Primary school students are taking six days to get home during the holiday period because direct government-funded charter flights are only available to Indigenous students.
From Years 6 to 7, students in the small remote cattle town of Normanton generally attend boarding school in bigger towns such as Charters Towers—often needing to fly to return home.
Robbie Katter, the Queensland leader for Katter’s Australian Party (KAP) says the current state-supported charter flight model only provides places for ABSTUDY eligible Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, with no access to non-Indigenous students even if seats go empty.
“This is not an Indigenous problem. It’s a remote living problem,” Katter said in a statement.
“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.”
Normanton has a population of just under 1,400 people in the 2021 Census.
Life in remote Australian towns can be tough for young students.
‘Anything to Avoid the 6-Day Ordeal’: Father
Normanton resident Derek Lord is a father and the Air Traffic Services Reporting Officer at Normanton Airport, around five hours north of Mount Isa.Lord says he regularly sees 20-seat government-chartered planes arriving with fewer than half the seats occupied.
Yet his two sons, who board at school in Charters Towers, have been turned away from those same flights because they’re not ABSTUDY recipients.
Lord is willing to pay for the seats, but he isn’t allowed to.
“My boys have been left sitting at the airport, bags packed, because they weren’t allowed on a plane with empty seats,” he said.
Students Traversing Most of North Queensland to Get Home
The Epoch Times understands the process of getting home can be exhausting and drawn-out.For example, to get from Charters Towers to Normanton, they first need to catch a bus to Townsville, then take a commercial flight to Cairns, before waiting for a Rex flight to Normanton.
The process equates to a six-day, one-way loop around the vast north Queensland region just to get home.
Alternatively, parents can drive direct between Charters Towers and Normanton, which would take nine hours. However, roads often risk being cut off by floods during the wet season.
Charter Flights Triple the Cost of Commercial Flights
Meanwhile, the MP Katter is also critical of the government’s decision to award the charter flight contract to a UK-based operator, rather than the previous Cairns-based 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 $1,781 per ABSTUDY seat—almost triple what a regular flight costs—and delivering a shambolic service,” he said.
Katter claims that since the switch, planes have shown up despite their being no passengers, and single-engine aircraft without proper weather radar tech are being sent into some of Queensland’s toughest flying conditions.
“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.”
In response, a spokesperson from the Department of Social Services denied there was a “new charter flight arrangement for ABSTUDY.”
He did say overall funding for charter flights came through the financial support ABSTUDY provided to help Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students remain engaged in their studies.
“It is a key part of the Australian government’s broader agenda to closing the gap in educational and employment outcomes between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and non-Indigenous Australians,” the spokesperson told The Epoch Times.
“ABSTUDY pays for travel that is the most practicable and cost-effective mode of transport, and reasonable in individual student circumstances.”
