Interview - ABC Afternoon Briefing
PATRICIA KARVELAS: Today you announced that you’ve cut funding to a service in Victoria that’s been warned and continued to not meet the standard. What were they doing? Can you explain what standards they weren’t meeting?
JASON CLARE: Safety hazards in the centre. So this is a family day care centre; it’s not a typical childcare centre. It’s in a number of different homes in the northern suburbs of Victoria. We issued them with a notice in August of last year indicating that unless they improved the standards in the centre that we would cut off the childcare subsidy that effectively funds the centre. And they still didn’t. Some of the sorts of things that the state regulators found when they visited the centre – and excuse me as I sort of refer to some notes –
KARVELAS: Yes, please.
CLARE: Hazardous materials including bleach, paint and Ratsak bait accessible to children in various rooms. A freestanding chest freezer on a verandah with no child safety lock. Obstructed emergency exits. Those sorts of things. So what we’re dealing with here is not just, you know, the risk of sexual predators in centres but general safety hazards. And the most powerful weapon we have to wield here is taxpayers’ money. We fund child care centres. It takes – it accounts for about 70 per cent of the funding of the centres. They can’t run without it. And if centres aren’t prepared to act, then I will – I said this is not an idle threat. This is the proof of it. But not just that – you played a clip from what I said in Parliament – 115 centres have been put on notice. About 46 or 47, I think, have now after seven years or more of not meeting the sort of safety standards that we set have now suddenly done it at risk of losing their funding. And seven others have voluntarily just given up their license because they weren’t able to meet the standards that we expect.
KARVELAS: So that means that the remaining number – and I can’t do quick enough maths, which is why I’m in journalism – but the remaining number remain at risk?
CLARE: Yes.
KARVELAS: Are you prepared to act and remove their funding? Are they poised to lose their funding? What’s the time frame, what are the issues?
CLARE: They could as well. Some of those have not met the deadline that we’ve set. So for some centres we’ve put them on notice and given them six months, nine months, 12 months. So they’re all on that track. They’ve got to be assessed by the state regulator to see if they’ve fixed the problems. But what I said in Parliament when I introduced the legislation is if you don’t meet the standard, then expect that we’re going to act, and we have today.
KARVELAS: You mentioned that the one centre, which is a family day care, has lost its funding on the basis of, like, you know, hazards, rather than predators. How many in that group are perhaps about predators? Because that really – I’m not saying that the other issues don’t matter. Anyone who has children wants them to be safe from everything.
CLARE: Yeah.
KARVELAS: But that was clearly the most alarming and –
CLARE: Look, I don’t have a breakdown on that basis. I should say to viewers –
KARVELAS: Are there cases?
CLARE: Look, if the regulators have evidence that there is a predator in a centre, they will act immediately. The police will arrest the person. The centre can be shut down in a day. What this legislation is about is saying that these are the safety standards. If you don’t meet them, then we will shut you down. I took another step two weeks ago. When we announced the 15 per cent pay rise extension for child care workers I said there’s two conditions – you only get the money if you do two things. Number one, you cap your fees, and that will save parents money. But number two, you have to meet that national safety standard. Now, 95 per cent of centres do today. That’s pretty good – 95 per cent of centres meet that standard. I want it to be 100 per cent. And so what we’re saying is you only get that $3.5 billion to pay the workers more if you keep our kids safe.
KARVELAS: And the centres that suddenly were able to fix their standards because they faced a threat, how much monitoring will they face given they were kind of lagging on that. Now they’ve found their mojo apparently, but how are you going to watch them?
CLARE: Well, that’s done principally by the states and the state regulators. You know, I’ve been pretty blunt over the last 12 months or so that not enough has been done to keep our kids safe, whether it’s the feds or the state governments, whether it’s Labor or Liberal. We’ve got to do more. You know, we announced about a quarter of a billion dollar package in the wake of that horrific news last year, and the states have lifted their game and the number of visits that they make to centres, you know, sometimes there are visits unannounced on the spot to see whether centres are meeting their standards.
But just to give you an idea of the other things that are going on, if you’ve got a child in child care centre today, you’ll see signs that that say mobile phones are banned. Personal devices are banned in centres now. There might be kids at home, so I’m not going to explain why, but I reckon mums and dads know why we have done that. There’s a trial of CCTV cameras going on in a couple of hundred centres now across the country. We know they’re useful for the police, but we’re looking at what else they might be able to do to help keep our kids safe.
KARVELAS: And that trial, is that getting to a point where you’re getting enough evidence to say that you need to roll that out more broadly?
CLARE: Too early, but we do have the AFP involved in assessing the evidence there. So they’ll give us feedback on what works and what doesn’t. Perhaps the most important thing, though, is mandatory safety training because 99.9 per cent of the people who work in our centres, you know, they love our kids, they want to keep them safe. You know, they are just as broken by the sickening stuff that’s happened in the last 12 months as any of us. And so that mandatory training that we’ll rolled out, we gave the workforce six months to do it. 99 per cent have done it within three months. That’s a good sign. It shows how seriously they’re taking it. But that’s just the first step. Next month the next stage of training begins. And I’ve done the training myself, so I know exactly what it’s like, and it helps not just to, you know, identify a predator that might be hiding in plain sight but the sort of things that we’re talking about right now in terms of general safety for our kids.
KARVELAS: At the time where a lot of these stories were coming out, they were very alarming, of course the most high profile out of Melbourne.
CLARE: Yeah.
KARVELAS: But at the time there was a bit of a crisis of the childcare system, as you know. I anecdotally spoke to many parents who said they just were not going to even send their kids to child care. It was having a real material impact on how people were behaving. Has that now restored to normal?
CLARE: In some places. You know, some of the centres that were employers of that individual have seen significant drops in the number of parents who are trusting those services with their kids, to be frank. One of my friends had two daughters at one of those centres and had to go through the, you know –
KARVELAS: Yeah.
CLARE: Right? You can imagine what that’s like if you’re a mum or a dad and you’ve got to deal with all of that. But, you know, I do know that fundamentally the people who work in our centres are terrific people and, you know, they are the best asset we’ve got to keep our kids safe. But I’ve got a job to do too, to make sure that I equip them with everything they need to do their job. And so part of that is training. Part of that is getting rid of the phones. Part of it is a national register. Like, we didn’t have this 12 months ago.
KARVELAS: No.
CLARE: And so when the cops turned up at different centres to find out where this bloke worked, you know, they had to go through the paperwork in the office to work it out.
KARVELAS: Yeah, it was astonishing.
CLARE: It was ridiculous. Well, now we’ve got a register to fix that.
KARVELAS: So first centre, which is a family day care centre, but none of the sort of formal day care centres or any of them next? Are there those on the list?
CLARE: Well, seven have relinquished their license voluntarily. But there are other child care centres who are on that list. And so, you know, the message today is the message I’ve been giving for 12 months. I'm not mucking around. If you don’t meet the standards, then the funding will get cut off.
KARVELAS: I want to talk just before I let you go on something else that we’ve been covering for a while here and I think is very important. The biggest review of the tertiary education sector in decades, the Universities Accord, took aim at the Job Ready Graduates program. Of course that creates different costs for humanities degrees. They recommended junking it two years ago. Why hasn’t it happened?
CLARE: Yeah, well it’s failed. And I’ve been pretty honest. I’ve said this is unfinished business. But it is part of that report, right, the Universities Accord, which is big. It’s going to take a bit of time to implement all of it. We’ve implemented about 36 of the 47 recommendations. I’ve got a Bill in the parliament which is about helping more kids go to uni. In the years ahead, more people are going to need either a TAFE qualification or a uni degree. That Bill in the parliament invests an extra $3.5 billion in the sector so more kids get a crack at uni, in particular kids from poor families and from the regions and the bush. I’m doing that for a reason – you know, 50 per cent of people in their 30s have a uni degree, but not where I live.
KARVELAS: Absolutely it’s an issue. But in terms of what is clearly an inequity, people are waiting –
CLARE: Yeah, so part one is extra funding for extra places at uni. What you’re going to is how much does the student pay. So I guess I’d say three things: number one, we’ve taken a big step by cutting student debt by 20 per cent. That’s helped people who were at uni or are at uni now by, I think, it took about $16 billion of debt off the shoulders of about 3 million Australians –
KARVELAS: Will it happen, though, this particular change?
CLARE: So that’s been done.
KARVELAS: Yeah.
CLARE: Step two ahead of this Job Ready Graduates reform, step two is trying to make it cheaper and quicker for people to do a uni degree. At some unis you can – if you’ve done a TAFE qualification you can get a year off your degree. That will cut about ten grand of your degree. I want more universities to do that. And so we’re working this year on trying to get more universities to do that so that if you’ve done, say, a nursing diploma at uni, you take a year off your uni degree. If you do a teaching course at TAFE, it takes a year off your degree as well. That will save not just ten grand potentially off your degree, depending on what the course is, but you get into the workforce a year earlier. And then there’s Job Ready Graduates, right, which, you know, I have said is unfair and I’ve said has failed.
KARVELAS: Are you committed to doing it in this term of the Albanese government?
CLARE: I’m going to get information back from the Tertiary Education Commission later next year. They’re looking at the pricing of university degrees and how all of that works. And so Barney Glover, who’s the chair, the Chief Commissioner of the ATEC, has said we’ll get that advice in the second half of next year. That advice will help us in the decisions we need to make with the next step of reforming higher education.
KARVELAS: So it’s some time down the road, though?
CLARE: It’s going to take a while. Like, it’s expensive, right, and it’s complicated. But I’ve said it’s unfinished business, there’s more work to do.
KARVELAS: Thank you so much for coming in.
CLARE: Good on you, PK.