I'm Ruby Jones and you're listening to seven AM. When Joshua Brown was arrested for allegedly abusing children at childcare centers across Melbourne. It exposed a horrifying reality, patchwork regulation and an understaffed, profit driven industry failing children. Months on, as state and federal governments try to deal with the fallout, and as the Albanezy government pumps record investment into the early childhood sector, experts say children still are not safe
in childcare. Today, Crime Reporter at the Age Sharon Grog on the tension between rapid business growth and child safety at the heart of the childcare sector. It's Tuesday, October twenty eight and just a warning, this episode discusses allegations of child sex abuse. So Sharon, I thought to begin with, we could go back to July when police first went
public with their investigation. Tell me what we initially heard about, what was going on in childcare centers, and then what you did to try and uncover more.
The first we heard about this was just before nine am on July first, As I remember, our editors were all about to walk into morning conference and the cops had called a press conference which happens all the time.
The Premier was going to be.
There, which wasn't necessarily unusual, but then I got sent the media release of what was coming, and I remember my stomach just dropped.
Brown was not known to police prior to this investigation. However, as soon as we identified he's alleged defending he was removed from the community.
He had a.
Valiant working with children check, which has since been canceled.
Basically, a twenty six year old childcare worker named Joshua Brown had been charged with sexually abusing at least eight babies and toddlers at a Point Cook childcare center, and he was under investigation for abusing more kids at another
Essendence center. He'd worked at more than twenty centers across Victoria, so the investigation had been running in secret for weeks, but they were going public now because they had to launch this unprecedented testing program for the kids at those centers, testing for STI sexually transmitted diseases.
As a precaution, we are recommending that some children undergo testing for infectious diseases due to a potential exposure risk in that period. We do understand that this is another distressing element to the situation, and we're taking this approach as a precaution.
They hadn't wanted to start a panic before they told those families. But then we learned that they had to test more than a thousand kids because he'd contaminated food at the center with bodily fluids.
Hundreds of additional children are being recommended for testing.
That's right, Jen, eight hundred and thirty in fact, and that's on top of the existing twelve hundred children that have already been advised by the Department of Health to get tested for infectious diseases.
We were looking basically at one of the worst pedophile cases I think we'd seen. So we hit the phones, basically calling anyone we thought might know about this, and we learned that the cops had raided Brown in May after finding a horde of child abuse material filmed at that childcare center.
And as you say, Joshua Brown had worked at many childcare centers across Melbourne. There were so many families affected. So as you started looking into the centers, what came to light about Brown and his work history.
Yeah, So once we started looking at Brown, it became clear he'd been in childcare for a really long time.
Considering he was twenty six.
He'd worked at two of the biggest chains in the country, Affinity in G eight, and that meant he'd been sent out to fill in its centers all around the state. Pretty soon, though, after going public with the list of where Brown had worked, the cops realized there was a problem.
The dates weren't matching up. People were ringing in.
Affinity and G eight both came out and said, whoops, you know, we got some of the dates wrong. Then they came out again, whoops, he wasn't ever at this center, or there was another one we missed, or in the case of the Essendon Center, we worked out he'd actually been there for six months, longer than what Affinity had told police. And that's the one where he's being investigated for further abuse.
And you looked into that, this discrepancy between what the police were told and what actually happened at Essendon in particular. So tell me about that.
Yeah, So some staff at Affinity came forward and leaked me some pretty extraordinary like basically a treasure trove of internal documents. And one of the alarming things I found once I started digging through was there was a post in Affinity's internal staff communication portal. It's kind of like their Facebook. And there's the CEO, T Hickey. He likes to post pictures from his visits to centers. He signs
it off to Affinity and Beyond. And there he was visiting the Essendonce center, where Brown had worked right up until he was arrested, and where cops suspect he kept abusing kids just weeks before the raid on Brown. Hickey was there and he was praising how great the team was and how they'd recently come off a department watch list.
That was the first anyone had heard of that, And.
Still were yet to really get any answer on why that center was being looked at by the regulator and why it came off the least.
That's just how opaque the system is. I got my.
Hands on another really concerning thing too. There was a complaint made by a young childcare worker on placement at the Point Cook Center, where Brown is actually charged already with abusing babies and toddlers. They had said, look, we're so understaffed. Workers are constantly being left alone with the kids, and they thought rightly that was dangerous. So this complaint was made while Brown was working there at the same
time he's accused of abusing kids there. In fact, most of his serious offending was actually after that complaint was made.
This complaint had gone over G.
Eight's head to the regulator, and it was the regulator who chose not to take it any further. They looked at it and said, that's all right. And honestly, it's one of the things I just can't stop thinking about.
Can we talk more about the way that the oversight system works or doesn't work by the sounds of it. So when a center is flagged, what is then done to address that and to then make sure that it is meeting standards?
Well, you know, they say they review things. And I wish I could lay this out for you in proper detail, but there are so many agencies involved in so much bureaucracy and secrecy, it is actually really difficult to get the full picture. I've learned so some parts of government don't even tell each other about child safety investigations. For example, it's an entirely different branch of government here in Victoria
in charge of reviewing working with children's checks. Because at the time Brown is arrested, he's still got a valid children's check, even though we found out there were multiple complaints made against him, he lied repeatedly on his resume, he'd been fired more than three times, and he was still deemed a very fit person to be working with kids.
One of the other key things at the heart of abuse cases is usually supervision, so childcare workers will tell you they're always understaffed at the really big for profit chains, so they're always trying to get heaps of kids in while kind of saving cash on staff. Basically is the business model, but there's this idea of the two eyes rules, so a kid shouldn't be left alone with one person. If we're thinking about safety, there should be two people
in a room, never one, really though. The only legal requirement are staffing ratios, which different in every state, but usually it's about one educator to every four babies, and it changes based on the age. But centers will sometimes use an under the roof loophole, so they'll count off as staff who aren't watching kids in those ratios.
Or they'll apply for exemptions.
The big problem is that the regulator doesn't really come out to check, and when they do, sites are usually notified, so in the case of Affinity, for example, I could see them sending these staff wide memos thanking people for filling in for their absent colleagues while the regulator was on site. And even if they do get caught, more often than not, the regulator will suggest, you know what, you can just apply for a staffing exemption rather than slapping them with any real consequence.
Coming up cash bonus incentives at the cost of child safety. Sharon, let's talk a bit more about Affinity, which is one of the chains where Joshua Brown worked. Tell me about how they operate, what we know about how they approach both child safety and as a profit company making money.
Yeah, so, Affinity are owned by a private equity group Quadrant and since that group of coming, they've been really aggressively buying up centers to expand their kind of revenue base and take advantage of the government's push to have more kids in childcare. And look, by comparison, Affinity spends less on staff than other childcare chains, but their enrollment
push is really intense. So we found clear policies of them instructing staff to infiltrate Facebook mothers groups to promote their centers, and you know, like they'll get staff to run prize competitions for which parent can write them the best review. Also are confirmed that managers get big cash bonuses sometimes tens of thousands of dollars and shares in the company as incentives for growing those enrollments. So they're
always running these internal campaigns. There's shout outs from the CEO, Tim Hickey, for his rising stars of enrollment or occupancy is what they call it, and they always list growing as their key priority rather than safety. In fact, one thing we were leaked was this crisis meeting for staff at Affinity. We actually got the full recording and it was days after Four Corners had broadcast are really damning expos into child safety breaches at Affinity centers in New
South Wales. And even then you can see the senior execs saying, look, just stay focused on enrollments, just really you know, brushing aside those real safety concerns.
That were aired.
And you mentioned Tim Hickey, the CEO of Affinity Education Group, so he fronted the New South Wales parliamentary inquiry into the childcare sector recently. So tell me about what he said.
Well, we've actually been investing a lot in compliance and safety and doing a lot of work on our systems and processes which are very robust, and we can take you through the detail of what we actually do.
Hickey starts by saying he has the finger to the pulse at all his centers, doing weekly meetings with staff and regular visits, and then he can't answer any questions about what was going on during safety incidents. You know, apparently he didn't know that kind of day to day stuff.
My priority and what I'm hired to do is to take care of Affinity centers and drive safety and quality, because if we don't drive safe, high quality centers, we're not going to have a sustainable business.
He was forced to admit he'd gotten pretty big bonuses the same year as some of those safety scandals earlier at Affinity. But the thing that did surprise me is he really sort of doubled down and dismissed the idea of there being a staffing problem, even though it's come up again and again.
Our centers or a meeting or exceeding the national quality standard, and the vast majority deliver excellent early education every day.
And you know, in fairness to Affinity, there's a problem in the bigger sector with a shortage of people. The politicians grilling him brought it up a lot, and you know, they're legally required staffing ratios being consistently broken at his centers.
And there was quite a fallout from his appearance at the parliamentary inquiry.
Tell me about what happened after he gave evidence.
After that appearance, we had some more angry staff get in touch and we found out that Affinity had ignored a complaint about child safety at one of its centers where Brown was being investigated, a complaint about a child inappropriately touching another child, and this had been made after Brown had actually.
Been arrested at the Escidence center.
Affinity didn't tell sex crime detectives who were then investigating Brown, so the board of Affinity hadn't known that Affinity had actually withheld so much information from police. I mean, it was not just that they got the work history wrong of Brown when they initially told police. It became apparent that both these big childcare chains gps track their staff
to the minute and to the room location. It's usually to stop people taking breaks, and they hadn't passed that information to police for a very long time, and now here they were not passing on another safety complaint to the investigators. So suddenly we got word that Hickey and his chief operating officer, a guy who had told parents to stop being emotional over the Josh Brown case early on, they were both going effective immediately.
Right, So some executives are gone, But the big question moving forward is how much has actually changed at these large chains since these allegations came to light.
Well, look, there was a lot of real horror when the case broke, but so many of these problems have been known for such a long time, and there is a concern now that a lot of the solutions now are being reached for are these quick band aid style things like putting CCTV cameras and centers banning phones. There is finally now going to be a national register of
childcare workers. Experts have been calling for that for years now, so workers won't be able to just shop around between states if they've lost their check somewhere else, and there will be tougher penalties for breaches too. In New South Wales, for example, the regulators talked about visiting centers once a year now, but obviously that's still a very low amount, so we need a regulator with teeth. The bigger issue
of understaffing and that proper regulation. It's more expensive, it's harder to fix, but it's so important.
And Affinity is just one company in this space. So and what does their story tell you about problems in the way that the industry operates at large?
Yeah, this is definitely a symptom of the bigger industry. I mean a lot of the problems at Affinity are also problems at GSH And it really speaks to that dominance and that rise of for profit providers in the sectors rather than government run, community run.
Experts have been telling me that these.
Big private chains that have moved in, you know, they'll have lawyers on retainer when a safety scandal breaks, and it's in their interest to protect the company, not kids.
So there's this real.
Conflict there about protecting reputation and profit versus protecting children.
Think about sort of pressuring staff.
To get more kids through the door all the time, even giving them equity in the company, so their income is tied to this kind of growth. That's not a great incentive to speak up and report. As they tell inquiries, they always tell stuff to do.
Sharon, thank you so much for your time.
Thank you so much. Ruby.
Also in the news, Environment Minister Murray Watt has rejected calls to split the government's proposed Environmental Bill into two stages, with laws for streamlining approvals and laws for environmental protections to be introduced separately. The Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Actors expected to be introduced to Parliament this week, with the Coalition calling on the Government to break up the
legislation with just three sitting weeks of Parliament left. Minister What says he's still hope for the bill will be passed this year, and Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke says the Australian government acted on its own intelligence assessments as Israel's intelligence agency named an alleged Iranian official behind anti
Semitic attacks in Australia. MASAD and the Office of the Israeli Prime Minister have released a statement identifying a senior commander in Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps as the person behind anti Semitic attacks in Australia last year via a network of recruited criminals and secret communications. I'm Ruby Jones. This is seven am. Thanks for listening.