It is a pleasure to rise and speak on several bills on childcare safety and reforms, and I will speak to some of the reforms that are part of the various bills – the Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority Bill 2025, the Early Childhood Legislation Amendment (Child Safety) Bill 2025 and the Social Services Regulation Amendment (Child Safety, Complaints and Worker Regulation) Bill 2025 – which we are debating today.

This is about overhauling and improving our child safety regulation in this state, and it is part of our commitment that we made earlier this year that we would accept all 22 recommendations of that rapid child safety review, which was handed down by Mr Weatherill AO and Ms Pam White PSM in August.

I have heard lots of contributions today, and all of us agree that the safety of our children is paramount, especially in our early childhood education settings, and that they are and should be our highest priority.

Every parent who drops off their child at school or at an early childhood centre, or with others, with adults who are caring for them, need and deserve the confidence of knowing that when they do drop their child off they are leaving them in a place which is safe, caring and built around looking after their wellbeing.

These bills certainly are there to strengthen that foundation of trust, because we must have trust in our educators, trust in our system and trust that this government is particularly doing the work to make sure that the welfare of every child comes first.

I have the pleasure of visiting kindergartens and childcare centres across the Bellarine fairly regularly, and I always admire the care and dedication of our educators that are working in these settings. They deal with small children. I used to be a primary school teacher; I had grade 6 students, and that was about as young as I would like to go. I could not be a prep teacher, and I do not know whether I could do early childhood myself. But these educators are just incredible at looking after our youngest little Victorians, and I thank them for all the work that they do.

They certainly play a really vital role in children’s lives. They are in places where children go to explore the world; they grow, they learn, they play, they build friendships and they have really great connections with their educators. They are part of your family many times, and they guide these young people with their emotions and their social development every single day. But as I have said, we have to have confidence that those settings are safe, and it within the system of regulation, oversight and accountability that we have a role to play here in this place.

One of these bills is the social services regulation bill, and that is about consolidating those key child safeguard functions – the working with children check, the reportable conduct scheme and the child safety standards – under one strengthened independent regulator.

This is going to bring all those protections together and create a more streamlined and powerful framework to safeguard children. Under this bill, instead of appealing to something like a VCAT tribunal, decisions will now be able to be made subject to an internal review with advice from an independent expert panel, ensuring that greater expertise in matters of child safety and disability.

This bill also introduces mandatory child safety training and testing for all applicants for a working with children check, and this is to ensure a base level of child safety literacy.

All employers engaging people in child-related work will be required to also verify participation in the working with children system. This builds a record of where people are working and allows the regulator to notify employers if a person’s clearance is suspended or cancelled and/or to track their work over time.

This is about strengthening the integrity of our system. It is not just a compliance matter; this is about embedding in every decision that we make in every workplace and every interaction that families can have that confidence that the people who care for their children are not only qualified but appropriately vetted, trained and monitored as well.

This is about a culture. It is more than compliance; it is about culture and a culture that puts children first. Recognising that trust between families and educators is sacred, and ensuring that safety is never negotiable, this is about reforms that families can have confidence in.

The Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority Bill 2025 is a landmark step in our government’s commitment to ensure that every child in early childhood education and care in Victoria is safe, protected and given the best start. This part of this bill responds directly to the recommendations of the rapid child safety review that we initiated, and it is talking to recommendation 9 in full.

This is about establishing an independent early childhood education and care regulator and creating a Victorian early childhood worker register. Both of these are really important, critical parts of the system. The children that go to care, as I have said, have that right to be safe wherever they learn, play and grow.

This bill ensures that we look at this sector that is rapidly growing and growing in complexity. I think I remember the minister explaining at the start of the year that if we were going to design a system, we would not design it as it is right now; we would design it in a different way. But we are trying to deal with a system that the private sector has gone into, and so now we are trying to reform a system that has already been in place for many, many years.

Currently the services are regulated by the quality assessment and regulation division within the Department of Education, but the department also operates services, which can create a bit of a conflict of duty. So this bill transfers a regulatory power from the department to a new, independent Victorian Early Childhood Regulatory Authority, and others have spoken about that and have called it VECRA. VECRA will be led by the early childhood regulator and report directly to the Minister for Children.

This independent structure will ensure effective oversight, as I have talked about, in an ever-increasingly complex sector. VECRA will also be integrated into a regulator for the child safety standards, consolidating oversight and ensuring children’s welfare is in focus. By consolidating information across all the providers, VECRA will be able to quickly identify which services a person has worked for, should it arise, and the register is also able to share information across the Social Services Regulator.

It is about joining up those critical data from multiple sources to better protect children. This will make sure that the functions of each – VECRA and the Social Services Regulator – support each other. As I have said, this is about more than compliance; it is about building a culture that puts children first. It eliminates conflict of interest and ensures that in every corner of the state in Victoria’s early childhood sector children can learn, they can grow and they can thrive in environments that are safe, nurturing and fully accountable.

Just in conclusion, when I speak with parents across the Bellarine community, a message comes through every time, and it is something that I feel as a parent as well: we just want the best for our kids. We want our kids to be safe, we want our kids to be happy and we want our kids to be surrounded by people who genuinely care for them. So many families and childcare centres and kindergartens become an extension of your family. They care for our children, and we rely on and trust them deeply every day.

That is why these reforms really matter, because they are about strengthening that trust, giving parents’ confidence back into places where they know that their children will be safe but also grow into wonderful human beings, with wonderful memories of their time in child care. Again, I thank the workers for their care of our youngest children.