The federal education minister, Jason Clare, says the “drip feed” of information about the work history of alleged paedophile Joshua Dale Brown highlights the urgent need for a national database to track childcare workers.
On Wednesday, another childcare centre was confirmed by police as being among Brown’s work history, bringing the total number of his known childcare workplaces to 23.
He has also worked at a children’s occupational therapy service. Police have warned “further updates are likely in the coming weeks”.
On Tuesday, detectives from Victoria’s sexual crimes squad confirmed four more childcare centres had been added to Brown’s work history, after which authorities recommended about 800 additional children get tested for sexually transmitted infections.
Speaking on Sunrise on Wednesday morning, Clare described the situation as a “nightmare” for families.
“More parents are being put through the wringer – all the fear and anxiety that their kids might be sick – and all the trauma that kids have to go through,” he said.
“The Victorian government and authorities are doing everything they can to track the details of where he worked.
“But this highlights an example of why you need a database or a register, so you know where all childcare workers are and where they’re moving from centre to centre. That’s just one of the things that we need to do.”
Clare said authorities “should be able to press a button” and know Brown’s work history.
“This is a live investigation, so let’s park this individual case,” he said. “We should have a system that tells us where all workers are, which centres they’re working at, whether they’re crossing individual borders.”
In an interview with ABC Afternoon Briefing later on Wednesday, Clare said the “drip feed” of information about the workplaces highlighted the case for a national worker database.
This month the Victorian government announced it would develop its own childcare worker registration system as it waited for a national scheme to be established. It would also require all childcare centres to adopt the federal ban on personal devices by 26 September or face fines up to $50,000.
At the time the reforms were announced, the state’s minister for children, Lizzie Blandthorn, said national reforms were moving at a “frustratingly slow” pace.
A national worker database would be in addition to a package of childcare safety laws that Clare will introduce next week when the federal parliament sits for the first time since the election.
The legislation would allow the commonwealth to cut off childcare subsidies to operators guilty of egregious safety breaches, ban providers that fail to meet minimum standards from opening new centres and allow authorities to conduct unannounced spot-checks.
Currently those checks require a warrant or Australian federal police officers to accompany them.
Clare said under the legislation, substandard centres would be issued notices to lift their standards within a certain timeframe or risk losing funding.
The improvement notices would be made public, Clare said.
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The government is hopeful the legislation will pass within the first sitting fortnight after the opposition leader, Sussan Ley, wrote to Anthony Albanese pledging bi-partisan support.
The Greens said it “won’t stand in the way” of a national database for staff but said the government must go further and establish a federal watchdog with powers to shut down centres.
Victoria police revealed at the start of July that Brown had been charged in May with more than 70 offences relating to eight alleged victims in his care, aged between five months and two years old.
Police said establishing Brown’s complete work history had been “extremely complex” as childcare providers do not have centralised records. It meant detectives had to “execute search warrants to obtain handwritten records, shift rosters and other critical information”.
Education provider G8 wrote to parents on Tuesday to tell them that Brown had also worked at World of Learning in Point Cook on 24 August 2023.
This centre was not previously listed by police.
G8 said there were no records of Brown working at World of Learning Point Cook “on any other day” and apologised for not providing the information sooner. The company said the information had been passed on to police, who confirmed the location on Wednesday evening. It is now on the government website listing Brown’s employment.
Victoria has also announced a review into childcare safety in the state, which is being led by the former South Australian premier Jay Weatherill and a senior bureaucrat, Pamela White. It is considering whether CCTV should be mandated across centres.
G8 and Affinity Education Group, which employed Brown, have said they would either implement or speed up the rollout of CCTV to all their centres regardless of the inquiry’s findings.
Clare said more CCTV cameras would “deter bad people from acting badly in our centres, but also help police with their investigations when the worst happens”.
But Clare dismissed calls to bar men from working in the childcare industry altogether.
“Targeting blokes is not the solution,” he said. “If we go back and have a look at examples of abuse and neglect in our centres, it’s not just men, it’s women as well.”
– With additional reporting by Eelemarni Close-Brown
