Page 4255 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 21 September 2011
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not actually have a solution to the problem confronted by the principal of Lanyon high school. Nowhere since this issue has arisen has there been any practical solution, any commonsense solution to the problems confronted by principals like the principal of Lanyon high school.
We had talk about discussions. Quite frankly, what we are having now is Mr Corbell sort of vaguely proposing that we have some sort of higher-level IDC to work out what to do about truancy when the people on the ground were doing something. But they were slapped down, and Mr Corbell aided and abetted that slapping down.
I congratulate Mr Seselja for bringing this proposal forward today. I congratulate him for having the courage to bell the cat on this subject. We have Ms Hunter and Mr Corbell coming along with their sadly predictable position that we could not possibly discriminate against young people. We do discriminate against young people for the benefit of young people every day of the week. There are loads of provisions in the Discrimination Act.
As Mr Seselja pointed out in his introductory speech, 23 pages of legislation in the Discrimination Act are about exemptions. I have an exemption in the way that I employ people. All sorts of people have an exemption in the way they employ people. There are a range of exemptions for all sorts of things. But at the end of the day, is there going to be an exemption to protect young people from themselves when they do dumb things like wagging school? No, there will not be, thanks to Meredith Hunter and Simon Corbell.
MR SESELJA (Molonglo—Leader of the Opposition) (8:06), in reply: If there are no other speakers, can I express my disappointment that the Labor Party and the Greens have chosen not to support this bill this evening. This is a bill that sought to bring back some common sense into this situation. It sought to restore some basic common sense to a situation which most people would see as absurd, a situation which does not really exist anywhere else, where we see around the country efforts like this are not just tolerated by the government but are actually encouraged by the government.
Most recently we have seen the Queensland government saying that they would support these kinds of moves, moves which have been rendered illegal by this interpretation of the act—an interpretation that we disagree with and that we have sought to address through this legislation. It is unfortunate that we have been forced to bring forward legislation, legislation which is going to go down, where it is necessary for us to give legal protection to those who want our children to stay in school during school hours and to protect them from prosecution.
This bill started because of an incident on 7 September 2010 when Lanyon high school principal, Bill Thompson, was reported in the Canberra Times for his imaginative attempt to keep kids in class. This teacher of 32 years—and as you rightly point outed, Madam Assistant Speaker, this expert—this expert who was dismissed, I think, by the Labor Party and the Greens, asked a simple question of local shopkeepers. He asked the shops in the nearby centre not to serve kids from his school during school hours. In return, he offered to promote in the local school newsletter, as a sign of community support, the names of the shops that helped prevent truancy.
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