CCTV cameras in childcare centres must not become paedophile ‘honeypot’: Clare

CCTV cameras that will be trialled in up to 300 childcare centres to guard against abuse will require strict policing to ensure they do not become “a honeypot for bad people”, while workers will be banned from using their phones on the job in a crackdown on the beleaguered sector.

Education Minister Jason Clare met with his state and territory counterparts in Sydney on Friday to discuss child safety in early education and care. They agreed to the $189 million childcare funding package, which also includes a national childcare worker register and mandatory national safety training.

“We all know why we’re here, Australians have been shocked and sickened by the revelations over the last few weeks and months,” Clare told reporters. The latest allegations against Melbourne childcare worker Joshua Brown, who was accused of sexually abusing eight toddlers and babies in his care and contaminating children’s food with bodily fluids, have boosted momentum for reform.

The national CCTV assessment, which the government will spend up to $22 million to fund, will begin in the last quarter of the year and advise on the best ways to protect the privacy of the recordings. It will be up to the states to identify any childcare centres that would be compelled to take part in the trial, such as those flagged in quality reviews.

Clare said the Australian Centre for Child Protection would oversee the trial, and evaluate where cameras should be placed and how the data is stored to avoid the footage being “hacked by paedophiles”.

“We want to work with the Centre for Child Protection on the rules of who holds the data, where is the information stored, to make sure that we keep our kids safe, and we don’t do the opposite of what we’re all intending here and create a honeypot for bad people,” he said.

Clare told ABC News Breakfast the cameras were only a first step. “Cameras can’t do everything. They can help to deter people from doing bad things. They can help police with their investigations afterwards.”

United Workers Union early education director Carolyn Smith broadly welcomed the changes but cast doubt over the cost of a widespread CCTV rollout for the nation’s 17,000 centres.

“We think it’s a good idea that the government has introduced a trial,” she said. “It gives us all a chance to have a look at what benefits there may be, what concerns there might be, and whether this is worth the considerable cost it would take.”

A security system for a medium-sized centre of 40 to 90 children, including cameras, storage and installation, would cost between $1800 and $2400, according to Security Wholesalers.

She said reassurances needed to be made about how the vision would be kept safe.

“How do we make sure that it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands when we see banks, insurance companies, really significant companies, being hacked at the moment?”

Ministers also agreed on Friday to compulsory national child safety training to boost workers’ professional development to “identify somebody who might be hiding in plain sight”.

“Everything we’ve heard individually and collectively today tells us that perhaps the most important thing we can do is skill up the workforce to be able to identify somebody who is hiding in plain sight, not just grooming kids, but grooming [workers],” Clare said.

A National Educator Register will track workers across states, and new legislation will compel centres to log information about all their employees – including when they are hired or fired – to increase visibility of “red flags” when someone moves quickly between centres.

Minister for Early Childhood Education Jess Walsh said “it is … really quite extraordinary that we don’t have that kind of register right now, today”.

Clare said the body responsible for setting national standards, the Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority, would build the register from scratch to be ready to pilot in December and roll out from February 2026.

In one of the first bills passed in Albanese’s second term, the government gave itself greater power to strip funding from centres that were underperforming, and 37 centres which have failed to meet standards for seven years have since been ordered to rapidly improve their performance or they could be cut off.

The government has also promised to build a national network by the end of the year to stop people banned from working with children in one part of the country from getting similar jobs elsewhere, fulfilling a decade-old royal commission recommendation.

Opposition education spokesperson Jonno Duniam praised Clare for shepherding through Friday’s reform, but said the test would be how fast the changes could be implemented.

“Trust has been damaged here. We need to restore it.”

The ministers will meet again in October.

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