The more I look, the more horrified I am - there's no end to the things that keep coming through, NSW upper house member says
Every Wednesday about 5,000 pages of documents are sent to the clerk's office in New South Wales Parliament House and members of Abigail Boyd's staff scan each one.
The documents are being released in tranches by various state government bodies after a legal fight by Boyd, a Greens upper house member and the chair of the NSW education committee.
They detail breaches, enforcement actions, suspected criminal conduct and other serious problems afflicting the state's childcare system.
"When I looked through them, it was just horrific," Boyd says. "There were letters from constituents to various ministers saying, 'These terrible things happened to my child, what are you going to do about it?' ... every third document was an educator or a teacher abusing a child ... but then a regulatory response that was clearly inadequate."
The first batch was released to her in December last year under privilege, meaning she could not share what she had seen with anyone, including her staff or a lawyer.
Boyd was convinced the documents should be made public.
So, working alone, she filed motions over several months to get them released.
Most are from the Department of Education, which oversees the early childhood education and care regulator. The department argued against their release on grounds of legal and commercial privilege, that they contained personal details, and that the work involved in redacting and releasing them was overly burdensome.
The dispute eventually went to arbitration and in March Keith Mason KC decided that the release of the documents - with names of children and educators redacted - was in the public interest.
Reading them takes "a big chunk" of Boyd's time and isn't without a cost.
"I tend to do it on weekends because that's when I can sit, and also I find it quite emotionally taxing," she says.
At times she has found herself sitting on the couch crying as she reads.
Her staff now field calls from parents, whistleblowers and childcare workers who know Boyd cares about the issue.
"We put it all into spreadsheets and we try and map it across the documents," she says. "We've got and try and pick out where the issues are. But yeah, it's massive. It's been a massive part of our work. It's very stressful because it matters ...
"And I've only got two years of stuff [the scope of the inquiry gives her papers from 2022 to October 2024] ... This is a two-year period for New South Wales. And it's shocking.
"This is absolutely systemic. And the idea that it's just a few bad apples ... I wish it was just a few bad apples. But the more I look, the more horrified I am - there's no end to the things that keep coming through."
What Boyd has learned has fuelled her to fight for a radical rethink of the childcare system. Last week she chaired the parliamentary inquiry into the NSW early childhood eduction and care sector, questioning department officials, a police boss, and current and former early childhood workers.
"When I first moved that call for papers, I thought maybe we'll find something," she says. "Maybe there'll be a little something here and I can look at it. But all hell let loose."
Flaws in the childcare system have crashed into public awareness over the past year after reporting by the ABC's Four Corners about abuse and neglect and the horrifying allegations of sexual abuse against multiple children by a childcare worker in Melbourne.
Boyd sees these as two sides of the one coin. "Where there are regulatory gaps, it's easy for people to exploit them," she says. "And whether you're a bad company doing the wrong thing or you're a perpetrator of sexual violence wanting to come in and do the wrong thing, there are loopholes to go through."
These are compounded by the "systemic impact on the sector as a whole from the behaviour of these profit-taking institutions that have cut corners for so long and treated workers so poorly for so long that we now have a really precarious workforce. It's very casualised."
A workforce shortage has made centre directors more likely to "look the other way" and "ignore red flags", she says, and she has witnessed "a fear from workers who are trying to do the right thing that they can't report and ... they can't say anything that's going to bring their centre into disrepute, particularly when it's one of these big for-profit centres."
The understaffing that besets the sector leads to ratio breaches, which in turn means "you're not having workers keeping a check on other workers. So there's a whole bunch of issues around the workforce."
The federal government announced on Friday it would fund a national educator register, mandate child safety training for staff, carry out additional spot checks on centres and facilitate information-sharing around working with children checks.
Boyd says this won't be enough. "It tinkers around the edges," she says. "It's woefully insufficient to address the systemic and structural issues in the sector that have been allowed to fester for so long."
High on Boyd's agenda of reform are private providers, which now operate almost 70% of centre-based daycare services.
A 2024 Productivity Commission report found that for-profit providers spent less on wages, paid staff less, and that fewer of their staff were employed full-time than at not-for profit centres.
As a result, the commission found, not-for-profit centres had lower staff turnover and fewer vacancies—two things child safety experts say are linked to creating a safer environment for children.
"We've allowed it to happen not by design but because people were just not really caring and they thought the market could sort it out," Boyd says. "We now know that's not the case and so we need this really big-picture set of reforms."
She acknowledges that some for-profit providers, especially smaller companies, are doing a good job. But she would like to see a ban on private equity companies operating childcare centres, and a limit on the number of centres each company can operate.
She wants the government to cap the amount childcare centres can be charged for leases.
Childcare is "after all, an essential public service", she says.
"We just need to really be bold in the way that we regulate them so that it's actually brought back to being a service for the public, not something to be traded."