just a business model for big for-profit operators like G8, Affinity, Only About Children, Guardian and Busy Bees.
I will take one example that I plucked out of the volumes of case studies that I received from the Regulatory Authority. It is one highly typical example from Affinity Kids Club Rosebery Early Learning. It said that there were no early childhood teachers on Mondays, when the service requires three early childhood teachers; no early childhood teachers on Tuesdays, when the service requires four early childhood teachers; no early childhood teachers on Wednesdays, when the service requires three early childhood teachers; one early childhood teacher on Thursdays, when the service requires four childhood teachers; and one early childhood teacher on Fridays, when the service requires three early childhood teachers. On each of those days of the week, there was a deficit of at least three early childhood teachers at that one site. A Regulatory Authority officer said:
Prior to leaving the service, to the best of my recollection, the nominated supervisor said, 'I am not going to deny it, we don't have enough ECTs'.
From what I have read of those sorts of incidents, that is pretty standard. Shockingly, the response from the regulator was "You may consider a waiver application". That has been the regulatory approach in this State. We talk a lot about the degree of the fines to be issued. But when the Regulatory Authority is not fining any of the services in the way that it should—I think we had $8,000 in fines in a year—it is no surprise that we have ended up with the patterns of noncompliance that we are seeing. The Wheeler review was made up of cherrypicked cases. The finding was that there was nothing wrong with the regulator but the law was insufficient, and that is how we got here today. But how can anyone claim the regulator has been anything other than asleep at the wheel, given such clear cases of inadequacy in that example and in the documents?
Others have described the provisions of the bill in detail, and I will not repeat them here. We will look at some of those provisions in more detail as we move through amendments during the Committee of the Whole stage. However, the bill focuses on increasing fines and punishing wrongdoers, increasing ministerial powers, and basically taking what I would call a "tough on crime" approach to the issues the sector is facing, rather than—with some exceptions—addressing the systemic issues that the sector is facing and that are creating the problems in the first place. In other words, the bill is more focused on punishment after the event than on preventing harm before it occurs. That has been hugely disappointing for me not just as someone who has spent so much time looking into those issues, trying to understand the systemic issues at play and attempting to work with the sector on meaningful reform, but also as someone who understands all too well the harm that child sexual assault does to a person.
Many like to hold onto the self-serving myth that children are too young to understand what has been done to them and that, if adults do not talk about it with them or explicitly recognise the sexual nature of it, then children who have been abused will forget it more easily or feel less harmed by it. Unfortunately, that is just not true. The psychological scars of being harmed at a place where they were supposed to be safe last a lifetime. No amount of punishment of a perpetrator after the fact will ever create any kind of justice or salve for the harm caused to a child who has been the victim of child sexual abuse. That is why our number one priority must be to focus on prevention of abuse in our early learning centres and not just on shaking our fists at wrongdoers after the event. I view the bill through that lens, which is why I was so disappointed that it was brought in the way it was, without the detailed consultation required with the sector and with child safety experts.
To be honest, at times I wanted to not support the bill, despite the good intentions I believe are behind it. If anything in the bill could have unintended consequences and create a sector that is less safe for children, then we should not pass it. That brings me back to staffing. If we know that the number one prevention measure for child abuse in centres is having enough experienced staff, then we cannot pass provisions that could lead to fewer staff working in the sector or deter the better players, who have higher levels of quality staffing and are statistically far less likely to have safety issues. Anything which makes services more stretched, which leads to more profit‑takers dominating the sector or which deters quality professionals from staying in the sector will make it less safe.
The short inquiry we held into the bill was incredibly valuable in gaining insight into how some of its provisions will operate. The fact that New South Wales is departing so significantly from the national law has caused great concern among some stakeholders, with many arguing that it will undermine the national framework. They note that the education Ministers' meeting in August, supported by New South Wales, agreed to pursue a reform package by the end of 2025. There is concern that New South Wales going it alone undermines that work. The remainder of the sector's concerns revolve around the impact of the reforms on the viability of not-for-profit services, which provide a statistically safer and better-quality learning experience in their centres, as well as the impact the reforms may have on attracting and retaining staff. The bill proposes offences and fines on individual workers for matters that they may have no effective control over rather than focusing on those with management responsibility for those services. The Greens will propose amends to attempt to deal with some of those concerns and to ensure that the bill achieves its aim of creating a safer sector rather than the opposite.
I sincerely thank Parliamentary Counsel's Office for its incredible work day after day, but I note that because of the pressures placed on the PCO, I am in the extraordinary position of having to had to wait until late yesterday to receive even a first draft of the amendments I requested a week ago. I do not know if I have been able to finalise them, but I hope they are now final, and we will get them before the Committee of the Whole. As a result, I have not had the opportunity to discuss the amendments with the rest of the crossbench, and that has put me at a significant disadvantage. I apologise to my fellow crossbench members and ask for some latitude on that basis as we try to get through to the Committee stage. I sincerely thank all of the stakeholders who took the time to participate in the short inquiry into the bill.
Again, though, I put my greatest thanks on record to those who have supported my office's work in this area this year. They have blown the whistle, provided us with information, backed our work in, shown us support and, above all, wanted to work together to reform the sector they love and are proud to be part of. Finally, I place on record my thanks to the tireless and endlessly inspirational Adele Ferguson, without whom I honestly believe none of us would be debating the bill today. It is because of her hard work and commitment to justice that the light has been shone on the early childhood sector this year, and I thank her with all my heart. I look forward to continuing to work with her and everyone else who has been helping us on this journey until we achieve the meaningful reform that children and workers in the sector deserve. We support the bill, and we look forward to the Committee of the Whole stage.
Abigail then went on to secure 20 Greens amendments to the Bill.
Read the debate in Hansard here and here.
16 October 2025