If you destroy children, you destroy hope

Written by: Louisa L. on 9 July 2025

Sexual abuse inside childcare centres has outraged Australians. Now 1200 children will need invasive tests for sexually transmitted diseases. It’s horrible. Those innocent little children. What despair, grief and underserved guilt their families must feel. 

Imagine their anger when they learn some centres apply minimum legal worker-to child-ratios that leave babies alone with one staff member; that most childcare workers are paid so poorly that half have less than three years’ experience and are unable to recognise warning signs; that even if they do, some feel scared to raise concerns; that some training providers churn students through online courses, where face-to-face TAFE once provided all qualifications, and TAFE teachers and other staff were often able to identify those unsuited to childcare before they graduated.

All this was exposed by Guardian Australia’s Lisa Bryant in late June. She and others had known it for years. ‘Constant turnover creates exactly the kind of instability in which misconduct can go unnoticed. A stable, valued workforce is a safer one – for everyone,’ she wrote.    

Bryant doesn’t mention that a privatised system breeds capitalism’s compulsion to chase the highest possible profit by pushing down costs.

But it’s implicit in her questions, ‘If someone wanted to harm children, might they be able to work out which settings offer them the best opportunity? The ones running on the bare minimum of staff, with constant turnover, lots of trainees, and as few qualified staff as regulations allow?’ 

A war on children

Only once before has mass testing of children for sexually transmitted diseases been proposed. It was demanded during the 15-year NT Intervention, by John Howard – with bipartisan support. Legislation was proposed and passed in just one late night sitting in 2007. 

Most doctors and many parents and caregivers refused to allow children to subjected to the abuse of mass testing.

Based on lies, it was another wave of genocide. Disguised as concern for children, the legislation didn’t mention the words ‘child’ or ‘children’ once. It was a land, water, gas and mineral grab. 

As the army poured unannounced into some bush communities, terrified adults ran to hide children, thinking they’d be stolen. Eventually they were stolen, in record numbers, there and Australia wide. 

Since then, by every measure including suicide, incarceration, illness, cultural and educational deprivation, intense poverty, housing stress, removal from families, the lives of those Children of the Intervention have been negatively impacted. It was war on children.

We know children are more likely to be sexually or physically abused in prison than outside it. Remember the footage? Young Dylan Voller, cowering in a cell alone, attacked stripped naked by guards. As a teen, strapped to a chair, a hood over his face like a wartime ‘terrorist’ suspect being tortured. 

And governments and media blaming the young victims for the despair they created! ‘Young violent criminals run wild,’ they rage. This year the NT Government lowered the age of criminal responsibility to ten.

Now every state and territory except the ACT jails ten-year-olds. They’re nearly all Black. 

If you destroy children, Black or white or brown, you destroy hope, you destroy the future. But more and more people begin to understand the truth. They know Australia, by almost every measure, is run for profit, for trillionaires, for war. 

They know Australia is a crime scene. They’re fighting back. 

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