Hunting Ground

More than a year after her Logie Award-winning investigation into childcare abuse, Adele Ferguson returned to ABC Four Corners with Hunting Ground — a follow-up investigation that revealed the crisis in Australia's childcare sector had not only continued, but had deepened.

Drawing on newly obtained government data, court records, and interviews with survivors, families, and sector insiders, Ferguson documented a pattern of repeat offending, inadequate background checks, and regulatory failures that had allowed predators to move between childcare centres undetected.

The investigation revealed that despite the public outcry following the original Betrayal of Trust report, systemic changes had been slow to materialise. Regulatory bodies remained under-resourced. Mandatory reporting obligations were inconsistently applied. And the sector's rapid expansion — driven by government subsidies and private equity investment — had created conditions where profit was prioritised over child safety.

Hunting Ground named specific failures in the national oversight framework and called for a national register of workers found to have engaged in misconduct — a reform that had been recommended following Betrayal of Trust but had not been implemented in the intervening months.

The broadcast prompted immediate responses from state and federal governments, with several jurisdictions announcing emergency reviews of their childcare regulatory frameworks. Parliamentary debate intensified around the adequacy of the National Quality Framework, and renewed pressure mounted on the federal government to establish a national worker register.

Together with Betrayal of Trust, Hunting Ground formed the most significant investigative journalism series on child safety in Australian history — a body of work that forced governments, regulators, and the sector itself to confront a crisis they had long been aware of but had failed to fix.