Nigel Scullion (NT, Country Liberal Party, Deputy Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to make a second reading contribution to the Social Security and Veterans’ Entitlements Legislation Amendment (Schooling Requirements) Bill 2008. This bill seems to go a lot further than the legislation introduced by the previous government. We legislated for welfare payments to be quarantined in the event of the bad behaviour of welfare recipients—such as not sending children to school and neglecting children to the extent that they were brought to the attention of the child protection agencies—and where there appeared to be no amelioration of that behaviour. But this legislation provides for the actual suspension and potentially the cancellation of welfare payments.

This is where things really start to divide. This is where the rubber hits the road. This is a very sophisticated and complicated social policy environment. The government is now introducing legislation where the compliance penalty will be to take money from families—simply to take money from families and ensure that that is sufficient leverage. But, as we know, taking money from a family has a direct impact on a range of people who perhaps were not the perpetrators in the matter. The previous government, of course, said welfare quarantining would ensure that at least the children who were supposed to be going to school still had food on the table. We ensured that the basic commodities needed at what was sometimes a very difficult time for these individuals were there. Perhaps those on the other side did not have enough time. Perhaps they were a bit busy and had only a few moments to cobble the legislation together. But it is an extremely unsophisticated and clumsy approach to policy to have the sort of compliance that is going to make the circumstances of these individuals and families worse.

Of course we all want kids to go to school so that they receive the best possible education. I understand that at the moment some 20,000 children of school age are not enrolled, and some of the reports indicate that, on any given day, around 200,000 children are not attending school. There is no doubt that this legislation, which we will be supporting, clumsy though it is, is an attempt to ameliorate the parlous circumstances that these children find themselves in.

Like most of us in this place—or perhaps not—I was certainly a child who needed all the assistance he could in getting to school. Had it not been for the size 12 boot of the local constabulary, I would not have attended at all. I understand why some children do not find the school environment particularly attractive. But it is the responsibility of the states and territories, and for someone of my generation it beggars belief that they would have 200,000 kids on any given day not attending school. We used to wag every now and again, but someone was on our case all the time. Think about the future of those 200,000 kids. In this place we talk very glibly about rights. The word rolls off the tongue. Rights seem to be something you can pull out of anywhere. But I would think nobody would disagree with the fundamental right of access to education.

The states and territories have let us down dreadfully. It is surprising to see such truancy, which is effectively what it is. The fundamentally Labor states and territories have failed this country so badly that they are now calling on the Commonwealth government to act to make sure the kids go to school. That is the sort of abject failure we are seeing around the country. I am not sure what they will be asking us to do next—rates? Rubbish? I am not really sure. Maybe we are going to be asked to provide Commonwealth bus drivers to go and get the kids. This is a monumental failure of the state and territory governments.

We support the federal action, but the states have to be involved. The government talks about ending the blame game; there is a lot of rhetoric in that area. Ending the blame game does not mean saying to the states and territories: ‘Sorry about that. You’ve forgotten to do your job, so we’ll just take it over.’ The states and territories have to be involved in lifting capacity in the medium term to ensure they can get back to doing the job they should be doing.

The situation will be that schools and principals will have to report attendance figures to Centrelink if they are not currently providing this information to their own state education departments. So often the state education departments, when you say, ‘How is it going—what is your attendance like?’ find it very difficult to provide that information. But now a principal will have to make the decision. He might say, ‘We know that Johnny is a bit like Nigel and he is down the creek, fishing every day. There may be a bit of a difficulty with Johnny and his family and, as the principal of the school, I have to ring up Centrelink and tell them that they have to cut off their dole.’ I think that is a pretty tough call for a schoolteacher, or any person who is caring for children, to make. They are going to have to make that call. I think it would have been a lot better and a much more sophisticated approach to say to these principals: ‘You have to make a decision so that there is some leverage and they will still be able to feed their kids. They might even be able to afford the bus fare, to make sure the kids can go to school, now they have decided to do it.’ But in this unsophisticated approach they will be taking the money away again. Our approach was a much better system, which was simply to quarantine the welfare.

Mr Rudd has been very big on demanding benchmarks and critical performance indicators for all the legislation. He talked about closing the gap. He said we would get specific benchmarks and we would know when we had reached them and when the policies were absolutely successful. But if you read this legislation there is nothing like that in it. What are we attempting to get? Is it 100 per cent attendance? Is it 95 per cent? Is it 90 per cent? We are not really sure, but we are going to implement this legislation and just hope for the best. It is very clumsy. It seems to be inconsistent with the rhetoric from those on the other side about putting in specific targets. It is going to be very hard to judge whether there is success or failure. This is a bit of a stunt. You read on the front pages of the newspapers that government is being hard and decisive and taking tough action. We will speak about the tough action in a moment. I wonder about the stunt aspect of that.

We have raised concerns through the Senate committee process about Centrelink resources. Is Centrelink going to be able to process all the attendance reports from every school around the country and isolate individual parents who may not be sending their kids to school? It is unfortunate that the minister is not here because then I would have had the opportunity to bail him up personally about this. I am sure he is listening. At the moment there is a bit of a crisis in Centrelink. Most people in business understand that when you make a change in a $100 billion business you have a look at the reactions to that. We have made a number of changes here. The government said, ‘We’re going to remove the liaison officers.’ So what changed? There was an eight per cent increase in complaints. Every single indicator to do with Centrelink shows that it is underresourced and the staff are overworked. I pay huge credit to the wonderful Centrelink staff, who work their hearts out in an ever-changing and difficult environment. This is going to be another impost, a new area. The message is: ‘Centrelink, by the way, you are now going to be responsible for truancy.’ And we do not seem to be providing any additional resources for that.

You can imagine the difficulty in contacting and counselling parents and in breaching them so that their payments are stopped. This is an entirely new area and quite a difficult area to deal with. It is certainly something that the states and territories have put in the too-hard basket. It is an enormous job. It is going to be resource intensive. But the real point is that this entire thing will be a complete stunt. We will support it, but it is going to be a complete stunt and a complete waste of time. It is another half-baked idea. Remember the old pie that is still frozen in the middle? It is going to be one of those, because they have not resourced Centrelink sufficiently to be able to perform this new task.

There are also a couple of legal issues—again, I am not sure whether this was done in a rush—to do with providing information to Centrelink. Most state and territory governments do not appear to have reliable attendance data. That has been a problem for some time. Even if they had the data, I do not know whether they would be prepared to provide it to the Rudd government. In 2006 COAG agreed to provide attendance data, but here we are today, in 2008, and there is no attendance data. In fact, after agreeing to it, Tasmania said, ‘I think we’ve got a terrible problem under the Privacy Act and that’s the reason we can’t do it.’

How is this going to work, given that the states and territories said they were going to provide the data and two years later they still have not been able to do it? The fundamental process of identification in this matter is through the attendance data. I cannot see anything in the legislation about how this is going to be addressed. If the minister has an opportunity to address that issue, I would certainly appreciate it. So the real question is: are the state and territory governments on board? It has been their responsibility. We have been letting them off the hook. But are they now on board to provide the vital data to Centrelink which, under this legislation, this entire process hinges on? If they are not capable of providing that then this is just a tough bill stunt to try to make the PM look like he has a bit of spine that, in effect, does absolutely nothing. This is spin over substance. Really, the only outcome being sought is a newspaper headline. That is why it is absolutely essential that we ensure that the resources are there so that Centrelink has the appropriate support. We need really strong action in that regard. Otherwise, this legislation will have absolutely no effect.

What are the states and territories going to do to support truancy officers? They have to make a commitment. I will be supporting this legislation in the short term because, hopefully, it will get kids to school and support the states and territories up to a point. But there has to be a point where they take responsibility for their task. That has to be a part of these negotiations. There has to be a commitment from government, through COAG, that the states and territories will start playing their part. Perhaps I am a bit naive, but I think that the Commonwealth and the states should be working together to ensure that we enrol all children. Surely we as a nation have the capacity to find out where the 20,000 children who are not enrolled live. We should have compliance services to ensure that they remain at school. You can imagine that, with all kids at school enjoying a full and well-rounded education, the outcome would be that all Australian children would have much brighter future prospects. That is something that I would call an education revolution. It would be a revolution that this side would be prepared to support.