|
August 26, 2008
I heard on Radio National Breakfast this morning that Gillard and Macklin are planning to continue the policy of mutual obligation. Centrelink will trial quarantining welfare payments for those parents whose kids don't go to school for up to 13 weeks in eight areas in the Northern Territory. Parents are required to give Centrelink evidence that their children are enrolled in school, and if not, they have to work with the school in lifting the child's attendance. If not their welfare payments are suspended.
The assumption, as Larissa Behrendt points out in an op-ed in The Age. In Rethinking indigenous policy she says that the assumption is that the root cause of the problems in the Aboriginal community can be found in the behaviour problems of Aboriginal people and that forcing change through a stick approach is the way to fix things. The failure of children to attend school is simply explained by bad parenting. She adds that:
The Halls Creek School trialled a voluntary program that linked welfare payments to school attendance in 2008 and the evaluation, undertaken by Professor Robyn Penman, found that school attendance of the children did not improve over the course of the trial. The quality of teaching and the culture at the school were as significant as parental attitudes, and overcrowding in houses makes it more difficult to provide an environment in which families can be "school ready" or a culture of learning can be created
She adds that placing a punitive measure on families to ensure their children come to school is hypocritical from any government that neglects the same children by failing to provide adequate funding for a teacher and a classroom.
This is one example of Australia lagging behind in investment in people and communities over the part decade across education, skills building and active labour market programs, despite the rhetoric about investing in human capital to ensure a fully engaged and productive workforce.
|
What has happened to evidenced-based policy then?