Brendan O'Connor (Gorton, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support the bill and the amendments moved by the member for Cunningham. This is an important area of public policy because it deals with how we equip our future workforce with sufficient skills to, firstly, enable them to have good, decent, quality jobs and, secondly, ensure that we grow our economy and remain a successful nation and a successful society.

It is a very important area that, I would argue, over the recent years has not been attended to as well as it might have been. There is no doubt that the decisions that have been made, both federally and at the state level, have not always served vocational training well. This matter, of course, goes to reforming the VET FEE-HELP area, but I think it is important, just in by way of context, to talk about how important vocational training is and about the absolute need to reform this area. The acquisition of the skills that are required to properly match the emerging demand in our rapidly changing labour market in this country is critical. There could hardly be a more important thing to be discussing today. This is something that Labor wants to see improved, and that is why there are amendments being moved by the shadow minister. Certainly I believe that Labor, when last in government, undertook some very significant reforms after close examination. Whether through the Bradley Review of Australian Higher Education or the Gonski review on education, there was very significant work undertaken after proper examination of the deficiencies of our education system. What I think we need to do further is to properly examine vocational training. We have got to get this right because there are too many deficiencies with the system. I think many of the speakers who have contributed to this debate have outlined those deficiencies.

There is no doubt that very significant rorts have existed within the system. It is fair to say that the vocational education sector has exploded as open market policies and the rorted loan scheme have fuelled mass enrolments hidden from regulatory scrutiny. So says John Ross in today's The Australian, where he quotes Martin Riordan, chief executive of TAFE Directors Australia, who is very significant contributor and expert in the field. Mr Riordan said:

Private, for-profit providers have collectively exploded as an industry, with the data showing they now deliver to two-thirds of the vocational education and training student population.

More than half of the federal funding for VET and VET FEE-HELP has been allocated to providers without the scrutiny and data disclosures required for other commonwealth programs.

Mr Ross further stated in the article:

Until now, the government had tallied only publicly funded vocational education and training. This included training by TAFEs and the other institutions—including private and community colleges, and training arms of companies—that had managed to secure government contracts. Under this approach, there were fewer than 1.8 million VET students counted last year.

The new report, released yesterday by the National Centre for Vocational Education Research, is the first to capture privately funded training as well as public. It found that 4,600 providers around Australia—including 2,865 private colleges—attracted 3.9 million enrolments last year. This compared with fewer than 1.3 million students at universities.

Given the explosion in these areas and given the lack of standards, particularly amongst many of the private providers, the government needs to take action to improve this sector to ensure quality training for people, particularly young people, who are entering these courses, and to ensure that the training is of a sufficient standard to enable people to find work. I think it is fair to say that we need a sector that is more sensitive, as I said earlier, to the emerging areas of demand in our rapidly changing labour market. We do not believe this has been undertaken too well by this government, and there needs to be a lot more done.

That is why, whilst we support the bill, there are amendments, and I think there are even further amendments that need to be debated. Labor is calling upon the government to appoint an industry funded national VET ombudsman and support Labor's call for the Auditor-General to conduct an audit of the use of VET FEE-HELP. Labor also proposes an amendment in detail requiring the department to write to the student with a clear statement on the amount of debt that they are about to undertake, requiring the student to reply to the department before the debt is raised.

We have too many students either in debt—which is bad enough—or even unaware that they have accumulated a debt, because of the way in which the government have mishandled this whole area. We know what they did when they came into office. Despite our very strong reservations and protestations, they removed the support for providing tools for apprentices, and they introduced a loan scheme which would appear now to have left vulnerable thousands of students who are in debt up to their eyeballs. These are young, vulnerable Australians accumulating a debt which in many cases they are not even aware of. For that reason, the government deserve a heavy censure.

We need to see an improvement here. The member for Cunningham has been vigilant in articulating Labor's position in respect of these matters because we are going to stand up for those young people in particular who may not have ever entered into a loan arrangement before and who have found themselves vulnerable as a result of the failure by the government to properly provide support for them and the proper advice required when someone so young may be entering into a very, very significant debt by way of a loan.

The bill we support. It does not go far enough. We call upon the government to accept the amendments that are being proposed by the opposition in order to redress what are clearly significant problems within the sector. It is my view that there have been some very bad decisions in this area, such as the former Victorian government ripping out hundreds of millions of dollars from TAFE in Victoria. It happened in Queensland—I think it did—under Campbell Newman. It has happened at a cost for those young people who lost their opportunities to acquire skills they needed to enter the labour market.

We have an unemployment rate of young people in excess of 14 per cent. That is 16- to 24-year-olds. For teenagers it is even higher, and for some parts of Australia, of course, we are seeing unemployment rates north of 20 per cent—25 per cent and more in some parts of Australia—partly because these young people do not have the requisite skills to enter the labour market. We do know that the labour market is changing. There has been the disappearance of entry-level work as a result of a number of factors, including technological change. Also, those older workers who may have been made redundant in some sectors of our economy are competing with young people for jobs that were hitherto usually occupied by young people. There is a combination of reasons why it is harder for young people to enter the labour market. Certainly one of the problems is the failure to deliver proper, quality training to them and provide sufficient support so that not only do they acquire the proper accredited training but they also complete that training—they complete their apprenticeships or their certificates.

Further, there is no doubt in my mind that the experiment of having a sort of laissez-faire attitude towards the provision of training—which does pre-date this government; I am not going to attack the minister for that—has led to some really substandard providers being in the system. I think many reputable private providers agree with us and would agree with the government if they were to say that we need to clean that up. There have been too many shonky providers, too many bottom feeders, who have been exploiting young people. In some cases they have even been involved in gaming immigration. This sort of behaviour, this conduct, needs to stop. It brings this country into disrepute. It brings our vocational sector into disrepute. Most importantly, it really does undermine the future prospects for too many young Australians, and we need to do better for them.

This is a bill we can support, but there are some very significant and genuine amendments that the government should be acceding to. If they are absolutely fair dinkum about wanting to provide quality care and they want to ensure that young people and participants in the vocational sector generally are not to be exploited then I think they will listen carefully to the opposition and to the compelling arguments by members on this side, in particular the member for Cunningham, and accept these amendments because they will improve the bill. Upon enactment, it will improve the law, which will strengthen the sector, which will make it harder to exploit young people and participants in the vocational sector generally. It will clean up much of the problem that we need to clean up in order to have a first-class vocational sector.

As I say, there has been great work in recent years with the Bradley review and with the Gonski review. I think we need a closer examination of this vital sector for our economy. This legislation could be a start, particularly if the government accedes to the amendments being proposed by the opposition. I support the bill and in particular support the amendment moved by the member for Cunningham.

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