Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

The only explanation I can give for the minister's speech is that he slept through the last 2½ years. He has been in government for 2½ years. When they came to government, the figure for VET FEE-HELP for 2013, which was our last year—a partial year—of government, was around $700 million. The next year, in 2014, it was $1.6 billion. It grew from $800 million to $1.6 billion and they slept through it. It was estimated to reach $4 billion in 2015 and they still slept. They slept through those years, and now the minister gets up—2½ years into government; 2½ years after whatever it was that Labor caused. They let this grow and it is our fault somehow. It grew from $800 million to an estimated $4 billion on their 2½ year watch and they slept through it. That is the only explanation I can give for that.

Now they are about to drag TAFE, one of our finest institutions, into the mess that they have presided over in the last 2½ years. They have presided over the growth of an extraordinarily shonky system in VET education and now they are going to drag TAFE into it as well. If there is anything you can say about today it is that we have seen proof, yet again, of the ocean of difference between Labor in education and the Liberal Party in education. We have seen the Liberal Party, when they were elected, walk away from their commitment to schools and cut $30 billion from our children's future. They reconfirmed over Christmas that that remains. Then there were the $100,000 degrees—they are still on the table. Now we learn that the one remaining element, TAFE, one of our great institutions—even though it has come under extraordinary pressure in the last few years, because of Liberal cuts—is coming under attack again. It is the envy of our neighbours to the north; they look to TAFE as an example of how to train for vocational education.

We have a Prime Minister who talks about jobs. He talks a lot about jobs, yet he decimates the very infrastructure that this country needs to make it possible for our people to participate in the modern workforce. He rips away at our schools. He rips away at our universities. He rips away at the capacity of people to participate in the workforce by engaging in the development of their skills. What are they actually going to do? According to the secret plans that were leaked this morning—there are a lot of secrets out of there after 2½ years, and we are finally hearing of some of their plans—their plan is to move TAFE out of the states and into the federal system, and then open it up to the same kind of competitive process that we see in the VET system. We are seeing absolute disregard for one of our great institutions. Having watched this government preside over the extraordinary rise in appalling behaviour in the VET scheme, this is not a government that you would trust with something as extraordinary as our TAFE. This is a Prime Minister who says one thing when it comes to jobs, but, when it comes to the reality of improving people's capacity to get jobs, he does something completely different.

They have been in government for 2½ years, and in that time I have seen some extraordinarily appalling examples of exploitation of the VET system in Parramatta. We have a company in Parramatta known as Unique International College—it is a couple of rooms upstairs of the Silly Willys $2 Man shop in Granville—which finally came under scrutiny late last year. Their registration was cancelled in October after they received $42 million in Commonwealth funding, despite only 2.4 per cent of its 800 students actually graduating. This was another of those colleges on this government's watch, while they slept through the whole VET debacle, that went out into the streets and enrolled people who could not speak English, went to places where people who could not speak English gathered—people who could not even fill in the forms and did not know what they were signing up for—and signed them up to $20,000 diplomas which did not exist. This is what we have had in this VET system. This is why we have had VET FEE-HELP ballooning from $800 million under us to somewhere between $1.8 billion and $4 billion over the last year. This is extraordinary incompetence. You would not let this lot near TAFE in a fit.

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