Julian Leeser (Berowra, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Mr Speaker, I draw your attention to the measures included in this bill to protect students from unethical business practices and to ensure the quality of training providers accessing government funding. This bill bans the use of third-party brokers and agents to recruit students. This is an essential measure to bring integrity back to the system. It also limits subcontracting to third-party providers—a measure also designed to rebuild integrity and quality.

The new program introduces other strong compliance measures to ensure that training providers are held to account and held to the high standards that their students and the broader community expects from them. Providers will be subject to monitoring and investigation, civil penalties, infringement notices, enforceable undertakings and injunctions. And providers may even be suspended in urgent circumstances.

The new program will also see new training organisations be subject to oversight of their growth forecasts and results. This will prevent unproven businesses from building business models based on the exploitation of students. It will stop the news reports of training organisations with huge short-term profits followed by immediate bankruptcy. It will stop rogue operators from seeing the VET sector as an opportunity ripe for the picking with no intention of being there for the long term. It will put the focus back on students.

These are the measures we have needed over the past four years.

In conclusion, the VET Student Loan Program introduced by these bills will restore the faith of Australians in the VET sector and allow the sector to rebuild its reputation. It will see genuine students offered worthwhile study with reputable providers with strong links to industry and business. It will undo the damage done by Labor's irresponsible changes to the VET FEE HELP system. It will support budget repair by significantly reducing the level of gross government debt that needs to be undertaken. It will provide an affordable and sustainable loan scheme that will allow students to gain meaningful qualifications with a pathway to employment.

I commend the bills to the House.

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