School attendance and welfare

In fact, under the Northern Territory intervention, the operation of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 and the right to appeal government decisions through the Administrative Appeals Tribunal and the Social Security Appeals Tribunal was suspended. And an evaluation report commissioned by the previous Federal Government indicated that in 80 Shared Responsibility Agreements with Indigenous communities, it was governments rather than communities that were not meeting their commitments.

As the Australian Education Union have noted, lack of adequate resourcing remains the critical factor in Indigenous children missing out on education. We know there are thousands of Aboriginal children in the Northern Territory who are missing out on schooling at least in part because of a lack of basic infrastructure.

And surely it is not just attendance we should be concerned about, but also quality of education.

There can be no doubt that revelations of shocking abuse and neglect of Indigenous children - any children - must be responded to by governments with urgency and sincerity. Their safety and wellbeing is a matter we should all be concerned with and vigilant about.

Surely then it is crucial that any measures introduced are subject to scrutiny to ensure that they are genuinely designed to address the endemic problems facing the communities and families those children live in.

Quarantining welfare payments is an extraordinarily expensive and inevitably ineffective shortcut to increasing Indigenous children’s participation in education.

Most importantly, it is diverting attention from what is known about what actually does work in getting kids to want to stay at school and giving them opportunities in life that their parents didn’t have.