Primary school students in remote areas are being turned away from taxpayer-funded charter flights with empty seats because they are not Indigenous.
Derek Lord, air traffic services reporting officer at Normanton Airport in north-west Queensland, said he regularly sees 20-seat government-chartered planes arriving with fewer than half the seats occupied.
Mr Lord said his two sons, who board at a school in Charters Towers, near Townsville, were not allowed to board the planes because they were only available to Indigenous recipients of the ABSTUDY scheme.
Without access to the planes, it takes them up to six days to get home for the holiday period, taking buses and planes via Townsville and Cairns.
Mr Lord had tried paying for seats on the planes but the ‘booking company that now does it, which is overseas, refused to allow our children to get on because they don’t meet the criteria’, he told 2GB’s Ben Fordham.
‘It’s taxpayer funded and even if we were willing to pay, the plane is coming here – it’s been paid for by everyone’s taxes whether you’re Indigenous or non-Indigenous, the kids are from the same town.
‘And by the way, we’re in the middle of a flood crisis and we couldn’t get in or out.
‘So there was no way to get our kids home unless it’s on a private charter ourselves, or through Rex, and Rex can be up to two to three weeks waiting for a seat.’
Derek Lord (right, pictured with Katter’s Australian Party leader Robbie Katter), says it takes up to six days for his sons to get home from school for the holidays
Queensland state MP Robbie Katter (pictured) described the plane policy as ‘crazy’
Mr Lord said the half-empty flights were a sign that the ‘system is broken’.
‘…The gap is not a gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous per se, it’s regional versus non-regional.
‘If you actually compared the two, I think you’d find that many of the non-Indigenous kids and families have the same disadvantages as Indigenous people in rural and remote communities.’
Robbie Katter, a Queensland state MP and the leader of Katter’s Australian Party (KAP), described the plane policy as ‘crazy’.
Katter said taxpayers were being ‘gouged’ while empty seats on the charter planes went to waste.
‘We’ve got taxpayer-funded school charter planes flying into towns like Normanton half empty – and still, local kids are being left behind at the airport because they don’t qualify for ABSTUDY,’ he wrote online.
‘It’s not about race – it’s about fairness.
‘If the plane’s already coming in, and there are spare seats, let kids get home.
‘We’ll be pushing hard to fix this and holding both levels of government to account.’
Part of Services Australia, ABSTUDY is a group of payments for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students and apprentices, designed to assist them with the costs of education.
