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

Maxine McKew (Bennelong, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Early Childhood Education and Child Care) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We have just heard the member for Warringah casting around a lot of cheap slurs and spending about 10 minutes posing a lot of questions—the answers to which he could have easily found out, I would have thought, by looking at the detailed notes—but saying almost nothing about the consequences of 20,000 children not being enrolled in schools across the country. I find it perplexing, because I know that the member for Warringah has spent time recently—and I praise him for this commitment—with Indigenous educators and children in Australia helping with reading. So I know that commitment is there, which is why I think his response on this bill is puzzling.

But I wish to speak in support of the Social Security and Veterans’ Entitlements Legislation Amendment (Schooling Requirements) Bill 2008. As the minister outlined in her second reading speech, the bill gives effect to measures outlined in the budget and is aimed at improving school enrolment and attendance through welfare reform. It will place conditions on the receipt of income support payments whereby parents are obliged to ensure that their children of compulsory school age are enrolled and attending school regularly.

Another point that the member for Warringah missed is that this is a measure that is going to be trialled in six sites in the Northern Territory, in an area in Cannington in Western Australia and in one other metropolitan site. Of course, trials are all about looking at what works and indeed examining some of those questions that the member for Warringah put. Importantly, what I feel that he failed to understand is that, while he talked about the issues of Centrelink and of principals at schools, in fact all parents under this bill receiving income support who live in the trial locations will be required to provide Centrelink with information about their child’s enrolment. Parents who fail to do this and fail to provide a reasonable explanation will be required to further engage with Centrelink, and there will be a very particular kind of complex case management around that.

The impact of this measure will be minimal for those parents who do the right thing and ensure that their children are in school. Those who do not take reasonable steps to improve their child’s attendance may have their income support payments suspended until such time as they can show that they have addressed the issue. This measure is a last resort. It will be applied in those cases where a parent has not provided a reasonable excuse that can account for an inability to comply. This is a very strong measure—there is no gainsaying that—but let us consider what has provoked this and why the government is acting.

ABS data suggests that the total number of children of compulsory school age who are not enrolled is around 20,000. The data further suggests that school attendance rates across states and territories are between 91 per cent and 93 per cent, with the rate for Indigenous children around 10 per cent less. That is 20,000 children not in the system. So what are the consequences—the consequences that the member for Warringah did not even attempt to address? These 20,000 children will never make it to a high-school graduation, will be unlikely to ever get a foothold in the job market and, more than likely, will be disengaged citizens for their entire lives. Without even the most basic tools by which they can navigate a complex world, those without adequate schooling are likely to be lost, unhappy and, I think it is fair to say, resentful souls. If they themselves parent, those same attitudes will be passed on to their children—lack of engagement and distrust of the value of learning.

Up to this point in time, we have tolerated this; the previous government tolerated this. I think it is extraordinary, when you look at that level of nonparticipation. Frankly, it is intolerable. Every day community organisations across the country deal with women and men with poor literacy skills whose capacity to cope in a very competitive environment is exceptionally limited. The cycle is repeated over and over again when children of such families also grow up with a very negative view of schooling and a mindset that is hard wired for failure. Social policy planners, of course, have been wrestling with this issue of intergenerational disadvantage for a long time and, as we know, with mixed results.

I think one of the great paradoxes of the times is that, while Australia has been enjoying record prosperity and very strong jobs growth up to now, the welfare bill, far from being reduced, is higher than ever. Through the boom years, we have simply failed when it comes to social inclusion. At a time when many of our industries are crying out for particular skill sets, we are being forced to rely on our immigration program to import the competencies we need. I think recognition of this problem has been building for some time but now, across the spectrum, the notion of passive welfare is seen more and more as the problem and not the solution.

We have to make a place for those who are now excluded from schooling, from employment and from civic society. With this bill, the government is sending a very clear signal to parents to do the right thing by their children and ensure that they attend school regularly. The matter is urgent. I was having a conversation with my colleague the member for Rankin this week. He talked about a survey that had been conducted two years ago in Logan, on the south side of Brisbane, which is in his area. That survey showed that 300 Logan year 7 students were absent—this is just one group of students in that area—for one-third of the year. That is a terrible figure. This bill is a start, a mechanism for sending a signal that this situation is not tolerable.

It is part of our wider agenda also to do something about our really quite dreadful high-school retention rates. Let us look at those. At around 74 per cent, the school completion rate has barely budged in 15 years. This is at a time when other OECD countries have managed to progressively and incrementally improve school completion rates. That is the legacy of the Howard years—a seeming indifference to this dreadful high-school completion rate. It is why over half a million young people between the ages of 15 and 24 are not in either full-time learning or full-time work. That is half a million young people who are not in a job and not involved in some kind of study or training.

There are multiple costs to tolerating these statistics. There is a national cost, with fewer skilled workers available to fill the demands of a modern economy; there is the community cost, as services, or even the justice system in some cases, struggle with people who are likely to vent their frustration in unacceptable ways; and there is the personal cost that I think is counted in a really diminished life. Life is hard for many, many people. A child born into a troubled family can be subject to such a level of toxic stress that it really inhibits appropriate brain development, and this is the case for many children in Indigenous communities but not exclusively so. These children will struggle through their school years. They will underperform at every level and feel that, at the end of it, the school system just spits them out. It is these children that we have to save. It is why, in my particular area of responsibility for early childhood, all our policies are focused on children’s development and on helping parents. We are putting that at the centre of policymaking because we know that the earlier the intervention, the greater the likelihood that children will be able to make a happy, healthy transition to school.

This is by way of saying that the circumstances that have produced what is unarguably a harsh measure, this bill, are complex. If the only thing we were to do as a government was to wield the blunt instrument of income suspension, then I would not be supporting this bill—but it is not. The concept of social inclusion is central to our policy approach, as are policies aimed at the development of healthy, well-supported children. The government has committed $3.2 billion in expenditure this year to support a whole range of ambitious initiatives that will support very young children and their families, and I am just going to mention a couple of them.

In its first budget, the Rudd Labor government committed $32 million over five years to a program to help disadvantaged children aged three to five to prepare for school under what is called the Home Interaction Program. This will be delivered, in partnership with the Brotherhood of St Laurence, in 50 disadvantaged communities across the country. The Home Interaction Program will give disadvantaged children a better start in life by supporting parents to improve their children’s school readiness. So it is help for children and, importantly, help for parents. Early intervention programs like HIP can increase school retention rates and attendance rates and, in the long term, employment opportunities, because they develop work readiness and leadership skills in participating parents.

Another current initiative is the ongoing work between the Australian and state and territory governments to establish integrated approaches to meeting the needs of children, families and communities. Specifically, this involves developing proposals for children and family centres in states and territories. We expect that centres will provide a mix of services that are responsive to community needs and will also provide early learning and parent and family support services. As part of this initiative, governments are working to improve outcomes for Indigenous children and families.

Most importantly, at the National Press Club last week the Prime Minister outlined our big national ambitions for an education revolution, which revolve around three central pillars of reform. They include: improving the quality of teaching; making school reporting properly transparent; and, most importantly, lifting achievement in disadvantaged school communities. We will be doing this through new funding arrangements with the states to put more resources into the schools that need them most. The Prime Minister was absolute in his comments that we will not tolerate underperformance. Of course, part of that is not tolerating nonattendance.

In conclusion, the government is moving on multiple fronts when it comes to engaging with parents, with schools and with the states and territories. We unashamedly want to lift the bar for everyone. That means ensuring that young people enrol in and attend school. This bill has a role to play as part of a suite of government measures aimed at ensuring that all children get an equal start in life.

Scott Morrison (Cook, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Social Security and Veterans’ Entitlements Legislation Amendment (Schooling Requirements) Bill 2008 provides some interesting insights into how this government operates. This should be a very important bill because it addresses very important matters. I would concur with the member for Bennelong about the importance of these matters. But where I suspect we differ is about how one goes about addressing these matters.

What we see in this bill is the way that the government pretends to deal with a lot of matters. Earlier today the member for Warringah made a very good point: this bill is a show bill; it is a window-dressing bill. It is a window-dressing bill from a shopfront government. I am a new member in this place, but what I have seen from those opposite as a government is basically all front and no shop when it comes to these issues. It is all out there on the hoarding, and you can see all the pretty lights, all the colour and all the movement, but once you get past the front, there is no shop.

This is a further measure in this government’s bid to cover the incompetence of state governments, which are Labor at every level, with their blame game. I want to talk a bit about these things. Let us first look at the minister’s stated intent for this bill. Truancy is a serious issue. It affects proportionally those in more marginalised sections of our community—the socioeconomically disadvantaged, ethnic communities and, in particular, our Indigenous communities. We are typically dealing with families and kids at risk. The problems are deep and the consequences are indeed great. Right around the country truancy rates are up. They are lower than in the United Kingdom but higher than in the US, Canada and New Zealand. We believe there are 20,000 children who should be in school who are not in school. What puzzles me about these statistics, and particularly what the member for Bennelong was saying, is that somehow this was the fault of a federal government. It was a federal government who apparently did not act on issues relating to truancy. If I read my Constitution correctly, it is actually state governments that were responsible for truancy rates. So the question is posed of the previous federal government, but no question is posed by those opposite about the actions of states.

The Deputy Prime Minister, in her introductory speech on this bill, said that we need to improve literacy and numeracy standards. She has set those as standards, I believe, in terms of the success of this measure, and she talked about increasing year 12 retention rates. So it is worth reminding ourselves of some of the things that the Howard government actually did do to address some of these matters that fell within their responsibility as a national government—not a state government that actually runs schools, and not a state government that is responsible for employing teachers and funding the development of schools, and funding the classrooms and doing all of these things, but as a federal government where they could act in their own areas of responsibility.

It was the Howard government that introduced national literacy and numeracy testing for children in years 3, 5, 7 and 9. Prior to that, there were no standards. There was no national testing. We just did not know. I think, above all else, that is a measure which demonstrates the coalition’s commitment to standards in education rather than shopfront measures. There was $457.4 million for a $700 literacy and numeracy vouchers program for students who were not meeting those benchmarks. There was bonus funding for schools that had excelled in raising literacy and numeracy standards, not just those that excelled in the standards themselves but those schools that had taken measures within their schools, with their parents, with their communities and had worked together to lift standards. These schools were rewarded under the coalition government.

The national agreement for reporting on schools attendance was achieved at a COAG meeting in July 2006 and subsequently followed up with various education ministers. As the member for Warringah pointed out, this is a deal that the states have never honoured. This is a deal where they had agreed to provide truancy information for the purposes of national understanding and reporting, and they would not do it on an aggregate basis. This bill is suggesting that they will do it on an individual basis where there is the risk that if that information is provided to Centrelink then that family will be affected—not just the child, not just the parents, but any other child or any other member of that family who is dependent on that source of income. This government expects the schools and the states to hand that information over.

What we have here is a war on truancy. It goes with the war on binge drinking; it goes with the war on obesity. Maybe we will have a war on wars as well. There is a war on all of these things. This comes straight out of the state government play book. It comes particularly out of the Blair government play book. With all of these wars, be it on binge drinking, obesity—or the fat tax—or whatever else, you will soon not be able to leave your house in this country without first ringing the Prime Minister’s office and checking to see whether that would be okay today.

All of these wars have something very familiar about them, which is that they are phoney wars. They are not real wars; they are phoney wars designed to send very subtle signals to the electorate rather than address the problems on the ground. It is all about the message; it is not about the problem. With this measure, the government is seeking to ride on the coat-tails of the Howard government’s doctrine of mutual obligation. That doctrine was set out by the Howard government and put into practice on the ground with Work for the Dole and a number of other measures. These honoured the idea of a social contract whereby responsibilities went with rights.

Those opposite try to portray this measure in that context. They try and do it but they are not serious. Their hearts are simply not in it. Since this matter was first addressed in the budget and later announced on the eve of these sittings, there has not been one question in this place to the Deputy Prime Minister or the Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs. We have had a host of questions in this place to the government for it to parade its moral obligations, responsibilities and doctrines, but it has not talked about them. It has not done that on one occasion since this parliament resumed. Beyond that, we have not heard once—we have not heard a peep—from the minister for families on this matter. I would be very interested to know what she really thinks about the measure. There has been not one question and not one speech from the minister for families on the measure.

The government’s proposal betrays a try-hard approach in its attempt to live up to the legacy of the Howard government, which put in place a genuine and real mutual obligation doctrine. One of the concerns about the way in which the government have tried to do this in their try-hard sort of way is that they have tried to talk very tough and have gone well beyond—and I think unreasonably so—anything the coalition government suggested. When we looked at this measure and tried to introduce it without the cooperation of the states, because the states would simply not participate in the program, we found that we were left in a situation where they would seek to get a headline in these matters but the details of likely action would be remote.

We know that the government has 18 members on its side of the House who do not support this bill. We know members on that side of the House do not support this bill. I am wondering what brought them to the position of supporting it. I suspect that it is this: while they want to talk tough about suspending payments—I would say that suspending payments would considerably disadvantage families—what they are really saying is: ‘You won’t have to worry because it’ll never actually happen. We’re just looking to try and talk tough on this bill but we’ll not put in place any meaningful mechanisms that would see any of these things actually eventuate.’ The reason is that the states will simply not hand over this information.

The member for Warringah made a very good point. He said: ‘If there is a deal, an agreement or an arrangement with the states to provide this information, even in these trials, then table that document in this place. Tell us that this bill and this mechanism will work by demonstrating in this place that you have the cooperation of the states. Show us that this information will be available to Centrelink when it is required in order to put this mechanism into place.’ That information has not been there for reporting of national truancy statistics. It was not there when the coalition sought to provide information to support its own measure, which was limited to income management. It was not there then, but apparently it is going to be there now. So where is the government’s agreement with the states to ensure the provision of the data that will enable this scheme to work?

The other matter concerning this bill is the ‘blame game’ game. This was a perplexing challenge for those on the other side of the House while they were in opposition and coming up to the last election. They had a very big problem. People were fed up with the performance of state schools and state hospitals around this country. People were completely fed up. Who and what could be responsible for the failure of state schools and state hospitals around this country when there were wall-to-wall Labor governments? Where on earth could they run to and hide when it came to schools and hospitals prior to the election? So they decided to blame blame itself. It was blame that was the problem. Blame was the reason that we had problems in our schools and hospitals. It was not the fact that state governments were conscientiously incompetent. It was not the problem of the states that they were unable to run these important institutions for the public. The problem was blame. It is the perfect Orwellian irony: blame blame itself. How convenient it is to blame blame when Labor is in power at every single level of government around the country. That is very convenient indeed. When you are running every single shop in the place, how convenient it is that there is nowhere the finger of blame can be pointed, particularly when every finger is coming back to the Labor Party.

Blaming blame has become the government’s way of getting around the position of responsibility. It was not the problem of state governments and their inability to run schools; it was actually the problem of Alfred Deakin and Edmund Barton. The government would have us believe that state governments cannot run schools and hospitals because somehow Edmund Barton and Alfred Deakin put schools and hospitals in the wrong box in the Constitution. It was not because states could not do it; it was because the Constitution was messed up. So it was not their conscientious and appalling incompetence; it all had to do with matters regarding the Constitution. It is an absolute farce that we would think that Canberra would be better than the states at running our schools. It is a farce to think that the solutions to these issues could be better run at a federal level than closer to home and on the ground.

In these situations, Canberra is more likely to fail than succeed. So it is time to understand one thing: where does the responsibility for our schools lie? The ‘blame game’ game cannot allow the states to avoid their responsibilities under any circumstances. Now, I am sure that there are people, particularly in my home state of New South Wales, who would love it if there were no state government—especially no Iemma state government; but, unfortunately, there is one. While there are state governments in this country, they must be held accountable for what services they are to provide. It is not simply a matter of saying that we need to end the ‘blame game’ game and stand together at press conferences and all smile at each other. For anyone to think that that will somehow change the situation is absolute nonsense. The ‘blame game’ game is an absolute hoax designed to avoid the accountability of state governments that have been elected to do certain jobs. But they are not doing those jobs. So what we find in this measure is an opportunity to try and shift responsibility for state schools from the states to the federal government. This is interesting because the Parliamentary Library says very clearly that the states have always had responsibility for school attendance. So the states should live up to that.

Harry Jenkins (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! It being 2 pm, the debate is interrupted in accordance with standing order 97. The debate may be resumed at a later hour and the member for Cook will have leave to continue speaking when the debate is resumed.