A disgusting headline

In contrast to his useful policy focused post, a more recent blog post goes down to the depths from Trevor:

Anne Tolley doesn’t care about sex criminals looking after children

From the Shadow Education Minister, this is disgusting and a reminder as to why Labour should not be in Government – if this is their idea of debate.

The Education Amendment Bill currently before the house removes the obligation to get a Police check for people who look after babies and young children unsupervised at gyms and mall childcare services.

Labour may have over-regulated but this goes too far.

Labour massively over-regulated. They forced creches at gyms to register as early childhood education centres, have qualified teaching staff etc – including the Police check.

The reality is a creche at a gym is not a school, or part of the educational infrastructure. They are a babysitting service. They allow a mum to use the gym and have someone look after their kids for 60 minutes.

One can have a sensible debate about whether or not gym creches should be required by law to do police checks on their creche staff. But to effectively accuse the Minister of being indifferent to paedophilia is again disgusting.

Personally I’m not at all sure there is a need. Labour sounds like they want to go down the route of the UK where you can’t even be an occassional parent helper for sports or scouts without a Police check.

Have any kids ever been molested by a staff member while their mother is exercising at the gym? I mean, what is the problem to be solved here?

Do we only require police checks for babysitters at gyms? How about for all babysitters and nannys? Maybe we need a Department of Babysitters to register and monitor them?

The Scouts have a policy of getting police checks on all new leaders. This is very sensible, as sadly youth groups do attract paedophiles. But Scouts are not required to do this by law. Are gym creche staff a bigger risk than scout leaders?

If there is evidence that not having mandatory police checks on gym creche staff has led to children being molested, then I can be persuaded that it may be a sensible idea. But can’t we hold that debate without Labour MPs asserting that the Minister of Education (herself a parent) doesn’t care if sex criminals look after children.