Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I want to acknowledge the remarks of previous speakers but emphasise my view that, above all else, ASQA must focus on ensuring quality to protect the consumers of vocational education, students, and on ensuring also that the significant public investment in the training system actually achieves outcomes for the industry and the nation, and on maintaining our reputation globally for quality. I say that with a great degree of affection. In a former life I spent some years helping to promote Victoria's international education sector across the world. I've led trade missions to many parts of the world with TAFEs and quality private providers, and I think it's fair to say that in recent years it's been devastating for those who've valued Australia's training system to watch the decline in quality, when they really understand what's going on.

To ensure that reputation for actual quality, then, a strong and productive relationship with the sector, the providers, is so important. In many instances, a collaborative and educative regulation can be appropriate. But reports of heavy-handed approaches for minor administrivia or paperwork breaches are not appropriate and not helpful. But, of course, there's a balance there and care needs to be taken—because I know there's been pushback from parts of the private training industry to perceived overreach—that the pendulum doesn't swing too far the other way, where real quality issues are uncovered. Then firm action does need to be taken. Australians should expect that the governance changes proposed in this bill will assist with that.

I want to turn my remarks to the proposed second reading amendment. The government have damaged the quality of Australia's world-class vocational training system by cutting TAFE and training by more than $3 billion. They're in their seventh year with $3 billion of cuts accumulating, coupled with the simultaneous crisis of youth unemployment and skill shortages that we're seeing break out. It's really quite an achievement, isn't it? We have skills shortages and at the same time they're cutting the training system by $3 billion and, in some cases, relying on overreach of temporary migration to fill the gap because they've stuffed up the training system. And, of course, they're failing to tackle completion rates.

This is not a genuine reform package; this is a minor little tweak to governance arrangements, which might be fine in itself. But, in their seventh year in government, with the crisis in the skills training system, this not a genuine reform package. These are serious and important issues. Indeed, it would be fair to say that the Liberals have conducted a war on TAFE, a war on public training, with their obsession with creating the market. I say right up-front: I think the former Labor government overreached in some areas in that regard. People have said so, and we've corrected that. But the government has had six years—and are now their seventh year—to address these issues, and there is nothing. A few weeks ago the Prime Minister said, 'We're going to have a look at the vocational training system.' He couldn't bring himself to say, 'We're going to fix the TAFE system,' could he? He said, 'We're going to have a look at the vocational training system.'

The COVID crisis makes it even more urgent that the government acknowledge this crisis and actually get a plan to overhaul the sector. We were already having skill shortages in critical areas of the economy before COVID. We've seen a 73 per cent drop in approved apprenticeships. We cannot lose the pipeline of apprenticeships right now, when migration into the country is stalled. It'll create a double whammy, so we have to see action from the government to restart the apprenticeship system and get it back on track. It's not rocket science, is it? You'd think that, in a recession, even this government would understand that now is the time to let people engage in the skills and training system and in the education system. Actually put some money back into TAFE to let people get back into the training system and incentivise them to do so now—not in six months or 12 months or at the next election when they come up with some nice-sounding policy, but now. Get young people back into the training system and back into apprenticeships. Uncap the university places. The universities are reporting that they can't accommodate the demand they're now seeing. Funnily enough, in a recession, people think, 'What am I going to do? Maybe I should upgrade my skills. Maybe I should go and get another qualification.'

Of course, we hear a lot about manufacturing. You can say 'manufacturing'. Yes, we want to see the resurgence of manufacturing, but it's not just going to happen. There are three critical ingredients, at least in my view: reliable, cheap power, and we know that renewable energy, which the government is so hostile to, is the cheapest reliable form of power; innovation and research, which the government is presiding over multibillion-dollar cuts to right now; and skills. They're the three ingredients, and the training system is so important.

I also want to turn some of my remarks to another important part of ASQA's function, which is the oversight of VET providers who deliver to international students. International education is this country's fourth-biggest export overall and our biggest services export. It is now worth $40 billion to the economy, and that includes significant VET delivery. It's in crisis at the moment. I've remarked elsewhere that the government needs to get its act together. It's the only top-10 export sector that the government is not only not assisting but actively harming, with the Prime Minister out there telling students just to go home. They are astounding comments that are damaging future prospects to our biggest services export industry.

In relation to vocational education, I say clearly that our future success will rely on three things. The first is ruthless enforcement of quality, which is where ASQA comes in. We are a higher-cost, high-quality provider. That's our market niche. We can't compete with low-cost providers and destinations elsewhere in the world, so we have to maintain that reputation for quality and be ruthless about it. The second is that we need a great student experience. One of our competitive advantages with other places in the world where young people can choose to go to study is that, overall, we have a good student experience. People can have an English-speaking experience, living in and working part time in the community. The third ingredient, of course, is positive word of mouth. That is where the Prime Minister's comments telling students to go home are so damaging. They set social media ablaze. People are rightly hurt, upset and, indeed, confused. Providers are despairing. I've spoken to them. The debate about student experience and marketing is for another time, but the government needs to act.

There's one thing I want to put on the record. I think the government could use this short window of time—I hope it will be short—when we don't have incoming students to actually fix a few problems in the vocational training system in relation to quality regulation by ASQA. This issue affects both domestic and international students, but I think it is a particular problem for international students. Australia's consumer protection system for international students and its legislative framework, despite the problems we've seen emerge in quality, was a world first and remains among the world's best. We should be proud of it. Indeed, our bureaucrats, trade officials and providers still spend time overseas—probably in Zoom at the moment—explaining to other systems how our system is run and the regulatory architecture around it. That commitment to the highest quality standards must be accompanied by strong and effective monitoring and compliance mechanisms. This is necessary to ensure quality teaching and services to international and also domestic students. Most providers seek to do the right thing, private providers included, but there remain some who do not. So, despite efforts over years, we're told, under this government to crack down on dodgy providers, serious concerns continue to exist in the community and also in the sector.

If you talk to the long-term reputable high-quality private providers, they share these concerns, probably more than anyone because it's them who get squeezed by the bottom feeders in the market that keep cutting costs. These bottom feeders are effectively a visa factory, selling work rights to students with very little regard to quality. They're concerned about the effectiveness of the current quality regime to catch these providers. I stress again: most quality TAFE providers do the right thing. But some of these bottom feeders are catering for a small minority of students who are not in Australia to study and are really treating the student visa as a work visa. It's a very small percentage of a very big number of students here, but that very small percentage is the part of the market that brings the whole into disrepute. Indeed, I would venture to say, based on evidence that we've seen and some of the work by fair work, it's those students right at the bottom of the market who are not here to study who are undercutting wages and pushing domestic residents and young people out of a job because they're not here to study and are therefore not adding to the economy.

Those students are recruited directly by dodgy agents, and, as a result of the COVID crisis and the government's failure to provide assistance, there's been a bonanza for onshore education agents who are hanging around outside the universities, hanging around outside the quality privates and saying to the students: 'Come to me. I'll find you a cheaper course. You'll still get your visa, but I'll find you a cheaper course. I might happen to get a great big kickback, but I'll give you a thousand bucks as well. How's that?' You can see what that does, of course, to the quality. How can you actually deliver a quality product if the students are paying four grand? You can't. It's cut teaching with no attendance, and the spiral goes down.

Dodgy courses and providers catering to that minority of students also risk our reputation and undermine community confidence. The problem is, in my view, ASQA's current regulatory regime—and this is the sort of thing that should be thought about if the government had a proper reform package instead of this piecemeal little governance thing and a few little marketing slogans, which seems to be most of their policy. The problem is ASQA's current regulatory approach doesn't identify these providers and shut them down, and the government changes in this bill wouldn't do it. The government's focus, they say, is building training provider capability through education and a quality improvement approach to address sector concerns, but it doesn't touch the real issues. In my strong view—and this is one suggestion—it's time to consider and trial a more fundamental shift in our regulatory approach to weed out, finally, those dodgy few VET providers who harm the reputation of the rest who try and do the right thing.

An additional thought for considering is that in Australia all VET providers are registered as both training and assessment providers. Once you get registered with ASQA, you're a training and assessment provider. In plain English, this means that, when you're registered, you do the training and you also do the exams and practice assessments and grade the students, which is fine in the good providers, but in the dodgy ones it opens up an enormous rort. It doesn't matter whether the student of the cooking class can actually cook, it doesn't matter whether the student in the aged-care course can actually look after senior citizens in a competent way, as long as they're paying the fees, you give them the mark and they keep the visa and keep working. But some countries separate the training and assessment functions to varying degrees, providing some measure of external assessment and independent validation of the student's competency. In the extreme, you'd think of year 12, where someone else marks the exam from the students at that school and there's a bit of moderation and so on. I'm not proposing we go to that extreme, but there's a strong case to at least trial external moderated assessment for the higher risk courses and the higher risk providers.

Just briefly I'll outline how this could work. Informal industry feedback that I've sought from quality public and private providers, coupled with data from regulatory enforcement action—ASQA probably has a reasonable idea, but, if you talk to the proper private providers and the decent agents in the sector, they will tell you who the dodgy providers are. They know to whom they lose the students for lower fees; they know who these providers are. This data combined with actual intelligence could suggest certain courses in the VET sector. I'd highlight cooking and aged care and security which pose a much greater risk of quality concerns and breaches. I propose that ASQA trial an independent training validation assessment—it's not a catchy acronym; the bureaucrats won't love it!—in identified high-risk courses. ASQA could accredit a limited number of high-quality providers—probably the TAFEs, as they do in other countries—and register them to undertake independent training validation assessments of students from other providers delivering the high-risk courses. In plain English, if there's ongoing evidence of concern regarding some of the dodgier cooking course providers, ASQA could force those providers to send their students, once a semester, for instance, for some independent assessment of skills. 'Go on, cook a cake for me. Go on, cook some peas. See if you can cook.' My mum failed cooking peas at nursing—that's where I got the peas from. She only passed her nursing degree because she stole some peas from one of the others. Cooking wasn't her forte. Anyway, that would identify the schools where most—

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