Children in remote communities denied seats on near-empty ‘Indigenous-only' charter flights
Derek Lord, a father of two boys living in the far north west Queensland town of Normanton about five hours north of Mt Isa and eight hours west of Cairns in the Gulf of Carpentaria, said his sons faced a 'six-day ordeal' to get home after they were not allowed to purchase seats on a nearly empty, taxpayer-funded flight.
Mr Lord, who is the Air Traffic Services Reporting Officer at the tiny Normanton Airport, said he regularly sees 20-seat planes arriving with fewer than half the seats occupied.
But he claims his two sons, who board at school in Charters Towers, 90 minutes southwest of Townsville, have been turned away from those same flights because they're not ABSTUDY recipients.
'My boys have been left sitting at the airport, bags packed, because they weren't allowed on a plane with empty seats,' Mr Lord said in a statement via Katter's Australian Party (KAP) Leader and Member for Traeger, Robbie Katter.
'We'd gladly pay for those seats — anything to avoid the six-day ordeal we have to go through with commercial flights to get them home for the holidays when roads were cut off due to flooding.'
ABSTUDY, introduced in 1969, is a federal government scheme for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people that offers education-related financial assistance, including course fees and travel costs for students who study away from home.
Mr Katter has slammed the new school charter flight arrangement as fundamentally flawed and unfair, describing it as a system that fosters division and fails to meet the needs of remote communities.
'This is not an Indigenous problem. It's a remote living problem,' Mr Katter said.
'When you've got families living in the same town, sending their kids to the same school, but being treated differently — that's wrong. It risks creating division in communities where it doesn't exist.'
Mr Katter said the situation had been made worse by the government's decision to hand the contract to a UK-based operator with no local experience, replacing long-time provider Volantair.
'We had a capable, locally based operator with 20 years' experience and regional knowledge,' he said.
'Now we've got a foreign company charging up to $1781 per ABSTUDY seat — almost triple what a regular flight costs — and delivering a shambolic service.'
The new operator, Air Charter Services, was appointed last year by Corporate Travel Management (CTM), which is responsible for the ABSTUDY charter contract.
Air Charter Services and CTM have been contacted for comment.
Since the change, according to Mr Katter, planes had shown up without passengers to collect, flights had gone unused, and single-engine aircraft without weather radar had been deployed into some of Queensland's toughest flying conditions.
'Kids are being left stranded, rural and remote families are being ignored,' Mr Katter said.
'It's time these services were made available to any child living remotely — not just those eligible under a narrow government program — and returned to experienced local operators who know the land, know the people, and care about the outcomes.'
Speaking to 2GB's Ben Fordham on Tuesday, Mr Lord said he had even tried paying for seats on the planes but his sons were denied 'because they don't fall under ABSTUDY'.
'The carrier even agreed to take our money 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 said.
'We don't understand it either. It's taxpayer-funded. Even if we weren't willing to pay, the plane is coming here, it's being paid for by everyone's taxes whether you're Indigenous or non-Indigenous, the kids are from the same town.'
Mr Lord noted 'we're in the middle of a flood crisis and we couldn't get in our out', recounting the tortuous journey home for his sons.
'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, three weeks waiting for a seat,' he said.
'We would have to bus them down to Townsville and then either bus them or plane them up to Cairns, and then they'd have to sit in Cairns over the weekend because there's no Rex flights, and then they'd have to fly home on Rex if we could get a Monday or Tuesday flight, and that's a big if.'
He said 'even Indigenous leaders here don't understand it'.
'I don't think it's about reconciliation, I think it's more about that the system is broken,' he said.
'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 many of the non-Indigenous kids and families have the same disadvantages as Indigenous people in rural or remote communities.'
Mr Lord added that son's girlfriend was Indigenous and 'the first time this happened, she got on one flight and he had to get on the other'.
Fordham said it was 'absolutely mad'.
'Just put the kids on the same damn plane,' he said.
A spokeswoman for Social Services Minister Tanya Plibersek told news.com.au the matter was being reviewed.
'The ABSTUDY program was introduced in 1969 by Liberal National Prime Minister John Gorton to help Indigenous students from very remote communities get access to education,' she said.
'Charter flights are only used where it is the cheapest or most cost effective alternative, from very remote communities. The allocation of spare seats is a matter for the charter company. The government agrees that empty seats should be made available for other students or community members to purchase where safe and practical to do so. The Minister will request updated advice from her department on this issue to ensure charter fees reflect value for money.'
The Department of Finance, which manages all the whole of Australian government travel contract, has previously clarified that CTM has no exclusive agreements with charter companies and will choose charter providers for the ABSTUDY program based on the needs of ABSTUDY travellers.
'CTM has encouraged competition through the expansion of charters available to be booked for the government, including the ABSTUDY program,' a spokeswoman for the department told Cairns Post last year.
'They have also recently included an additional 12 new charter service providers to the program, including two Indigenous businesses.'
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News.com.au
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- News.com.au
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Australians love a tale of property renovation, but one story that's little known is that Queensland Premier David Crisafulli was once a successful house flipper. Between 2005 and 2009, his private family company, Crisafulli Financial Services, bought and sold seven north Queensland houses in rapid, profitable deals. Those successful deals make a disastrous loss on another property in 2022, when he was opposition leader, unusual. The family company lost more than $50,000 on a long-held property sold in a rush. That was just less than a year after he secretly finished paying out liquidators $200,000 to settle claims of botched business oversight. Politicians have private business, but that business is sometimes thrust into the public arena. And the premier's failure to declare private business affairs on a register of interests was found in June to breach parliament's rules. A bipartisan parliamentary ethics committee decided he had failed to declare a liability for the $200,000 liquidator settlement. He had been "careless", and there was evidence he "ought to have known that such payments were to be declared (as a liability) or at least sought the registrar's advice", the committee found. Another question he has since refused to answer is how he paid for the $200,000. Journalist: Did you pay yourself? Premier: I've met my obligations. Did anyone assist him in paying for it? "Well, have a look at the report," he replied, arguing how he paid was "part of the analysis". But the report does not mention how he paid. It goes to what private business of politicians should be public. Transparency International Australia chief executive Clancy Moore said public figures withholding information about financial dealings erodes public trust. He said that was particularly the case when it related to "insolvency and potential conflicts of interest". 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By then, Mr Crisafulli had been in local government, later becoming a state minister in the short-lived LNP administration of Campbell Newman. In 2015, Mr Crisafulli lost office and ventured into the private sector. As revealed by the ABC, he landed a job via LNP donor and soccer-fanatic businessman Rabieh Krayem. The pair had known each other from Townsville and Mr Krayem had put forward the now-premier's name as sole director of a long-struggling training organisation SET Solutions. That was the same company in which Mr Krayem had just acquired a 50 per cent stake. Mr Crisafulli lasted mere months in the role — from his appointment in December 2015 until his resignation in April 2016. He was ultimately never paid a wage for his time, and one creditor told the ABC that Mr Crisafulli had been a straight shooter at the business and paid bills when promised. The business, which auditors found had received government funding for more hours of teaching than it had delivered, even when Mr Crisafulli headed the company, collapsed into liquidation in June 2016. Mr Crisafulli returned to parliament in 2017, but the ABC later revealed he had quietly paid liquidators $200,000 to settle claims the training business might have been trading while insolvent while he was at its helm. Such a payment can make business sense even when people do not believe they have done anything wrong. That's because settling liquidator claims privately may be cheaper and less scarring than risking a long battle which could potentially involve public court hearings. Mr Crisafulli secretly paid the settlement in three tranches: $80,000 in March 2020, $60,000 in July 2020 and $60,000 in July 2021. Insolvency industry sources said the multiple transfers can indicate financial strain or an inability to gather sufficient funds for a one-off payment. At the time, Mr Crisafulli's register of interests listed a multi-property portfolio and six Bank of Queensland mortgages. Land records also show an early-mid 2021 sale of one mortgaged property for $2.3 million and a mortgage-backed purchase of another for $745,000 by his wife, Tegan Crisafulli. In February 2022, about half a year after finishing paying the liquidators, his family company tried to offload a Townsville property bought for $287,500 12 years earlier. It was on a big but odd-shaped battleaxe piece of land. Even the sale advertisement was blatant about the property's bad condition: "No point in doing a building and pest." But buyers weren't keen. The asking price dropped. The advertisement suggested selling pressure: "The owner's instructions are clear, and this will be gone before the end of the financial year." By May 2022 it was sold for $230,000, marking a gross loss of $57,500. Mr Crisafulli won't answer why a sale needed to go through that financial year or if he was under strain then. Perhaps he might have wanted cash to make another purchase later, or to bring down borrowing levels. It could be unrelated to the liquidator settlement. But the premier, who had campaigned on his love for small business and transparency, will not clarify that, nor how he financed the $200,000 liquidator settlement. Perhaps he drew down on existing loans. Or family might have provided a payment as a gift — a carve out in the register of interests allows some family contributions to not be declared. In June of this year, when asked how he financed the $200,000 payment, Mr Crisafulli repeated phrasing he'd used before about having met his "obligations". He was asked: Did the $200,000 payment impose obligations on him to other people? "I want to be clear, this was subject to this analysis (the committee report) and I have met my obligations," he responded. Yet the report does not mention how he paid. He had also previously, when asked why he had not listed the liquidators' debt as a liability, maintained he had "met [his] obligations" — a statement the ethics committee later found was incorrect. Transparency International's Mr Moore said even if a payments disclosure "is not technically required under the letter of the law, the spirit of democratic accountability calls for more openness". "Transparency is not a technicality, it is a test of leadership." Deputy Opposition Leader Cameron Dick argued in June that questions remained.
