Australia has never had an early warning system for children at risk of harm. We built one.

By Ruby O'Rourke and David Salajan, Co-founders, SAFE

This morning, one of the country's most senior technology journalists, David Swan, wrote about SAFE in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, and we're extremely grateful. The story asked the questions you would expect about privacy and consent. When a national audience is asking how children are kept safe, child safety is finally being treated as the national issue it is.

Here's what each of us had to say.

From Ruby

The schools, the Brownies, the Girl Guides, all of these signals were missed. Neighbours told me years later that they had heard me scream, and done nothing.

If I'm going to leave my life with anything, it's knowing the next generation has this layer of SAFE sitting under the surface, a flight control tower for children at severe risk.

From David

When a system holds sensitive information about children, the protections have to be higher than we accept anywhere else. That is how SAFE is built, so that a child protection expert reviews every case. Australia has never had an early warning system for children at risk of harm. SAFE is now solving this problem.

Educators are the eyes and ears in childcare, and nothing replaces that. SAFE backs their instincts, holds their observations so they are not lost, and gives them somewhere to raise a concern, knowing it will be taken seriously.

David Swan, thank you for putting this on the agenda.

A sector at a breaking point

The numbers behind that aren't rhetorical. NSW Police detectives working child abuse cases receive 10 to 15 new reports every single weekend. Almost 16,000 reports reached the state's Joint Referral Unit in the past year alone. Assistant Commissioner Scott Cook's word for it, "epidemic", is the right one, and it's the backdrop against which this story, and this year's reforms, are landing.

The childcare sector is now undergoing its biggest safety overhaul since the national quality framework began. New laws made children's safety the paramount legal consideration from February 27. A national workers' register is being built. Mandatory child safety training becomes a requirement for every carer by August 27. A $226 million government package is funding a national CCTV trial. A NSW parliamentary inquiry this year went further still, recommending a dedicated database to track problematic staff behaviour and stronger intelligence-sharing between regulators, police and screening bodies.

Every one of those reforms is necessary. None of them, on their own, does what SAFE does: turn an educator's everyday observation, a bruise, a missed meal, a parent who isn't okay at pick-up, into a signal that a trained child protection expert actually sees, in time to act.

Why this started with one story, not a spreadsheet

SAFE started because Ruby lived through a childhood where none of the danger was invisible. Teachers, Brownies leaders, Girl Guides, neighbours who heard her scream, the signals were there the whole time. Nobody connected them. Ruby began building childcare software in the mid-2000s, and the predictive layer that would become SAFE started in 2012, in partnership with NICTA, Australia's former national ICT research centre, now part of the CSIRO. David joined that work to build the machine that could hold and connect what educators were already seeing.

Fourteen years of that work, and 68,943 children's data assessed across 1,064 services nationwide, is what sits behind the system: a machine that surfaces the signal, and a former child protection worker who decides what it means. No score, no flag, and no algorithm output ever reaches a family or a decision on its own.

The case is moral, and it's economic

Early detection is better for children and families, and it's cheaper for the country. The Cost of Late Intervention report, from Minderoo Foundation and The Front Project, put what Australia spends every year fixing problems caught too late at $22.3 billion, up 47 per cent since 2019, with $10.2 billion of that going to child protection alone. That gap, between a signal noticed early and a childhood spent moving through child protection and out-of-home care, is exactly the gap SAFE was built to close.

While the childcare industry has homed in on early childhood education standards, care and safety have too often been left as an afterthought. Protecting children and protecting good educators are the same job, and every child-facing organisation in this country should put child safety ahead of every other measure.

It comes down to the only measure that actually matters to us: detecting children at risk of harm early enough to intervene, and giving every other child the space to thrive. That's the whole job. Everything else, the technology, the reviewers, the reforms, is in service of it.

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