Education Minister Julia Gillard today announced the measure aimed at targeting the up to 20,000 school age children who are regular truants.

"(These laws) will give the commonwealth government power to suspend welfare payments if people don't have their children enrolled and regularly attending school," she told reporters.

Ms Gillard said the key obligation of parents of school age children was to ensure they attended school.

She acknowledged sickness and other circumstances could sometimes make this difficult.

"But there's no excuse for not having children regularly attending school," Ms Gillard said.

"If children are to benefit from education, if they are to get the best start in life, then they must be enrolled in and regularly attending school."

Ms Gillard said statistics suggested that up to 20,000 children of school age could be regularly missing school.

"We want to fix that statistic, we're concerned about it," she said.

The measure would have a trial run in eight communities to start, but the draft legislation would allow the program to be expanded nationally.

Ms Gillard said the program would be reviewed before it was rolled out nationally.