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Following the childcare abuse scandal in Victoria, former royal commissioners say their recommendations have not been implemented and that governments have been ‘shameful’ and ‘delinquent’. By Gina McColl.
Key child protection recommendations not implemented
Eight years since the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse handed down its final report, key recommendations to ensure child safety and prevent abuse have not been implemented.
The reasons, experts say, are partly political and bureaucratic. They are also cultural, reflecting deep discomfort with talking about child sexual abuse and society’s hallucination that a royal commission means the work is done.
“People are uncomfortable talking about it, uncomfortable sharing it, and uncomfortable dealing with it,” says Andrew Murray, one of six commissioners who sat on the royal commission. “So there’s a great natural and human resistance to actually confronting what it is.”
Among the commission’s 409 recommendations, childcare is rarely mentioned.
Of the 8013 private survivor sessions conducted between 2013 and 2017, only 32 related to abuse in childcare. This represented 0.5 per cent of victim evidence, compared with 41.6 per cent for abuse in out-of-home care and 31.8 per cent in school settings.
These figures cannot be generalised as evidence of the prevalence of abuse in childcare, cautions Professor Leah Bromfield, who oversaw the commission’s research agenda and now heads the Australian Centre for Child Protection. Much of the commission’s work focused on historical abuse, pre-dating widespread formal childcare.
“The royal commission responded to what it heard about,” Bromfield says. “The world’s changed again since the royal commission … Childcare has expanded, grown really rapidly. That creates risk in itself.
“When you’ve got extra risk, you should be putting in extra protections.”
The lack of action on some of the most critical protections arising from the commission’s recommendations has come under greater scrutiny in the wake of Victorian childcare worker Joshua Dale Brown being charged with 70 child sex offences, with hundreds of other children now being tested for sexually transmitted infections.
Former commissioner Robert Fitzgerald says the commission published a detailed report following a public hearing on YMCA child abuser Jonathan Lord in 2013, which included similar conduct, risks and loopholes alleged in the recent Victorian matter and other cases.
“Recruitment failures, grooming signs ignored, reluctance to raise concerns – it’s all there. And now we’re seeing the same issues arise, in multiple cases,” says Fitzgerald, currently the age discrimination commissioner.
“It is shameful that the safeguarding recommendations have not been fully implemented … It’s not good enough for governments to say, ‘We’ve been working on it.’ ”
Murray agrees. “Some of our own governments have been delinquent … they just haven’t paid attention.”
The National Office for Child Safety (NOCS) – established in response to the commission and charged with leading the implementation of several recommended priorities – directed questions about implementation to the Attorney-General’s Department, of which it is part.
This is inconsistent with the commission’s recommendation that the NOCS be an independent agency.
Of the 206 recommendations directed wholly or partially at the federal government, a departmental spokesperson said 122 have been implemented, with 13 “in progress”. A further 82 of 84 recommendations relating to redress were addressed by measures that included the government’s 2018 creation of a national scheme, administered by the Department of Social Services.
A spokesperson for the department said the Minister for Social Services this month announced $27.2 million in additional funding to support services for applicants to the national redress scheme. They said they were “continuing to work to consider the remaining two recommendations”.
Policy analyst and survivor Alison Quigley, along with a team called the Owls for Justice and a bunch of spreadsheets, is attempting to audit the implementation of the recommendations across state and federal jurisdictions.
“Historically, we’ve had all these reviews, commissions, and the recommendations come out and they fall away, and no one keeps a track,” says Quigley, who was inspired by the commission to disclose her own sexual abuse as a young teenager by her gymnastics coach, Graham Partington, who was jailed in 2017.
“What we’re doing is mapping gaps, but we’re acutely aware … the word ‘implemented’ is extremely flawed – a really slippery beast.”
Owls’ standard is to ask government departments for data and evaluation that shows a child safety measure is up and working.
There is often either no response or previous public information is provided. In other cases, she says, the response is, “We haven’t figured out how to do that yet.”
While the audit is ongoing – Quigley is also a member of the NOCS National Strategy Advisory Group and completing a PhD – she says the work provides some reassurance progress has been made.
Landmark reforms resulting from the commission include changes to the statute of limitations, which Murray describes as “a wonderful achievement, because our figures show that it takes 24 years on average for someone to finally find the ability to tell somebody what happened to them”. Laws have been changed to allow the admission of “tendency evidence” in sexual abuse trials, which also facilitated joint trials for multiple complainants, and the sanctity of the confessional can no longer be used as a mechanism for priests to avoid abuse disclosures.
Still, advocates say, the failure to implement all recommendations is creating substantial risk, as evident in the charging of Brown in Victoria and the conviction of Ashley Paul Griffith in Brisbane for abusing 73 girls, mostly while working in childcare.
Those who spoke to The Saturday Paper nominated three critical reforms that remain unimplemented: a national Working With Children Check (WWCC) protocol that includes information sharing, a mandatory reportable conduct scheme and enforceable child safety standards that are specific to organisations.
Such measures are often interrelated, ensure accountability and overcome the practical obstacles to preventing child sexual abuse.
Bromfield says child safety principles, as recommended by the commission, need to be mandatory and “operationalised” in meaningful ways nationwide.
As an example, she refers to the need to define reportable conduct in different settings. Teachers hugging students is inappropriate in high schools, whereas physical comfort is appropriate in childcare, but you want line of sight so that staff are visible while providing kids with personal care.
“It’s really uncomfortable to think, Could my colleague do this? We have to take people’s fear away from calling that out,” she says.
“So you close the door [while nappy changing] … I have to report that, regardless of why you did it or what I think about why you did it. We have to take some of that discomfort away of assuming what the intent was. It’s up to that person to then explain, ‘Oh, actually the door swung closed, and I had the baby on the nappy change table, and I couldn’t reach to open it.’ ”
Murray says national leadership on the “non-delegable” duty of organisations including childcare providers, as recommended by the commission, is essential. Mandating that any organisation involved in the care of children must act in the best interests of the child as its primary responsibility, with board members and senior staff personally liable for breaches, as exists for other workplace hazards, would drive sector change, he argues.
Murray also calls for the governor-general and other high-profile Australians to refuse to be patrons of organisations that don’t have the best interests of the child in their articles of association.
Fitzgerald is particularly critical of the lack of a nationally coordinated WWCC protocol, which the commission recommended be modelled on the existing criminal checks system.
He says the reform is “only partly done, largely because the Commonwealth refuses to coordinate it and some states and territories have simply failed to respond in a timely manner, protecting their own differences to the detriment of children’s safety”.
National Children’s Commissioner Anne Hollonds says when she started her role four years ago she ordered an independent review of previous responses to royal commissions and inquiries between 2010 and 2022. The outcome was a report that “found the same recommendations are … just recycled again and again”.
The lack of accountability arising from the division of responsibility between the Commonwealth and states needs to be addressed, Hollonds says, repeating her call for a minister for children to ensure accountability and national coordination, and for “child safety and wellbeing” to be made a priority at national cabinet.
“We need to make the federation work for our youngest citizens,” she says.
Bromfield says after a royal commission the “easy things” get implemented. She says “the things that are really the biggest, the most complex, intended to drive some of that systemic or cultural change – they don’t get to them in the first two years, then attention wanes”.
“People think that things have been done that haven’t,” she says, “because of the differences across the states and territories.”
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on July 19, 2025 as "A royal mess".
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