Greens senator Steph Hodgins-May has told the ABC that the Greens will not stand in the way of the government’s legislation to address concerns about child care safety, following reports into the sector led by the ABC, but that they want it to go further.

The government legislation will strip Commonwealth funding from centres that don’t meet the national minimum standards, but Hodgins-May said that is “bandaid solutions to much, much deeper structural issues”.

Whilst we might see some short-term improvements on safety, they aren’t going to go to the heart of the issue. They’re not going to lift national quality consistently across the country. Instead, they’ll crack down on individual providers and, really, sadly, it’s going to require harm to have occurred in order for the government to step in. The Greens are really pushing for more. We’ve written to the Prime Minister urging him to work with us on a national watchdog with teeth that can enforce our national quality standards in a way that hasn’t happened. At the moment, we’ve got this patchwork effect where multiple states have different regulations, but no national body to actually enforce and work towards raising national quality standards across the country.