Keith Pitt (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is timely that we put some of these anomalies to bed. I am someone who has actually attended a TAFE course. I was originally an apprentice who commenced almost 30 years ago. I have been through the TAFE system and I owned a private RTO for many years, from inception all the way through a five-year audit, taking that company from an accredited training organisation with one accredited short course through to a business which had over 50 short courses, qualifications and outcomes in skill sets. So I actually have some knowledge in this area. What I can tell you is that some of our speakers have been misinformed. In my view, one of the biggest providers of subcontract training—and this is in Queensland; I cannot speak for the other states—is TAFE. TAFEs provide the majority of subcontract trainers. They are the ones who put the majority of these people in the field. The private RTOs, I acknowledge, have some difficulties, and I certainly struck many of them over the number of years that I was in business in this area.

It is good to see that in this bill there are changes which will make a real difference to the VET sector. The first is the change requiring advertising around any course to identify the RTO. I have been affected by this many times. I made a decision very early in my business career that we would base our company on quality, which would likely give us longevity, and that certainly turned out to be the case. The business, which I no longer have an interest in, of course, due to my role here, is still going strong. It still employs the same people, it still has relatively the same turnover and it provides the same services in the same regions. So that was a good decision, but I must tell you that, financially, it was a very tough one to make, when you have a fly-by-nighter who might roll into your district, advertise in all the local papers and through the local associations and undercut the local prices by some 30 per cent, and of course everybody rolls up for the new qualification which is much cheaper. You then spend a week being abused by people on the phone because they can get it somewhere else at less cost. However, even though you explain to them that the course that they are doing is not what they think it is, they still continue down that road.

The requirement for VET courses to advertise with, likely, an RTO number to identify the provider is valuable. This will help with third-party agreements. I had very few of them, quite simply because my third-party agreements were very tight. The contracts were very detailed and required people to do particular things, which of course they did not want to do. For those who wanted to stitch the system up, it simply did not work for them.

I must say that ASQA has probably been one of the most difficult organisations I have ever worked with anywhere in my entire working career. They were absolutely appalling. The work that they did resulted in the loss of many providers in regional Australia. As I am sure my colleague here would know, in regional Australia it is far more difficult to get the required training, because there simply are not the providers or the volume. That means that you need someone to come locally or you need someone to travel. One of the issues with TAFE—and, as I said, I am someone who attended TAFE over a number of years—is, quite simply, that they did not make themselves flexible enough. That has changed. There are a number of TAFE providers who now operate on the same basis as a private provider. They all go to the site, they will work around shift work and they will provide whatever is required, and that is working. A number of major TAFE providers have managed to get that over the line. Unfortunately, the concept that you can do a 9.30 to 3 o'clock day in the modern environment, on an industrial worksite, simply does not work. That is the absolute reality.

There is the requirement for a new quality standard provision. As someone who has been through two changes in the set of quality standards, I must say they are relatively dubious, in terms of the auditing and how that works. I will give you a very basic example. I once had four audits in a 12-month period. Given that an audit costs a small organisation some $20,000 to $30,000, that was a very tough period of time for my operation. In the four audits, I had three changes under the same quality standard by three different auditors, which basically meant I ended up back where I started. Every three months, we had to change all of our documents and all of our systems, only to have the next auditor, three months later, tell us to put it back to something else, until we finally got to a different auditor who told us to put it back to where it was at the beginning. These are the types of red-tape challenges the private providers in particular face, because they do not have as many resources as some of the TAFE structures.

I am very pleased to see the provision that the minister can make a quality standard for emerging issues. I think it is important for them to do that. The quality standard system is relatively basic. Of course the change to require a seven-year registration is good news for all providers; a five-year re-certification audit is an enormous exercise, which usually ties up four or five people and a number of auditors, depending on skills you have on your skill set and which costs a large amount of money. The question is: is it necessary? If your business has operated for five years without complaint, without issue, without any problems, why would you need to do an entire re-certification every five years at enormous cost? It is one of the problems that we had with ASQA. Under the former Labor government, ASQA worked on a cost recovery model. What that meant was—and this is a real example—an operator who worked out of Emerald and had three staff; they worked very hard to meet all the quality requirements and did everything necessary. They were quoted $45,000 for the recertification audit. What do you think the result of that audit was? The result was very simple: it did not go ahead because they did not have $45,000 in cash to do it. Consequently, the business closed and could no longer provide that service in regional Australia. That work then went to somebody else working under this contract, most likely through TAFE.

The $68 million that has been committed over the next four years will be helpful to reduce this costs. Out in the real world, things cost money. Quite simply, whatever gets put in front of a private business it has to pay for. I got to the stage inside my business where I did not bother preparing for audits—we just waited them to show up. It simply cost far too much money to have everything on the table. I know of a number of operators who simply had what they called their audit box. In that audit box would be all the compliance documents and everything else needed to tick and flick the sheet off. When the auditors rolled up, they came out with their audit box, put it on the table and way they would go. That is not a quality system. As anyone who has worked in industry would know, that is not how it should work.

It has been an interesting time looking at the VET system. Of course, the cost to RTOs has been very expensive and the number of RTOs has declined. One of the reasons they increased rapidly, particularly in Queensland, was around the licensing provisions for skills like forklifts, backhoes, end loaders and general load-shifting equipment. One thing I would urge the minister to consider, if the minister happens to be listening, is we need to sort out the national training system around licensing. It is something that costs the country an enormous amount of money—I realise the complications and the difficulties. In Victoria you do not need a licence to drive a dozer or a roller or other earth-moving equipment; you need a competency. However, if you go to another state, you need an accredited short course or a skill set or something else under the VET system. As you move through state boundaries, you move into different licence areas, which costs more money if you do not have the right one. A case in point: I remember one of the fly-in people who rolled into my district and trained a heap of people around load-shifting equipment. In three days they came out with six tickets, which were not actually licences. They were rather a skill set, which was required to operate perhaps in Victoria or somewhere else. I recall this particular one was because in one of my other roles in industry I was lead auditor and did a lot of work on heavy construction sites—on multi-storey buildings. I clearly remember coming to clean up after a private company had failed an audit; there was a subcontractor I had spoken to about this course—I told him that he really should not be doing it, though it was up to him—and he was the packing his gear up. It turned out that one of the reasons they failed the audit was that they did not have the correct skills to operate the equipment. They had been thrown off the site and lost the contract. So that one decision to save some 20 per cent of the cost ended up costing him a very large gig, a very large contract and a lot of money.

Those are the sorts of decisions that people make all the time. I do want to raise an issue that was brought to my attention by one of my constituents, Narelle Casberg. I want to congratulate her on the representations she made to me and to former state members around her son. Her son is autistic and is on the DSP but desperately wants to work. The issue that they had was, of course, with TAFE in that he was not allowed to be a full-fee paying student through TAFE—that was only available to international students. I congratulate Narelle because her representations got that requirement changed, and her son was able to attend a course. They put forward some $10,000 to attend the course and he completed the course, but then he had the same challenge for the next level. Many of the courses required for trade need time on the ground under supervision, log books and all the other bits and pieces that go with that.

The other issue has to do with red tape and the very rapid changes in trainer qualifications. Over the time I had my business, we went through three changes in training qualifications, which meant that every single trainer in my organisation had to do it again. Of course, these courses take somewhere between three, five or 10 days—15 days depending on what the course is—and whether they could get credit any for their former skills. This happened over and over again. It really did not make a lot of difference to the skill set they had for what they delivered and what they assessed, because the people I used were highly qualified, highly experienced and knew what they were doing and had done it for some time.

I do recall there was a suggestion that in areas of high risk where you had to do licence training there was going to be a requirement for the trainer to have one year in every three back in industry to reset their skills. Life is difficult enough without having to move from your full-time position to find another position in a skill set that you already have simply so that skill set is maintained. There are other ways of doing that. It would be an enormous burden on industry and on the training sector. It would be incredibly difficult if you worked in a regional area, then you would have to shift towns just to get your 12 months' experience back up.

I do take the point about private RTOs. I have seen any number who do the wrong thing and who rob their students. Let me give you a classic example: recent changes to the national standards around asbestos required a new skill set and a new set of qualifications to be able to do asbestos removal. There were a number of different layers, including supervision, occupational hygiene. There was a private provider who managed to do that training online. You could learn how to be an asbestos supervisor in a friable environment in an online course with a click and flick. I am not too sure how it is you do the assessment for a buddy check or for fitting some particular respiratory equipment—which is very important if you work in asbestos; you really want to live. I am not sure that the tick and flick from the online course would actually get you over the line. However, it did make an awful lot of money for somebody—quite simply, you enrol, pay your money, which was 50-75 per cent of an actual course cost. No-one was required to be there, they did not need a facility and they certainly did not need to have any of their practical equipment needed to do these assessments.

One of the reasons that these things should be limited is that you want to get them right. When you work in a high-risk environment, the people who do that work have every right to expect that they are trained correctly and properly, so I congratulate the minister on some of these changes. There are additional reporting requirements now for making complaints, which I find exceptional. However, from experience, in general, the majority of complaints come from competing RTOs. The number that I had over the years basically came from anyone who lived in the district who did the same work. After we had our fifth audit from the same complainant, I put in an FOI request which determined it was the same one, and they stopped coming. We had passed every single one without a nonconformance. It is something you would think they would work out.

High-risk licensing is something which is very important; however, we must ensure that our red tape does not get out of hand. I want to give you a simple example about cost. When I first started in this industry, you could get a forklift assessment for $200 or $250, because basically it was with an accredited provider as an individual under a piece of statute law. It was not a requirement under the VET system. It was not a nationally recognised training; it was a skill set assessed by a person who was approved by the state as having those skills and the required qualifications. That outcome is now $650 on average, as a general measure. You are required to go to training. The assessors are required to log, six days before the assessment takes place, that it will take place for the particular person. This is allegedly so that an auditor can show up; however, it makes for some very challenging work environments if you are in construction or heavy industry where, as I am sure you know, if it rains then work stops. When work stops, you want something else to do, and atypically that is training or skills maintenance. You cannot do that if you have to give six days notice. I am not sure that we can judge when the rain might occur! Those sorts of things make it very difficult and add layers and layers of cost, not only to industry but also to individuals. It makes it incredibly difficult. So, I am very pleased that the minister has put the bill forward with the amendments that are in it. Certainly, the $68 million for ASQA will make a difference to the operations that they perform, but I would encourage them to take practical steps. Not every private provider is out to rob their student. The majority are there to provide a service.

In the short time I have left—and it is a unique opportunity that you do not get very often—I would like to thank very briefly some of my former long-term staff whom I had with me for almost a decade: Theresa Peebles as the training manager; Ronnie Lau as operations manager; Ivan Grylls—the undefeatable Ivan—who shows up at every opportunity, who works all day and all night; Jared Wilson, the occupational hygienist; and of course Jeff Hatcher, one of our mines trainers, who spent his life as an assessor with Rio Tinto, only to retire to my area, roll through my door one day and say, 'Could you give me a job?' I commend the bill to the house.

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