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Australia truants may lose their families' welfare

(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-08-25 15:22

CANBERRA, Australia -- Australia's government came under fire from school principals and a welfare lobby Monday over a plan to cut welfare payments to parents who do not regularly send their children to school.

Education Minister Julia Gillard told reporters the government will introduce legislation to the Parliament this week that would deny welfare payments for up to 13 weeks to parents who do not have a reasonable excuse for their children's failure to attend school.

Statistics suggest that currently up to 20,000 Australian children do not regularly go to school, Gillard said.

Community Services Minister Jenny Macklin told reporters the new measure is to be tried in seven Outback Aboriginal townships where few parents have jobs and truancy among children is rampant. It will also be given a tryout at a suburban school in the west coast city of Perth, Macklin said.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said the measure was aimed largely, but not exclusively, at Aboriginal families.

"We have real problems of school non-attendance in indigenous communities and also school non-attendance on the part of certain other kids as well," Rudd told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio.

"You've got to take a hard-line approach to this," Rudd said.

Australian Primary Principals Association President Leone Trimper said the government should be helping rather than punishing parents and that withholding welfare would not address the underlying family problems that lead to truancy. She also voiced concern about what would happen to children when a household was without income for three months.

"It is a punitive measure," Trimper told ABC.

The nation's leading welfare lobby, the Australian Council of Social Services, questioned whether the plan woulsucceed.

"We've yet to see the evidence that this kind of approach will work," council President Lin Hatfield Dodds said. "It's extremely punitive; it would have an immediate and severe effect on people's lives."