The Sorry Situation
Many people find it difficult to comprehend how taking Aboriginal children away from their parents could have been so popular an idea. Perhaps they would find it easier to understand if they were provided with a different degree of the same type of situation that is still popular today: government schooling.
Children are forced to attend school, where their teachers are forced to teach what the government decides. As every schoolboy knows, this is for their own good, because their parents cannot be trusted to educate them. Now, the government might be right; children may be better off away from their parents and at school. But forcibly taking children away from their parents, even if only for six hours a day, and with the best of intentions and even the best of results, is still a forceful activity, synonymous with kidnapping.
In the future, perhaps, we will look on compulsory attendance and compulsory curriculum at schools differently. Maybe we will have people who had absolutely nothing to do with it apologising on our behalf. Maybe certain victims of poor schooling would value that.
Mencken made a similar comment:
[The mob] looks for leaders with the necessary courage, and when they appear it follows them slavishly, even after their courage is discovered to be mere buncombe and their altruism only a cloak for more and worse oppressions. Thus it oscillates eternally between scoundrels, or, if you would take them at their own valuation, heroes. Politics becomes the trade of playing upon its natural poltroonery — of scaring it half to death, and then proposing to save it. There is in it no other quality of which a practical politician, taking one day with another, may be sure. Every theoretically free people wonders at the slavishness of all the others. But there is no actual difference between them. [H.L. Mencken, Notes on Democracy (New York: Knopf, 1926), p. 50.]
What next? Will drunks, dole recipients, criminals, idiot journalists and other left-wing Australians demand that the Rudd government apologise for the policies of the Howard government? It would be an improvement over what the Rudd government is doing now.
from: http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,23466073-5001021,00.html I post it here for archival purposes:
PARENTS who fail to send their children to school could be jailed for up to two years, under draconian new anti-truancy laws to be introduced to parliament today.
For the first time, powers will be granted to the Department of Education to ask for court orders forcing parents to enrol their children at school.
And magistrates will be empowered to impose jail sentences for parents of habitual truants and fine them up to $10,000.
In a further plank to a major education reforms, which began earlier this year with the lifting of the school age to 16, the State Government will beef up laws to ensure all children in NSW are enrolled in school, and punish the parents of habitual truants.
Premier Morris Iemma, who announced the reforms during a press conference at Parliament House at 1.15pm, said it was time that the issue of school enrolments and truancy became one of parental responsibility.
However, Mr Iemma has tried to also indemnify his government from future liability, in the wake of the Shellay Ward case, by giving legal protection to departments that notify the Education Department that a children is not enrolled in school.
Shellay Ward, a seven-year-old autistic girl, allegedly starved to death after being left with her parents, despite her younger sister having already been removed by DOCS.
The new laws include:
* Allowing independent medical experts to asses if a child is too sick to be enrolled;
* New powers to the Department of Education to seek court orders to enforce children to be enrolled;
* Provision for home instruction to children too sick to attend;
* Issuing court orders to force parents of truants to undergo drug rehabilitation;
* Requirements that non-Government schools to advise of unsatisfactory attendance and;
* Providing jail terms for parents who flout court orders.
“We want to give our children every opportunity in life and the twin building blocks are good parenting and a good education,” said Mr Iemma.
“This is about parental responsibility.
“They have an obligation to ensure their children attend school.
“We’ll take action against parents who fail to either enrol their children in school or ensure they attend regularly.
“The Government is taking action to encourage assist and compel parents when their children are not regularly attending school.
“To make school attendance more likely, magistrates are being given new options to make orders that are tailored to meet the circumstances of each family.”