The many faces and multiple betrayals of ‘Australia’s worst daycare predator’

A collage of photographs shows a grinning face peeking out from fancy dress costumes, wreathed by colourful wigs, hairline retreating over 15 years of dress-ups, playtimes and staff parties at one of Sydney’s largest daycare providers.

The centre that posted the images celebrating Hamish Tait in June 2024 was then blissfully unaware the man they had watched grow into a “rock star” child carer was allegedly the worst paedophile to infiltrate Australia’s daycare sector.

Tait was 20 and was finishing his college degree in early childhood education when he started placement at Mel and Mick Scaife’s Fit Kidz chain in Sydney’s north-west every Friday in 2009.

“People come in and have all the enthusiasm, realise what a hard job this is and sort of drop off – but Hamish was the opposite,” Mel Scaife told this masthead.

“He was warm, engaging, went camping with his mates. There was never a red flag, never a complaint, never a sign.”

Those who knew Tait in those times recall a “theatre kid, not a rugby kid”.

He wasn’t a good singer but he’d sing the loudest. He had an ego, and he let the women educators clean up when he made a mess. However, he was beloved by the kids, co-workers and parents.

The only complaints Fit Kidz ever received, Scaife said, came when Tait would leave to work at another of their centres: “He was a rock star.”

Now, those at Fit Kidz are wondering what they missed.

“Our team that are still turning up every day for families, my heart just breaks for them. They’re questioning, ‘did we miss something?’. We’ve all dedicated our lives to caring and advocating for children,” Scaife said through tears.

“And the families feel they chose a service that they were happy to leave their children every day but didn’t vet properly.

“Everyone just feels an awful sense of guilt and betrayal and sadness.”

Abuse images trigger alert

Exactly one year after the collage of Tait’s many faces was posted on Instagram to celebrate his 15th anniversary at Fit Kidz, the US National Centre for Missing & Exploited Children contacted its Australian counterpart.

It alleged a Sydney-based user had accidentally uploaded child abuse material to a cloud server and had hit an AI tripwire.

Australian authorities realised the user worked at a number of childcare centres around Sydney and ran his own, called Wild Earthlings, which took children on bushwalks around the Hills District.

He’d used his own business to gain access to more than 60 centres across the city, the Central Coast and beyond. Often no children were present as Tait taught staff after hours.

Operation Moonbi was established and on June 10, 2025, officers raided Tait’s brick home at Glossodia, north of Richmond, and seized 25 devices.

It took three weeks for forensic police to get into Tait’s iPhone but they immediately realised the scale of his alleged crimes.

The phone showed “first generation” child abuse material (CAM) involving four or five child victims, meaning it had allegedly been produced by Tait and had not been collected from the internet.

“It was apparent from the preliminary examination of the first device that there could be a number of child victims in this matter,” AFP Commander Brett James wrote in a court document in November.

“Additionally, Mr Tait’s 16 years as a childhood educator, and the identification of offending in an institutional setting, raised concerns that he may have been offending over a long period of time.”

Tait’s footage allegedly shows him undressing children as they use the bathroom, for his own sexual satisfaction.

‘Everyone just feels an awful sense of guilt and betrayal and sadness.’

Tait hadn’t been arrested during the raid on his home, but given the evidence and the alleged risk he posed to children, Moonbi’s detectives wanted him in a cell.

On July 10 last year, they swooped up the driveway of Tait’s parents’ home in West Pennant Hills, handcuffed him and searched his pockets against a wooden fence, in front of his family.

The country was already reeling from the allegations levelled against Sydney childcare paedophile David James, Melbourne childcare worker Joshua Dale Brown – who has pleaded not guilty to abusing children – and Ashley Paul Griffiths, who is serving decades in prison in Queensland and who will soon be extradited over similar charges in Sydney.

The suppression of Tait’s name gave the AFP time to identify children in videos and contact parents without the contamination of a media frenzy.

Moonbi and the AFP victim identification teams would ultimately sort through close to 2.5 million files. In the vast trove, they allegedly found 158 individual children being abused and recorded at five centres over a 16-year period.

The first of 329 charges laid against Tait appears to relate to his Wild Earthlings bush school. But it didn’t take long before parents were contacted by the AFP and relayed the news to the Scaifes.

“We have parents asking us, ‘why didn’t you tell us, how didn’t you know?’,” Mick Scaife said.

“Well, we only found out when parents told us the AFP had sat in their kitchen and said, ‘is this a picture of your child?’.”

Fit Kidz, which had a policy against any devices in bathrooms, say their rooms were open-plan and had viewing windows to allow educators to monitor each other.

But Tait, police allege, had secreted his personal phone into the bathroom of centres and opportunistically recorded children.

This week, the AFP released a list of all the centres where Tait allegedly abused children.

There are five. One is Wild Earthlings Glenorie. The other four are Fit Kidz Box Hill, Putney, Rouse Hill and Warrawee.

The victim identification team allegedly identified 136 children through their faces, clothing, hair colour, hats and drink bottles captured by Tait’s images.

“In certain instances, child victims have been tentatively identified through non-CAM images that involve them holding merit certificates, or paintings with their names on them,” the James wrote in his affidavit.

‘A family man, an artist, a dreamer’

Tait, in his 16 years in the industry, had fallen in love with and married a co-worker. He passed himself off as an engaged father, a family man who shared the duties of parenthood.

Tait also branded himself as an artist, a traveller and a dreamer with a special interest in Aboriginal culture.

That expertise, and his didgeridoo, got him through the door of many more centres to train staff about First Nations culture.

He ran a photography business boasting he could “capture the beautiful world of children in a candid, innocent and natural way”.

Tait’s now-defunct website, dated 2014 from online data, included photographs of Uluru and Indigenous children, and it said the people and landscape were dear to his heart.

“Spending time with the people in remote communities teaches me so much and the children emanate such infectious joy. It is hard to get a photograph that doesn’t make you feel something.”

The Herald and The Age this week revealed Tait had travelled to the APY Lands, a remote Indigenous community on the border of South Australia and the Northern Territory.

He had allegedly abused children in a community of just 300 residents while working at a centre there. His four-wheel-drive sported Aboriginal flag stickers.

On a poetry blog from more recent times, Tait wrote extensively about the innocence of children.

“Give me the babies from the market with their patchwork trousers and matted hair,” he wrote.

“Give me the sun kissed shoulders and bare feet that climb the old bricks and race through the daisies.

“These are the children who will save the world.”

Tait had instructed his lawyers to fight any attempt to lift the year-long non-publication order over his name. He argued the social standing, mental health of his own family, and his chance of a fair trial would be destroyed.

This masthead lobbied for the non-publication order to be lifted. For two weeks, the public knew the worst alleged daycare paedophile in the nation’s history was trying to keep his name secret. Angry parents took to social media to defy the gag order.

Fit Kidz was named extensively online. The Scaifes outed themselves as the unnamed alleged abuser’s employer.

In a statement, the Scaifes said they had been accused of a “cover-up” and the order prevented them from defending themselves.

“We have not been the first to know things but we have never had any interest in protecting a person whose [alleged] actions have caused such profound harm to so many,” the couple wrote.

“Our focus has always been, and will continue to be, supporting those affected and strengthening the safety of the children entrusted to us.”

They did not name Tait.

‘It’s hard to reconcile the man I knew as Mr Hamish with the man who [allegedly] did all of this.’

“At the end of the day, I’m responsible for every little person across 10 centres,” Mel Scaife said.

“I’ve got to be able to trust every educator to be able to care and advocate for children, who can’t do it for themselves.

“Everyone who does this job signed up for that. But this trust … It’s just such a breach.”

Tait’s alleged victims could live with the damage caused forever but his parting cruelty, to his old friends and his family, came when he tried to keep his name secret.

He enlisted his wife and his parents to his application in the court, saying they needed protection from the fallout of his alleged crimes. But it did the opposite, drawing them into the news coverage, and the furious public painted them as conspirators.

Ultimately, Tait’s secrecy bid failed because Operation Moonbi had hit a wall, as 22 children remained unidentified at the time of the court hearing on Monday. This has been reduced to 16 since Tait’s name became public.

“It’s hard to reconcile the man I knew as Mr Hamish with the man who [allegedly] did all of this.”

Parents who believe their child had contact with Tait are urged to contact the AFP on (02) 9765 1000, from 7am to 7pm AEST.

Support is available from the National Sexual Assault, Domestic Family Violence Counselling Service at 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732). Anyone affected by sexual, domestic or family violence can also access 24/7, free and confidential trauma-specialist counselling through Full Stop Australia (1800 385 578).

The AFP is updating the list below as investigations continue.

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