Auction election

There is already a sense of "up the ante" in the rhetoric of State election promises. My current peeve is: any promise on juvenile toughness you can make I can make tougher.
Education Minister, Jane (The Terrifying) Lomax-Smith (see here) announced that a newly elected Labor government would barcode schoolkids so that they could be scanned each day and truancy records automatically generated. Countered by Liberal Vicki (the Equally Terrifying) Chapman with: we will publish the attendance records.....for what good that will do.
Do either of these people have a commitment to doing more than appealing to a certain sector's vocal critique that we are not tough enough on our kids? This sort of bizarre toughness auction does little, in my mind, to actually address issues.
At least part of the question is about the failure of our school system to actually address the issues to do with such things as truancy. We need not so much to ask...how can we keep better track of those who play truant? as why do they play truant?
It is convenient for governments who want to have mass appeal, but who do nto want to spend dollars where they can get away with it, to blame shift.
Ask yourself, why do kids not go to school? On the face of it the root analysis must be that there is something outside school that is more attractive than inside. As long as schools are struggling with inadequate resources, understaffing, a dispirited staff and degenerating facilities...it will always be possible to find better options outside.
If, and I say "if" both parties are genuinely interested in ensuring kids stay at school and not play the truant then the solutions need to be better than the sort of draconian stuff that is being talked about here.
However Fred and Thelma Voter, often vociferous about the young ratbags, are not terribly interested either in challenging our clever pollies to do more than just act tough.
Many years ago, we coined the notion of the "clever country". Certainly SA expresses interest in becoming a technology centre of Australia. For the life of me I cannot understand how we can become a "clever country" without the deepest commitment to education...this means big dollars. But there seems little political will.
Once again, although the auction election is fascinating it exposes that in many ways both sides of Parliament are interested in the short term ("get me elected for another four years") solution. And are quite happy to ignore these fundamental issues.
In a perverse way we should be thankful to the truants, they expose to us a system that is unable to keep the interest of these young people who shoudl be being offered the best of all possible educations, but they are not!