Parents have called for a national perpetrator register. Here’s how providers might respond. 

Last week, the Daniel Morcombe Foundation, parent advocates including campaigners Childcare Choice wrote to the Prime Minister calling for a national perpetrator register, a mechanism to ensure parents and providers are alerted to charged individuals and their childcare settings without the delays we have seen play out, again, in real cases. The letter also drew support from the Opposition, a reminder that this is one of the rare child safety measures with room to move quickly and with productive bipartisan support.

The case that prompted it is a familiar one to anyone working in this sector. When the name of alleged perpetrator Hamish Tait was released, six child victims were identified, a full twelve months after his arrest. For those families, that year meant a delay to therapeutic support, and a delay to coming forward at all and presenting their experience around the abuse. It echoes an earlier case: Ashley Paul Griffith, now serving a life sentence for offences against around 60 children, had been the subject of two complaints in the years before his arrest. Neither was escalated. He continued working.

A national register and clearer naming timeframes won't fix much. Nor can it be mistaken for major reform. But it is about as close to an uncontroversial fix as this sector gets, with significant impact to affected families, and there are signs of genuine cross-party appetite to get it done. That is worth welcoming.

It's also worth sitting with why it took a parent-led letter to get this far. The gap has been visible for a long time. What the letter really surfaces is a broader pattern this sector already knows well: families are often the first to sense something is wrong, and the system isn't yet built to capture that.

Parents are a source of intelligence, not just a source of complaints

This is where providers have real agency, whether a register is established or not and should not wait for regulatory reform to drive their effort.

A single parent-raised concern, a shift in a child's behaviour, imitation of something in play, can look ambiguous in isolation and is often treated that way. But a trend of raised concerns, viewed together, tells a very different story. Right now, most services don't have a systematic way to see that trend, because complaints and casual concerns aren't consistently logged, let alone reviewed in aggregate.

This isn't a novel idea. In aged care, "what can you tell us about your feedback and complaints system" is one of the first questions any auditor asks and has been standard practice for decades. It's a level of rigour a 7-Eleven applies to a customer survey. It doesn't yet sit as a clear feature of the Early Childhood Education and Care Quality Framework.

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse found something similar across many of the cases it examined: someone, somewhere, had noticed something felt off, often in small, hard-to-articulate ways. That instinct is real and worth taking seriously, even before it can be substantiated.

What providers can do now

Regulatory reform of the quality framework may or may not follow this letter, nothing has been announced yet. But providers don't need to wait to strengthen this themselves. In practice, that can be as simple as:

• A visible, easy way to raise a concern, including anonymously (a physical box, a form, a folder)
• Logging concerns raised verbally to staff, even briefly, rather than letting them go undocumented
• Reviewing raised concerns as a set, periodically, to look for patterns rather than assessing each in isolation
• Tracking and closing the loop on follow-up, so families can see a concern was responded to. 
• Connecting parents with each other through established WhatsApp groups like school chat groups, that parents can themselves raise and discuss concerns at aggregate levels. 

In an aged care audit, a service with a healthy, well-documented complaints trail rarely raised concern. A manager who said "we don't get complaints" usually did. The instinct to treat an absence of complaints as good news is worth retiring.

The rating system under the National Quality Framework has always been considered innovative compared with binary met/unmet accreditation models seen elsewhere. It is important that the framework's innovation does not, however, overlook features that are simple, actionable, and effective. 

A national perpetrator register matters because it gives affected families a faster path to support and, potentially, to justice. It also gives families another chance to bring forward details that might otherwise go unspoken , recollections that, put alongside others, can expose a pattern earlier and raise pictures of risk that may identify other perpetrators. Providers can build the same principle into daily practice, well ahead of any legislative timeline. Families using the system every day are already a source of safeguarding intelligence. The opportunity now is to start treating them like one.

Mary Winkels is a regulatory policy specialist and a spokesperson for parent-led campaign Childcare Choice, and Hayley Jones is a psychologist, safety consultant and childcare safety advocate following the lived experience abuse of her child.