The City of Stirling — the biggest local government in Western Australia — has an 89-item to-do list on child safety, and its mayor says the job is nowhere near finished.

An organisation-wide review measuring the council against the National Principles for Child Safe Organisations found strengths across the city, but also gaps in its policies, processes and practices. Mayor Mark Irwin, speaking to PerthNow, put it plainly.

"We've taken some significant steps on our child safeguarding journey, but we know there's still a long way to go." — Mark Irwin, City of Stirling mayor

What the review found

The gap the review kept coming back to was a structural one: the city had no overarching child safeguarding policy settings and processes tying the rest together. Specific recommendations included updating the council's codes of conduct, introducing a complaints-handling process built specifically for child safety concerns rather than folding them into the general complaints stream, and writing child safeguarding into staff roles, responsibilities and training.

None of that is a finding of wrongdoing. It is the kind of audit a large organisation runs against a national benchmark — and the point of the benchmark is that good intentions and good staff are not, on their own, a system.

Eighty-nine actions, ten stages

The city brought in consultants to turn the review's recommendations into a child safety and wellbeing improvement plan. That plan contains 89 actions, prioritised across 10 stages, and was signed off at executive level in June.

Stage one is under way now and deals with the foundations — governance, structure and policy. Later stages take in the complaints overhaul, embedding child safeguarding into every role at the council, and building a workforce-wide training plan.

Two pieces are already done: the improvement plan itself and a child safeguarding policy framework. The policy that sits inside that framework is expected to go to the council before the end of the year, alongside a formal statement of commitment setting out a zero-tolerance position on child abuse, neglect, exploitation and harm. An internal steering group, led by the city's community development directorate and made up of senior staff, meets for the first time in October.

Why a council needs any of this

It is easy to think of a local government as roads, rates and rubbish. Stirling is also a children's services provider several times over: libraries, leisure centres and pools, crèches, school-holiday programs, kids' sport, youth services and community events. The city says roughly 17 per cent of its residents are aged between 10 and 24. Every one of those touchpoints is somewhere the national principles apply.

And someone will be checking

The 10 National Principles for Child Safe Organisations came out of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse and were endorsed by every Australian government. In Western Australia they have functioned as a best-practice framework rather than a legal duty — but that is shifting. In October 2025 the Ombudsman Western Australia was named the independent oversight body for organisations that do child-related work, according to the Commissioner for Children and Young People WA.

Irwin said the city was doing its work in preparation for future enforcement of the principles, and was aiming for best practice rather than the minimum.

The forum

On 8 September the city hosted a half-day child safeguarding forum in partnership with the WA Council of Social Service, drawing about 250 people from community groups, sporting clubs, service providers and other organisations. WA's Commissioner for Children and Young People, Dr Jacqueline McGowan-Jones, and Youth Affairs Council of WA chief executive Kylie Wallace attended, with Anglicare WA and Child Australia presenting on what embedding safeguarding practices actually took them.

Irwin said the city had reached a point where much of the groundwork was done and the talk needed turning into action.

What to watch for

Three markers over the next few months: the steering group's first meeting in October, the child safety and wellbeing policy and statement of commitment reaching a council agenda before the end of 2026, and — the real test — whether stages two through 10 keep moving once the launch publicity fades. Ratepayers with children in a Stirling crèche, holiday program or library session have a straightforward way to check: ask.

Photo: Orderinchaos via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0). A file photo of the Mirrabooka library, one of the City of Stirling facilities covered by the council's child safeguarding work; it is not connected to any specific matter in this report.