Children in remote communities denied seats on near-empty Indigenous-only charter flights

The Australian government will review charter flight arrangements for students living in remote outback communities after claims non-Indigenous students were prevented from boarding planes because they were not ABSTUDY recipients.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.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,” 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.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,” Katter said.“When you’ve got families living in the same town, sending their kids to the same school, but being treated differently �...