Have governments been careless about kids? We need to learn the lessons.
Australia's National Children's Commissioner Anne Hollonds
Originally published in The Canberra Times on Monday 8 September 2025
Last month, we saw governments scrambling to fast-track long overdue reforms to improve the safety and wellbeing of children. This followed widespread community outrage over recent allegations and media exposés of shocking abuse and system failures in our childcare centres.
The response from our political leaders was a flurry of new commitments. Attorneys-General pledged to strengthen Working with Children Checks. Victoria committed to implementing all 22 recommendations from its Rapid Child Safety Review. And then we saw the Australian government and state and territory education ministers committing to collaborate on the biggest child safety reforms in our history.
These strong commitments are welcome, but they are long overdue, and government leaders have been forced to admit they failed in their duty to protect children.
Our political leaders are understandably keen to move on from past failings and focus on the future. But it is critical to understand why it has taken so long, why numerous previous inquiries and reviews were ignored, and why so many children were harmed before we saw commitments to act.
As we have reeled from the collective shock about the system failures, one thing has become clear: no one in government has been sufficiently focused on the safety and wellbeing of children.
While the recent action from our governments is a step in the right direction, it is simply not good enough for our political leaders to only focus on the future. Why? Because without an honest review of the barriers that stopped us acting in the past, we are likely to repeat the mistakes. Not just in the distant future, but also right now.
Right now, children are at risk of harm because we are ignoring decades of inquiries into desperately needed reforms across our child protection and child justice systems which are in a state of chronic crisis.
There are more than 3000 recommendations consistently repeated in inquiries between 2010 and 2022 that are sitting on shelves. These recommendations helped inform the National Children's Commissioner's report tabled in the Australian Parliament last year called Help Way Earlier! How Australia can transform child justice to improve safety and wellbeing.
The Help Way Earlier! report provides the foundations for a national reform roadmap to improve the safety and wellbeing of children caught up in our child protection and criminal justice systems.
One of its key recommendations is the creation of a National Taskforce to enable states and territories to work together on evidence-based reforms to prevent crime by children and help make our communities safer. In a similar way, governments across the federation work together on health, education, housing and women's safety.
The Help Way Earlier! report, and the Senate inquiry which followed, both concluded that states and territories working alone are failing to fix the crises in our child protection and child justice systems, just as they failed to address the safety issues in our childcare industry.
The fast-tracked reform commitments we have seen over the last month to fix problems in the childcare sector shows that strong leadership from the Australian Government is critical to advance cross-federation collaboration on child safety and wellbeing.
We urgently need the same strong leadership and collaboration by governments across the federation to implement reforms for the safety and wellbeing of all children wherever they are, especially for the most vulnerable children who are in our child protection and child justice systems.
The ongoing chronic crises in these systems are not because of a lack of knowledge. Our problems are due to a lack of accountability for action, and it is critical that we learn the lessons.
Now is the time to identify, analyse and overcome the government barriers to acting on the evidence to protect the safety and wellbeing of our youngest citizens.
National Child Protection Week | 7 - 13 September | www.napcan.org.au
