VIDEO: Hunting Ground

"Hunting Ground: Childcare Exposed"

27 October 2025

Four Corners

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: How do you spot a predator when they look like everyone else? They don't hide in the shadows — they blend in… and childcare has become their perfect hunting ground.

MICHAEL SALTER, PROFESSOR OF CRIMINOLOGY, UNSW: The offenders are giving us the picture, they're painting the picture for us. The offenders are choosing early childcare as a conducive place for the abuse of children. So the offenders are speaking for us. They are telling us that we have a massive problem.'

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: Until now, families have been kept in the dark. We've found almost 150 childcare workers accused or convicted of child sexual abuse or inappropriate conduct. But with less than 1 per cent of offenders convicted — over the years many thousands have got away with it. And with access to the largest ever database of childcare files — 200k pages of documents previously kept from public view — we've uncovered what's really been going on.

ABIGAIL BOYD, NSW GREENS POLITICIAN: It's lack of staffing, it is a lack of regulatory response. It's all of these factors coming together that create all of these gaps for these paedophiles to wriggle through.

DR. MICHAEL BOURKE, CLINICAL AND FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGIST: They're hunting in packs. So we don't have a lone wolf. We have a wolf in a pack, and they are strategic, they are vicious, and they are supporting each other as they hunt.

DREW VINEY, FORMER TEAM LEADER, AUSTRALIAN FEDERAL POLICE: The psychology of these people is to seek out opportunity and childcare centers represent an excellent opportunity for them.

ANONYMOUS MUM: These monsters are thriving in these spaces because it's so easy for them too.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: Do you think Australians have any idea how pervasive it's?

MICHAEL SALTER, PROFESSOR OF CRIMINOLOGY, UNSW: I don't think that the public has any idea how bad this situation is.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: I've been investigating childcare for more than a year… and some of what I've seen, I'll never forget. Safeguards are crumbling…. predators have found their way in… and they are preying on our children. There's so much we can't show you… it's too graphic, too distressing….but it's happening…This is a hard story to watch… but it's too important to turn away.

TITLE: HUNTING GROUND: CHILDCARE EXPOSED

ON-SCREEN TEXT: Every working day there are more than three reports of sexual or physical abuse of children in childcare.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: Ashley Griffith is one of Australia's worst paedophiles — his case lays bare how deeply the childcare system is failing. He worked undetected in NSW and Queensland childcare centres for almost 20 years … raping and sexually abusing 65 children in Queensland.

And we reveal his Sydney playground, where he is accused of abusing 23 kids.

DREW VINEY, FORMER TEAM LEADER, AUSTRALIAN FEDERAL POLICE: Ashley Griffith is probably one of the worst cases I've worked on.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: Drew Viney helped catch Griffith this is the first time he's talking about the case. He has worked at Interpol, the Crimes Against Children team in Lyon and headed the AFP's national victim identification team — an elite unit that works with authorities worldwide to unmask predators, identify child victims used in abuse material, and rescue them from harm.

DREW VINEY, FORMER TEAM LEADER, AUSTRALIAN FEDERAL POLICE: He was someone who I remember sitting in an interview with him after his arrest and asked him outright, how many children do you think you've abused during your time in childcare centres? And he said, straight away "a hundred children". I thought he was exaggerating, self-aggrandizing. Unfortunately, the inquiries that led after that showed that he wasn't exaggerating. Almost all of his victims were two to 3-year-old girls. He's vaguely charming in his dealings with people, but he also presents himself as someone who genuinely cares about the children, a laughable concept to regular people. But on some level people like him believe that that's how it is for him.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: Griffith meticulously catalogued his abuse uploading videos to the dark web. It enabled police to identify blankets in the abuse material.

DREW VINEY, FORMER TEAM LEADER, AUSTRALIAN FEDERAL POLICE: The bedsheets itself were found to be made a small company in southeast Queensland that did them on small orders for childcare centres. We spoke to the provider and they gave us a list of childcare centres that they had sold the sheets to…

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: Drew started to visit childcare centres, which opened up his eyes to problems in the sector.

DREW VINEY, FORMER TEAM LEADER, AUSTRALIAN FEDERAL POLICE:The childcare centers would swear black and blue that would they never have the opportunity to do things like that. There would always be at least two people on when dealing with the children. But the videos later showed that he acted with complete impunity. And that's what does surprise me and concern me is that the ratios aren't what they should be, especially given the amount of money that is provided to childcare centers, not only by the government, by the parents who are funding the operations.

DREW VINEY, FORMER TEAM LEADER, AUSTRALIAN FEDERAL POLICE: In Queensland Griffith was sentenced to life in November 2024 with a 27-year non-parole period… he is yet to face trial in NSW. For legal reasons, and to protect her child, we can't identify this mother, but Griffith abused her daughter at Explore and Develop Camperdown, in inner Sydney, where he worked between 2014 and 2017. The centre is now under new ownership.

ANONYMOUS MUM: It's a life sentence now for me and for her. It's always there. It's always present. You can't fully trust. You question every decision you ever made. Did I do the right thing? For a long time, I didn't blame myself at all. I thought, well, I did what every other mother does and got back to work and put my child in care and trusted that people were looking after her appropriately. But as the years have gone on, I do blame myself, and I do wish I had made different life choices.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: This mother had no idea her child had been abused until she received a call from the police. And then they went through what information they had compiled?

ANONYMOUS MUM: Yes. That they had absolutely conclusive evidence that my daughter had been a victim of Ashley Griffith.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: Understaffed, under-supervised centres gave him the freedom to offend — setting up tripods, phones, and cameras, filming some abuse for 15, 20 and even 30 minutes without anyone noticing.

DREW VINEY, FORMER TEAM LEADER, AUSTRALIAN FEDERAL POLICE: He would set up a tripod and would record his ongoing abuse on multiple occasions. there were multiple videos of the kids just playing naked

ANONYMOUS MUM: If you've got the ability to take out your phone and put your phone up on the side and start filming, then no one's there watching you.

DR. MICHAEL BOURKE, CLINICAL AND FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGIST: Griffith is what we call a preferential pedophile, and he's also exclusive and he doesn't have any kind of noteworthy history of relationships with adults. So he's someone that is very, very focused on a particular age group, and in this case, it's not only children, but it's very, very young children.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: Forensic and clinical psychologist Dr Michael Bourke is a global authority on child sex offenders. He founded and then led the US Marshals Behavioural Analysis Unit for more than a decade and has consulted with the FBI, CIA and Australian authorities to profile and track some of the world's most dangerous predators.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: Most people think of paedophiles as these creepy people that they could spot a mile off . Or are they hiding in plain sight?

DR. MICHAEL BOURKE, CLINICAL AND FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGIST: No, they're hiding in plain sight. Absolutely.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: Dr Bourke has interviewed more than 1200 child sex offenders, to help understand how they think and identify patterns in grooming and online activity, so potential offenders can be detected earlier. These are some of them. Ordinary people with everyday jobs… until the mask slips and you see what's really going on.

PRISONER #1: I had a lot of fantasies of having a wife having children, just so I can abuse them, fantasy would be my wife passes away for some reason and I get to take care of the children and I take them into a secluded area where I am the only one that they can depend on.

DR. MICHAEL BOURKE, CLINICAL AND FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGIST: Before you came to prison what would have been your preferred age range for males?

PRISONER #2: Mostly with the youngest age possible, one or two of my infant victims were male, that was a four-year-old male, young as possible because of the deviant attraction.

DR. MICHAEL BOURKE, CLINICAL AND FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGIST: And for females, would you also be aroused for infant females?

PRISONER #2: Yes, the more defenceless and vulnerable they are, the more attracted I am. Anytime I would see an opportunity I would try for it.

DR. MICHAEL BOURKE, CLINICAL AND FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGIST: How many times in a day?

PRISONER #2: Uh, I would say the peak would have been 15 to 16 a week

DR. MICHAEL BOURKE, CLINICAL AND FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGIST: When you're in front of some of these offenders… it'll make the hair stick up on the back of your neck. You're speaking to a human being that is very dark. They commit acts of evil, and they sometimes not only are ambivalent, but they relish the acts.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: What's playing out now in Australia worries him. Why would a predator be drawn to working in childcare?

DR. MICHAEL BOURKE, CLINICAL AND FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGIST: Predators are drawn to childcare for the same reason that fishermen are drawn to the place where there's the most fish. The predators are going to look for any prey rich environment, any environment in which there's children, and then there's a decreased chance of being detected right? And they also trade information online with each other. So once they find somewhere where the rules aren't enforced, or a system like childcare where people are getting away with all kinds of things that goes viral in paedophilic networks, that information immediately goes out and it's shared with like-minded individuals, and they start gravitating to these places.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: What do these faces tell you?

DR. MICHAEL BOURKE, CLINICAL AND FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGIST: Predators don't have horns and speak monster. They are like you and I, they are literally the man or woman next door, and they're very, very good at what they do. They can appear charming, they can appear caring, they can appear professional and intelligent, and their predilections are siloed. Their interests are kept in a very secretive deviant compartment, and it's very easy to miss.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: For months we've been tracking paedophiles in childcare. What shocked us most is the number of them. Our investigation identified 148 childcare workers alleged or convicted of child sexual abuse or inappropriate conduct. 42 are convicted. Right now, 14 are facing charges, like 26-year-old Joshua Brown accused of 73 offences including sexually penetrating children. There's another 94 – some caught, some banned, some got away with it – and we can't tell you who they are. Nearly three quarters of the alleged and proven offending occurred at for-profit services. and a whopping 88% per cent of that offending happened at for-profit long day care centres.

MICHAEL SALTER, PROFESSOR OF CRIMINOLOGY, UNSW: It's undeniable, but for-profit providers are overrepresented in the child abuse and neglect statistics in early childcare. And that is certainly the case when it comes to child sexual abuse matters.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: Disturbingly, they're just the visible edge of this hidden crisis.

ON-SCREEN TEXT: Of those who report childhood sexual abuse, only 2% lead to a conviction.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: Most offenders never face charges and only a fraction are ever convicted…There are numerous steps before an abuse case makes it through the system. The first two being the child has to know and be able to disclose.

DR. MICHAEL BOURKE, CLINICAL AND FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGIST: It's very difficult to make some of these cases and children, children sometimes don't make the best witnesses. Children sometimes recant, they'll change their stories and the perpetrators count on that. They count on the fact that this child may come across as less than credible. Many cases drop out before they reach the stage where you would say it's in the official records, 84% of victims never disclose their sexual abuse in their entire life. So we think we're capturing just a small amount.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: And in terms of how pervasive they are. Do we have any idea how big this is?

DR. MICHAEL BOURKE, CLINICAL AND FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGIST: Estimates range from 1% to 5% of society have some sort of sexual interest in children. That's a scary number, it means out of every 100 people there's someone that has a sexual interest in children, and that's prepubescent children.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: Can they be rehabilitated?

DR. MICHAEL BOURKE, CLINICAL AND FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGIST: People are desperate for the answer to how can we get rid of this deviance, this scourge. And the answer is, unfortunately we don't have any solution. The model that we use is not a curative model. It's a management model. … with internal management and appropriate external management, we have a prayer of preventing the manifestation of those fantasies and urges.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: We've spoken to many parents across the country who say their kids were abused, but the case went nowhere. At one centre two mothers are adamant their kids were sexually abused by the same childcare worker. Their complaints to the centre and police hit a brick wall and the worker stayed on. This woman is legally prevented from revealing her identity to protect her child.

ANONYMOUS MUM: I said, is there anyone at childcare who you don't like? And sure enough, she said, this educator's name. And I said, why is that? And she answered, because he touches me and my heart just sank and my daughter said "he told me, don't tell anyone". And I think that's when we knew that this had definitely happened.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: And you told the childcare centre?

ANONYMOUS MUM: They focused a lot on the fact that the educator was quite popular with the parents. "Um no but we get great reviews about him, the parent's love him." We called the police. It's a difficult story. She's not going to tell it to a couple of grown men that she's never met before.

One particular woman who a few months down the track ended up sending me a text and letting me know that the same thing happened with her son, and her son had disclosed to her that this same educator had sexually abused him.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: Why did you decide to speak up?

ANONYMOUS MUM: I want to be able to tell her I did everything I could. And I'm sorry. I'm sorry I handed you over to him. I think that's the hardest image I have to deal with. She was holding onto my clothes and I had to pray her fingers off one by one to hand her over to her abuser, it feels like such a betrayal… and I want to tell her I'm sorry.

DR. MICHAEL BOURKE, CLINICAL AND FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGIST: These crimes thrive in naivete and they thrive in secrecy. These are crimes that occur in darkness, and I don't mean physically. I mean in the darkness of ignorance people don't like thinking about sex offenders. They don't like thinking about our most vulnerable population being at risk. But in that ignorance and in that silence, in that refusal to step into this world and really see it for what it is that allows these men to do what they do almost with impunity, it emboldens them.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: You felt very strongly that you needed to tell your story?

ANONYMOUS MUM: We need a wakeup call that this is happening in childcares, that you can't just trust that childcare will look after your child. The child is behind a closed door, and you have no idea what's going on behind that closed door.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: At another centre, in another state, this mum had a horrific experience in 2020.

ANONYMOUS MUM: She went literally overnight from being a happy go lucky little kid to being just depressed and miserable. She started to come home with blood in her underpants. She started to say things to me like, "Mummy, would you lick me?" Pointing between her legs? And I just didn't understand what was going on. I didn't understand where this was coming from. And every time we talked to the childcare, we were always brushed aside. It was the day after her third birthday, I had bought her Barbie dolls and she grabbed the Barbie dolls. She ripped off their clothes and she started to lick them between the legs and that was when I knew she had been sexually abused. From the age of three, she became malnourished. She couldn't eat. She would replay what happened to her again and again. She would replay the abuse. And then she thought I was the perpetrator and she would attack me. And this would happen for hours and it would happen every day for years.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: How horrific.

ANONYMOUS MUM: So I guess one of the messages is that kids are not resilient. People think they are. They become ill from these things and it has long-term repercussions and it steals their childhood.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: Did you go to the police?

ANONYMOUS MUM: We went to the police a number of times. And they took a report, but they said, they can't get evidence there's not much they could do. I feel like I am pressing a giant red panic button and nobody cares. And I'm just being told that I'm a stupid overprotective woman. And more recently, we know of another family who had the same blood in the underpants, removed the child, but didn't want to go to the police. There were no men in my daughter's childcare. There were only women. We need to know what's happening behind those closed doors. There is no one stopping these paedophiles. Why wouldn't it keep happening?

ON-SCREEN TEXT: More than 70% of long day care centres are run by for profit operators.

MICHAEL SALTER, PROFESSOR OF CRIMINOLOGY, UNSW: We have clear evidence that for-profit providers are an issue here in terms of quality and safety standards.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: By law, centres must meet staff-to-child ratios — but with wages the biggest cost, some providers cut corners, leaving children under-supervised. Almost anyone can enrol online and be placed in a centre within days…

ABIGAIL BOYD, NSW GREENS POLITICIAN: We've had a sector that has been so poorly regulated that we've allowed to become dominated by those seeking a profit that we now have an increasingly casual and precarious workforce. We have undertrained staff, we have centres without enough staff, and we have a culture where reporting is very difficult to do for lots of reasons.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: NSW Greens MP Abigail Boyd has been working with us for a year to access previously hidden childcare regulatory files

ABIGAIL BOYD, NSW GREENS POLITICIAN: When you look at the lack of educator training, when you look at the amount of centers that don't have enough staff and the regulator keeps telling them and then allowing them to get away without having enough staff, if you said to me after I'd read all of that, do you think that there will be child sexual abuse in here? Obviously that is if you know anything about paedophiles, if you know anything about these sorts of predators, they look for scenarios like that. They look for sectors like this… This lack of regulation. This lax approach to allowing these providers to continue at all costs., it is ripe for paedophiles to come in.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: The regulatory files paint a damning picture, page after page of centres breaking the rules, poor staffing, ratios breached and hundreds of centres breaching child safety laws. This is how we found Jilly's Educational Childcare Centre. This unremarkable centre operated in the semi-rural suburb of Rossmore, NSW. Chris Buchtmann was banned from childcare in March last year. His centre shut down in November. What's unusual is the centre is on the same block as his house. We tracked him down. How many children over the years would you have looked after?

CHRIS BUCHTMANN, FORMER CHILDCARE OWNER: Thousands. Thousands.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: So at the end of last year, your childcare centre Jilly's was closed down…Why did they do that?

CHRIS BUCHTMANN, FORMER CHILDCARE OWNER: They believed I was a danger to children, a risk to children.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: Do you take any responsibility for the closure of the centre?

CHRIS BUCHTMANN, FORMER CHILDCARE OWNER: Yes, it's totally my responsibility, totally closed because of me, because I was in charge when the cat's away, the mice played and that's why it got closed because there was no oversight making sure the girls were doing their job as per the regulations.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: Since 2013, his centre never met the national quality standards, the benchmark for safety and quality in childcare. The regulatory documents show systemic issues including child protection failures, unsafe sleeping practices, dirty, broken furniture and poor supervision. Over 10 years it clocked up 136 confirmed breaches, multiple emergency action notices. Many of the breaches were found to pose a significant risk to the safety of children. The regulator raised other concerns. So in 2006 there were allegations you accessed pornography in childcare services computers including where the children were playing.

CHRIS BUCHTMANN, FORMER CHILDCARE OWNER: Okay.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: Is it accurate or not?

CHRIS BUCHTMANN, FORMER CHILDCARE OWNER: That is false. Okay, I'll give you a number of reasons. One is I have a parent not paying their fees.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: So in 2006 that allegation that you are watching pornography on your computer, you are blaming it on a disgruntled parent.

CHRIS BUCHTMANN, FORMER CHILDCARE OWNER: And would you believe I think that's the one where even the police turn up and they took my computer, sat down, went through it and found nothing.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: November, 2009 there's a report to Crime Stoppers that alleges you have approximately a dozen images of children without clothes a computer. True?

CHRIS BUCHTMANN, FORMER CHILDCARE OWNER: False.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: So in 2016 there's a report to Family and Community Services that multiple hard drives left behind at a service you owned contained videos of naked children and material with disturbing titles. So some of the titles that they had was"…and the wiener is, Chitty Chitty Death Bang."

CHRIS BUCHTMANN, FORMER CHILDCARE OWNER: Yes. It wasn't me.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: So you are blaming the regulator?

CHRIS BUCHTMANN, FORMER CHILDCARE OWNER: Yes. They didn't like me. They didn't like the childcare centre. They are misogynistic towards males.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: You make a very serious accusation that regulators want to get men out of the industry. So in the last 12 to 24 months, there has been a lot of news about alleged paedophiles or convicted paedophiles who have infiltrated childcare. Do you think that…

CHRIS BUCHTMANN, FORMER CHILDCARE OWNER: They shouldn't be allowed in… I'm not a paedophile. There's been no convictions. Just the department says, oh, here's some allegations, therefore we're going forbid you to work in childcare, the allegations are administrative allegations.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: In May, 2024, the inspectors came to the centre and they saw cameras pointed at the nappy change table and said that was inappropriate.

CHRIS BUCHTMANN, FORMER CHILDCARE OWNER: Okay… the nappy change… you are the baby. I'm the educator. The camera is up there behind the educator pointing across a window we've got broken into several times. And the camera was there. It was a dummy camera that was not operational. It was there for two reasons to make sure the staff knew that they may be observed in their way. They changed the nappy and two, to stopped burglary at night. It was pointed across the window.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: So was the regulator lying?

CHRIS BUCHTMANN, FORMER CHILDCARE OWNER: Yes.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: How many times have the police investigated you

CHRIS BUCHTMANN, FORMER CHILDCARE OWNER: Oh, probably three times.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: At 73 Chris Buchtmann is fighting to lift his childcare ban and restore his Working With Children Check.

CHRIS BUCHTMANN, FORMER CHILDCARE OWNER: I can't work in milk bar, I can't work in Woolie's, I can't work as a bus driver. Wherever there's a chance of a child entering the premises, I can't work.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: And you want to work?

CHRIS BUCHTMANN, FORMER CHILDCARE OWNER I have to work. I've got no money. I own two houses, therefore I can't get the age pension. I can't even get a health card. So where am I supposed to get money from? The only way to get money is to become a criminal. That's what they're forcing on me.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: The NSW regulator said its investigation was extensive and a large volume of evidence was collected. It said the CCTV in the nappy room was genuine and functioning.

It said recent state government reforms to the regulator would allow it to take stronger action sooner.

ABIGAIL BOYD, NSW GREENS POLITICIAN: There was just a string of complaints. The regulator kept going in and getting them for all sorts of breaches. It was an absolute horror show that place, and yet it took them, what, 11 years to shut them down. 11 years. How does that happen?

ON-SCREEN TEXT: 77% of childcare workers say their centre operates below minimum staffing levels weekly.

KATRINA BROADBENT, FORMER HEAD OF QUALITY ASSURANCE, OAC: I have a really unique viewpoint in that I've worked in a number of roles. I've seen how the bigger companies operate, and I have a knowledge, I guess, of what goes on behind closed doors. And it's not always what parents think is happening.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: Katrina Broadbent has nearly 20 years' experience — from auditing big childcare providers at PwC to her most recent job managing the compliance and quality team at Only About Children. She's seen it from the inside and now she's blowing the whistle on a system she believes is failing children and families.

KATRINA BROADBENT, FORMER HEAD OF QUALITY ASSURANCE, OAC: My team was responsible for carrying out quality and safety audits and also responding to incidents. So in that, I mean reporting incidents to the regulator and any other governing body that's involved.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: Only About Children, or OAC, is one of Australia's biggest for-profit childcare operators. Educators and parents call it Only About Cash. In NSW alone, OAC racked up 320 confirmed breaches between January 2024 to September this year. It's owned by US giant Bright Horizons, a $9-billion childcare giant listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Katrina left in April

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: And why did you leave?

KATRINA BROADBENT, FORMER HEAD OF QUALITY ASSURANCE, OAC: I didn't agree with where the company was going in terms of the issues that are arising in the sector. I didn't want to be a part of something where I didn't think that they were prioritising what they should have been. They want to portray the image that they're putting safety first, but it's not always the case.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: What do you think they're putting first?

KATRINA BROADBENT, FORMER HEAD OF QUALITY ASSURANCE, OAC: Certainly the for-profit providers, I would say profits because that's what they're in the game for and whatever it means to achieve that, that's what they're going to do. The bigger providers in particular are operating on very tight budgets and staffing is one way that they can cut costs. You can't provide quality and safe care of children when you are running at that really base level of one educator to let's say four or five babies. It's just impossible.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: As we started investigating childcare it quickly became apparent the for-profit sector was at the centre of the problems. It sparked calls for reform.

SARAH FERGUSON: Why did it take a television program to make this an urgent matter of business development?

JASON CLARE, FEDERAL MINISTER FOR EDUCATION: Well it shouldn't, but there's a bit of a history here at the ABC of Four Corners doing the right thing…The bottom line is that Ministers haven't been doing enough fast enough, right?

SARAH FERGUSON: Including you?

JASON CLARE, FEDERAL MINISTER FOR EDUCATION: Including me, and I take my fair share of responsibility for it.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: Our Four Corners investigation also triggered a parliamentary inquiry in NSW, which called some of the biggest operators to answer questions.

TIM HICKEY, CEO, AFFINITY EDUCATION GROUP (2015- OCT. 2025): So my base pay is $625,000.

RICHARD BELL, CEO, LITTLE ZAK'S ACADEMY: My salary is $550,000.

ABIGAIL BOYD, NSW GREENS POLITICIAN: The reporting has you getting $3.3 million in 2024…

PEJMAN OKHOVAT, CEO AND MANAGING DIRECTOR, G8 EDUCATION: More than half of the amount that you've referred to are what's termed long-term incentives.

ANNA LEARMONTH, CEO, ONLY ABOUT CHILDREN: My salary is just above $400,000.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: On the issue of safety they all sang from the same song sheet.

TIM HICKEY, CEO, AFFINITY EDUCATION GROUP (2015- OCT. 2025): Safety and quality remain at the heart of everything we do.

PEJMAN OKHOVAT, CEO AND MANAGING DIRECTOR, G8 EDUCATION: Safety being the number one priority.

RICHARD BELL, CEO, LITTLE ZAK'S ACADEMY: Our commitment to safety.

ANNA LEARMONTH, CEO, ONLY ABOUT CHILDREN: Safety is our highest priority.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: But the evidence is damning as Katrina knows all too well.

She spent years auditing some of the country's biggest childcare providers.

KATRINA BROADBENT, FORMER HEAD OF QUALITY ASSURANCE, OAC: Consistently across the board it was things like issues with supervision, operating at really basic staffing ratios, enormous knowledge gaps in child protection, and also just a lack of accountability within the centres. So that lack of accountability was really obvious in the audits.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: Katrina also says the casualisation of the workforce is also putting kids at risk.

KATRINA BROADBENT, FORMER HEAD OF QUALITY ASSURANCE, OAC: You have these floating staff that aren't necessarily managed by a particular person or manager, and so they have the ability to move between centres and potentially be committing these acts of abuse, but completely going unnoticed.

KATRINA BROADBENT, FORMER HEAD OF QUALITY ASSURANCE, OAC: When she was at OAC she came across Quoc Phu Tong, who was a casual worker at four OAC centres. Tong was sentenced to two years jail in March after pleading guilty to sexually touching a child.

DR. MICHAEL BOURKE, CLINICAL AND FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGIST: Tong is the type of offender who obtains arousal from simply being close to kids. So behaviours that most people would consider benign, normative for a sex offender like tong, these are very arousing types of activities. So for tong to be close to the children, to kiss the children, to be engaged and active with the children, this is a part of what we call emotional over-identification. The other thing though is he may have been ramping up and he may have been grooming. This could have been something where he was testing the limits or even gaining enough courage to go one step further.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: Our childcare documents reveal OAC ignored months of complaints from parents and educators, as far back as June. OAC only took action in September after more serious allegations emerged.

KATRINA BROADBENT, FORMER HEAD OF QUALITY ASSURANCE, OAC: In that case there was fundamental challenges and issues with staff knowledge and education of child protection and what their responsibility is as mandatory reporters, but then also how to respond to concerns from parents and from other educators that something is happening. And even though there might be minor when nothing's done with those minor occurrences, that's when it tends to snowball into something more serious occurring.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: The regulator said it imposed a series of conditions. In a statement OAC apologised for reporting delays and said regulatory conditions had been "progressively removed." It said… "We acknowledge the Government inquiries and reviews, which are driving important regulatory change in our sector, and strongly support all reforms currently underway."

ABIGAIL BOYD, NSW GREENS POLITICIAN: I think the regulator absolutely did not do enough, and we see this time and time again, the idea that you could have a service that has identified child sexual abuse, who then doesn't tell the regulator on time, and then the regulator really doesn't respond in any significant way to that. It's pretty telling.

ON-SCREEN TEXT: Every day 226 reports are made to Australian police of online child sexual abuse material up 41% in a year.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: The Working with Children Check is meant to be a safeguard- it's not. We found more than 700 cases of missing, expired or unverified working with children checks. In most cases the regulator gave the centre weeks or months to fix it up, and that's just NSW. In Queensland convicted child sex offender Andrew Vassel worked in childcare for seven years without one… doing maintenance work and even playing Santa. It was a tipoff to the police that finally stopped him. It's 5pm on July 16 and Queensland police are about to make an arrest. After two hours we capture Vassel being led away in the dark. While there is no allegation he offended at the centre, the next day, he pleaded guilty to not informing police where he was working. The fine was $2000. But even workers with a working with children check aren't guaranteed to be safe.

ANONYMOUS MUM: I received a phone call from a detective with the Australian Federal Police informing me that a worker at the daycare centre that our daughter attended had been arrested for possession of child sex abuse material. And the reason we were being contacted was because he had photos of our daughter.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: Andrew Dierick — a Victorian childcare cook — had a working with children check until he was caught paying women overseas to abuse kids while he masturbated. He was convicted in 2022 and is serving four years and eight months. And did you have any interactions with him?

ANONYMOUS MUM: I actually had a lot of interactions with him. he always fussed over her. And she was a bit of a favourite kind of thing with him. And obviously all of that was really chilling in retrospect nut if the Federal police hadn't gotten in contact with us, if there'd been no pictures of children from that centre on his phone, in addition to the other horrible things no one would've ever known.

DR. MICHAEL BOURKE, CLINICAL AND FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGIST: She's almost certainly someone that he was targeting and had a very specific interest in.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: Part of the argument in the court was that this developed in his later years.

DR. MICHAEL BOURKE, CLINICAL AND FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGIST: Yeah. One of the biggest myths that's out there about paedophiles is that somehow this is something that they catch when they're in their thirties or forties. That just doesn't happen in human sexuality.

ON-SCREEN TEXT: Children make up less than 20% of Australia's population yet they account for half of all sexual offence victims

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: The weaknesses in childcare are being seized upon by predators online. Allowing them to find each other, share strategies and justify their actions.

VOICEMAIL: Message received at 12:22pm.

MICHAEL SALTER, PROFESSOR OF CRIMINOLOGY, UNSW: "Hi Adele, we have just gotten the offender conversations back on the dark web and they're really alarming…it's clear we have a number of offenders we have offenders talking about childcare and daycare … we can arrange to meet up…cheers."

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: Professor of criminology Michael Salter specialises in the study of organised sexual abuse, including in childcare. When you look at childcare, there are 1.5 million kids that go to childcare every day. From what you've been witnessing and researching is childcare safe?

MICHAEL SALTER, PROFESSOR OF CRIMINOLOGY, UNSW: No, I don't think that childcare is safe. My real sense of alarm is that often we are only detecting those men through the online investigations into their images and videos. We are not detecting them on the ground in childcare centres through proactive safeguarding measures.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: And why do you think that is?

MICHAEL SALTER, PROFESSOR OF CRIMINOLOGY, UNSW: Unfortunately, the regulatory bodies have not been given the teeth that they need, have not been given the resourcing that they need to maintain a really high level of safety standards.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: Australian childcare centres are becoming a global target. The number of users on encrypted sites is multiplying — fuelled by anonymising browsers such as Tor which let predators hide online and access the dark web.

MICHAEL SALTER, PROFESSOR OF CRIMINOLOGY, UNSW: Over the last 20 years we've had a proliferation of encrypted platforms. So that includes the so-called dark web or the Tor browser. we've created spaces beyond the reach of the law where child sex offenders can congregate in their millions. There's about 45,000 child sexual abuse websites just on the TOR platform alone. It's estimated that the population of child sex offenders on the dark web numbers in its millions.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: Professor Salter also advises the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, creator of Arachnid — a system that hunts child abuse material across the web, including the dark web.

MICHAEL SALTER, PROFESSOR OF CRIMINOLOGY, UNSW One statement from an offender on the dark web that really stood out for me was he said, babies are meat, babies are meat and you can't tell me anything different.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: We asked Arachnid analysts to scrape dark web forums on childcare to see how offenders talk and plan. They have paedophile handbooks that share strategies on technical security, how not to get caught and where to find a child. One manual suggests getting a job in childcare and gives tips on interview questions and answers… then once in, how to gain trust… "This can only happen over time," it advises. This is what predators are saying…

ANONYMOUS: Bring toys to train target… make sure you aren't in view of any cameras unless it's your own then film away… Do foreplay or massage target to relax them…

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: Their conversations on these forums are deeply confronting. Most are too explicit to show but the discussions reveal how organised and twisted they really are.

ANONYMOUS: "My wife owns the daycare, and yes, she's a pedo, so I have access to babies."

"I like kissing the little ones on the mouth…licking and sucking…"

Little do they know I've been abusing the FUCK out of their precious baby boy the whole time — It actually makes me chuckle. There is a secret room where I can play with them. If anyone wants to know more, I'll tell you in private.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: Images are routinely traded on dark web forums. Babies filmed… Children forced to pose. Predators hiding behind masks. Some of them have the baby or the child hold a piece of paper with the handle and the date. What's that about?

DR. MICHAEL BOURKE, CLINICAL AND FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGIST: Yeah. I mean, to prove that the person who's trying to submit those images is to prove that they, in fact, were the ones that abused that child, and the date is that it just happened so that it's proof that this is an original image. These offenders are really interested in having original material. They don't want someone to send them things that they've already seen before. There is an entire network that is facilitating more and more acts of harm and more and more egregious acts of harm against children. And yes, it's increasing at an almost exponential rate.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: What's the main insight you've got out of speaking to them?

DR. MICHAEL BOURKE, CLINICAL AND FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGIST: There's not one reason why people commit these acts of harm. There's different motivational pathways and pedophilia is the one that a lot of people know about. Pedophilia is a sexual interest in prepubescent children. We have individuals who are exclusive and they are only interested in children and then others who are non-exclusive, which as the name implies, they also may have adult relationships, they may be married and they also are capable and do harm children. But we also have sadists and we have psychopaths, and we have individuals we call hedonistic, indiscriminate. And then we have the largest group of offenders, which are none of those which are opportunistic offenders or people that offend just because someone is in the wrong place at the wrong time.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: Childcare is broken

MICHAEL SALTER, PROFESSOR OF CRIMINOLOGY, UNSW: We are at a historic moment where across all levels of government, there is a real sense of urgency that we have to get early childcare right. And there is a scrutiny on the sector at the moment where the public is just becoming aware that every week we are seeing these egregious child abuse cases. So we have an opportunity now to get this right, but I am worried that the spotlight will move on.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: The Prime Minister has refused to consider a Royal Commission into childcare.

ANTHONY ALBANESE, PRIME MINISTER: We don't need a Royal Commission…They take years, they cost a lot of money.

MICHAEL SALTER, PROFESSOR OF CRIMINOLOGY, UNSW: So the Royal Commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse, skipped over the early childcare sector, and so we really need to grab the bull by the horns now

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: Governments are rolling out piecemeal fixes —hoping it will calm things down. The Federal Childcare Minister, Jess Walsh declined a sit-down interview but said the government was taking swift action. In a written response, she sidestepped several questions, instead pointing to the reforms already announced. NSW told us they've introduced nation leading reforms — prioritizing child protection.

KATRINA BROADBENT, FORMER HEAD OF QUALITY ASSURANCE, OAC: I think a lot of the reforms that they're making or planning to make band-aid solutions, I don't think it's going to address a lot of these fundamental issues in the long run.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: At the same time jurisdictions like the ACT and Victoria are fighting to keep childcare files a secret. Terrified of what full transparency might reveal.

ABIGAIL BOYD, NSW GREENS POLITICIAN: There is this secrecy because everyone is so concerned about their own reputation.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: There are thousands of dedicated educators and there are good centres too but for families, navigating this sector is a minefield. Restoring trust starts with reform… at the very least a national childcare commission to oversees the sector and real scrutiny of private operators. What other things do you think we need?

DREW VINEY, FORMER TEAM LEADER, AUSTRALIAN FEDERAL POLICE: So a good intelligence sharing system throughout Australia. At the moment, we don't have any way of saying, well, there's been a complaint against a particular person and there's concerns have been raised about how they've dealt with children previously.

DR. MICHAEL BOURKE, CLINICAL AND FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGIST: You have to have the right laws in place.

ADELE FERGUSON, REPORTER: And honesty that this is happening.

DR. MICHAEL BOURKE, CLINICAL AND FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGIST: Yeah. It's not going to work if we ostrich and put our heads in the sand and just hope it's not in our backyards. It is in our backyards. They've infiltrated childcare.

ANONYMOUS MUM: Parents are just so desperately busy. And we all feel guilty about it. I know I do, but we've just got no choice to put them into the centres.

ANONYMOUS MUM: It's the tip of the iceberg where else would pedophiles go to get access to kids without any ramifications? There is nobody watching them. Why is it the way it is? Why is it okay to abuse babies that can't talk? It has been a rough road because then you feel rage towards the system.

DR. MICHAEL BOURKE, CLINICAL AND FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGIST: To give your 6-year-old infant to a childcare provider and saying, please take care of this child. You're placing a lot of trust in that individual. And for you to not realise that that is a predator who can't wait until you drive away. It is, it's one of the worst things a new parent probably could possibly imagine.