Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to speak in support of this bill, the Student Identifiers Amendment (Enhanced Student Permissions) Bill 2019. TAFE debates have been almost always disappointing in this chamber. There's not a great deal of light on the other side, from their period in government. This government now finds itself refunding nearly a billion dollars in recrediting due to 66½ thousand Australians who were led up the garden path by VET FEE-HELP. It's probably a scar on Australia's social policy that's going to exist for a very long time. I can just continue that constant back and forth, but, ultimately, vocational education is one of Australia's political structures.

The reality is that states and territories run the system and the federal government supports where it can. We've got an agreement, called the National Agreement for Skills and Workforce Development, and we provide almost half of that $3 billion every year into the hands of states to deal with the very questions that, conveniently, when in opposition the opposition, the Labor Party can roll out and say the whole system's a disaster. The other $1.1 million supports employers, something that was slashed quite viciously in the final year of the Gillard administration, which is why we find ourselves in this position now, having to find ways to make the system work more harmoniously. These very modest amendments are commonsense ones. They just put the student, effectively, at the centre of their own transcripts, training records and attainments. It's universally supported in this building, as far as I can see, so really this is just another chance for those in opposition to have a swing.

The reality is that employers, VET organisations and RTOs all want to access students' records and see what they've attained. If you're delivering further education, you want to be able to see that those enrolling have got the basic prerequisites. They're all reasons why you need broader access. These changes give the students the power to identify and select who can see their transcripts, their reports, their records of achievement and their attainments. The students can choose for how long and what part of their record they see. That gives them an enormous amount of control.

It has been since 2015 that we've had a student identifier. It started in the vocational sector first. They've got nearly 10 million of these unique USIs set up. Around 1½ million people have already accessed their online records. Clearly this is a heavily used part of the system. We're just removing a huge amount of grit in the wheels by letting the students determine this and allowing stakeholders to directly be able to see students' records without having to constantly turn to a government body to arbiter that or set up penalties for when these things are breached. There will still be those protections, of course, which I think are important.

We have a system which gets an enormous amount of Commonwealth support but that fundamentally rests in the hands of states and territories. It won't benefit anyone down in this parliament for me to list the range of concerns I have about how Queensland runs the VET system. The obvious point is, when you see the Labor Party referring to lower numbers here and smaller numbers there, that we've actually made demand driven tertiary education something that almost every Australian with certain scores can aspire to, so we have seen an absolute expansion of tertiary education and, self-evidently, we have vocational providers saying, 'That has made it harder for us to compete on a level playing field.' Both sides supported those reforms, but, ultimately, more work needs to be done with how tertiary and vocational education come together.

The additional challenges that have been falling on the shoulders of vocational providers have basically been for the benefit of tertiary providers, so you can't complain about a slight reduction in vocational training when you've seen almost a doubling in some universities of tertiary training. They're still the same people out there, and they're still meeting the same employment demands; they're just gaining a different kind of qualification.

To finish on that point, it's important to keep up with what our economy needs and, more importantly, where the global economy is looking for skills. We're part of a global context of ideas and skills meeting demands. Increasingly, liberalised medium-size trade economies like Australia need to have the people who can go out and take advantage of what we're delivering through trade agreements.

Australia is incredibly well placed. These amendments will make it easier for students to show their attainments and records to those who they chose—that includes what part of their records and for how long. It's a very important addition to this. I support the bill.

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