Joshua Dale Brown, 26, faces more than 70 charges involving eight alleged victims under the age of two.
The alleged abuse took place between April 2022 and January 2023 at the Creative Garden Early Learning Centre in Point Cook, in Melbourne’s southwest, according to The Daily Mail.
New details show that Brown had earlier been employed at a Nido Early Learning facility in Werribee, where he was terminated during probation after working 18 shifts.
Nido said the dismissal was over "unsatisfactory attention" given to an internal incident involving one child’s behavior toward another. “The action did not relate to any behaviour by the individual towards a child,” a Nido spokesperson said, adding that the company has “zero tolerance for the non-compliance to our internal policies.”
At G8 Education, Brown was the subject of two additional internal misconduct investigations, both involving non-sexual incidents with children. Both claims were substantiated. He was suspended and later resigned following the second inquiry.
Brown’s employment history, now confirmed to span 24 childcare centers since 2017, has been difficult for investigators to reconstruct. Authorities said they had to use search warrants to obtain paper-based records, rosters, and other files due to a lack of centralized data.
Parents of roughly 2,000 children who may have had contact with Brown have been advised to get their children tested for infectious diseases. This week, his employment record was expanded to include four more centers.
The revelations have reignited criticism of the failure to act on recommendations made by the 2017 Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Former commissioner Robert Fitzgerald said “Ten years on from our recommendations around information sharing and record keeping, the job has not yet been done and it has not been done because the nine governments of Australia have not committed the willpower to get it done in a timely manner.”
He warned that “every gap left in safeguarding the sector meant children were put at risk.”
The commission had urged governments to improve registration systems, allow better data sharing between institutions, and maintain thorough employment records across jurisdictions.
While all nine governments agreed to the recommendations, Fitzgerald noted progress has been slow. “These are all manageable. These are all achievable and my disappointment is that progress has been made, but the job should have been done.”
The federal government has pledged to introduce new legislation when parliament resumes, including rules to cut funding to non-compliant centers. A national register of childcare workers is also being fast-tracked.
