Today in Parliament, Abigail gave an adjournment speech highlighting systemic issues in Australia's early childhood education and care sector, revealing troubling accounts of abuse and exploitation within an increasingly privatised industry where profit outweighs care.
Abigail said:
I spent the past six months working with Four Corners to expose the structural crisis in our early childhood education and care system. Last Monday night's episode revealed story after story of deeply troubling accounts of children and workers being subject to serious abuse and exploitation, in what has become an almost entirely privatised industry where too often profit outweighs care. These revelations have shaken households and struck a chord with educators and industry insiders. The inadequate quality of care found in for-profit providers seems to have been the worst-kept secret in the country—and, upon reflection, why would it be? Should we really be shocked by revelations that multinational private equity companies might be cutting corners in pursuit of supposed efficiency improvements? Are we really surprised to hear that massive corporations are viciously optimising rosters, indifferent to the impact that inadequate staffing has on the children in their care?
Why should we not expect a large, profit‑seeking corporation with a steady stream of government subsidies propping up its cashflow to optimise its operations to deliver the bare minimum standard of service and care to still remain viable—and probably a bit less than that, because it knows it can get away with it? The sad and simple fact is we have heard this story before. Does nobody remember the lessons we learnt in aged care—the horrors that were uncovered through the royal commission of multimillionaire aged-care business owners driving Lamborghinis while those in their care were drugged, restrained, abused and fed slop? The ingredients are all here again when we look at early childhood education and care, and it is playing out the same way.
It has been revealed that one in 10 childcare centres in Australia has never been rated by regulators, while just less than 10 per cent in New South Wales do not meet the minimum standards. Only 14 per cent of for‑profit centres exceed the National Quality Standard, while non-profits are more than double that rate. But even those services that do receive ratings that say they are up to scratch may be gaming the system or relying on ratings that are years out of date, with parents none the wiser. We have heard of over‑enrolled services; of services failing to have staff employed with a Working with Children Check, or no qualified teachers at all; and of nutritionally worthless meals and unsafe play areas. There is a burn and churn culture of staffing. Every action is taken in pursuit of profit and efficiency rather than being motivated by a genuine care and desire for child wellbeing and safety.
It is not just the operators getting in on the action. Child care has become one of the most profitable plays in Australian real estate. Investors are flooding the sector, flush with a steady stream of Government subsidies. Fees paid by parents for many services are more than $1,000 a week, pushed ever higher by skyrocketing rental costs. Experts have warned that Government funding, without sufficient strings attached and scrutiny applied, is fuelling a private rent economy for child care. Quality is slipping, accessibility is still unacceptably low and childcare deserts are emerging and entrenching themselves in rural and regional areas. That is because, for those commercial childcare landlords, rent is calculated per child, meaning that children become a walking dollar sign to predatory corporate actors. When we commoditise a young, vulnerable person like that, how can we expect anything other than exploitation and neglect? When those market forces are let loose, how can we expect anything other than non‑profit and community-run services being undercut and forced out?
In the first tranche of documents I managed to have released, we exposed what was happening at the private equity owned Affinity early learning. That group operates 255 centres across Australia, and every one is run under corporate performance metrics like occupancy targets, wage targets, revenue and profit targets, and budget targets. Child wellbeing comes second. Case after case of neglect and breaches of child safety have been unearthed. But those are not isolated incidents. Last night I received a further box of documents, this time detailing incidents that have occurred in services owned and operated by G8. G8 is the nation's largest ASX‑listed early childhood company, operating more than 400 centres across Australia under more than 20 brands, including Community Kids, Great Beginnings, the Learning Sanctuary and World of Learning. In 2024 G8 posted a net profit of more than $67 million on the back of revenue of more than $1 billion. Some of its centres charge families in the order of $170 a day, or more than $850 a week, yet scores of centres captured in the documents between 2021 and 2024 were plagued with basic safety and hygiene failures as well as incidents where children were left unsupervised, put in harm's way or assaulted.
If breaches of those kinds—not only the extraordinary but also the mundane and entirely predictable and preventable—are occurring so frequently across the largest ASX-listed early childhood company in the country, we have to assume it is a standard feature of the corporatised early childhood model. Each of those incidents taken in isolation may not be cause for huge alarm, but it is the patterns of offence and the structures that permit them to occur that warrant a big-picture view of the sector. Nothing could be more important than taking a firm and unflinching look at the sector responsible for the care and education of our littlest people, and that is what I hope the New South Wales parliamentary inquiry established in the wake of the fallout from the Four Corners exposé will do.
Read the transcript in Hansard here.
27 March 2025