Peta Credlin: What have we become when a childcare worker is charged with sexually abusing babies and infants?

The fact an alleged Melbourne perpetrator had passed all working with children checks suggests that we should look at culture as much as regulation, writes Peta Credlin.

There is hardly an Australian not shocked and appalled by yet another case of a male childcare worker charged with the systematic sexual abuse of babies and infants in his care.

What sort of society have we become? What sort of depraved individuals walk among us? Why are our governments and authorities failing to protect our most vulnerable. And what can we do about it?

These are all questions I’ve asked myself, as I’m sure you have too, as we try to comprehend the horror of a Melbourne childcare worker charged with 70 counts of aggravated sexual assault, including rape, involving eight children aged between just five months and two years old. Allegedly, the man has posted images of his crimes online and some 1200 children, says the Victorian government, now require testing for sexually transmitted diseases.

What staggered me was the news that the Premier Jacinta Allan and her ministers were briefed about this abuse and kept it quiet for a week before the families were informed.

It is to comprehend the horror of a Melbourne childcare worker charged with 70 counts of aggravated sexual assault.

Knowing politics as I do, this would have been so that the PR team could have time to work up a media-handling strategy. But this can’t be spun away. It’s government failure of the worst kind and, in years past, would have forced the immediate resignations of officials across the board.

Not so anymore, as we live in the age where, as soon as these alleged crimes were made public, the politicians call a review to then enable every follow-up question to be smothered by the line: “I don’t want to pre-empt the review.”

Victoria Premier Jacinta Allan. Picture: NewsWire/Valeriu Campan

Opposition Leader Brad Battin. Picture: NewsWire/Nadir Kinani

No voter should accept this.

We need action now, not months down the track when the report lands on someone’s desk and they’ve dulled the community back into submission.

A leader with a backbone would recall parliament immediately. She would ask former police officer, now Opposition Leader, Brad Battin to sit down with her and their respective teams to agree to a set of new urgent laws to protect our children. They must be laws that the major parties support and not the rubbish that gets diluted in the upper house by radical fringe MPs.

Then we must start to talk about the hard stuff.

Show me any new mum who wants to leave her six-month-old baby with a man (or anyone) at a childcare centre? They don’t. But as life becomes more and more unaffordable, everyday families need two incomes to survive and, because we have built a system that supports institutional childcare over parental care, that is what we force them to do.

Enough.

As taxpayers, we are spending $16bn dollars a year on a childcare system that is one-size-fits-all.

We must wake up to what is happening here. As taxpayers, we are spending $16bn dollars a year on a childcare system that is one-size-fits-all. We funnel billions into unionised childcare businesses that exist to make profits, rather than make it easier for parents to stay at home with their little ones at least for the first two to three years, when childcare is as much about nurturing and parental bonding as it is about education.

For years, I have argued that the money we spend should follow the child, not where the care is provided. So, support that’s paid to the parents to choose the care that best suits them, not the childcare operator.

For some parents, that might mean a parent can afford to stay home for longer. For others, it might help supplement the pension of a carer grandparent. Or, if we’re talking about a couple of young children, help the family hire a nanny to work in their own home. It doesn’t stop parents choosing a childcare centre if that’s what they want but, critically, they get a choice.

Support should be paid to the parents to choose the care that best suits them, not the childcare operator.

As someone who believes in choice, this is a no-brainer. I even suggested this policy to the Dutton team last year but, clearly, it went nowhere. And yet this is just the sort of policy that would enable the Liberal Party to highlight its ideological difference from Labor. The Left believes in big government and uses public money wherever it can to grow its unionised worker base.

The Right believes in choice and knows that the family is the most important social unit that civilisation has ever created and must be better supported through good policy.

Rather than fake election fights over personality differences, this is the sort of policy debate I think voters are desperate to have. It’s as though the Liberals have lost the moral courage to fight and the intellectual grunt to do the hard work to design new and different policy options.

And here’s a few other suggestions from me.

Don’t just say that childcare centres have a duty of care to protect the children in their charge but make management criminally liable for abuse that takes place on their premises. If owners and managers can be criminally liable under industrial manslaughter laws for workplace deaths, why shouldn’t childcare centre owners and managers be criminally liable for sexual abuse that takes place on their watch?

Cut the excuses and bring in a national system to vet people working with children. Make it so rigorous that people who fail can’t appeal.

And, finally, establish the national child sex offenders register that people like Bruce and Denise Morcombe have fought for decades to create.

While we’re at it, be honest about the sort of society we have become and try and change it. The fact that this alleged Melbourne perpetrator had passed all working with children checks suggests that culture is at least as important as regulation. A society that does almost nothing about the flood of hard-core pornography directed at our children, and that demands we celebrate drag-queen story-telling in some council libraries as a sign of “inclusion”, while deploring child sexual exploitation, is already guilty of double standards. The sexualisation of our children must be stopped.

And, dare I say it again, stand up for women and girls to be safe in single-sex spaces like toilets and changerooms.

None of this is in isolation.

VERSION OF A VOICE ALREADY REJECTED

Victoria is the petri-dish for activists and what is happening there on Indigenous issues is coming to your state too.

Not only is the Allan Labor government pushing a series of treaties with Indigenous groups and rewriting our history as a story of shame, but it will also now make the current First People’s Assembly permanent as a Victorian version of the failed federal Voice.

Even though 54 per cent of Victorians voted “no” to the Voice and thereby implicitly rejected the whole Uluru “Voice, Treaty, Truth” agenda.

Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan. Picture: NewsWire/Josie Hayden

Premier Jacinta Allan says that a state Indigenous voice to parliament is different from the rejected federal one because it would be legislated rather than entrenched in the Constitution.

But since when did voters make that distinction?

If the Premier really believes that Victorians are happy with special rights for Aboriginal people and billions in compensation from her already broke state, put it to the vote.

THUMBS UP

Warren Mundine – he’s right to say that choosing MPs on anything other than merit is a mistake. Gender quotas today, tomorrow race?

THUMBS DOWN

More anti-Semitic terrorism – a Melbourne synagogue fire-bombed Friday night at the same time the Albanese government funds anti-Jewish ‘creative’ hate. Wake up.

Originally published as Peta Credlin: What have we become when a childcare worker is charged with sexually abusing babies and infants?