Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Families, Community Services, Indigenous Affairs and the Voluntary Sector) Share this | Hansard source

The Social Security and Veterans’ Entitlements Legislation Amendment (Schooling Requirements) Bill 2008 goes further than a bill introduced and passed by the parliament in the term of the Howard government. The Howard government legislation permitted welfare payments to be quarantined in the event of bad behaviour by welfare recipients such as not sending their kids to school or so neglecting their kids that they are brought to the attention of the child protection authority. This bill goes further and not only provides for the quarantining of welfare payments for the necessities of life; it provides for the actual suspension and even potentially the cancellation of welfare payments to those parents who do not properly do their job.

Let me say at the outset of my contribution to this debate that all of us should want kids to go to school and all of us should think that bad behaviour ought to have consequences. But this bill is not just about that; this bill is about putting a mechanism in place to achieve these desirable outcomes—a mechanism which I think will be quite ineffective, as I propose to show.

A Prime Minister who talks about truancy without putting in place an effective mechanism to deal with it is not a conservative but a fraud. A Prime Minister who talks about truancy without doing something meaningful about it is not a conservative but a fraud. The problem with this legislation is that it strikes a pose but it will not actually make a difference. It will not actually reduce truancy—first, because the states are most unlikely to agree to provide the data which is required if this new legislated mechanism is to be effective and, second, because, even if the states do agree to provide this data to Centrelink, Centrelink staff are most unlikely to enforce the new rules.

It is interesting that, as with so many Rudd government initiatives, the hard work to make the aspirations behind this legislation come into being has to be done by someone else. This government is very good at announcing changes that it cannot actually make itself. Let us be very clear about this: truancy is a state government responsibility. It is a state government responsibility that has been handled extremely badly over the last few years. In Western Australia, in South Australia, in the ACT and in the Northern Territory, there have actually been no truancy prosecutions since 2004—none whatsoever. In New South Wales, there were only six truancy prosecutions in the seven years leading up to last year. This is how seriously the state Labor governments take their responsibilities in this area.

I certainly accept that truancy is a problem. According to the Deputy Prime Minister when she announced this legislation, there are some 20,000 school-age children who are not enrolled at school and for whom no alternative arrangements have been made. That is a serious problem—no doubt about it. If you look at the data which is collected and published from time to time in New South Wales and Victoria, it seems likely that, on any one day, 10 per cent of schoolkids are not there. That means across the country, on any one day, some 200,000 kids—a vast army of children—are not where they are normally supposed to be: at school. Yes, most of those would probably have a legitimate excuse, but many would not, and there is a serious problem in our country if, on any one day, 200,000 kids are not at school.

But why would you trust a federal Labor government to fix a problem that the state Labor governments have so woefully ignored for so long? Why would schoolteachers and school principals start reporting data to Centrelink which they do not think they ought to report to their own head offices or to their own state education department truancy authorities? Especially why would they report this data when the consequences of that reporting could mean that the family about which they are reporting is totally without income? If they will not report the data when the consequences are a mere fine, why would they report the data when the consequences are a loss of income for that family?

I can well understand why reportedly 18 members of the caucus raised serious objections to this legislation when it was presented to the Labor caucus last week. I would encourage decent members opposite who do have the best interests of families and children at heart to tell us in the course of this debate precisely why they are concerned.

This government has form when it comes to failing to put tougher welfare rules into practice. The Howard government, to its credit, tried to insist that people on unemployment benefits did the right thing by the wider Australian community. The Howard government put in place a system whereby if three times you did not do the right thing—three times you did not turn up for job interviews or for Work for the Dole programs—after the third time your welfare payments could be suspended. What did the incoming government do? The incoming government said that this ‘three strikes and you are off’ rule was too harsh. The new Minister for Employment Participation said that the Howard government’s suspension of benefit rules were too harsh because they penalised families for the delinquency of one member of those families.

So, having adopted this bleeding heart approach to welfare in this respect, members opposite now want the public to believe that they are going to be as hard as nails, as tough as teak, in this further respect—they will not actually penalise adults for failing to do their duty but they will penalise families, they will penalise children, in which the adults fail to do their duty. This is an implausible suggestion that the government are making to the people of Australia, and that is why I say that, even if the states can be persuaded to provide personal, individual attendance data from the schools to Centrelink, it is highly unlikely that Centrelink will actually take the measures that the new government want us to believe will be taken against parents who do not do the right thing. That is why I say that this legislation is window-dressing. It is window-dressing from the world champion window-dresser, namely the Prime Minister, Mr Rudd.

It is important in the course of debating this legislation that those members opposite who do support it, particularly the Minister for Education and the minister responsible for the payment of benefits, Minister Macklin, start to answer some detailed questions on the mechanics of how this legislation might work. For instance, when will this suspension measure actually start to operate? For instance, when they announced it on budget night, it was supposed to start operating in the second half of this year. When they re-announced it on the front page of the Daily Telegraph last Monday week, it was not going to start until the first half of 2009. As well as when it might actually start, they need to tell us exactly who is going to be covered by this legislation. It was presented on the front page of the Daily Telegraph as a major national initiative that would apply to everyone, yet in fact, as announced on budget night, it was only a trial applying to some eight locations and involving some 3,300 schoolkids.

They also need to explain to us exactly what difference they hope this legislation is going to make. For instance, if the government really do believe that the welfare payments of delinquent parents will be suspended or even cancelled, as responsible economic managers they must have factored in a cost and a saving. Tell us what that cost is; tell us what that saving is. Are they intending to reduce non-attendance rates to zero? Do they think schools should attain 100 per cent attendance or 98 per cent attendance rather than the 90 per cent attendance that they currently seem to have? They need to make that clear. Do they believe that instead of the 20,000 children that the Deputy Prime Minister has told us are not enrolled at all there should be zero unenrolled children or, say, under 1,000 unenrolled children? If they are serious about this, if it is not just a half-baked scheme to address a concern revealed by focus group polling, they need to tell us exactly what impact it is going to have and exactly when that impact is expected to be made. They say they believe in testing teacher performance and school performance—what about testing their own performance by giving us some concrete benchmarks against which they can be judged? If this government expects to be taken seriously, these ministers need to come into the parliament in the course of this debate and give us that information.

I have some specific questions that I think Ministers Gillard and Macklin need to answer. Have they got agreement from the states for this information to be transferred to Centrelink and to the Commonwealth government? And it is not good enough to have just agreement in principle. I remind the House that in 2006 COAG agreed that the states would provide to the Commonwealth the identified data on school attendance rates and it was not done, and the education ministers’ council in 2007 agreed with the Commonwealth that the states would provide the identified data. In other words, they agreed to act upon the previous agreement, and to the best of my knowledge that still has not been done. So not only have the states reneged on their agreement to provide the identified data, the new government would have us believe that the states will provide specific personal information. It is utterly implausible that the states would not provide information which would have no specific consequences for people but that they would provide information that might lead to families losing their welfare payments.

Last year the Tasmanian government even indicated that the provision of personal information by schools to Centrelink would be illegal under the Privacy Act. So it is not enough for ministers opposite to say, ‘Oh, yes, we are talking to the states about this,’ or ‘Oh, yes, we’ve got an agreement in principle about this.’ Unless they can tell us that they have specific agreement to a detailed set of protocols governing the transfer of this information and what might be done with it, we cannot take them seriously and all of this is frankly a pose.

I have some more specific questions. Will Centrelink have to provide all schools with details about the families on welfare living in the area? Unless the schools have the information about which parents in the school community are on welfare, how can they then know which are the children on whose attendance they are supposed to report for the purpose of possible suspension of welfare payments? Do not think that this is a light matter. Mr Deputy Speaker Scott, you know enough about the way government works and about the difficulties of getting sensitive information to large numbers of other governments and other government departments to know just how difficult it will be in practice for Centrelink to tell the schools which are the welfare families in their school community, let alone for the schools to tell Centrelink just who has been turning up to school and under what circumstances.

A third question is: will all people currently on welfare with children have to prove to Centrelink that those children are enrolled at school? Again, the logistical difficulties of this are quite daunting. At the very least you would think that Centrelink would have to write to every single household—millions of them—and presumably those households would have to come up with a statement from the school saying, ‘Yes, these kids are enrolled.’ Let us not underestimate for a second the toing and froing, the collating and the collecting, not to mention the embarrassment to teachers and families involved in this whole process.

I certainly support strong action to get kids to school. I certainly support tough penalties for people who do not do what they should. But we have and always have had in this country the potential for schools to notify the truancy authorities if the kids are not turning up and for the truancy authorities to frogmarch those kids to school—and, if there is a problem, to take strong action by fining the parents. That is the way it was done until politically correct Labor governments started to ignore the law—and that is the way it should be done again. That is a much better way of doing things than the one that has been proposed by the Rudd government.

As I said, without vastly more detail, without a huge measure of greater clarity, this legislation will turn out to be a half-baked way to solve a problem that should never have arisen. It will be yet another measure from this government that is more about striking a pose than making a difference. It will be yet another measure from this government which is more about grabbing a headline than building a better country. Not for nothing is this government increasingly being known as the dud Rudd government. This legislation is more evidence, if any is needed, that this is a government that is not doing its job.

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