Federal Government in childcare crackdown as popular after-school care provider hit with $220k in fines

The Federal Government wants to come down hard on childcare centres that breach minimum standards with new laws to punish those that transgress. The laws to be put to Parliament on Thursday will cut subsidies to services that breach quality standards, prevent providers who don’t meet minimum standards from opening new centres, and make it easier for regulators to send in inspectors. Anthony Albanese said governments needed to do more to ensure parents could have confidence in childcare centres. “No parent should be concerned when their little one is left with a worker in a child care centre,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Monday. But while the Federal Government is the biggest funder of childcare services and sets quality rules, the States are responsible for punishing breaches of standards and the WA regulator is already on track to hand out more sanctions to errant providers than last year. WA’s childcare regulator has fined after-school care provider Camp Australia $220,000 — more than was levied against the entire sector in the State in 2024. The Education and Care Regulatory Unit has taken 85 enforcement actions, including suspending three providers and winning fines in cases against another nine, including Camp Australia, in 2025 . In 2025, Camp Australia faced 10 enforcement actions, half of which were disciplinary proceedings in the State Administrative Tribunal that resulted in fines for having failed to adequately supervise the children in their care. The fines related to incidents at its Bannister Creek, Cloverdale, Coolbinia, West Leederville and Makybe Rise services between late 2022 and mid-2024. The organisation – Australia’s largest provider of outside school hours care with more than 500 services across the country – says it has now put new leaders in charge of its WA operations, paused excursions and put in place temporary session caps at some services, and increased its compliance monitoring and educator training. A spokesperson for Camp Australia said the root cause of the problems was “momentary lapses in active supervision practice” and that the provider was committed to learning from every incident. “Importantly, no child was harmed, but on each occasion our practices fell short of the high standards we set for ourselves,” they told The West. “Post-pandemic workforce pressures have affected the entire sector, but our investigations found that the key issue was inconsistent execution of established supervision procedures, not insufficient staffing levels. “As we have attracted new staff into the sector to address workforce shortages caused by attrition during the pandemic, we have had to upskill new educators.” The State Government data on the number of breaches is revealed amid national attention on safety in childcare after Melbourne educator Joshua Dale Brown was charged with more than 70 alleged child sex offences and hundreds of families were told to get their children tested for infections.