Childcare horrors are shocking, but they’re no surprise to me

It’s the stuff of nightmares. Broken bones. Burnt hands. Children strapped into high chairs for hours and force-fed until they vomit. Toddlers yanked, shaken, dragged along the ground. Kids found unsupervised in car parks or roaming next to busy main roads. Babies left in soiled nappies all day. Ignored, neglected, left to cry.

And then there’s the video – just nine seconds long. A defenceless baby, strapped into a bouncer, crying hysterically as a childcare worker slaps her across the face repeatedly for fun. Her colleague films it, laughing, and uploads it to Snapchat. It’s hard to believe this is happening in Australia’s childcare centres, but it’s been going on for years, all in plain sight.

Illustration: Monique WestermannCredit:

But there’s even more heinous crimes. It took the announcement of a 26-year-old male educator being charged with more than 70 counts of child sexual abuse at a Melbourne childcare centre before people started asking the question … is childcare safe?

For someone like me, who has been investigating childcare for almost a year now, the news was horrifying but not a surprise. In Victoria, NSW and Western Australia, at least one report of sexual misconduct is made every day. And that’s just what’s tracked and reported. In Queensland, South Australia and the Northern Territory, there’s no reportable conduct scheme, so we simply don’t know.

The Victorian man facing charges, Joshua Dale Brown, worked at 20 childcare centres, most of them owned by big private operators including private equity-owned Affinity Education, listed ASX giant G8 Education and United States-owned Only About Children. His case is ongoing and remains before the courts.

Scratch the surface, and you find more. On Wednesday, a worker from Affinity childcare group is scheduled to face a NSW court charged with nine counts of sexually touching a child. This case is also ongoing.

In March, Quoc Phu Tong, who worked at a Seaforth centre run by Only About Children, was sentenced to two years in prison for the intentional touching of a child.

Then there’s Ashley Paul Griffith, a childcare worker sentenced to life in prison after pleading guilty to a series of offences at early learning centres, mostly in Queensland. His crimes, described as “depraved”, included rape and the production of child-exploitation material. Griffith’s abuse went undetected for years. He had held a valid Blue Card – Queensland’s working-with-children check – due to systemic failures in the child-protection systems.

In March, I launched a series of investigations into the $20 billion childcare sector, forensically exposing a system in deep crisis. What was revealed is how for-profit providers, now accounting for 75 per cent of the sector, have fundamentally reshaped it. According to the ACCC, the big operators, on average, pay lower wages, hire more casual and part-time staff, and experience higher educator turnover than their non-profit counterparts.

At the same time, they receive the lion’s share of the $14 billion a year of taxpayer money spent on childcare subsidies. These are taxpayer dollars propping up a system where some operators spend as little as $1 a day per child on meals, and where educators are placed under KPIs to boost occupancy and cut costs. When you follow the money, the priorities are clear. Profit comes first.

It’s such an obviously stark difference to how we treat primary and secondary education. Childcare is a vital service for families turned into a money-making machine. The childcare sector has exploded in scale but the laws and oversight meant to govern it have not kept pace, particularly with the rise of the big for-profit operators, with their deep pockets and lobbyists in tow.

It is also a property play. Children aren’t just enrolled, they come with a price tag. Their enrolments can add as much as $350,000 to the value of a property, pushing some centres into the millions. Some ads even say no experience necessary for owning a centre.

The brutal reality is Australia’s regulatory system is fragmented and reactive, with each state handling complaints differently and no consistent national oversight. In many cases, regulators are under-resourced and hesitant to use the enforcement powers they do have. Centres with repeated breaches remain open. Serious incidents, including abuse, neglect, and unsupervised children, are often dismissed as “one-offs.”

They’re absolutely not.

Affinity Education offers a window into how the regulatory system is failing families. Between 2021 and 2024, its NSW centres racked up more than 1100 regulatory breaches, averaging more than one a day. Yet in that time, the regulator issued just nine infringement notices, totalling less than $2000 in fines.

Thousands of pages of internal regulatory documents reveal the same problems surfacing again and again: unsafe sleep practices, staff out of ratio and incomplete records ranging from expired working-with-children checks to missing staff qualifications and children’s medical histories. In most cases, they are told to do better by the regulator. Despite this, since December last year, Affinity has been allowed to expand – acquiring 13 more centres in NSW.

Then there are the National Quality Standards which are meant to give parents peace of mind, a ratings system or benchmark for safety, care and education. But they, too, are broken. One in 10 centres have never been rated and the others are rated on average every four years. Some are not rated for nine years.

The flaws in the system are there for all to see. A worker shortage due to burnout and low pay, education providers exploiting the situation by offering fast-tracked courses and some selling fake qualifications – all of which undermines the quality of care.

We’ve seen review after review. NSW had one and released the findings last week. Now Victoria is scrambling to conduct another. What about the other states? Do we really have to wait for a scandal to break before each state starts paying attention?

Federal Education Minister Jason Clare admitted to Sarah Ferguson on the ABC’s 7.30 that governments and ministers haven’t done enough. They have been too slow to act. He is right. He is finally taking action, introducing legislation to cut funding to childcare centres that fail to meet safety standards and working-with-children checks.

But there are other fixes he can make including the establishment of a national childcare commission, a key recommendation from the Productivity Commission in September 2024. Or an independent review into the National Quality Standards or the performance of its oversight body, the Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority.

But none of this addresses the elephant in the room: the dominance of private operators and the inherent conflict of interest between profit and child welfare. Nor does it tackle the widespread fraud and compliance failures uncovered in the Auditor-General’s recent report into childcare subsidies which estimated $2.6 billion has been sucked out in the past five years. But as many know it is the tip of the iceberg.

The sector is riddled with complexity, failure and risk. While there are some good operators and good, passionate educators, it is getting tougher for families to find quality care.

A royal commission or independent inquiry is the only way to truly expose how deep the problems go. The Greens have called for it, alongside educators, parents and some policy experts. But the major parties remain silent. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has dismissed the idea, saying a royal commission would “take too long” as the system spirals further into crisis.

It’s worth remembering the banking royal commission. The government of the day resisted it, too, but in just a year it exposed systemic misconduct, helped restore public trust, and forced long-overdue reforms. Why should children deserve any less?

Adele Ferguson is a gold Walkley Award-winning investigative journalist with the ABC. She is a former Sydney Morning Herald and Age reporter.