Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

There is quite limited information available that indicates positive outcomes have been achieved in some instances when SEAM led to people becoming engaged with Centrelink and when they were assisted through a case management process. Our contention is that this can be achieved and provided without cutting off income support and threatening people with complete impoverishment. The report includes some strong suggestions from community members about the causes and the potential solution for factors that contribute to poor school attendance but the government seems reluctant to act on this advice.

I do not mean to take the minister the wrong way, but the sense that has come through from people who have taken a look at the report and compared it with what the government eventually did is that we seem to have zeroed in on this punitive proposal for cutting off people's income support and not taken a look at a heap of very interesting and, to my mind, vastly more creative proposals that came out of the same piece of work. Bullying, poor housing, a lack of parental education and worries that kids would lose their culture were some of the elements identified as contributing to poor attendance. Some of those reasons you could kind of understand. Kids are being sent off to school but they are coming back saying: 'I don't understand what they are saying. I can't hear what's being said. The language is wrong. Why can't I learn some of this stuff in my own language?' Some of these things do not fall back to poor parenting. There are entirely legitimate reasons why a kid might simply prefer not to find themselves in that environment and, if we are going to engage and contend with that, we need other ways to do that than just telling parents that their income support is to be cut off.

So solutions that were raised and have been tried—there is some evidence around the effectiveness of these—include support and mentoring of parents, greater involvement of elders at schools, incorporation of Aboriginal culture into school and bilingual education. None of those, I would hope, sound particularly controversial. Evidence heard during the Senate inquiry was also fairly clear—SEAM is not working and there is not enough evidence to support its expansion across the Territory. The inquiry revealed that there were numerous community-supported and quite effective measures that have a better prospect of improving school attendance. Everybody here is on the same page in terms of outcome, but in this instance we disagree very strongly on the method. Evaluations of comparable programs internationally are mixed, but the literature tends to suggest that well-designed, targeted and incentive-based programs work significantly better than punitive sanctions-based programs.

Some of the potential negative impacts we have seen were outlined by Mr Jones, who is the General Secretary of the Uniting Church in Australia Northern Synod. He said

It may be noted that school attendance rates in the Northern Territory have continued to decline overall, and the SEAM trial schools evaluation has reported the failure of the SEAM measure. This negative step will only further alienate parents and decrease the levels of support within communities. We request that this aspect be deleted from the SEAM legislation.

Again, as Senator Siewert proposed for the measures we were contemplating a short while ago, if this amendment fails we will propose a number of amendments that finetune SEAM. As the committee would be aware, Senator Siewert has approached this bill in a constructive spirit that, if the amendments to knock these schedules out do not succeed, then we will do our best to improve and reform the measures.

Another area of concern raised during the inquiry was the inability of SEAM, even if it did manage to get kids to school, to address barriers to learning. What is the point of sitting there if you cannot hear what is being taught? Dr Bath, the NT Children's Commissioner, noticed that nearly 47 per cent of children in the NT have multiple development vulnerabilities, as measured by the Australian Early Development Index. That figure compares to a national average of just under 12 per cent. There are entire classrooms of kids who are well off the chart in terms the early development index. Cutting the parent support payments is not going to fix that—it is not going to help that.

If we look at the intervention's own data, it is estimated that up to 60 per cent of kids have multiple developmental vulnerabilities. Children with these vulnerabilities are going to require special assistance or enriched programs to deal with those areas of vulnerability. The minister, if he chooses, can go into some details about how we are doing that, but I would also be keen to hear how cutting off income support is helping kids who find themselves in those circumstances. I suspect it is not even worth asking for evidence, because anybody with a basic measure of commonsense would think, 'Well, cutting off payments to parents who are already being income-managed with these little plastic cards is not going to help kids in those circumstances'.

Neither Senator Siewert nor I would claim that this is easy. It is hard, it is complex and no set of dot points or bumper-sticker slogans will solve this for us. But reaching for punitive measures as the first tool in the box is so wrong. I do not think that any of the measures that I have just listed would necessarily be effective by themselves, and the AEDI data would probably support that contention. Why do we force kids to school if they are not able to sit on a chair and pay attention to the teacher or hear what is going on?

Evidence put before the Senate inquiry points to the effectiveness of holistic, long-term, well-designed, targeted and incentive-based programs that are community-led and community-owned. Those sorts of things are going to need to survive changes of government; they are going to need to survive the whims and the fads that wash through this place about how we can help people a long way away from us. We are absolutely ready to help achieve that kind of policy stability. We have to get the initial settings right and that means putting the tools into the hands of the people who are on the front line. The inclusion of conferences and school attendance plans in the bill are steps in the right direction, but we believe they should go much further in order to have a positive, long-term impact on school attendance.

Throughout the inquiry numerous examples of effective measures were provided, often based on independent research or community consultation. For example, the St Vincent de Paul Society noted that numerous proactive solutions to improving attendance were provided by communities during the Stronger Futures consultations. It is very disappointing that these suggestions were not then incorporated into the bills and that we come out the other end of a process, with which people engaged in good faith, with nothing other than a stick to beat parents with. We could have done a lot better.

I have a huge list of suggestions from communities whose views were sought and who gave their time to put their views to the government—things like using local elders to teach culture in schools or incorporating local language and culture in schools that kids can relate to rather than a culture that might be quite alien to them. Senator Whish-Wilson reminded us before that for some of these kids and some of these parents, English is a third or fourth language. I do not know how many senators can speak three or four languages—I certainly cannot. It is going to be really tough to come into a classroom effectively speaking a language alien to what you have grown up with at home.

A heap of good proposals were put on the table—homework centres where parents can help out and bring families back together, rather than the tradition that we have grown up with where we kick the kids out of home to school, perhaps to a completely different city, and then bring them back again from time to time; footy programs, linking excursions and incentives to attendance; full-time parent-liaison officers—but they were set aside in favour of a proposal to take money off people. I have a long list here I can table if the government is interested.

Other positive measures that were put forward in submissions included cultural appropriateness of the school setting, including the involvement of Aboriginal teaching personnel, parents and community members in all aspects of the schooling process from initial planning to implementation and delivery of programs; and recognising the importance of Indigenous discourse.

I presume that the minister is very familiar with many of these measures, which came through the consultations—I am sure the advisers in the box would be very familiar with them—and I ask the minister if he could provide us with an understanding of why none of them appear to have been taken up. The only thing that has come through in this bill is a proposal to pull people's welfare support payments.