Transcript - Sunrise with Matt Shirvington

MATT SHIRVINGTON, HOST: Well, turning now to an important summit that's just two hours away, Education Ministers from around the country will sit down together for a special meeting on child safety in early education and care. The government is today proposing a $189 million package to keep kids safe, including funding a new National Educator Register, mandatory child safety training for all staff and mandatory phone ban from September, just 10 days away.

Joining me now is the Federal Education Minister, Jason Clare, live in Sydney. Good morning to you. Well, how confident, first off, you'll sit down with the States today. Are they all on board?

JASON CLARE, MINISTER FOR EDUCATION: Yeah, I think so. I think they get it. I think every Australian gets it. Australians have been sickened by the revelations out of Victoria and other parts of the country over the last few months and they expect us to act. 

We've already, as you know, mate, passed laws through the Federal Parliament to cut off funding to child care centres that aren't up to scratch, that aren't meeting the safety standards that parents expect and that our kids deserve. We're already using those powers. We've sent notices to 37 childcare centres already telling them that they've got to get up a scratch or we'll cut off their funding. And there's more to come on that front. 

But today's meeting, as you rightly point out, is about the next step, about a National Educator Register so we can track people working from centre to centre and from state to state. National mandatory child safety training. So, the people in our centres, the awesome people who work in our centres, who look after our kids, who educate our kids, have got the skills they need to be able to identify somebody who might be up to no good in their centres and keep our kids safe. 

But not just that, also a national trial of CCTV to make sure that we get that right. That's one of the tools that we can use to deter these bad actors from perpetrating the sort of crimes that we've seen against our kids, but also help police with investigations. A national ban on mobile phones, the personal phones that are used by paedophiles in centres. We've seen evidence of that as well, as well as more national inspections of centres. They're important to be able to make sure that centres are up to scratch.

SHIRVINGTON: Jason, the big one was the National Register, because you can fail a Working with Children Check in one state and then go to another and get a job. When is that going to be implemented? That's critical, isn't it?

CLARE: Yeah, it's one part of the puzzle. I don't think anything's a silver bullet here, but work on that, if we get approval today, will start immediately. 

We've got to build that from scratch and we'll have to pass laws to make it mandatory for centres to put the information in it. But we want to test and trial that by December of this year and have it rolling out from February of next year. It's just one of the things that we need to do, Shirvo. The mobile phone ban is important as well. So is the training for all of the educators. The CCTV is part of it as well. There's not one single thing that we need to do here. We need to do all of it.

SHIRVINGTON: Just on the 37 centres that you identified that are absolutely failing standards at the moment, you've given them six months to improve. However, they're still operating, aren't they? Are you comfortable with that?

CLARE: These 37 centres have been failing to meet the sort of safety and quality standards that we expect for more than seven years. So, time after time, regulators have told them that you're not meeting the standard and they've continued to not meet that standard. Now, what I've said is, if you don't meet the standard you should --

SHIRVINGTON: But they are still open, for the next six months.

CLARE: Yeah, that's right. And I've said, meet the standard or we'll shut you down. So, they've got six months. They've told the parents at that centre that they're subject to these new laws. They've got six months to meet that standard or the funding gets cut off.

SHIRVINGTON: It's a long time. A lot can happen in six months. Minister, I'll let you go. I know you've got a busy day. Thanks for joining us.