Page 4268 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 22 September 2010
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We support the action of Kingsley’s Chicken in resisting calls to refuse service to children during school hours, as to not serve school students raises issues of discrimination and human rights, and, as the retailer correctly identified, may actually be unlawful.
As a quick recap, Madam Deputy Speaker, let us look at this. Principal Thompson lobbies to work with the school’s community—in this case local businesses—not to serve truant students. The government ends up defending these truant students’ right to eat fried chicken. During the last sittings, the minister for education qualified his experimentations on our education system as being in tune with the many powerful reform currents in the contemporary Australian education debate.
The government’s defence of students’ right to wag school so that they can eat fried chicken is beyond rich and goes straight to the heart of what education should not be about. Have the powers in this city become so cynical that education is no longer thought of as a right? Or is the government taking some twisted epicurean stance, believing that eating junk food is more vital than having a proper education?
Condoning the inmates who run the asylum is ugly populism, narrow-sighted and irresponsible. Legal esoterica might seem smart and witty at the dinner table, Mr Barr, but there is no place for this when children’s education and futures are at stake. Furthermore, with local equivocations like this, why not argue that it is also unlawful to withhold sales to minors wanting to buy alcohol and tobacco? Turn the government human rights argument around and what we get is that abetting, or getting another to abet, student truancy is depriving that student of their right to a proper education.
If the government truly has the best interests of minors in mind, abetting or getting another to abet in truancy must be unlawful under any human rights regime. It probably is, except for the ACT, or so it seems. Just as much as a child needs a parent’s or guardian’s consent, a school’s paternalism towards its students is warranted, justified and necessary. As such, when addressing this matter, I do hope that the minister shows some leadership, maturity and logic on this increasingly bizarre situation.
This is a discussion that sorely needs to go back to fundamentals. We all know that truancy is a problem, but the government’s record in addressing this problem is iffy. For example, to quote the government over the last three years ending in 2009, only 11 cases of non-attendance have been reported by principals to the Department of Education and Training to contact parents to re-engage their child in schools. There were no instances where the chief executive had cause to take further action for non-attendance under section 12 of the Education Act 2004.
In fact, it was only in 2009 that the ACT had its first case, whereby a mother was charged for failing to ensure that her children were attending school. The government’s truancy numbers seem to hide a more sinister reality. Whether you agree with the principal of Lanyon high school or not, the proactive measures that he has taken hit home on a fundamental tenet of teaching. No matter how challenging your students are, you never give up on them. I see this in the teachers I meet during
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