Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Environment, Heritage, the Arts and Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I support, as do my coalition colleagues, any actions which are just, practical and effectively result in achieving greater school attendance for all Australian children throughout the country. What we are concerned about with this Social Security and Veterans’ Entitlements Legislation Amendment (Schooling Requirements) Bill 2008 is that the Rudd Labor government has a very poor record of following through good intentions with adequate resources and proper process. We tend to get the grand statement and the photo opportunity, but there is nothing beyond and nothing that will really make a difference. Often the cynicism that those who are to receive the service feel when expectations are built and then dashed leaves them even worse off than before.

Let me give the House a few examples—none of them is nearly as important as education for children. Fuelwatch was supposed to bring down the price of fuel. Petrol is one of the very serious inputs to business but is also necessary for community members to go about their daily family life. Fuelwatch was going to make a difference, we were told. It was going to bring down petrol prices. In fact, what we got was a website. The Fuelwatch process is a nonsense and has the opposite effect of dampening competition in selling fuel across the country.

Then we had the business of ‘grocery watch’, or GROCERYchoice as Labor initially called it. It is another serious issue. The cost of living for households has gone up so much since this government was elected that families want relief. There are already families in my electorate on food parcels due to the drought. Even with salaries, the cost of fresh and manufactured food has gone through the roof. People expected something to happen when this government said, ‘We will bring down grocery prices.’ What did we get? We got ‘grocery watch’, another website that is so stupid, so flawed, that it has become the target of every comedian in the country. It was so badly designed it could never bring down grocery prices, and it cost taxpayers $13 million.

As I said at the beginning, the sound education of our children is of critical importance. No nation can expect to have a just and civil society with social inclusion, full employment or even decent workforce participation rates if children do not go to school and stay as long as it takes to have a sound, basic education that will maximise their opportunities in life. But we cannot expect to deal with non school attendance with a single instrument. We know that school attendance is very much a part of the states’ work, and there are a lot of complexities around who keeps data—especially at the secondary level—about school attendance, in particular when a child is already over the legal age of compulsory education in a state. I want to applaud this government for at least—like the coalition—articulating the problem, but I am extremely concerned that, as I have mentioned already, this will be a one-day wonder with success measured in newspaper column centimetres for the day and maybe a few bits of TV. The Australian community deserves to have much more and much better. All Australians deserve more, but particularly our minority groups—like our Indigenous Australians and also our recently arrived refugees—and our country communities. They are suffering extremes of depopulation and internal migration, not only because of drought and climate change but also because of poor government policy—for example, taking their water and leaving them without the means of production.

Members will note that I am not calling these students who do not attend school ‘truants’. That term implies that students knowingly and wilfully choose not to be enrolled or not to go to school, preferring to spend their day in the sun. That seems to be the implication when you talk about these children as truants. It is estimated that up to 20,000 children of school age are not enrolled in schools and, of course, many, many more are not going to school. Why aren’t children being enrolled in school? We have to ask that question in order to understand what to do about it. The intention of this legislation is that parents will be made to enrol their children by understanding that, if they do not, they will have their income support payments cut off for a period of up to 13 weeks or perhaps permanently. This implies that there are parents—either two parents or even one parent in control of the child. The legislation says that if a child is not attending school then the parents will have up to 13 weeks—over three months—to have that child back in school and then their payments will be re-established. If they cannot pull that off, their payments will be permanently withdrawn.

I have to say that I am concerned that we do not know enough about why children are not enrolled in school, but we can speculate. That speculation, backed by some good research and communication with the states, should have better informed this policy. Is a child not enrolled because the parent does not speak English? Because they have recently arrived in this country? Because they are not literate? Perhaps the parent never went to school. Perhaps the child does not even have a birth certificate. Perhaps the child was not born in the hospital system. Perhaps there is not a school at the outstation or near where a child lives, so the parent did not understand the expectation—even though a school was not available. And this is the situation in a lot of Northern Australia. Even though there is not a school, that child should be enrolled somehow or have their income support withdrawn.

If a child is refusing to attend or does not attend school, is it because they are too hungry? Is it because they are embarrassed about the fact that they do not have a uniform, or that they have not been able to wash? Perhaps they have a chronic undiagnosed illness or disease. Perhaps their hearing is so poor that they cannot hear and so they fail in school. Or perhaps their eyesight is damaged or too poor and it has not been diagnosed or treated. Or perhaps they were born with foetal alcohol syndrome that has not been diagnosed and the child cannot cope at school. Perhaps they have been bullied, or perhaps, the night before, they watched their parent become a victim of domestic violence—or perhaps they have been a victim of violence themselves. Sadly, we know only too well the extent to which that happens in our most dysfunctional and impoverished Indigenous communities in the emergency response area. Perhaps the child does not have a parent nearby. Perhaps the grandmother is raising the child and she has too many to feed and keep safe to ensure that the children of school age not only go to school but stay there all day. Perhaps the child has not had a bed to lie down in and they do not have decent housing. As I have said, they may be so hungry that their object is to get some food, not to go into school and stay there all day.

Perhaps a child has no-one in their family who is employed—nor has there been anyone employed for generations. So when someone says, ‘If you don’t go to school you won’t get a job,’ that is not a meaningful statement for them. If they have no understanding, knowledge of or expectation that they will be employed in this country, the lure of staying at school to get a qualification and a job is not in their family’s life experience and it makes no sense to them.

These are just some of the reasons why we have school attendance problems and issues. These issues, it would seem to me, require a much more comprehensive state-Commonwealth partnership. This policy highlights the total failure of child protection systems in the states and territories. Every now and then the media reports some horrific story of a child reported to DoCS, for example, who has not been removed from a desperately dangerous situation and the child dies. We know that, sadly, there is abuse in families. We know that a lot of children are not safe. Often a symptom of failure of protection is that a child does not go to school. Perhaps the child is shifted around too often by a parent trying to get out of a very violent situation and it is impossible for that child to go to school. I want to read from today’s Australian a report which highlights this problem. I quote:

In its submission to the federal Government’s intervention review team, chaired by indigenous leader Peter Yu, the Secretariat of National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care, said the Territory’s child-protection system remained seriously flawed with “a chronic lack of capacity” to deal with the issue.

Failure to go to school is often an indication of a child protection need. The chairwoman of the SNAICC, Muriel Bamblett:

... yesterday told The Australian she believed there was a culture within under-resourced child care agencies in the Territory that “if a child is living on the land, they won't go in and remove that child”.

She is referring to a situation where a child’s safety is not being given absolute priority consideration.

In its submission, SNAICC, which represents Aboriginal child care agencies nationwide, said there had been no significant increase in notifications of abuse or removal of children despite an extensive focus on child abuse and neglect over the past year.

“This is cause for grave concern and suggests that systems firstly for ensuring children’s wellbeing and secondly for protecting them from harm are still seriously flawed and lacking capacity across the Northern Territory,” the agency says.

Child protection is very important work and this report stresses that the very first areas to experience the full brunt of this legislation, six of the eight sites, are going to be in the emergency response area—in the Northern Territory, where there is a total failure of the Northern Territory government to do the right thing, to resource better and to have better systems of child protection. So by itself, just going in there and having the schools report that children A, B and C have not gone to school again, and taking the parents’ welfare, does nothing to address the complex and longstanding problems of these children needing protection—and children who need protection often do not have good school attendance or may not even be enrolled in school.

I am concerned that this legislation is just another bit of window-dressing which does not go to the heart of or deal with the complex set of problems. It does not demonstrate that the states or territories are going to do anything different other than provide data from the school principal which says, ‘Yes, we had 13 not at school again today.’ A lot more work, a lot more understanding and a lot more community and parental support—or grandparental support—has to go into ensuring that all of our children reach their full potential, all of our children are safe and all of our children live a life of choice and deep meaning in our country. That cannot happen with a strategy which simply says: ‘Your child was not at school. Parent, get your act together. Why wasn’t your child at school? You don’t know? We will give you three months to get your child back in school.’ That strategy is just not good enough.

The Northern Territory is going to be the location for six of the initial sites where the so-called truancy will be dealt with. There are eight sites in all. One is possibly going to be in Cannington in Western Australia, and we do not know the site of the final trial. In the Northern Territory in particular, the coalition understood only too well the interconnectedness within the cycle of poverty, despair, and dysfunction that affected the lives of children and adults in remote communities. We understood that unemployment was at the core of the sense of alienation and boredom which can lead to pornography, drug and alcohol abuse and finally the terrible child abuse that was reported so profoundly and distressingly in the Little children are sacred report. We looked at what has caused that chronic unemployment over generations, when there is employment—in fact, jobs going begging—in the Northern Territory. Of course we immediately focused upon CDEP, the Community Development Employment Program. What we found was that the Northern Territory government had been cost shifting the payment of teachers’ assistants in schools for years by simply reimbursing these women—it was and remains mostly women—through CDEP, rather than having them employed by the Northern Territory education department and properly trained and supported so they became literate, numerate English-language speakers, who could then help to give a more meaningful school experience to their students.

If the school is a poorly resourced place, if it does not teach adequate English, if it does not teach literacy and numeracy, if it looks like any other run-down shack in that community, if it is hot, dusty and dry, if teachers are overworked and if they depend on the welfare-paid teachers’ aides to do most of the heavy lifting, why would a child be excited by the prospect of learning in that place? So we said to the Northern Territory government: ‘Get your act together. Here’s at least $30 million to go to those schools with those Indigenous teachers’ aides so you can put them on a proper salary. Give them a proper job. Give them the professional development that they need. Give them a sense of pride in a career—it could be permanent part-time; that is up to the individuals—and in that way we can help build the experience of school as a good place for boys and girls in the Northern Territory.’

I am saddened and sickened to say that the Northern Territory government has not used those millions of dollars to transfer the Indigenous teachers’ aides onto Northern Territory payrolls. I think that is a disgrace. So here we go: we are now going to ask those hard-working, overtaxed school principals to dob in the kids not going to school, track down the parents, if they can, take them off their income support for up to three months and tell them they have got three months to get the kids into school—and then presume the job is done. Well, it may not be. The coalition would never have put this on the plate as a stand-alone, simplistic, silver bullet solution to a complex, longstanding, difficult situation. We also would not further enforce the notion that this is a problem just for Indigenous families. We would have had a number of sites trialled across Australia, not just in Indigenous communities, because failure to attend school occurs across Australia, in particular in areas under great financial distress and with low socioeconomic status.

While of course I support anything that is going to help give children a decent education in this country, that starts from families being sufficiently resourced, sufficiently secure and functional, so they understand the importance of the child attending school and they can supply that child with the physical and emotional support they need to go to school. That includes a good night’s sleep, a decent meal, hearing them read—and if the parents are not literate, that is also a problem needing attention. I want parents to be very much a part of this movement to help kids stay in school. Under this legislation, parents are simply going to be the ones with their incomes removed.

I do not think this is good stand-alone policy. I think it should be part of a total package or strategy. Certainly, in Halls Creek in Western Australia, where a similar process was trialled, it worked. But, with the process that occurred in Halls Creek, there was a whole range of other measures in place and in parallel. I ask this Rudd Labor government not to go again for the quick headline or the quick TV show appearance. Let us be serious about this. This is a chronic and serious problem for a developed nation. It is a problem which, if not properly addressed, condemns a child to another generation of unemployment, alienation, poor health and lower life expectancy. So, while I support the principle of improving school attendance, I say, ‘You have got to do much better.’

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