A remote preschool in an Indigenous community in South Australia has appeared on a list of 55 childhood education facilities where accused paedophile Hamish Tait worked or attended between 2009 and 2025, according to a register the Australian Federal Police established under Operation Moonbi. The Guardian reported the SA site's inclusion after a non-publication order shielding parts of the investigation was lifted on Monday, following a legal challenge.

Tait, 35, faces 329 charges spanning alleged offences from 2009 to 2025. The charge sheet includes 162 counts of producing child abuse material, 81 counts of filming a person engaged in a private act without consent, and 24 counts of using a child under 14 for the production of child abuse material. Police have identified 136 alleged victims; a further 22 remain unidentified. He was arrested and charged in July 2025 and has been held in custody since.

The scale of the digital evidence is considerable. Police seized almost 2.5 million files from electronic devices at Tait's home at the time of arrest, a figure the AFP has since refined to 2.4 million files analysed over the course of the 12-month investigation, which also involved 12 search warrants, per the AFP. Operation Moonbi began in June 2025 after the AFP received a report from the US-based National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the AFP confirmed at the time.

Tait worked across 62 centres in total; the Operation Moonbi list published by the AFP names 55 of these, many of them in Sydney. The AFP has said it has not suggested Tait offended at every centre named — the list functions as a notification and information-gathering tool rather than a claim of offending at each site. The matter is proceeding before the courts in New South Wales, and Tait has not been charged with any offence in South Australia.

The AFP has established a Local Contact Point in Sydney to support families and coordinate the response, and has contacted 121 families in relation to the investigation, according to AFP marketing materials. The children involved were of preschool and primary school age, the AFP said, as reported by Nine News. AFP acting commander Luke Needham has urged anyone with relevant information to come forward to assist police in identifying the remaining victims.

The South Australian entry on the list has drawn a distinct political response given the demographics of the community involved. Acting premier and Indigenous affairs minister Kyam Maher described the allegations as "disturbing" and said he had requested further information from SA police. No charges have been laid in South Australia, and the presence of the preschool on the register does not itself establish that offending occurred there — a distinction the AFP has been careful to draw publicly, even as it acknowledges the register's purpose is precisely to surface such possibilities for families who may otherwise never learn their child's centre was on the list.

The lifting of the non-publication order this week is itself a notable procedural development. Non-publication orders of this kind are typically sought by prosecuting agencies to protect the integrity of an ongoing investigation — preventing, for instance, premature identification of victims, contamination of evidence, or flight risk in related inquiries. That the AFP sought such an order suggests investigators judged the risk to the broader Moonbi effort as significant enough to warrant suppression even as charges proceeded in open court. Its removal following a legal challenge points to a tension the Australian courts navigate regularly in high-profile abuse cases: the public's right to know which institutions employed an accused offender, set against the state's interest in protecting an investigation still identifying victims. With 22 alleged victims yet to be identified, that tension has not fully resolved.

The remote and cross-jurisdictional character of this case also bears on how such investigations play out administratively. A childcare worker moving through 62 centres over sixteen years, spanning capital-city Sydney institutions and a remote SA Indigenous community preschool, illustrates how thinly credential and working-with-children checks can be stretched across a mobile workforce and how difficult contact tracing becomes once an allegation surfaces. The AFP's approach — publishing a public list rather than relying solely on direct family notification — reflects a judgment that the network of families potentially affected is too large and too dispersed to reach through case-by-case contact alone, even with 121 families already directly notified.

The case remains before the NSW courts, with no SA charges filed and police stressing that inclusion on the Moonbi list is not itself evidence of offending at a given site.