Adjudication No. 825 (November 1995) [1995] APC 55

ADJUDICATION No. 825 (November 1995)

The Press Council has partly upheld a complaint by a Sydney kindergarten that an article in the Sunday Telegraph newspaper on privately run child care centres was unbalanced and unfair.

Eileen and Harley Byrnes, who run a kindergarten in Westmead, said there was no statistical evidence whatsoever for claims in the article on 21 May 1995, of abuse and neglect in private child care centres, nor that their standards were lower than those of government[Dhatch]funded and community[Dhatch]run centres.

The complainants said balancing articles in the newspaper's next edition on the following Sunday were too little and too late.

The 21 May article stated that parents needed to choose child care centres carefully. It quoted a Community Services Department adviser (a pseudonym was used but this fact was not disclosed in the article), the head of Macquarie University's Institute of Early Childhood, a child consultant, and the National Childcare Accreditation Council. No representative of privately run child care centres was quoted in the article.

The general standard of the whole child care industry was praised, but opinions varied as to whether commercial centres had lower standards. However, the article was unbalanced by two factors:

• references in a highlighted introductory summary to "shocking evidence of sub[Dhatch]standard activities [being] allowed to flourish because parents are simply too scared to speak"; and

• the lack of any comment in the article from the privately run child care industry on the allegations.

In the following week's edition, the Community Services Minister himself was quoted as saying that, "with rare exceptions", community[Dhatch]based and private centres are well run.

On an issue of enormous importance to parents, the original article lacked balance for the reasons noted above. The newspaper did provide some redress by the publication of two articles in the following week's edition but these were insufficient to balance the unfairness. To this extent, the complaint is upheld.