Ewen Jones (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The original question was that this bill be now read a second time. To this the honourable member for Cunningham has moved as an amendment that all words after 'that' be omitted with a view to substituting other words. The immediate question is therefore that the amendment be agreed to. I invite the member for Swan to give us his address in continuation.

Steve Irons (Swan, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As I was saying before, my home state of Western Australia has had a very high demand for skilled workers over the past 10 years, in particular due to the state's mining and housing boom. Although the resources industry is currently on a construction phase downturn, major infrastructure developments are still being rolled out and a significant number of homes are still being built, particularly in Perth's outer suburbs.

This of course includes major infrastructure projects such as the billion-dollar Gateway WA project and the $1.6 billion Perth Freight Link project, which are both currently being rolled out through my electorate of Swan. I went into greater detail about these major infrastructure projects in my speech on the cognate appropriation bills earlier this week. For those members who are not aware, these projects are already boosting Western Australia's economy, alleviating road congestion and creating about 1,300 construction jobs just for the Gateway WA project alone, with the majority of works being undertaken by more than 600 Western Australian businesses. Each of these projects requires skilled work men and women who would have completed a national vocational education course to become qualified. Many of the businesses that I have discussed would have apprentices working for them and completing their theoretical units at TAFE, or a fully qualified adult may be undertaking a course to gain further skills to help them in the workplace, such as an electrician undertaking a business course if they are looking to become a business owner in the future.

I might just add, on the Gateway WA project, that it is well ahead of time. It is six months ahead of schedule, and it is now at 60 per cent completion. We see that the coalition and state governments are doing a wonderful job driving that particular project.

As I have said, there are a significant range of VET courses, which are regulated on a national level by the Australian Skills Quality Authority, or ASQA. According to ASQA, these courses include:

… technical and further education (TAFE) institutes, adult and community education providers and agricultural colleges, as well as private providers, community organisations, industry skill centres, and commercial and enterprise training providers. In addition, some universities and schools provide VET.

When encouraging students to undertake VET courses, the government always, of course, promotes those industries listed on the National Skills Needs List, as this assists students to know which industries have greater pathways for employment once they are qualified. The list includes a range of industries from automotive electricians to fitters, plumbers and upholsterers.

What stood out to me, though, is that the air-conditioning and mechanical services plumbers and air-conditioning and refrigeration mechanics are the two top required skills on this national list. As you would know, that was my background for more than 25 years. Even though the list is in alphabetical order, I am sure that members will put that fact out of their minds while I focus a small amount of time on these important industries!

These employment pathways stood out to me because, as many members know, and as I said before, I spent more than 25 years in business in the air-conditioning, heating, ventilation and refrigeration sector. I had good employees, but it is definitely an industry that needs to be promoted and boosted to ensure that high-quality work men and women continue to be trained, which is why the VET sector is absolutely crucial to the Australian economy.

If we want to have Australian owned businesses with locally manufactured products, we need a skilled workforce to create those things and provide the necessary services. After all, we live in the 21st century and have an expectation that, when we flick a light switch on, the light will actually turn on, and if we turn the tap on we expect water to come out. But, if all of a sudden we have a significant decline in the number of electricians and plumbers our country has, we are going to be in a bit of trouble.

As I previously said, this is why this coalition government is implementing key legislation now to support our apprentices and to support vocational education and training to ensure that students are not deterred from seeking a qualification in these industries and to ensure that they are appropriately regulated. I have heard the Deputy Speaker talk about his child before in this chamber, and I just want to reiterate that—as I know I said before—my son is doing a bricklaying apprenticeship at the moment. He has already spoken to me about the idea of going on and doing further studies with VET so that he can not only be a bricklayer but go into running his own business and starting a construction business. So the National Vocational Education and Training Regulator Amendment Bill 2015, the bill before the House, is a very important factor.

This idea of regulation in fact goes to the heart of the bill before the House, with the overall aim being to improve the quality of Australia's VET system. This will build on a number of reforms that the government has already implemented, including new national standards for the training providers, which came into effect on 1 January for new providers and will be implemented for existing providers on 1 April as part of the transitionary period.

The government has also committed $68 million over four years to ASQA to enforce new regulatory standards under a risk management model. The bill before the House will enhance this regulatory framework on a national level to give greater certainty to students, employers and the government that best practice is being undertaken. It will specifically provide ASQA with greater capacity to respond to emerging issues in the VET system and to more effectively regulate registered training organisations to ensure that dodgy providers are no longer able to damage this sector and also to give the transparency that providers need.

As Australian Council for Private Education and Training CEO Rod Camm said last month:

These measures are necessary to protect both students and colleges from the harmful impacts of a small number of poor quality providers who undermine the integrity of the entire system …

… After a necessary and welcome period of consultation by the government, I think we can all agree these reforms are urgent, and must be passed as soon as is practicable.

I guess that is another example of the government consulting with industry and consulting with associations and stakeholders within the economy. And I could not agree more with what Mr Camm said.

With 164,000 public VET students and approximately 42,000 apprentices in Western Australia—according to the relevant 2013 and 2014 statistics respectively—who are undertaking a training course, it is vital that the government and the industry work together to ensure that our students are getting the very best education we can provide. This is also particularly important for my electorate of Swan, which, as of last month, had 4,645 apprentices in training and more than 92 RTOs providing a range of training programs. The government is improving quality of teaching and we are encouraging more students. I also highlight that the government is directly responding to industry concerns about those dodgy providers, who, as I said, are undermining the integrity of the entire sector. The bill before the House will achieve this through a number of amendments to the National Vocational Education and Training Regulator Amendment Act 2011, including implementing a new instrument known as a Quality Standard to provide the Commonwealth with emergency powers to address quality issues within the sector.

As industry has identified during the government's consultation processes, the current time taken to respond to cases where a provider has not complied with ASQA's standards is too long—far too long. This is because the Commonwealth, if it is to change standards, must have the agreement of the states and territories. Although this is an important oversight mechanism, 12 months, to my mind and that of government and industry, is far too long to address issues of concern. These emergency powers will ensure the Australian government is able to consult with employees, training providers and state and territory governments to create a new quality standard within weeks. This rapid response time will ensure ASQA continues to meet its objective to maintain nationally consistent, high-quality training and assessment across Australia's VET system.

As I mentioned previously, a concern that has been made by students and industry is the lack of clarity around training providers and the qualifications a student will receive under many VET programs. This is largely due to the marketing of training and the type of information that must be provided to prospective students. The bill before the House will enhance the standards in these areas by requiring all organisations involved in the marketing of a VET course, including third parties or brokers, to identify which registered training organisation will be responsible for the qualification. This will ensure that students know which provider they are signing up for and can review the quality of that provider. Under the proposed amendment, ASQA will also be able to pursue anyone who does not clearly identify who is providing the training and to take action against any individual or organisation which contravenes this standard and provides false or misleading marketing material to prospective students.

Although I have discussed this bill in the context of enhancing oversight by ASQA as the regulatory body for VET programs, a key provision in this bill is also in line with the government's overall agenda to cut red tape. As members would be aware, the government has already cut $2.1 billion in red and green tape as part of our autumn and spring repeal days—as we are now into autumn, I am sure there is one coming; and I am sure the member for Chifley, who is at the table, would be interested in that—which is more than double the $1 billion in compliance savings that this government has committed to make each year. The bill before the House will reduce the compliance burden on industry in this context by extending the registration period for RTOs from five to seven years. This is in direct response to ASQA's advice that re-registration audits are the least effective method of identifying poor performing providers and that their resources would be better directed toward more targeted and random investigations and audits. This will also bring the registration requirements for RTOs in line with that of the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency, or TEQSA, registration.

The bill will also make a number of minor amendments to ensure that best practice is being exercised by the industry's national regulator. This includes provisions to allow ASQA to request information from any person who is purporting to be an RTO but who is not, to permit ASQA to share information with other entities where necessary and to streamline processes for ASQA to issue written directions. (Time expired)

Justine Elliot (Richmond, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I also rise to speak on the National Vocational Education and Training Regulator Amendment Bill 2015. This bill contains amendments to the National Vocational Education and Training Regulator Act 2011 which will work towards supporting ongoing reform measures, including protecting the integrity of the vocational education and training, or VET, system. It also gives the regulator capacity to respond to emerging issues. There are also technical amendments to improve the efficiency and operation of the act and, consequently, the regulator. The bill also extends the period of registration that is able to be granted by the regulator from five to seven years.

As we have heard from many speakers on this bill, a high-quality vocational education and training sector is fundamental to growing our skilled workforce and also fundamental to making sure that we have a very productive economy. It is vitally important for both those reasons. At the same time, there needs to be effective safeguards in place to protect those in the system, particularly those who are young and those people who are vulnerable. As stated by the shadow minister, the member for Cunningham, we on this side will be supporting this bill. She has also moved an amendment to strengthen transparency. I support the amendments that the shadow minister has moved, which will accelerate the introduction of consumer protections for vulnerable people who may be exploited by unscrupulous training providers. Some of these issues have already been identified in the interim report of the Senate Education and Employment References Committee inquiry into the operation, regulation and funding of private vocational education and training providers in Australia, which was tabled recently.

Labor is calling on the government to request the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to develop national consumer advisory information on the VET sector and for the government to explore all options for increased consumer protection. The ACCC has consumer information available for many sectors that have been the subject of exploitation in the past. Labor has requested that a similar campaign be developed for the vocational education sector to ensure that that oversight is there. We looked at some of the revelations of over 600 complaints to the New South Wales Office of Fair Trading about unscrupulous providers. This really does show that there is a need for urgent action in this space in terms of the transparency required. The fact is that young people deserve to have access to the best quality training, and they also deserve and need to have action to safeguard their rights while they are accessing this sector. This is vitally important. The minister must act now to ensure that consumers are aware of some of those practices are occurring so that people can make informed decisions about who they choose to train with and get the required skills from. This will ensure that they are not being manipulated by the many unscrupulous marketing and recruitment practices that have been occurring in the sector. We have seen a lot of that in the media recently.

The purpose of the National Vocational Education and Training Regulator Amendment Bill is to introduce some measures to protect the integrity of the VET system and also to provide a balance between protection and regulation of the system. The bill aims to enhance the quality within the VET sector by protecting the integrity of the sector through quality assurances that will enable the delivery of high-quality training for students, which is, at its essence, what is required in this field. We want to make sure that that high quality is maintained. It is imperative that students gain relevant qualifications and also imperative that employers have confidence that an individual's qualifications are a reliable measure of the knowledge and skills they possess regardless of where they may have been trained.

The bill also aims to improve transparency in the marketing of VET courses. As we have said, many concerns have been raised about the manner in which some VET courses have been marketed and some of the methods used. At times, it can be very unclear to students, particularly if they are enrolling online, who is actually responsible for their course. The bill places additional requirements on the context of advertisements that relate to VET courses, requiring greater transparency in their marketing. This will allow students to clearly identify who is actually responsible for their course. The bill also reduces the regulatory burden through extension of registration periods. The bill extends the period of registration able to be granted by the regulator from five to seven years. The bill will also provide a number of administrative improvements to streamline processes.

But what this bill fails to do is provide specific consumer protection provisions, which is exactly why the shadow minister has put forward that specific amendment. We believe that is vitally important. As many people have highlighted in speaking on this bill, some of the reports in the media have been very disturbing. We have seen reports on the increase of unscrupulous behaviour by some registered training organisations who are preying on vulnerable students, signing them up for very large VET FEE-HELP debts. It is quite disturbing when you see the situation that some people are in. Distressed students have sometimes been completely unaware that they were signed up for a particular course. Further adding to their distress, often they find they have been saddled with quite a significant debt as well.

These reports often identify a real problem with people being misled about the actual debt they will be incurring with the Commonwealth government through the use of VET FEE-HELP. Many of these stories have identified people having debts sometimes over $20,000 without even finishing a course or gaining a qualification. This is just nothing more than clear exploitation of people who simply want to get out there and improve themselves and improve their chances of getting a job. Unfortunately, we have seen too many instances of people being exploited in those situations. So we really have to see some action taken to stop people who are often already in vulnerable situations being trapped into debts which can lead to more and more hardship for them.

Under VET FEE-HELP, students are able to access up to $97,728 in total for most courses offered by eligible registered training organisations. This becomes something of a double-edged sword in that it provides access to education and training but can also become a very large carrot for those unscrupulous providers. Indeed, some registered training organisations have further muddied the waters through the use of brokers as well. These brokers, at times, have embellished their products to sell them. In this case, it is education and training products to potential students. The use of brokers currently allows RTOs to distance themselves from the actions of some of these particular brokers who are incentive driven. Sometimes, as we have said, their behaviour is quite unscrupulous. The amendments in this bill take some steps to making RTOs accountable for the actions of the brokers they encourage and engage to sell their products, but more needs to be done. With the Grattan Institute warning that almost half of all vocational loans will never be repaid, the financial burden on the Commonwealth continues to grow. When we further consider that the growth of VET FEE-HELP has exceeded all projections, with more than $1.6 billion allocated just last year, action is clearly needed. The community are certainly calling for action in this space as well.

Yet, instead of action from this government, what we have seen from the Assistant Minister for Education and Training, Senator Birmingham, is that he has been out there advancing the incorrect and fanciful argument that it was Labor in government that failed to protect students and taxpayers from these unscrupulous providers. In fact, Labor has a very strong and long record on investing in skills and helping students and workers to obtain the skills they need to participate and compete in the modern workforce. As well, it was Labor that was committed to and introduced regulation and quality assurance. We are very proud of our record in this particular area. But unfortunately for well over a year Senator Birmingham and his predecessor, whilst they might talk tough about action against those RTOs, have failed to take firm enough action to stop these problems which of late, as we have seen, have been quite extensively reported within the media.

While we are talking about providing training and skills, I want to turn to New South Wales and look at what is happening there and the need to have a greater investment in TAFE. I would like to make some remarks about New South Wales Labor and their very strong commitment to a strong, quality TAFE system. That was demonstrated in their recent statement in relation to TAFE. As New South Wales Labor have said: 'We need to grow smart jobs and opportunities for our state, but we can't do that without a strong, well-funded TAFE system.'

The fact is that, since 2011, the New South Wales Liberal-National government has cut $1.7 billion from education and training, sacked 1,100 TAFE teachers and support staff, cut TAFE courses, slashed class contact times and drastically increased student fees by up to thousands of dollars. In 2015 alone, fees have risen significantly, with 40 per cent of students being slugged an extra $500 to $1,500 for courses. These particular cuts have been devastating for the people of northern New South Wales in areas such as mine. In fact, they blame the National Party for these very vicious and harsh cuts to TAFE. It is the responsibility of the National Party. They have cut funding and cut courses for people in northern New South Wales and in other parts of New South Wales. The National Party will be held to account not just for these massive cuts to TAFEs but also for their cuts to education and health.

Quality education and training is the key to a better job, a better career and a better life. I commend New South Wales Labor for making the commitment to invest in skills and training and ensuring we have a fair and equitable TAFE system so that can give our young people the start in life they deserve. It has been announced that, if elected, a New South Wales Labor government will invest an additional $100 million to help make TAFE affordable and accessible for everyone in New South Wales by winding back the privatisation of TAFE and stopping the course cuts and fee hikes that we have seen from the Liberal-National government. This funding from New South Wales Labor would also allow TAFE institutes to reinstate vital courses which have been cut and restore support services for students. As part of New South Wales Labor's TAFE rescue package, they have committed that within the first term of government they will abolish the Liberal National's Smart and Skilled privatisation program. They will reverse the Baird government's TAFE fee hikes. They will also guarantee funding to TAFE by capping the amount of public funds that can be contestable by private operators at 30 per cent, and they will commission a landmark review of education and training in New South Wales, which is really important as well.

Every day we depend in some way on the services and support of someone who has vocational qualifications. We on this side of the House understand how important that is, and equipping the workforce with the skills required for the jobs of today and those of the future is an urgent challenge in my state of New South Wales. I certainly commend New South Wales Labor for the commitments they have put forward particularly in the context of the state election we face in a few weeks time.

On top of the harsh cuts by the New South Wales Liberal-National government, we also have the harsh cuts by the Abbott government as well. It has cut $2 billion from the skills portfolio since the budget. That is devastating when you look at the extent of some of those cuts. I will run through some of these cuts, because they are quite extensive and I would like to list them because this issue goes to the heart of the need to have people who are properly trained and skilled in our workforce. As I said, they have cut $2 billion from the skills and training sector, with the axe falling on the following programs and services: the Australian Workforce and Productivity Agency, the Tools for Your Trade payments, the Australian Apprenticeships Access Program, the Australian Apprenticeships Mentoring Program, the Accelerated Australian Apprenticeships program, the Apprentice to Business Owner Program, the National Workforce Development Fund, the Workplace English Language and Literacy Program, the National Partnership Agreement on Training Places for Single Parents, alternative pathways programs, the Productive Ageing through Community Education program, the Step into Skills program, joint group training and base funding for industry skills councils.

That is a shameful list of cuts by the Abbott Liberal-National government to skills and training. It is vitally important that people throughout our community can access these services, and yet the policies of the Abbott government are attacking opportunities for young people. Whether it is those cuts to training and skills programs or whether the cuts are to youth programs, and there are higher education cuts as well, they all impact on the opportunities for young people to get trained, to get ahead, to get a good job. We have spoken many times about the harsh impact of the $100,000 university degrees. In areas like mine, it means that people just cannot send their families to university. Yet again they hold the National Party responsible for this. They tell me it is because of the National Party that their kids will not be able to get to university. They will hold them to account for these very harsh measures. It is unfair that kids from regional and rural areas cannot access university because of the National Party's harsh cuts.

We are also talking about cuts to youth programs and training and skills initiatives. We saw the Abbott government cut those three youth unemployment prevention programs in the budget. Those three very important programs were Youth Connections, Partnership Brokers and National Career Development—all vital to providing, again, skills and training for our young people. I have had a lot of feedback from my area because people are very concerned about the fact that young people cannot access these services.

In conclusion, we need to have a government that is committed to providing effective training and skills for our young people and we need to have that training, as well as our TAFE services, all in place. We also need to make sure there are effective mechanisms in place to provide consumer protections for our younger people—we have to make sure they are aware of exactly what they are signing up to and understand exactly what courses they will be undertaking and paying for. We would certainly like to see some more transparency and consumer protection. Consumer protection is important across a whole range of areas but it is particularly important when you are dealing with younger people or with vulnerable people, so we would like to see an advance when it comes to consumer protections in relation to this bill.

Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Finance) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The most used term in that 15-minute contribution was 'the National Party'. The member for Richmond is obsessed with the National Party—the member for Richmond, brought back to the parliament on Greens preferences. She ran a very interesting campaign on coal-seam gas—not that I think there are any coal-seam gas developments in her electorate—and mischievously took out full-page ads against a very good candidate, Matthew Fraser. Matthew Fraser is still campaigning determinedly for the seat of Richmond, and well may he win because he will produce better speeches than the one we have heard for the last 15 minutes from the current member for Richmond—brought to you by the Greens, returned to this place by Greens preferences. And she knows that. She is obsessed with the National Party. Everything she ever talks about involves the National Party—but why would you not be obsessed with the National Party? It is a very good party. In conjunction with the Liberal Party, we form government. I know that is hard for the other side to accept; I know they are in a state of denial about the 7 September 2013 election result, but the National Party have a very good record in delivering for rural and regional children.

I notice all the kids up there in the public gallery. The sorts of reforms that we are bringing to primary and high school education, as well as to tertiary education and TAFE, will help those kids. Our reforms will provide the sort of platform that those kids are going to need when they choose a career. That will not be far away. I am proud of the efforts and the commitment of the state education minister, Adrian Piccoli—the current member for Murrumbidgee, based at Griffith, who is running for the newly-formed seat of Murray at the state election at the end of the month. He is the father of two young children and he understands the unique challenges that country kids face as well as all the things that New South Wales kids need, whether they are country based or whether they are in Sydney, Newcastle or Wollongong, to help them get better marks and get the best education and put them on the path to a bright future and a great career.

The National Vocational Education and Training Regulator Amendment Bill outlines our commitment to ensuring we have a high-quality education and training system and demonstrates the lengths the government will go to in order to crack down on unscrupulous vocational education and training providers and improve the quality of training. I heard the member for Richmond talk about unscrupulous vocational education and training providers, and on that score she is absolutely right. Some of the other things she said were totally ridiculous. Be that as it may, quality education and training in regional Australia is crucial in continuing to drive development and prosperity.

This bill will enable the Australian government to create new quality standards in order to quickly address any problems with providers and courses. That is important. This bill will require any provider who is marketing a VET course to clearly identify which registered training organisation is providing the qualification. It will extend the registration period for RTOs from five to seven years to enable the Australian Skills Quality Authority, the national training regulator, to focus its attention on investigating and taking action to crack down on poor-quality providers.

The government are absolutely committed to taking strong action against training providers who are taking advantage of vulnerable students, because we are serious about giving students the very best opportunity to obtain a trade of the highest quality that opens doors and job prospects upon completion. Not every school leaver wants to go to university and obtain a tertiary degree. Many of them want to go to a college of technical and further education. I have always argued, as my predecessor did, that a TAFE diploma is every bit as important, every bit as good, as a tertiary degree—every bit as important.

Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Absolutely.

Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Finance) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I hear the member for Chifley acknowledging that. I know that he does not beat up on the National Party all the time! Occasionally, he acknowledges the great work that this government is doing. It is a pity his colleague the member for Richmond cannot find it in her heart to do the same.

The VET sector requires strong quality assurance in order for the system to deliver high-quality training outcomes for students, which this bill is seeking to better enable, but also, importantly, to ensure the qualifications a student achieves are a reliable measure for employers of the skills and knowledge they have attained, regardless of where they were trained.

Currently, making new standards to address quality issues can take up to a year. As a result of the measures in this bill, addressing specific concerns or issues can be resolved in a matter of weeks, which is particularly beneficial to students but also to local industry and business needs—and this government is all about making it easier for business.

The bill also includes simple measures to ensure students understand which registered training organisation they are signing up to for their chosen qualification. It is absolutely unacceptable that training organisations are allowed to offer cash rebates and technological incentives to students in order to increase student numbers. It is inappropriate, because providing education and training should be about increasing the capacity of students, not improving the bottom line for training organisations.

The measures in this bill complement the tough new regulatory standards for new training providers which came into effect on 1 January 2015. Existing providers will be required to uphold these same standards from 1 April 2015 and to make it crystal clear in their marketing and promotions to students what they are signing up to, what the debt provisions are and how they may or may not change into the future.

The Australian Skills Quality Authority is responsible for the regulatory and quality-standard issues emerging in the VET sector. We are committing $68 million, which is not an insignificant amount, over four years to ensure the tough new standards are enforced. Extending the registration period for registered training organisations from five to seven years will enable the Australian Skills Quality Authority to redirect resources and to target the early detection of noncompliance, and that is important. This measure has come from the authority itself, which advised the government that the current renewal audits are the least effective method of identifying poor quality and performance among providers.

In addition to the introduction of new national standards for training providers, this bill further builds on significant reform in the VET sector through the establishment of a new training complaints hotline, improved data reporting and new trade support loans for students.

There are a great number of training providers across regional Australia; and, make no mistake, there are many, many good ones. I would say the majority, absolutely, are very, very good ones. The Nationals are committed to ensuring improved educational services are delivered in rural and regional Australia.

Mr Husic interjecting—

I will just say that again, because I do not think the member for Chifley quite heard me: the Nationals are committed to ensuring improved educational services are delivered in rural and regional Australia.

Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There are as many references to the National Party in your speech than in the member for Richmond's!

Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Finance) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I still have about eight or nine references to the Nationals to go before I get anywhere near the member for Richmond, Member for Chifley! Anyway, I digress. I will continue. Regional communities depend and thrive on educational service providers operating locally, particularly in vocational education and training, because it assists in building and in strengthening our communities, and our communities do need help. As I say, there are certain unique challenges in rural and regional Australia, certain unique challenges facing country kids, and one of those is gaining access to independent rural youth allowance. I know the member for Barker, who is in the chamber, is committed to doing something in that space. One third of Australians choose to live, work or operate their businesses in regional Australia. Those businesspeople, when young people come into their businesses for apprenticeships and the like, want them to be the very best, and this legislation will help that. In the context of this debate, strengthening VET quality standards will benefit regional students, communities and businesses enormously. Regional areas have a vital role to play in overcoming Australia's national challenges and in driving economic development. By investing in employment and workforce skills, we are increasing the potential of our great regional economies and assisting improved productivity, development and economic opportunity.

The Nationals, at our party room meeting last month in Wodonga, collectively agreed to develop further detailed policy and in four key priority areas, one of which is our focus on ensuring we strengthen our regional youth policy by providing quality and improved access to education and jobs in regional Australia. The measures in this bill will play a role in working towards that very aim.

In the Riverina, we have a number of education and training providers, and good ones at that. In particular, the TAFE NSW Riverina Institute offers a wide range of specialist training centres responsive to specific local-sector industry needs. The institute has established long-term partnerships with many businesses and community organisations which are responsive to local needs and provide a tremendous benefit for the local economy, including with both Deakin and Charles Sturt universities, particularly Charles Sturt, which has a huge and growing campus at Wagga Wagga; the Forest Industry Council; and the local Regional Express pilot training academy in Wagga Wagga. The academy is producing pilots not just for Rex but for other airlines as well and giving great incentives to young people, and some not so young, to become pilots for the vital aviation industry. Many of them stay on with Rex, which is a tremendous company, a tremendous airline.

I was pleased early last year to confirm that the Riverina would benefit from more than $5½ million in funding for trades training centres throughout the electorate, and I will say—here you go, Member for Chifley—that this is something that was promised by the previous government that is now being delivered by the coalition government. But I acknowledge the previous government for its initiative in this space.

The schools in the Riverina that will benefit are Ardlethan Central School, which will receive $2,845,000 to establish the Riverina Access Partnership of Schools Trade Training Centre with Ariah Park and Barellan central schools to provide a certificate I in agrifood operations, a certificate II in agriculture, a certificate II in construction pathways, a certificate II in engineering and a certificate II in hospitality; Batlow Technology School, in the Snowy Mountains, $855,000 to establish the HV Smith Memorial Trade Training Centre to provide certificates I and II in engineering; Temora High School—I know that Principal Pat Netherey was absolutely delighted with this, because he mentioned it at his last school assembly, and you never die wondering what Pat thinks—$1 million for the Goldenfields Learning Community Trade Training Centre to provide certificates I and II in engineering and a certificate II in construction pathways; and Tumbarumba High School, that great school up in the foothills of the Snowy Mountains, $1 million for a centre to provide a certificate I in manufacturing and a certificate II in engineering. I know that David Crelley, the Principal of Tumbarumba High School was also absolutely delighted that that money was going to be made possible by the coalition. Admittedly, it was promised by Labor in the last iteration, but it is certainly going to be delivered by the coalition.

As I said, these six schools in the Riverina are going to benefit from that, but it will not be the schools but the kids at those schools and the teachers at those schools who benefit. Some of the children from those schools will leave the area, but many, many of them will stay because of the great benefits of country living, and they will provide the chefs, electricians, painters, construction workers and the people who are going to work in agribusinesses and in food processing. Who knows what they might achieve, but they will achieve it because of the possibilities provided by this funding and the possibilities that are being been provided by the coalition investing in their future, investing in these four trade training centres. That is so very, very good.

This commitment is further confirmation which demonstrates this government is committed to ensuring there are quality education and training opportunities for young people, particularly those in regional areas. We are delivering these vital centres in a challenging budget environment. We have inherited the debt and deficit legacy of Labor, but we are getting on with the job of paying that down while still providing opportunities for young people. It is important that skill shortages are addressed, particularly in country areas, the food bowl of the nation, and these trade training centres will further provide outstanding vocational training opportunities for students.

This Nationals-Liberal government can be proud of the reforms being undertaken and implemented across the vocational education and training sector. The new registered training organisation quality standards strengthen industry engagement, increase requirements for trainers and assessors to improve the quality of training and assessment and increase transparency of information to students. We will continue to crack down on inducements and dodgy marketing practices and, importantly, we will ensure training organisations exhibit a greater duty of care when signing up students to incur a loan. There is much more to undertake; we appreciate that. The government is looking at further reform, in particular to put an end to the abuse of VET FEE-HELP and misuse by providers. The Assistant Minister for Education and Training, who is doing a good job, might I say, appreciates there is further work to be done and has indicated a comprehensive approach to reforming VET FEE-HELP to end the rorting of the current system established by the previous government.

At the end of the day, we want to enable students to gain the very best qualifications to meet the challenges of a modernised world, to strengthen our communities and to ensure the regions gain from the expertise in the employment sector. We are committed to ensuring we have a vocational educational and training system which places students front and centre and provides the opportunity to attain a qualification of a high quality standard. The National Party will help achieve that.

Lisa Chesters (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In beginning my remarks, I would like to comment on a few of the things that the previous speaker said in relation to training kids in the regions so they can go on to jobs in food processing—if those jobs actually exist, which is the big part of this debate that is missing. If we are serious about training kids in the region and getting vocational skills, getting TAFE qualifications, going through the good RTOs and getting a certificate, then let us ensure that they have a job to go to. One of the other problems that we have in the regions, particularly in regional Victoria and New South Wales, is that a lot of these jobs are being performed by people who are here on 417 and 457 visas. We need more than empty rhetoric from National Party members who stand up in this House and say, 'We are training the kids, and they will go to jobs in food processing in the region.' When they go to that job they are competing against somebody who has been brought in here on a visa, which means that they are being paid less than the person working next to them. Within this debate we need to make sure that if somebody stands up here and says, 'That's okay, they're going to get jobs in food processing,' let us ensure they have jobs in food processing to go to.

Another comment that is being made by people opposite is that this is all the fault of the Labor government, that Labor created this mess and that the coalition are the heroes, riding in on their white horses to clean up the mess. It is not a Labor mess. This mess was started by the former Howard government. In 2007, the Howard government extended FEE-HELP to include the VET sector for the approval of diploma and advanced diploma courses. VET FEE-HELP commenced in 2009. This has been a problem that has been a long time brewing. It was a Labor government that introduced the Australian Skills Quality Authority to try to tackle some of the problems that were being experienced in the sector.

There is at least one thing that both sides of the House can agree on, that there is a problem. There is rorting going on and we do need action. There are countless media reports—not just recent media reports but reports that go back some time—exposing the outrageous rorting that is going on within the system. For example, take what has been going on in our contract security industry for many, many years. You will meet a security officer who is working right next door to another security officer. One of them will have completed their training in a day, where they paid for their course up-front. I can remember security officers telling me that it was a tick-and-flick process. They were presented with the exam and they were also given a copy of the exam with the answers. Basically, they had to go through and tick and flick. They got the paperwork that they required from their RTO, submitted that and, on the basis of that paperwork, were issued a security licence.

This is clearly and obviously a rorting of the system. There is no way that this particular security officer could have the skills or qualifications that are needed to work in the security industry. To work in the industry, a security officer in Victoria is required to go through compulsory restraints training to ensure that, if they have to restrain a member of the public, it is done in a safe way. There is no way you can physically learn to do this through a tick-and-flick program. This is a problem that has been occurring for quite some time in the security industry and has started to be investigated by the Australian Skills Quality Authority, an institution that was set up by the former Labor government to crack down on this behaviour.

Another industry which has received some media attention recently is ECE, early childhood education. It is unfortunate that we learn that childcare centres in this country have started their own black list of accredited training organisations providing poor-quality graduates that they are not willing to employ. The ABC reported in September last year that the childcare centres had started an unofficial black list of training providers that they were not willing to use because the graduates were so poor. They argue that there had been an explosion in the number of trainers being offered cert IIIs and diplomas in child care after the government made qualifications mandatory. The childcare centres say that they know some of these organisations have created tick-and-flick systems, where the students were effectively buying their qualification. What we have seen happen is a policy which was about encouraging skills and qualifications in early childhood education being exploited by these providers, where they set themselves up as fly-by-night operations and tick-and-flick organisations. The way the models of these organisations work is that they wait to be caught. If it is an organisation or a training provider in security or child care, they will rip off as many students as they can, wait to be caught, disappear and then set up as another training organisation under a different name the next day. We have to ask ourselves: at what point do we declare the system broken and start looking at a better way to deliver vocational skills in this country?

I should note the comments of some students who have been refused work or have tried to work in the childcare industry after receiving their qualifications from one of these dodgy providers. One particular young woman, who was doing a diploma in early learning, said that half the class dropped out after two years because they realised they were not going to get the skills that they needed to work in the early childhood education sector. For the half of the class that dropped out, not only did they then have debts to pay back to this government but they also were left without qualifications to get them work. This young woman said that, when she started working in a childcare centre, she realised she did not have the skills to cope as she did not have the training that she needed to do the programming for the children and she struggled with the class sizes. This brave woman says that she has such a passion for the sector that she has now restarted her diploma with a better provider. So she will end up with two debts in order to get her qualifications. She says: 'It's not really fair that I undertook a course in good faith and I went through this experience.' These are the kinds of people that we should be working to protect when they undertake study in this country. It is up to this government and our state governments to ensure that the study that students undertake will in fact result in a qualification that will be acceptable to employers.

Another childcare worker, in Melbourne, said that her cert III course involved rewriting slabs of a textbook into work sheets. She said they were assigned homework but were told, 'Here's your textbook, here's your notebook; just fill it in in your own words. You don't need to use your own words, really; write it as it is in the book because, that way, you can guarantee to get the best mark.' If we think about what is involved in early childhood education and what our early childhood educators do in centres, it is a practical job. You need to be working with children. Apart from the programming, which is quite technical and book based, a large part of the role is hands-on. To suggest that, to qualify for an early childhood education diploma, it is good enough just to copy word for word out of a textbook without stepping into a childcare centre is beyond what is acceptable and another example of why reform in this area is so important.

When it comes to skills and ensuring that we have a workforce that is ready and ensuring that we are getting good value for money as taxpayers, I believe we need to start looking at the kind of structure that we have in Australia. We need to start reinvesting in TAFE and the public institutions that we do know deliver good-quality vocational skills and training. In my own area of Bendigo, I am grateful and proud that the new Labor government has committed extra funding to ensure that there are no further job losses at the campus like the job losses we saw under the former government and that some of the courses are coming back. Bendigo is an area of growth and it has quite a lot of new housing developments going ahead, yet Bendigo TAFE last year closed their cabinet-making course. It is a bit hard to build a kitchen if you do not have cabinet-makers. One of the reasons they cited for having to shut down the course is that they did not have enough students enrolled in the course. When speaking to the TAFE, they said that part of the problem was that they were being undercut by a number of RTOs and that some young people were going into those other courses and being promised the world. They were told that they could fast-track their skills and fast-track their certs and start earning money sooner in the industry.

Because we have not had enough action in this area, and because we have these dodgy providers out there, there has also been a knock-on effect in our TAFEs, who are delivering quality. Some may say that this is the demand-driven system. Some may say that this is what happens when you have a market and that those that are less popular will drop out. But those that are less popular—like our TAFE courses—tend to be the courses that take longer, and tend to be the courses where people actually get the skills they need. They are the institutions that we should be investing in and making sure are a priority for funding when it comes to this area.

The proliferation of registered training organisations has, in my opinion, backfired. We are now increasingly seeing report after report, from industry after industry, of people coming forward to say that they have paid for a course but have not received the skills that their employers require. Last year, the TAFE inquiry that was set up by this House came to Bendigo. I can remember hearing from one of the people giving evidence that they had completed an apprenticeship in hairdressing. Yet, when they started their job, on their first day, the principal hairstylist came up to this young graduate and said, 'You can't cut hair. You're going to have to start again. That's not how you cut hair.' This young apprentice had just completed her apprenticeship. She had what she thought were qualifications, and she now had to start again. These are just some of the many examples of students who are being, in many ways, ripped off and taken for a ride by these dodgy providers.

As I said earlier in my contribution, this is not a problem that has occurred in just the last few years. This is a problem that goes back to the Howard government, when they first extended FEE-HELP—which was a good idea, but we needed to make sure that the education providers were ready. It is good that we are introducing stronger regulations requiring RTOs to declare their relationships with sales brokers. It is good that we are seeing more reform in this area so we can catch out more of the dodgy providers, but I would argue that not enough is being done.

I would also argue that we need to do an analysis about whether funding this system in this way—providing FEE-HELP to private, profit-making providers—is actually the right call, or whether we need to go back and start investing properly in our publicly funded TAFEs, and ensuring that they are able to deliver the courses. We used to have a very good structure of skills delivery in this country: a strong apprenticeships scheme, and a strong TAFE sector. That has been eroded away and replaced, in many cases, with a shell of what used to be a TAFE system, a handful of apprenticeships compared with what there used to be, and a dodgy RTO system that is not delivering the skills that this country is paying for, that the students are paying for, and that employers expect.

I believe that the government needs to do more to address these shortfalls and really get serious about delivering skills, whether it be at the apprenticeship level or at the TAFE and vocational level. A start would be to restore the $2 billion that has been cut from skills and training since those opposite have come to office.

Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to compliment the member for Bendigo on a great speech. On the strength of that speech, I look forward to her supporting this legislation when it comes to the vote. I would point out that it is a great pity, in fact, that the member for Bendigo was not here for the last six years while the training system was run into the ground. Her colleagues turned their backs and refused to do anything to fix up the proliferation of dodgy RTOs.

It is interesting to listen to these speeches, as I have done back in my office at various times today. I was listening earlier in the day to the member for Newcastle, Sharon Claydon. You wouldn't know that there is a state election coming up in New South Wales, would you! She managed to line up the New South Wales government on a number of occasions, and gave great weight to that old saying that there are lies, damn lies and statistics.

I thought that I would go and have a little look, after her speech, at some of the rates she talked about for technical training in New South Wales as compared with my state of South Australia. Therein lies the variation. Of course, it is priced differently in the two states. I could only check for TAFE in South Australia. I do not mean, in any way, to cast any aspersions on TAFE; I have just used them as an example. For certificate III in agriculture, in New South Wales, for instance, it is a flat rate. It is an all-inclusive rate of $2,170. In South Australia you can actually build that qualification and leave some modules on the table, or not. It is true that there is a minimum fee of $1,333, but if you want to take all the modules, which is roughly equivalent to New South Wales, it is $4,500. So, it is a little over double the cost, in fact.

With respect to certificate III in civil construction and plant operations, the comparison is that the cost is $2,080 in New South Wales and nearly $4,500 in South Australia. I am sure that, if I went through all the courses, I could find variations that run in the other direction. I take issue with the argument that the member for Newcastle put when she attacked the New South Wales government. I say: we should all look a little deeper and make sure that we understand the issues what we are talking about, and bring wisdom to this place and not just plain partisan bashing because we have a state election coming up.

I turn to the bill itself. In June last year, I ran some forums in my electorate—one in Port Pirie, and one in Whyalla. They were very, very well attended, I must say. I was assisted by Karen Andrews. It was perhaps on the basis of some of the work that she did helping out some of the members that she is now the parliamentary secretary to the minister. She was very helpful and we had a really good roll up—lots of training providers and businesses that use the courses provided by the RTOs.

It was pretty clear that, while there are some good things happening out there, there are also plenty of deficiencies. As the member for Bendigo has just said, there was a high level of concern about the quality of service providers, particularly the fly-in fly-out providers. For instance, we found that aged-care courses that should take months to complete were being completed in a matter of days and that students with minimal hours on a piece of plant were being granted plant operator tickets and a licence to operate. When such a person rolls up looking for a job, the boss says, 'Can you drive a forklift?' and he says, 'Yes, sure I can,' but when the boss pops him on the forklift, he cannot do it. That has to be fixed. We just cannot put up with that in Australia. Not only does that attack the student, in that they have paid for a qualification that is substandard; it actually destroys business confidence in the qualifications system. If, on a regular basis, an employer finds that the person who walks in the door cannot actually do what they are qualified to do—whether, as the member for Bendigo spoke about, it is a hairdresser or whether it is a person working in aged care—in the end they do not trust any of the qualifications and it is back to square one, so we really achieve very little at all.

At the forums there were two types of providers—those doing VET training in schools and those providing post-school training. It is a complicated area, because schools are a state responsibility, whereas adult training is largely the responsibility of the Commonwealth. There were a number of issues raised that intersect between state and federal policies and funding lines. All in all, the training sector generally is not a happy place. There is a lot of frustration and disappointment.

This bill addresses many of those key issues and, in particular, the substandard provision of training from RTOs. This government will not put up with shoddy practices and with course attendees being ripped off. We will not put up with the taxpayer being ripped off and we will not put up with employers being driven to regard many of the qualifications of potential workers with suspicion.

The standards for national vocational education are policed by the Australian Skills Quality Authority, ASQA. This bill greatly strengthens their hand. Currently RTOs are registered for five years. ASQA inform us that the regular review of five years is not really a very useful vehicle for keeping an eye on how these RTOs are providing a service to their customers. If you know when the audit or the review is coming, you can tidy things up and make sure that the ASQA inspector sees exactly what you need them to see on that particular day. Acting on that advice, we have decided to extend the registration period to seven years, which will free up some ASQA resources so that they can more actively monitor the quality of RTOs at any time. ASQA will be given an extra $68 million over the forward estimates to police RTOs.

I spoke earlier about the interface and the often tortuous negotiations between the states and the Commonwealth, taking at least 12 months to get modifications to standards in this area. This bill unilaterally introduces a new quality standard, meaning that ASQA can get on with the job. I say: you beauty! When we see malpractice happening in our communities, we want to be able to jump on it straightaway. This will give a great amount of flexibility to ASQA to act. When they see things that are not happening correctly, we can make alterations to the standard and they can then enforce the alteration. As I said, they get an extra $68 million to do that.

We have all become very frustrated—when I say 'all' I mean the Australian public generally—with the delay between the announcements of governments' intentions or policies and their implementation. It can often take many months, sometimes years, to get to that point. In recent times we have been unable to get legislation through a fairly uncooperative Senate, which adds extra time to that lag. People often think that, when a government announces something, the deal is done. That is not the case, and it is not the case with training either. It is very important that ASQA will be freed up to act in this manner.

The bill also addresses the issue of poor information provided to individuals on the courses that they may be undertaking. RTOs will be compelled to inform their customers who owns or operates a training provider. It will force them to make clear to all students what they are committing to every time they embark on a new course or a variation to their course. So they will know their financial commitments and they will know just what kind of qualification they will have at the end of their course. That would seem to be dead simple. It is like buying a car. You would expect people to be well informed about what they are buying. But, unfortunately, it is not the case with all providers. All providers are not created equally. Some of them are doing a very good job. As I found at my forums, it is those people, the good providers, that are crying out for increased scrutiny in this area. They lose business to poor operators, who they are able to undercut on price. Sometimes it is more expensive for those who deliver a quality product than it is for those who fly in and fly out after a few days and give you a shoddy qualification. So they are more keen than anyone to get this fixed up.

This is very important to my electorate, which, as I have said a number of times in this chamber, covers more than 90 per cent of South Australia. Of course, hands-on workers are the predominant species in an electorate like Grey. We have fewer professional services but more people who actually work in the trades and the hands-on professions, if you like. So, getting good qualifications, whether it be in the mining industry, the building industry or the fishing industry, is very important. It is a term of trade. In fact, in 2013 there were 160,000 public VET students in South Australia. We will be providing over $130 million in funding and support for the subsidisation of VET training over the forward estimates. That is a substantial investment in South Australia. It comes at a time, of course, when there will also be around $30 million coming into South Australia to help with the training procedures surrounding the exit of the car industry in our state.

In 2012 there were 44,000 VET qualifications awarded through the public VET system and approximately 28,000 apprentices and trainees in South Australia. That is a lot of people, but, from my point of view, I would like to see more. I think there are many occupations in our workforce where the workforce is ageing and where we need upgrading of qualifications. In fact, with our apprentice training system, it must be said at some stage that a lot of employment providers have been burned in the past by the vagaries of the apprentice system. So we also need to make sure that we help them out and provide the assistance, and credible assistance, where it is needed.

By and large these bills are a great advance. I have been privileged to be able to participate in the forums and then give the feedback from my forums directly to the then minister, Ian McFarlane. Of course, I have been able to pass that on now to Senator Simon Birmingham, a close South Australian colleague of mine. I expect that the VET sector will welcome the changes and that we will be able to get on with the job and make sure that our young people are getting the training they need and, more or equally importantly, that businesses are getting the trainees they need with the right qualifications and suitable skills when they arrive at work.

Chris Hayes (Fowler, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The National Vocational Education and Training Regulator Amendment Bill 2015 is a step in the right direction; there is no question about that. It is an attempt to improve what is clearly the regulatory oversight of the vocational education sector. Having said that, it is also right to say that this bill does not go far enough in addressing the damage that has already been done to various individuals; nor does it propose to engage with the community to assist in minimising future problems in the VET sector.

I think everyone in this place knows that there are now too many examples of unscrupulous registered training organisations taking advantage of some of the most vulnerable members of our communities. The main priority of these organisations, as private training providers—and that is not all training providers, but the unscrupulous ones—is clearly profit driven: to enrol students and to take advantage of the VET FEE-HELP arrangements offered by the Commonwealth. Vulnerable members of our community, many very desperate to gain the skills and knowledge that they need to equip them for employment opportunities, are far too often left with large debts, no qualifications and possibly a dodgy qualification at best. Often they have nothing to show for the thousands of dollars that the government has contributed, and the debt that they have run up is likely never to be repaid, because they will never, in many instances, earn above the minimum threshold.

Given the extent of some of these practices operating amongst some of those private registered training providers, I would submit that the ACCC needs to be involved, because that would actually be a path by which to strengthen consumer protection and give greater advice on how people could redress their grievances in respect of these unsatisfactory practices that are emerging in the private VET sector. We also need to see a strict audit of VET FEE-HELP, as it has allowed many in the private provider areas of VET to take advantage of some of the desperate situations that many of the individuals who sign up as students find themselves in. There are now more than 4½ thousand private training colleges in Australia, and that number will continue to grow. More than $1.6 billion worth of taxpayers' money has been allocated to VET FEE-HELP, with 40 per cent of vocational loans expected never to be repaid.

At the same time as this is occurring, the quality of some of our VET courses is being very much degraded. We are now seeing a proliferation of shorter course lengths and larger class sizes, with little or no support for struggling students or those students who are labouring with various disabilities. I know that some private training companies are making huge profits, and sometimes those profits are made from cutting corners in quality. According to recent reports, some of the students, as the result of their training, are getting a paper qualification that has little or no apparent worth in the employment market, if they graduate at all. Coupled with that, we have seen state and federal Liberal governments cutting funding to the publicly funded TAFE colleges or the TAFE system. That is certainly not helping the situation. The Abbott government has taken $2 billion from the skills portfolio since the budget, closely following suit with what is being done by many of their state Liberal counterpart governments.

I can only speak for New South Wales—and some of the impacts on New South Wales TAFE are extraordinary. Since the last budget, we have lost 1,200 teachers—essentially, trade teachers—as well as support staff. They have already been made redundant. We have seen a drastic reduction in course sizes and face-to-face teaching between students and plumbers. For instance, plumbing has dropped from 864 hours as specified in the training package to 720 hours last year, and just 574 hours this year.

With little or no consultation with employers and no say on the part of the students, these changes are occurring and they are not welcome. They are certainly not welcome in industry and, for a student who is trying to get the best possible qualification possible for his or her career prospects, it is cutting corners.

Class sizes in New South Wales, for instance, in basic adult education can be as high as 30 to one, leaving little time for one to one between teachers and students. There is also a lack of support, as I indicated earlier, for struggling students—particularly, students with disabilities.

I have spoken many times in this place about my electorate being very multicultural. It is also an area with significant pockets of disadvantage. Regrettably, as a consequence, we have very high unemployment and extremely high youth unemployment. The opportunity for students to gain skills, which are transferable into employment, is very high on the agenda in electorates like mine.

We need to encourage people, particularly young people, to participate in further education, especially in the VET sector. There is currently a rollout of opportunities in the VET sector to exploit students. It does not help when we are defunding TAFE—maybe to make others more competitive, we are taking money out of the system, a system is universally respected. It also does not help, as a consequence of the changes, that TAFE fees are skyrocketing.

Fees are now being calculated per course, which makes it much harder to compare but, on average in New South Wales, they have increased by approximately 9.5 per cent. Coupled with the other changes—for instance, under this government, apprentices lost their Tools for Your Trade grants and New South Wales has increased the cost per course by an average of $500 per year—it is very difficult to even do source apprenticeships. There is a concerted attempt to restrict the ablity of TAFE to compete—some refer to it as making it a more contestable marketplace. For those who believe in qualifications with meaning, this is a repugnant attempt to downgrade what was—and I think still is—in many instances, a world-renowned technical and further education system by opening the doors to private training providers and allowing some very dodgy operators.

A recent story on the ABC shone the light on some unethical practices conducted during enrolment such as targeting individuals in areas of high disadvantage—areas like mine. The program also highlighted the lack of support to ensure that students actually graduate with the skills and knowledge that lead to employment opportunities.

It is simply a matter of signing people up, getting signatures on a piece of paper and moving on. These RTOs should not be allowed to transfer blame onto third parties used as recruitment agencies for their courses. They use third-party brokers to act on their behalf. So when things go badly and young people are ill-equipped to undertake the courses they have been signed up to, the RTOs blame the broker and say, 'It's got nothing to do with us, because we contracted that part of the operation out.'

Some colleges are known to prey on the most vulnerable members of our communities and use third parties or, in some cases, spruikers to promote expensive courses. Often, these courses are inappropriately offered to the long-term unemployed with very high and sometimes very specialised needs. Those who are targeted often have a low-skill base. English for many is a second language, and they have limited literacy ability. Again, this goes to whether a person has been appropriately recruited to undertake a particular course.

Many are not aware of the large debts they are signing up to. Often the lure of laptops, iPads and no up-front fees is enough for people to think; 'I'll put my name down for that.' These are vulnerable people who may not have a clear understanding of the costs they are running up or the costs that they are running up at public expense. As the ABC report indicated, many students do not have the basic literacy or numeracy skills necessary to complete this course and it has emerged that enrolment brokers have even undertaken the actual enrolment test on behalf of their potential students in order to ensure a sale is made.

There has been a sharp increase in various courses in the private sector. I have heard many speakers in this debate talk about what has occurred in the area of child care and the increase in certificate III and diploma courses in child care by some of the private RTOs. Child care centres that have employed some of the graduates from these colleges have found the majority are lacking in basic skills to do the requisite jobs required. What can we really expect when we are sometimes cutting year-long courses down to eight weeks, we are cutting teaching times down and we are making some courses—particularly in areas such as child care—simply a paper qualification? Yet, in terms of VET, vocational education and training, we should be equipping people with the skills and knowledge they need to undertake further employment opportunities.

There are also reports that some of the private training colleges are stealing curriculum information directly from TAFE and are failing to provide the necessary assistance and support to students. These are critical things in terms of trying to develop a person for future employment. They are things that we should not lose sight of. We need to ensure that, when we bring down legislation like this, it goes further than simply doing what this bill does. We need to put a stop to dodgy private providers, dubious sales methods to vulnerable people and the exploitation of taxpayer funded resources that are not being best used for the interests of the students or their employment outcomes. (Time expired)

Keith Pitt (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is timely that we put some of these anomalies to bed. I am someone who has actually attended a TAFE course. I was originally an apprentice who commenced almost 30 years ago. I have been through the TAFE system and I owned a private RTO for many years, from inception all the way through a five-year audit, taking that company from an accredited training organisation with one accredited short course through to a business which had over 50 short courses, qualifications and outcomes in skill sets. So I actually have some knowledge in this area. What I can tell you is that some of our speakers have been misinformed. In my view, one of the biggest providers of subcontract training—and this is in Queensland; I cannot speak for the other states—is TAFE. TAFEs provide the majority of subcontract trainers. They are the ones who put the majority of these people in the field. The private RTOs, I acknowledge, have some difficulties, and I certainly struck many of them over the number of years that I was in business in this area.

It is good to see that in this bill there are changes which will make a real difference to the VET sector. The first is the change requiring advertising around any course to identify the RTO. I have been affected by this many times. I made a decision very early in my business career that we would base our company on quality, which would likely give us longevity, and that certainly turned out to be the case. The business, which I no longer have an interest in, of course, due to my role here, is still going strong. It still employs the same people, it still has relatively the same turnover and it provides the same services in the same regions. So that was a good decision, but I must tell you that, financially, it was a very tough one to make, when you have a fly-by-nighter who might roll into your district, advertise in all the local papers and through the local associations and undercut the local prices by some 30 per cent, and of course everybody rolls up for the new qualification which is much cheaper. You then spend a week being abused by people on the phone because they can get it somewhere else at less cost. However, even though you explain to them that the course that they are doing is not what they think it is, they still continue down that road.

The requirement for VET courses to advertise with, likely, an RTO number to identify the provider is valuable. This will help with third-party agreements. I had very few of them, quite simply because my third-party agreements were very tight. The contracts were very detailed and required people to do particular things, which of course they did not want to do. For those who wanted to stitch the system up, it simply did not work for them.

I must say that ASQA has probably been one of the most difficult organisations I have ever worked with anywhere in my entire working career. They were absolutely appalling. The work that they did resulted in the loss of many providers in regional Australia. As I am sure my colleague here would know, in regional Australia it is far more difficult to get the required training, because there simply are not the providers or the volume. That means that you need someone to come locally or you need someone to travel. One of the issues with TAFE—and, as I said, I am someone who attended TAFE over a number of years—is, quite simply, that they did not make themselves flexible enough. That has changed. There are a number of TAFE providers who now operate on the same basis as a private provider. They all go to the site, they will work around shift work and they will provide whatever is required, and that is working. A number of major TAFE providers have managed to get that over the line. Unfortunately, the concept that you can do a 9.30 to 3 o'clock day in the modern environment, on an industrial worksite, simply does not work. That is the absolute reality.

There is the requirement for a new quality standard provision. As someone who has been through two changes in the set of quality standards, I must say they are relatively dubious, in terms of the auditing and how that works. I will give you a very basic example. I once had four audits in a 12-month period. Given that an audit costs a small organisation some $20,000 to $30,000, that was a very tough period of time for my operation. In the four audits, I had three changes under the same quality standard by three different auditors, which basically meant I ended up back where I started. Every three months, we had to change all of our documents and all of our systems, only to have the next auditor, three months later, tell us to put it back to something else, until we finally got to a different auditor who told us to put it back to where it was at the beginning. These are the types of red-tape challenges the private providers in particular face, because they do not have as many resources as some of the TAFE structures.

I am very pleased to see the provision that the minister can make a quality standard for emerging issues. I think it is important for them to do that. The quality standard system is relatively basic. Of course the change to require a seven-year registration is good news for all providers; a five-year re-certification audit is an enormous exercise, which usually ties up four or five people and a number of auditors, depending on skills you have on your skill set and which costs a large amount of money. The question is: is it necessary? If your business has operated for five years without complaint, without issue, without any problems, why would you need to do an entire re-certification every five years at enormous cost? It is one of the problems that we had with ASQA. Under the former Labor government, ASQA worked on a cost recovery model. What that meant was—and this is a real example—an operator who worked out of Emerald and had three staff; they worked very hard to meet all the quality requirements and did everything necessary. They were quoted $45,000 for the recertification audit. What do you think the result of that audit was? The result was very simple: it did not go ahead because they did not have $45,000 in cash to do it. Consequently, the business closed and could no longer provide that service in regional Australia. That work then went to somebody else working under this contract, most likely through TAFE.

The $68 million that has been committed over the next four years will be helpful to reduce this costs. Out in the real world, things cost money. Quite simply, whatever gets put in front of a private business it has to pay for. I got to the stage inside my business where I did not bother preparing for audits—we just waited them to show up. It simply cost far too much money to have everything on the table. I know of a number of operators who simply had what they called their audit box. In that audit box would be all the compliance documents and everything else needed to tick and flick the sheet off. When the auditors rolled up, they came out with their audit box, put it on the table and way they would go. That is not a quality system. As anyone who has worked in industry would know, that is not how it should work.

It has been an interesting time looking at the VET system. Of course, the cost to RTOs has been very expensive and the number of RTOs has declined. One of the reasons they increased rapidly, particularly in Queensland, was around the licensing provisions for skills like forklifts, backhoes, end loaders and general load-shifting equipment. One thing I would urge the minister to consider, if the minister happens to be listening, is we need to sort out the national training system around licensing. It is something that costs the country an enormous amount of money—I realise the complications and the difficulties. In Victoria you do not need a licence to drive a dozer or a roller or other earth-moving equipment; you need a competency. However, if you go to another state, you need an accredited short course or a skill set or something else under the VET system. As you move through state boundaries, you move into different licence areas, which costs more money if you do not have the right one. A case in point: I remember one of the fly-in people who rolled into my district and trained a heap of people around load-shifting equipment. In three days they came out with six tickets, which were not actually licences. They were rather a skill set, which was required to operate perhaps in Victoria or somewhere else. I recall this particular one was because in one of my other roles in industry I was lead auditor and did a lot of work on heavy construction sites—on multi-storey buildings. I clearly remember coming to clean up after a private company had failed an audit; there was a subcontractor I had spoken to about this course—I told him that he really should not be doing it, though it was up to him—and he was the packing his gear up. It turned out that one of the reasons they failed the audit was that they did not have the correct skills to operate the equipment. They had been thrown off the site and lost the contract. So that one decision to save some 20 per cent of the cost ended up costing him a very large gig, a very large contract and a lot of money.

Those are the sorts of decisions that people make all the time. I do want to raise an issue that was brought to my attention by one of my constituents, Narelle Casberg. I want to congratulate her on the representations she made to me and to former state members around her son. Her son is autistic and is on the DSP but desperately wants to work. The issue that they had was, of course, with TAFE in that he was not allowed to be a full-fee paying student through TAFE—that was only available to international students. I congratulate Narelle because her representations got that requirement changed, and her son was able to attend a course. They put forward some $10,000 to attend the course and he completed the course, but then he had the same challenge for the next level. Many of the courses required for trade need time on the ground under supervision, log books and all the other bits and pieces that go with that.

The other issue has to do with red tape and the very rapid changes in trainer qualifications. Over the time I had my business, we went through three changes in training qualifications, which meant that every single trainer in my organisation had to do it again. Of course, these courses take somewhere between three, five or 10 days—15 days depending on what the course is—and whether they could get credit any for their former skills. This happened over and over again. It really did not make a lot of difference to the skill set they had for what they delivered and what they assessed, because the people I used were highly qualified, highly experienced and knew what they were doing and had done it for some time.

I do recall there was a suggestion that in areas of high risk where you had to do licence training there was going to be a requirement for the trainer to have one year in every three back in industry to reset their skills. Life is difficult enough without having to move from your full-time position to find another position in a skill set that you already have simply so that skill set is maintained. There are other ways of doing that. It would be an enormous burden on industry and on the training sector. It would be incredibly difficult if you worked in a regional area, then you would have to shift towns just to get your 12 months' experience back up.

I do take the point about private RTOs. I have seen any number who do the wrong thing and who rob their students. Let me give you a classic example: recent changes to the national standards around asbestos required a new skill set and a new set of qualifications to be able to do asbestos removal. There were a number of different layers, including supervision, occupational hygiene. There was a private provider who managed to do that training online. You could learn how to be an asbestos supervisor in a friable environment in an online course with a click and flick. I am not too sure how it is you do the assessment for a buddy check or for fitting some particular respiratory equipment—which is very important if you work in asbestos; you really want to live. I am not sure that the tick and flick from the online course would actually get you over the line. However, it did make an awful lot of money for somebody—quite simply, you enrol, pay your money, which was 50-75 per cent of an actual course cost. No-one was required to be there, they did not need a facility and they certainly did not need to have any of their practical equipment needed to do these assessments.

One of the reasons that these things should be limited is that you want to get them right. When you work in a high-risk environment, the people who do that work have every right to expect that they are trained correctly and properly, so I congratulate the minister on some of these changes. There are additional reporting requirements now for making complaints, which I find exceptional. However, from experience, in general, the majority of complaints come from competing RTOs. The number that I had over the years basically came from anyone who lived in the district who did the same work. After we had our fifth audit from the same complainant, I put in an FOI request which determined it was the same one, and they stopped coming. We had passed every single one without a nonconformance. It is something you would think they would work out.

High-risk licensing is something which is very important; however, we must ensure that our red tape does not get out of hand. I want to give you a simple example about cost. When I first started in this industry, you could get a forklift assessment for $200 or $250, because basically it was with an accredited provider as an individual under a piece of statute law. It was not a requirement under the VET system. It was not a nationally recognised training; it was a skill set assessed by a person who was approved by the state as having those skills and the required qualifications. That outcome is now $650 on average, as a general measure. You are required to go to training. The assessors are required to log, six days before the assessment takes place, that it will take place for the particular person. This is allegedly so that an auditor can show up; however, it makes for some very challenging work environments if you are in construction or heavy industry where, as I am sure you know, if it rains then work stops. When work stops, you want something else to do, and atypically that is training or skills maintenance. You cannot do that if you have to give six days notice. I am not sure that we can judge when the rain might occur! Those sorts of things make it very difficult and add layers and layers of cost, not only to industry but also to individuals. It makes it incredibly difficult. So, I am very pleased that the minister has put the bill forward with the amendments that are in it. Certainly, the $68 million for ASQA will make a difference to the operations that they perform, but I would encourage them to take practical steps. Not every private provider is out to rob their student. The majority are there to provide a service.

In the short time I have left—and it is a unique opportunity that you do not get very often—I would like to thank very briefly some of my former long-term staff whom I had with me for almost a decade: Theresa Peebles as the training manager; Ronnie Lau as operations manager; Ivan Grylls—the undefeatable Ivan—who shows up at every opportunity, who works all day and all night; Jared Wilson, the occupational hygienist; and of course Jeff Hatcher, one of our mines trainers, who spent his life as an assessor with Rio Tinto, only to retire to my area, roll through my door one day and say, 'Could you give me a job?' I commend the bill to the house.

Kelvin Thomson (Wills, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I support the measures in the National Vocational Education and Training Regulator Amendment Bill 2015, and I support the amendment moved by the shadow minister. These measures are designed to improve regulatory oversight of the sector. Regrettably, the actions of unscrupulous registered training organisations and brokers have had serious effects on vulnerable individuals. People have been left with large debts and no qualification at all, or useless qualifications. It is nothing short of a national scandal that the government must deal with as a matter of urgency to ensure that the protection of students is prioritised.

There has been an explosion of cases of unscrupulous registered training organisations preying on vulnerable students and signing them up for large VET FEE-HELP debts. In many cases, the students are not even aware that they have signed up for a course, let alone debts of tens of thousands of dollars. The problem is exacerbated by registered training organisations employing brokers to recruit students on their behalf and then attempting to distance themselves from the actions of the brokers. This bill takes some steps to put responsibility on the registered training organisations for the actions of their brokers. There is also a change to allow more rapid response to quality and standards issues by the minister and the regulator. The growth of VET FEE-HELP has exceeded all projections, with more than $1.6 billion allocated last year. The Grattan Institute has warned that 40 per cent of vocational loans may never be repaid. This becomes a financial burden to the Commonwealth, and it needs to be addressed.

The education industry in Australia is highly fragmented. There are almost 5,000 registered training organisations that offer vocational education and over 11,000 that offer language training and other educational services. The number has been growing since the federal government extended student loans to the vocational sector. As reported by the ABC, teachers and education advocates are warning of shonky operators within the private training college sector, saying the federal government needs to do more to get rid of spruikers manipulating and misleading students. The Australian Skills Quality Authority, which regulates the registered training organisations, says it has received almost 4,000 complaints and conducted 3,000 audits since it was established in 2011—4,000 complaints in less than four years, an astonishing record of failure. Many teachers, advocates and other colleges have indicated that the complaints being referred to the authority seem to be falling on deaf ears. The authority has stated that some of their investigations could be lengthy.

In a 19 October 2014 ABC report, Sally Thompson, the chief executive of Adult Learning Australia, the peak body for adult and community education, said she was offended both as an educator and a Footscray resident when she saw disadvantaged students being recruited to training companies outside her local Centrelink office. Ms Thompson stated:

Our members often deal with people with quite low skills; they often deal with people with English as a second language, people with literacy difficulties and they've been telling us for a long time that they're just inundated with these kinds of spruikers … Spruikers hang out in places where they think marginalised people will be … we've had a couple of providers that have gone to our website, copied our whole website … then advertised our courses for VET-FEE-HELP … I just thought they were really misleading and designed to fool people into purchasing a product under false pretences … There were very big letters saying 'zero fees upfront' - no mention at all that the person will be hit with a debt of $10,000 at the end of this program … Now most people who are English as a second language learners … wouldn't know what VET-FEE-HELP was, much less that you'll be saddled with a $10,000 debt.

Mr Boyd Sparrow and his partner set up distance training college Sand Goanna in 2009 because they wanted to get quality employees for their tourism business. Their business name and information has been misappropriated twice by unscrupulous companies. They stated:

We've had a couple of providers that have gone to our website, copied our whole website, then pasted our website onto another website, then advertised our courses for VET-FEE-HELP," he said.

"The reason we caught it out is we don't actually have VET-FEE-HELP funding."

The ABC reported:

The company had to get lawyers involved to get other companies to cease using their name.

It did not stop their reputation being damaged among employers.

They now have to scan the internet every day to check their details have not been stolen.

What a disgraceful situation.

The Australian Skills Quality Authority Chief Commissioner Chris Robinson has stated that the regulator has cancelled, suspended or refused the registration of 350 colleges since 2011. The ABC reported in 2014 that childcare centres have now also started using unofficial blacklists of training providers that they will not use because the graduate quality is so low. The ABC reported:

There has been an explosion in the number of trainers offering Certificate IIIs and diplomas in childcare after the Government made qualifications mandatory.

Childcare centre operators have told the ABC many operate as "tick and flick" organisations where students effectively buy their qualification.

In many cases it has left students, who spent up to $4,500 on courses, unsuitable for employment.

Operators said children also lost out, with young graduates being unable to properly interact with infants during critical formative years.

Students and operators provided the ABC with the names of at least six organisations with questionable training practices.

These include offering the year-long Certificate III course in eight weeks, admitting to monitoring student placements by phone and online courses without sufficient supervision for work placements.

However, all still remain accredited training organisations with the Government regulator …

In 2014 the authority has cancelled the registration of one childcare course provider—the Community Training College in Queensland.

ASQA said it has an ongoing strategic industry review of training for the childcare and early learning sector.

It told the Productivity Commission inquiry into childcare it audited 46 trainers and found four out of five did not meet regulations—

four out of five!—

After being given the chance to fix problems, one in five still did not meet the standard.

It is little wonder, then, that the childcare workers union, United Voice, has called for a national inquiry into childcare training. The ABC reported:

United Voice said it was time for a national investigation into childcare training.

National secretary David O'Byrne said too many providers ran "tick and flick'' courses where poor training was done at high cost.

He said it was clear ASQA's regulation was not working.

"We want an immediate review across the country of Registered Training Organisations providing training in the early years," he said.

"It's not acceptable every couple of years, or when there's a complaint, to go and investigate a company.

"Families, they want to know when they place their children in these early learning environments that their children are being supported, that they're being educated and cared for.

"A child's brain development is crucial. The early years are the most important years."

Indeed, they are.

Last month a private college in Sydney, Australian College Broadway, was accused of claiming federal student training loans for pupils without appropriate skills. Former staff allege that, if students wanted to leave the college, the college hampered their attempts to withdraw from a course by either tearing up a letter or ignoring phone calls. The college, which offers hairdressing, beauty therapy and make-up courses, rejected the allegations.

However, young single mother Sammantha Saxton said she graduated from the college without the appropriate skills and has had to go back to TAFE and start again. Ms Saxton now has a $33,000 VET FEE-HELP debt from the college. Her employer said Samantha was unable to do many things she would expect from a graduate. Ms Saxton said she complained at least 10 times about the quality of the training during the course but nothing was done to rectify the situation. That college has received more than $50 million from federal government HECS style loans training since 2009.

The ABC has also reported:

Unscrupulous training colleges are targeting people with disabilities and the homeless in order to cash in on government education funding.

The ABC has obtained evidence some colleges are recruiting people with intellectual disabilities to costly diploma-level courses funded with expensive VET-FEE-HELP training loans.

However, this training is totally unsuited as those being targeted have low education and skill levels and high care needs, which means they will be unlikely to ever complete the courses. The ABC reported:

… marketeers have also been spotted outside Centrelink offices and referral services for the homeless and drug addicted.

There are also reports of telephone agents obtaining student details from job websites or disability programs in order to target them for new enrolments.

Students can borrow up to $90,000 under VET-FEE-HELP loans which they start to repay once they earn more than $53,000.

That is, $53,000 a year.

Jacqui Whitehead, mother of 24-year-old Lukus who has a diagnosed intellectual disability and autism spectrum disorder, became suspicious when Lukus was recruited to do a business course at Aspire College after being targeted outside Centrelink. The Adelaide man completed year 10 with a special life skills qualification for people with a disability. Once Lukus was struggling, Mrs Whitehead rang the school to inform them he had a disability and to seek extensions for his assignments. The college's response was to sell Lukus another course, and he now has an $18,000 VET FEE-HELP debt.

Single mother Rebecca Warfield was signed up to a $40,000 hairdressing course with a Sydney based training school. Months after signing, and being unable to attend classes due to personal issues, she went to see her accountant and was advised she had a $27,000 debt and the college was chasing her for $10,000. She does not read contracts because she has dyslexia; however, had she been able to read the fine print, she would have known that she did not actually enrol in a hairdressing course but rather a theory based salon management course—a distinction easily lost on Ms Warfield because of her dyslexia.

In my home state of Victoria, the movement of resources and students away from TAFE and into private training colleges of dubious and variable quality has been a disaster. In a media release of 25 February this year, the Victorian government stated that:

A number of employers in the automotive industry have been disqualified from hiring apprentices, following a Victorian Registration and Qualifications Authority (VRQA) investigation into low quality training.

Minister for Training and Skills Steve Herbert said the disqualifications followed an investigation of 115 employers in the automotive industry that checked whether 160 apprentices were being properly supervised and trained. The quality of training plummeted under the former Liberal Government’s cuts to the vocational education and training (VET) system.

Eight employers in Dandenong, Burwood, Albion, Campbellfield, Mitcham, Preston, Sunshine North and Glen Iris were disqualified from hiring apprentices. 60 training contracts between employers and apprentices were cancelled and a further 39 contracts were voluntarily cancelled.

The apprentices were all enrolled with a common training provider and those wanting to continue their apprenticeship have been offered support to continue their training with another provider.

Problems uncovered by the VRQA investigation included:

The Andrews Labor Government’s recently announced Review of Quality Assurance in Victoria’s VET System will recommend a new framework, so all training providers that deliver government-funded training meet quality standards. This will feed into the Mackenzie Review which will recommend a model of sustainable, high quality training across the training sector.

A compliance report by Victoria's education department showed that during 2013 payments were placed on hold for 29 RTOs until 'issues identified' were investigated. Private colleges have been exposed for offering free iPads and laptops for students to sign on to taxpayer-subsidised courses they often do not complete. The value of HECS-style loans for vocational students has blown out from $325 million in 2012 to $1.5 billion last year—double the expected rate of growth. Enrolments in these diplomas surged by 170 per cent from 2012 to 2013 and by a further 195 per cent the following year. The 56,000 extra enrolments equates to $770 million in federal government loans.

Whilst the bill is designed to improve oversight of the sector, it does not address the damage to individuals that has already occurred or propose action to engage with the community to minimise future problems. The flowering of second-rate training and scams we have witnessed has been a disgrace. We need to take concerted action to improve and protect standards and make sure that the qualifications and training actually lead to work.

Ewen Jones (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the National Vocational Education and Training Regulator Amendment Bill 2015. What is the problem we are trying to fix? Well, there are a few issues I have with Vocational Education and Training, or VET. I am the current chair of the House Standing Committee on Education and Employment. We completed another inquiry into TAFE last year. I say 'another inquiry' because there seem to have been a huge number of inquiries into this field by this place. When we were in Sydney and in other places around Australia, people who gave evidence often spoke of the Senate inquiry from 2001 and the great words and recommendations which came from that inquiry. When asked which of those recommendations had been implemented, and no-one could tell me a single thing which had made it into practice. We even had a Senate inquiry into TAFE and VET running concurrently with ours. I came continually to the same spot on the issue surrounding what we, as a federal government, can actually deliver for TAFE primarily, and VET in general. One of the real problems for TAFE is its acronym. It is synonymous with vocational education and training and therefore it is actually the victim of its own success. Everyone refers to the sector as TAFE and not VET. TAFE gets the blame and the credit travels very slowly.

I will move away from the legislation and speak about why ASQA needs to be a bolder and more prominent body for a moment, and I will address the base reason we have issues in VET at present. Once upon a time, TAFE was the only real player in town. You went there for everything. It was an institution but it was a hybrid form of education with a hybrid form of instructors and teachers. The old saying is that a camel is a horse designed by a committee. I see TAFE as an organisation which started off as a basic instrument and has had bits and pieces attached to it over time with soft wire and chewing gum.

During our inquiry, we saw so much good at TAFEs all over the country. We saw teachers and instructors who cared very deeply about their students and the future of the organisation. We saw fantastic facilities and central locations which are so good for students. We saw students proud to wear their 'I go to TAFE' t-shirts and polos. We saw a commitment to education and to turning out job-ready people who understand their job and why their training is important. We also saw, however, the pressure the organisation was under with inflexible workplace arrangements.

These facilities were also completely uncompetitive with others in the sector. We saw the other side of having great premises—the cost of maintaining building which are decades old, and in which it is almost impossible to make technology compliant and which are hugely expensive to air condition. We saw that open competitive tendering for services had eroded non-capital intensive courses, as they were being won by alternative suppliers of services, leaving TAFE with the high capital cost courses to maintain. If you can provide training with a laptop and a data projector, you can make a great living. If you have to provide the latest MIG and TIG welders, lathes, refrigeration equipment—as the member for Swan said earlier—vehicle hoists, plasma cutters and the like, your margins will be forever squeezed, and your business model will never be challenged by a private sector employer. The capital cost is too high. We saw with TAFE an organisation which took its community service obligation seriously. They know they are a part of our communities and that was even more evident in regional communities. Again, this is not a commercial consideration that its competitors need to take into account. We saw poor use of these expensive assets as well. They can and should do more with what they have. They are a great organisation, but we saw people coming to them with commercial kitchen facilities and asking if they could run courses at night or during holidays, because the TAFEs can be closed for an awful long time. There is a massive amount of investment there, but the TAFE organisation said no—they were not prepared to let other organisations use their facilities, even though there would be no-one else there at the time. That, to me, is inconsistent and wrong for TAFE.

Finally, what I saw was that TAFE was an organisation without a champion. To me it looked like schools were loved by state governments and universities were loved by federal governments, but TAFE was like the unwanted stepchild in the corner. It needs attention but it does not get anywhere near the same attention as the other two.

This is exposed in funding as well. We provide the state governments with massive amounts of money each year for VET, yet we as the inquiry committee were unable to find out—and I do not think the minister can find out—from state governments exactly how much of that money gets to TAFE. What comes up here is: why are we in this parliament continually working in this area when just about everything, with the exception of our funding, is ignored by state governments? One person said to me that, without federal government involvement, we would still not have national recognition of skills and qualifications. That astounds me. This is why ASQA must be brought to the table, to ensure that we have a national approach to VET.

The other side of the coin is the private providers of VET. While the vast, overwhelming majority of providers go about their business with the interests of their students at the core of their business model, we do see exceptions. These are the flies in the ointment which must be called out and penalised. Again, during our committee inquiry last year, we also heard, as the member for Wills just said, some of the most unbelievable stories about taxpayers' money and, indeed, the money of the people seeking qualification being completely wasted.

We heard about a provider who specialised in training for underground mining. They conducted darkness training by getting the students to sit under a table and then throwing a black blanket over the top of it—to find out whether they could handle the pitch-blackness of a mine. We heard of a provider who trained people in driving trucks on mine sites. They did this in simulators only. This one guy passed the training and was accepted onto a mine. He got out to the mine site and, to get into the big tipper trucks, he had to climb up a ladder. That is when he found out he had severe vertigo. He froze completely. The site had to be shut down while they brought an EWP, a scissor lift, on the back of a tilt tray through the site to go and talk him down. Think of the massive cost of those big trucks and the amount of money that goes through those sites. That this person could get onto a mine site without finding out whether or not he could handle heights, even on a ladder, seems unbelievable to me.

We also heard about the predatory practices of some organisations. Recently, a constituent in my electorate, Ms Susan Stephenson, contacted my office regarding her son Mitchell. Mitchell has been trying to get into work for some time and was hoping to get a position with a warehouse company, which would have given him work while studying and made him less of a burden on the welfare system. The provider did not put him through enough course modules for the right tickets, and he was then left to try and get the job when he was technically unskilled. Mitchell was put through a certificate IV. He was told by the provider that he had to; otherwise, he would lose his benefits. He had told his provider a few months earlier of his plans to do IT, but they still put him through the cert IV before he studied for a cert III. Today, to get that job he still needs a cert III. He and his mum had to come up with $5,200 of cold, hard cash to do the training while working only part-time. My office put Ms Stephenson on to the new National Training Complaints Hotline; and, the next day, the provider was on the phone trying to sort things out. But it should not have got to that stage. Ms Stephenson told me:

I think anything that is going to make these training organisations more accountable will be of benefit to young people. I'm sure there are plenty of young people who are still in Mitchell's situation that because no one jumped up and down about it for them, they are stuck not being able to look at changing to study something they are more likely to get a job in.

On Friday, at my office, I am meeting with a constituent who applied to complete a cert III in an area in which she wanted to improve. As the member for Wills, the member for Cunningham and just about everyone who has spoken in this debate has shown, these stories abound. Her application was rejected because they had it in their records that she already had a cert III. She has never done any VET training before in her life but had filled out a form or something like that somewhere along the line.

We all have heard the stories about these kinds of traders. They see a program and they see an opportunity and they see money to be made. They do not care about the individual. We can go on and on about the student making an informed choice here. But, if you are a desperate 19-year-old and you have a choice of 18 weeks training for a cert III in what you want to do or three weeks for a course where you get a trip to Bali—I know what I would have done when I was a 19-year-old. This is especially so as the people making the sale know exactly how to pitch the idea so that they carry credibility. It is only down the track that the error is detected and regret sets in.

In the end, what we are talking about here is the worst kind of threat. You can lose your money, but what these predators are stealing is people's opportunity. We need to ensure that the cracks in the system, which will never, ever completely disappear, are as small as we can possibly make them and that we react quickly. That is what with legislation goes to. No system is foolproof or perfect. The guy in Nigeria with the $60 million he has to get out of the country and all he needs is your bank details is still getting takers in this country today. If you have a good sales technique, you will find people you can play like a fiddle. What we are all talking about here are taxpayers' funds and the education of our community, and both are precious and should be respected.

What we need to do is to back our good providers and work with them. We have to ensure that our auditing regime is compatible with their business models. Many of these organisations have international students, and the audit process can seem unrelenting and pervasive. It is the guy down the road who operates out of an imported Nissan Skyline that we want to get out of the VET sector, not the providers of quality education.

This bill seeks to improve the quality of Australia's VET system. It will allow ASQA to act faster in responding to emerging quality issues. It will reduce the regulatory burden on consistently high performing training providers. More than anything, this bill allows ASQA to pursue individuals and organisations which want to just rip off people and take the money. It will introduce a quality standard provision. It will allow ASQA to pursue not only RTOs but those claiming to be RTOs.

This sector, to use a colloquial term, needs some love. It has been bashed by dodgy traders who give people and organisations who really care about their students and their futures a bad name.

We need to address the regulatory body to ensure that they can adequately protect not only the people receiving the training but the taxpayer as well. We are putting in another $68 million from the taxpayer to ensure ASQA can play their part. This is on top of the nearly $6 billion this year in support for VET through direct funding for programs, support to the states and territories, and student loans. All this money is courtesy of the taxpayer, who supports it. The taxpayer supports these things because they provide a return to them and our communities.

These amendments continue the government's approach to VET reform. Malcolm White, the acting CEO of TAFE Directors Australia, said in a media release on 25 February 2015:

The legislation is an important step in enabling the regulator to act quickly to address the practices of a few unscrupulous training providers that are damaging the reputation of VET. TDA looks forward to this legislation being supported in both Houses.

We are creating a VET system that supports both the students and the providers, a system that will provide the workforce for Australia's future.

I would like to make one final plea on behalf of TAFE. If we do not watch out, TAFE will end up being a provider of education that is incredibly expensive and of education to the illiterate, the infirm and the disabled, and nobody else. We have an asset in TAFE in this country, and it should be supported, but it has to be supported by the state governments. That is who has to support it, because that is who runs it. We can provide the money, but we have to make sure that we as a parliament stand up here and defend TAFE and drive through COAG the message—the member for Cunningham and I are one on this—that we value VET and we value TAFE for what they do for our community. I do not disagree with a single word of the member for Cunningham's amendment but I question whether this bill is the place for that discussion. I therefore support the bill but not the amendment. ASQA must be supported. ASQA must be Australia-wide and it must be a strong defender and able to move into these places and get these unscrupulous traders out of the game. That is the secret. I thank the House.

Matt Thistlethwaite (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I speak in support of the passage of the National Vocational Education and Training Regulator Amendment Bill 2015 and also of the second-reading amendment moved by the shadow minister. We have all seen the emails and advertisements encouraging people to start a vocational training course using phrases like 'Buy now, pay later,' or 'Get a free iPad,' selling to students courses they never intended to study or delivering courses in fewer hours and online. These are some of the aggressive tactics of an increasing number of private vocational training providers.

Educating the population is a noble and desirable objective. There is no doubt that the more educated the population is the more productive our economy is. Over time, the wealthier our nation is the higher the standard of living we enjoy. So we need to encourage people to take on education. But in doing that we need also to ensure that those who are offering courses, particularly in the vocational education market, are offering realistic courses and alternatives for students and are doing so in a way that ensures transparency and an ethical and open manner.

Nobody wins when the service provided is of poor quality or the student is ill suited to the training. It is not just about the number of courses that are operated and offered; it is also about the quality and the ethics behind the offering of those courses. It is crucial that the education suit the person, the courses be appropriate and the outcomes realistic.

In recent years there has been a very large increase in the number of people taking on vocational education and training courses. Unfortunately, in many cases they have signed up for courses they were unqualified for or for courses that the provider or the broker knew or had a very good inclination that the student would have very little chance of completing and ultimately repaying their VET FEE-HELP debt to the government. So it is important that we have greater transparency in the marketing of these courses.

In some cases, people are unaware who the provider is when they sign up for a course. They may go through a broker who will attract them to a course in a particular way. They will sign up online, but it is not very clear to the person when they sign up for the course who is actually providing the training and, ultimately, who provides and qualifies the person in the course they have enrolled in.

In its submission to the inquiry by the Senate Education and Employment References Committee into private VET providers, Inclusion Australia revealed a plethora of troubling stories. It provided firsthand accounts of spruikers signing up individuals with intellectual disabilities to courses that were expensive and offering totally unachievable qualifications and of sales people roaming the streets and signing up students with the promise of free laptops and the likelihood that, as long as they never earn above the threshold of $53,000, they will never have to repay the debt associated with the course. There were even reports of disadvantaged students and unemployed people outside local Centrelink offices being recruited to training companies.

A University of Sydney study has revealed that some of Australia's largest training companies are reporting profit margins of more than 50 per cent. To date, the RTOs' proclivity to distance themselves from some of the tactics of the spruikers or brokers who operate on their behalf has been a significant barrier to linking the RTOs with those who are undertaking the activities on their behalf.

This bill seeks to tie the responsibility between the course provider and the broker operating on their behalf. The bill allows a more rapid response by the minister and the regulator to quality standard issues, creates a new offence of offering to provide a VET course without disclosing the name and registration code of the relevant provider, and extends the period of registration able to be granted by the regulator from five to seven years. These are all good quality transparency measures that the opposition supports and build on the work that the previous Labor government did in establishing the quality framework around vocational education and training.

Whilst this bill is designed to improve regulatory oversight of the sector, it does not address the damage to individuals that has already occurred or propose action to engage with the community to minimise future problems. The actions of unscrupulous RTOs and brokers have had serious impacts on many vulnerable individuals, and many of those have been highlighted in the speeches of members of parliament in this debate. I think we have all been contacted by students, prospective students and parents of students who have had concerns and troubles with the way that many RTOs have operated and some of the activities that they have engaged in to sign people up to courses. The reports of people being targeted and left with whopping great debts and no qualifications or useless qualifications must be addressed. The government needs to look with more urgency at the notion of the protection of students in circumstances such as these. Labor is calling on the government to immediately seek a consumer protection information campaign by the ACCC, including advice for people who need to seek redress, and consider other mechanisms available to strengthen consumer protections.

However, for the time being, the reality, according to analysis by the Grattan Institute, is that 40 per cent of vocational students will never repay their student loans—that is a very troubling figure. In order to maintain quality in the VET sector, in 2011 Labor established the national regulator, the Australian Skills Quality Authority. Since its establishment in 2011, ASQA has received more than 4,000 complaints and conducted 3,000 audits. It was recently announced that ASQA would lead an investigation into 23 vocational education institutions following widespread allegations of students being tricked into signing up for courses.

It was in 2007 that the Howard government extended the use of VET FEE-HELP to include this sector for approved diploma and advanced diploma courses. VET FEE-HELP commenced in 2009 and, in 2011, in order to maintain quality in this sector, Labor established the Quality Framework through ASQA.

It has been a tactic of the government to seek to blame some of the circumstances that are occurring in this industry on the previous Labor government, claiming that it is Labor's fault that students have been undertaking courses and signed up by providers under predatory circumstances—they have been unable to complete courses; dollars have been wasted; debt has been extended—but this is a really, really narrow focused and baseless attack and is quite plainly and simply wrong. Labor, based on the information that MPs were receiving, conducted a number of inquiries—there was a Senate inquiry involved—and acted on the recommendations of those inquiries. Labor has held a strong belief that there needs to be appropriate regulation of all education sectors to ensure that there is integrity in the system, that there is quality in outcomes but also that there is transparency so people can make informed decisions in a marketplace about whether or not the course is appropriate and whether or not, importantly, they are in a position to complete the course.

In New South Wales, TAFE students have been struggling with a number of issues associated with changes to the system. In 2014, 40 per cent of students were slugged an additional $500 to $1,500 for courses under a new regime. To rectify this, the New South Wales Labor opposition have announced a $100 million TAFE rescue plan designed to abolish some of the measures that have been introduced by the current Liberal government. They have also promised to reverse some of the hikes in fees that have occurred to guarantee funding to TAFE by capping the amount of public funds that can be contestable by private operators up to 30 per cent and commission a landmark review of education and training in New South Wales after year 10.

Federally, the Abbott government has also, unfortunately, removed support for students in this sector, the VET sector. It has taken the axe to the skills portfolio, cutting $2 billion since the last budget. We have all seen programs such as Tools For Your Trade that have been cut. I have received emails from students and, indeed, from small business employers in our community, who are concerned that many of their apprentices will drop out of the trade because that vital support has gone. At a time when people are not earning a realistic and liveable wage because they are on an apprenticeship, they need all the support they can get to maintain a standard of living, particularly older apprentices. It is very important that the government understands that support for vocational education and training is crucial in ensuring that we are keeping a good flow of apprentices coming through the system.

Nonetheless, this bill does have Labor's support. I also support the second reading amendment that has been moved by the shadow minister. We are firmly of the belief that more must be done to protect students and young Australians and provide them with the proper support that they need to better themselves, to attain better work, to contribute to the future of our nature and, ultimately, to ensure that our nation is more productive because we have educated a greater number of people. But that is based on ensuring that the system delivers ethical outcomes and provides transparency and accountability in the marketing of courses so that young students in particular who are undertaking these courses are in a position to make informed decisions about their future and are signing up for courses that are appropriate and that, ultimately, they can complete so that they can go into the workforce, begin earning money and, where they have taken out a VET FEE-HELP loan, pay that money back. On that basis, we support these increased transparency measures.

Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I, too, rise to support the National Vocational Education and Training Regulator Amendment Bill 2015. I note the bipartisan support for this bill, and I think that this must be a very special day in the House in the great Australian parliament, given that it is the second bipartisan-supported action since question time.

It is completely understandable, when all of us, from all sides of the Australian political system, know what a terrible situation has been developing over time in relation to the Australian national vocational education and training system. We have an incredible series of great institutions in Australia who have built up reputations internationally and domestically as offering the world's best education, but this sector has often been populated by shonks who have damaged the reputation of Australia's education and training. They have also damaged those who took up many of these courses. Students have been damaged in their career progression, or they have even been so disheartened by their treatment and the debts that they have accumulated that they have become less employable. That is a great tragedy for the Australian community.

It is high time that someone—and of course it had to be us—looked very closely at this national vocational education and training system and put some rigour and quality standards and assurance practices into the system. We are now going to have new quality standards that will quickly address the problems with VET providers and their courses. I know that the opposition is supporting this bill, and their various speakers have been describing all of the terrible circumstances and cases that have been brought to their attention. Why didn't they do something about it? This problem has been well-known for quite a while.

We have an opportunity to start again, in a sense, to weed out the shonks who have made themselves a lot of money posing as the registered training organisations in our education and training sector. We will be extending the registration period for RTOs from five to seven years, but we will not have to wait until their re-registration before we can look closely at how they are performing. We will be able to look at their performance, their quality, the experience of their students, and their courses well before they are up for re-registration. We are going to enable the Australian Skills Quality Authority, ASQA, to focus its attention on investigating and acting upon high-risk and poor-quality providers. They will be given additional resources and a focus to do that.

One of the sad things that has come about as a result of these shonks who operate in the system is that a lot of international students have been attracted to Australia by the promotion of their courses, and they have experienced course outcomes that have been far from desirable. But, many of them were not really looking to do that cooking course, the hairdressing course or the aged care course; they saw these courses as pathways to migration, or permanent residency. That pathway is quite inappropriate when it comes to these education and training courses, and the operators. In fact, what should be coming out of these courses are good employment skills—skills that are relevant for a modern economy. They should not be a surrogate for a back door, or a new way to enter a back door, into Australian citizenship.

I have to say that our welfare system has also played its part in encouraging the huge growth of poorly designed courses with ad hoc curricula and poorly qualified teachers. For a very long time, you had two options if you were long-term unemployed. If you were looking to comply with the requirements for continuing to receive the Newstart allowance and you went to one of our specially selected employment service providers, they could either find you a job—hopefully they did—or they could put you into a course. Unfortunately, so many of these courses—whether they were in rural or regional centres, or metropolitan Australia—were in things like events management, health and beauty, or management. Management was very popular. A semi-literate or illiterate person was expected to become qualified in a certificate I, II, or III such that they could step into a management position, without their literacy, numeracy, or English language skills having been addressed during the course. There have been a lot of unfortunate outcomes in our system—until we addressed them—which have unfortunately given our vocational education training sector a bad name.

Along the way, we have also threatened the viability of our TAFE sector. Our TAFE sector has, in the past, been responsible for producing some superbly qualified tradespeople, whether in the building sector or in manufacturing skills. But, if they have to compete with an RTO offering courses at a fraction of the price, and with a fraction of the time required to complete the same certificate or apprenticeship, then, obviously, the RTOs will win out, and win consistently.

I want to describe to you one case study that has come to my attention. In my electorate, two young people from the Goulburn Valley had this experience—and I know that it was the experience of many, many others. They both wanted to become qualified builders. Building was in the family. Their father was a qualified builder-tradesperson. They signed up to a Skills Victoria RTO and, in turn, they were directed to a builder who would employ them while they undertook their apprenticeship. There was a trade school that they were required to attend one day a month. Now, a trade school sounds quite impressive. You can imagine classrooms, equipment, very qualified instructors, and the class populated by students or young apprentices doing the same course as you. But in fact this trade school was sometimes held in a footy club anteroom or some other casual space. There were students from a whole range of different courses or skills work—perhaps scaffolding, tilers, painters and decorators—all in together with the building apprentices.

This so-called trade school would run for one day a month. If they had been enrolled in TAFE to do their apprenticeship, they would have been expected to attend for one week a month. You can imagine why this alternative was so popular with the employing building company or tradesman, because they got a very low paid worker who they only had to release one day month, not one week a month. The apprentices were virtually not supervised at all in terms of occupational health and safety standards. These particular young people found themselves dismantling and demolishing buildings full of asbestos. This was of enormous concern for their future health. The owner of that business did not feel this was a problem, since it was, he said, what he had been doing most of his life.

Assessing the competencies of these two young men as they undertook this course was done by on-site 'verification'. The owner of the business, the builder, or the teacher from the RTO would come to the site and ask the apprentice to pose beside some scaffolding, say, with a hammer in their hand or some other tool, and photos would be taken. The trainee was not asked whether they had in fact had anything to do with that piece of work on the building site, whether the scaffolding had been anything that they had participated in. It was simply a photo showing the student standing beside a piece of scaffolding, and the box was then ticked to say that they were competent in scaffolding. You just had to hope for a good day so that the photograph would come out clean and clear. Some apprentices involved in this sort of very unfortunate practice were able to complete a year's worth of trade school theory within a day or two. What normally would have been expected to take a year, they could complete in a day or two. As I said before, apprentices from all different trades were with the same teachers in the same room—for example, in the footy change room.

A trade apprentice would have a qualified teacher for their specific trade, learning together with students from that same trade, using proper equipment in an appropriately set-up site, such as you would find at a TAFE campus. Some apprentices working in the Skills Victoria situation could fast-track their apprenticeship and finish within two years, when at TAFE that same apprenticeship would take four years. So you walked out of that experience, often exposed to quite dangerous occupational health and safety situations, with a piece of paper saying you were a fully qualified tradesperson. You could even go and start your own business, perhaps, in building. The young person was virtually unemployable in the trade, because it would very quickly be established that they had next to no skills and, of course, very little experience.

This was a very difficult and sad situation. It worked well where someone just wanted cheap labour—an apprentice in effect doing a builder's labourer job but not at builder's labourer wages. We had to stop this. Too many young lives have been put on hold while students have had to start again. Those young apprentices who thought they would become qualified builders but ended up with a useless experience have had to go back and try a university course or a TAFE course. In a sense, they have lost precious years of their early lives.

This bill will make sure that that sort of experience will not be commonplace or acceptable into the future. It is particularly important in rural and regional Australia, where we have such a shortage of qualified tradespeople and people working in the health services sector, in tourism and especially in hospitality. We have jobs going begging across the Murray electorate, particularly in the Murray and Goulburn valleys. At the same time, one in four of our young people aged 18 to 25 are unemployed. Goulburn Ovens TAFE has struggled to make ends meet, with further cuts to their budget under Victorian governments. While they knew and understood the terrible damage being done to young apprentices through many unconscionable and shonky RTOs, the Goulburn Ovens TAFE was not always able to attract students or to offer the courses they wanted to. We have jobs going begging and we have the unemployed. This is a terrible situation.

Bendigo TAFE, previously called BRIT, has a campus in Echuca which is probably one of the best-looking TAFE campuses you could find anywhere in Victoria, but it is virtually redundant. There are virtually no courses taught at Bendigo TAFE in Echuca. Apparently its board or its governing body have decided that it is a bit of a bother to extend their educational offerings to Echuca, a regional city some two hours drive from Bendigo. Instead, they have partnered with Holmesglen college; they are quite excited about that. Meanwhile, in Echuca we have some of the highest levels of drug dependency, particularly ice; we have homelessness; and we have extreme levels of youth disappointment in the unemployment rate. Here is an institute with a glorious campus in the middle of Echuca without appropriate courses being offered or any staff to go along with those courses.

The community college just across the road struggles to teach cookery in a tiny room in an old historic building. The cookery course is oversubscribed. There are too many local young and older people wanting to do cookery to fit into the room. Within the Bendigo TAFE campus across the road is a magnificent commercial cooking facility that is empty, unused. This is the disgrace of the system that we are now finding out about.

This bill is going to make all the difference. I am so pleased that it is now receiving bipartisan support. We must have quality standards assured. Our training and education sector has suffered too much with neglect, with years of misunderstanding and mismanagement. I strongly commend this bill to the House.

Gai Brodtmann (Canberra, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Defence) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is with great pleasure that I rise to speak tonight on the National Vocational Education and Training Regulator Amendment Bill 2015. People who have listened to my speeches in this House over the years that I have been here, since 2010, know that I am a big fan of vocational education and training. I am a graduate of the wonderful Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. I was union president of that much-loved institute. It was established over 100 years ago, when access to education was limited really to the wealthy, so it is the oldest workers college in the world. It opened up opportunities to people from low socioeconomic backgrounds, from working-class backgrounds, not just in terms of trades but also in terms of access to opportunities for broader learning. It is a wonderful institute that is now offering world-class education in engineering, architecture, visual arts, fashion design, communications and journalism—which is what I did. Then you have the TAFE sector, where you have the trades being taught in an ever-decreasingly funded environment—trades such as electricians and a range of other areas. It is a fantastic institution.

Not only did I study at the wonderful RMIT but I also had the opportunity, prior to this life, to tutor at the University of Canberra. I tutored both undergraduate and postgraduate students in a range of communication areas, and I absolutely loved that role—seeing the benefits that students get from vocational education, in terms of the confidence that they gain from actually having a skill that they can go out and get a job with, as well as getting a bit more of the arts, a bit of English, a bit of a language, a bit of thinking time as well, in addition to vocational education. The University of Canberra, again, is one of our great institutions here in Canberra. It was wonderful to be associated with those students and that institution and also to tutor there. I miss it terribly. I keep running into the students when I go out to events. They are all very flattering about my tutoring abilities, which is good, but I miss the joy that you get from passing on your knowledge. I had 20 years of experience in a particular industry, and it was wonderful to impart my lessons learnt to those students. That is the beauty of vocational education—you are giving people valuable, tangible skills that they can take on and learn and then use to get a great job and have a wonderful career.

Members in this place do not just know about my passion for vocational education and training but also know about my passion for education more broadly. I have spoken many, many times about how education allowed my sisters and me to escape a cycle of intergenerational disadvantage. My great-grandmother, my grandmother and my mother all lived timid lives, because they did not get the opportunities they wanted because of their lack of education. My great-grandmother left school at about 11. She was a domestic in the western district of Victoria. My grandmother left school at about 13 and, as many people in this chamber know, worked at three jobs just to keep food on the table and to keep the state away. She was a single mother like my great-grandmother, and the state was knocking on the door because, essentially, she was poor. My mother had to leave school at 15 because there was no money in the house. My working class matriarchy was denied choice and opportunity as a result of a lack of education. Fortunately, my sisters and I, thanks to the tenacity and commitment of my mother, had the opportunity to be educated. It is a powerful transformer. I am not just talking here about schools and universities; I am talking about vocational education and training. It not only generates macroeconomic benefits for Australia; it empowers people: it gives them skills and trades that they can go out and get jobs with, make money and be a contributing member of the community. Education allowed me to break the cycle of poverty and disadvantage, and that is why I am keen for children, adults and even mature age students to gain skills so that they can choose their own paths, so that they can get an education and have a choice in their lives.

We all know that skills and trades are the backbone of our economy. Anyone in this place knows that if you try to get an emergency plumber on the weekend, particularly here in Canberra, it is a very difficult task. I have my Canberran friends here, and they are acknowledging this in their smiles. It is a very difficult task and also an extremely expensive task. But it is not just in Canberra that we have skill shortages, even though we do have a lot of skill shortages here in the national capital. We have skill shortages in many parts of Australia. We need more skilled tradespeople across a range of sectors, so we need to do everything we can to strengthen our vocational education and training sector.

This bill seeks to do that. The bill is designed to improve regulatory oversight of the sector, and that is why Labor is supporting the bill. However, led by my colleague the member for Cunningham and the shadow assistant minister, Labor is seeking to make a number of amendments to the bill, because currently the bill does not address the damage to individuals that has already occurred; nor does it propose action to engage with the community to minimise future problems. The actions of unscrupulous registered training organisations—shonks, sharks, we have heard all the language—and their brokers have had a serious impact on vulnerable individuals. We all know the stories; they are horrendous. The reports of people being left with large debts and no qualifications or useless qualifications have to be addressed.

I think everyone in this place would agree on the need to strengthen the integrity of our VET sector. We have heard some absolute horror stories come out of this sector recently where RTOs have preyed on vulnerable students and signed them up for large VET FEE-HELP debts. In some cases the students are not even aware that they have signed up for a course, let alone a significant debt often around $20,000.

Under VET FEE-HELP, students are able to access up to $97,728 in total for most courses offered by eligible RTOs. In other cases, incentives such as iPads, laptops and shopping vouchers are being used to target disadvantaged communities in Western Sydney—and many of my colleagues who represent those communities have spoken about the shonkiness of these sharks who are taking advantage of vulnerable people and leaving them with a worthless qualification or no qualification at all.

In May last year, TheDaily Telegraph reported $200 spotter's fees were being paid to people to sign up to courses costing up to $25,000. The problem is exacerbated by RTOs employing brokers to recruit students on their behalf and then attempting to distance themselves from the actions of the brokers. This bill takes some steps to put the responsibility on the RTO for the actions of their brokers. There is also a change to allow more a rapid response to quality standard issues by the minister and the regulator.

Growth of VET FEE-HELP has exceeded all projections with more than $1.6 billion allocated last year. The Grattan Institute has warned that 40 per cent of vocational loans will never be repaid. This becomes a financial burden to the Commonwealth and needs to be addressed.

I want to briefly mention the features of this bill. It contains, as many speakers have outlined, amendments to the National Vocational Education and Training Regulator Act 2011 that support ongoing reform measures including protecting the integrity of the VET system; giving the regulator capacity to respond to emerging issues; and technical amendments to improve the efficiency and operation of the act and, consequently, the regulator. It also contains no specific consumer protection provisions.

While this bill is designed to improve regulatory oversight of the sector, it does not address the damage to individuals that has already occurred or propose action to engage with the community to minimise future problems. In Labor's view, the government must act with more urgency to ensure the protection of students is prioritised.

This bill creates a new offence of prohibiting a person from advertising or offering to provide all or part of a VET course without including the name and registration code of the responsible RTO. It extends the period of registration able to be granted by the regulator from five to seven years, and this should be amended so that the extension from five to seven years is granted only to existing low-risk providers at renewal of registration. It also makes a condition of registration that an NVR registered training organisation must satisfy the quality standards set by the minister by legislative instrument.

I have only got a short amount of time left, so I want to focus on Labor's proud achievements when it comes to vocational education and training, because we have a very proud track record. The $3 billion we provided for the Building Australia's Future Workforce program provides some 130,000 new training places for apprentices. In 2011, Labor established a national regulator—the Australian Skills Quality Authority. Labor then amended the legislation in 2012 to increase the coverage of VET FEE-HELP to all diplomas, associate diplomas and to conduct a trial to extend VET FEE-HELP to certificate IV courses. This meant that any Australian could have access to vocational training, no matter their background or financial position, which is particularly important—access for all.

Everyone in this place should want to improve the integrity of our vocational education and training sector. Last year our shadow minister Senator Carr and the shadow assistant minister called on the Auditor-General to investigate VET FEE-HELP to ensure that skills funding was being used in accordance with the intent of the legislation. The Auditor General has requested that a performance audit be included in the Australian National Audit Office's 2015-16 work program, and we support that.

It would be remiss of me, while talking about vocational education and training, not to mention the $2 billion worth of funding that has been cut from the skills portfolio by the Abbott government since the budget. I want to begin with something that is dear to my heart: trade training centres. We are talking about nearly $1 billion of investment in trade training centres gone as a result of the Abbott government's cuts. It is not just here in Canberra where we saw planned trade training centres evaporate into thin air—gone—even though the ACT senator ACT had great joy and was actively engaged in opening the trade training centres that Labor had funded. It was appalling that so many trade training centres had their funding cut here and so many young Canberrans have been denied the great benefits that flow from those centres—and not just Canberrans but right across the nation.

We have a suite of trade training centres—thanks to Labor—in Tuggeranong in the south of Canberra and we have a sustainable learning centre. We have a number of trade training centres at Catholic schools and colleges. They are providing fantastic opportunities for students to learn carpentry, computer skills, plumbing and building while, at the same time, learning French and English and continuing with year 12. Not only do they do year 12 but they also get a cert III in a trade—fantastic—and the parents whose kids are undertaking this training through trade training centres absolutely love it. They are quite envious of their children and the fact that they have the opportunity to gain a trade while completing year 12. It is extraordinary. Trade training centres are fantastic idea, and it is an absolute outrage that the Abbott government chose to discontinue funding to those centres.

Labor has a strong record on investing in skills and helping students and workers to obtain the skills they need to participate and compete in the modern workforce. We also have a strong track record on quality assurance. Sadly, the actions of unscrupulous RTOs and brokers have had serious impacts on vulnerable individuals.

The government should immediately seek a consumer protection information campaign by the ACCC, including advice for people who need to seek redress and consider other mechanisms available to strengthen consumer protections.

Mark Coulton (Parkes, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I too rise this evening to speak on the National Vocational Education and Training Regulator Amendment Bill 2015. I might just comment on the member for Canberra's contribution. One of the reasons that the Abbott government has to be financially responsible is because of the mismanagement of the economy by the previous government and the fact that, despite the problems in the VET sector, nothing was done and millions of dollars have been squandered because action has not been taken until now.

I too have some experience in the VET sector. Before I came to this place, I was the chairman of the Gwydir Learning Region, which is a community based learning organisation. We were involved in delivering a whole range of training and education, not only to school students through the local schools in the Gwydir Shire but also to many adults. What we saw was quite transformative as many adults in their mature years, after their children had grown up or at least were at school, obtained certificates in aged care, child care, IT, management, rural skills and retail—a whole range of things—and became actively involved in the workforce. Indeed, I think well over 100 people have been trained in aged care by the Gwydir Learning Region and those people are now working in aged care right across the north-west of New South Wales.

This bill has been introduced as part of the rolling reforms for the sector which are about improving quality, recognising the good work of VET providers and ensuring that students are given the right protections in the VET market. Before I go any further, I will say that in my electorate we have many VET training organisations that are completely legitimate. They do the job that they are supposed to do. They are dedicated to education and the students that they provide it to. I will talk about some problems that we have had, but they have mostly been because of out-of-town organisations and fly-by-nighters that have come through.

This bill is necessary to address the concerns that have had some media coverage about organisations that have been targeting vulnerable people to sign up to courses without a full understanding of the implications. This was brought to my attention at about the middle of last year. I had a meeting with a training operator in my office in Dubbo who came to me quite concerned that there had been some training operators targeting aged-care facilities—going to aged-care facilities and signing up the residents of those facilities to courses for which they had no ability and they possibly had no understanding of what they were signing up to. They were signing these people up to a large debt that ultimately was against their name. It is completely unscrupulous behaviour.

I notified the minister at the time that this was a concern and that we needed to be on the alert for this type of behaviour. Not long after, in November last year, I got alarming reports in the town of Coonamble, which is in the north-west of New South Wales, where an operator—maybe several operators—over a period of time came to town and were offering $50 cash inducements. They set up in a local club and people turned up in their droves. I heard anecdotally that possibly 100 people turned up. They received $50 cash in hand and the promise of an iPad and a laptop to come down the track. They were signed up to managerial type courses, and many of these people were illiterate and really had no concept of what they were agreeing to. They were just told that, if they spoke to a particular person, they would get $50 cash. These people signed up to a debt that is against their name. Admittedly, some or many of them will not get to the income threshold where that would need to be paid off. Possibly, they will never get to a position where they will be able to pay that off. Not only have these people been badly affected but the Australian taxpayer as a whole has been ripped off by billions of dollars.

If the Commonwealth government were going to put money into a town like Coonamble for training purposes, I could guarantee you that there would be many other ways of providing such a large sum of money—as much as these companies have ripped off—that would have benefits to the people in that community. I am very pleased that this bill will clamp down on that behaviour. I certainly believe that there are ongoing investigations into this behaviour. Personally, I would like to see these organisations not only stripped of their licence to operate but prosecuted. This is fraud on a massive scale. The previous speaker mentioned the dollars that have gone into this VET fee program. It is a program that I am very fond of and very passionate about. Education is transformative. People in my electorate, in many cases, missed an opportunity in their younger days to stay at school. This program gives them an opportunity to upskill, to get into their first job or to gain skills that would get them into a better job.

I am a big fan of this program, and it makes me sick in the stomach to talk about this unscrupulous behaviour. The citizens of the town of Coonamble were justifiably outraged at this behaviour—that someone could blow in from out of town and not only sign all these people up to a debt that would be permanently against their name but also rip off the Australian taxpayer for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

There is a duty to protect students from unscrupulous training providers, and we want good quality vocational training systems that we can trust. We also need to ensure that the link between training and jobs is real. What we saw with the Labor government was that they were interested in training for training's sake. The coalition believes in assisting people into real jobs in order for them to experience the prosperity that comes with employment. The coalition is committed to focusing on helping people to develop the skills that employers want—skills that lead from training to a job. The previous government, as I mentioned before, failed to safeguard the standards, and now the coalition has to go in to clean up the mess that was left. There was an indication that these dodgy operators had been there for some time.

The bill will create a new measure, a quality standard, so that any problems with VET providers or courses can be dealt with quickly. Another frustration I have had is that the people who could see that something was drastically wrong but there was no clear passage for those concerns to be brought to light. It is important to strike while the iron is hot. The current system around standards, established in 2012, requires the agreement of the states and territories and the whole process can take up to 12 months. Through this legislation and the newly-created quality standard, we will be able to deal with emerging and critical issues that are impacting on quality training. This is effectively an 'emergency power', whilst still maintaining avenues for consultation with states, territories and industry stakeholders.

Through this legislation changes will be made so that it must be absolutely clear to a student which organisation is providing the training. I have heard some of the other contributors to this debate say that there is an arm's length approach between RTOs and recruiters. It is a way of ring-fencing their organisation from the dodgy operations and that way they do not have to take responsibility for what others do in their name. Service providers will now be responsible for the services delivered on behalf of the brokers, and these arrangements must all be covered by a written agreement. Once again, I am hearing that some of these people who signed up that day in Coonamble may not have even signed a written agreement.

Through the changes in this bill ASQA will now be able to pursue anyone who does not make it clear who is responsible for the quality of the training. ASQA will have further authority to request information to assist in their investigations and to allow ASQA to share the information that they gather with other agencies.

The bill changes the registration period from five to seven years. It is important to recognise that most RTOs are doing the right thing—I said that at the outset. The RTOs I am aware of in the Parkes electorate are upfront, high-class organisations, and they are doing the right thing. It has been shown that the re-registration process is particularly poor at identifying whether a training organisation is performing to the appropriate standard. Instead, this re-registration funding will be used for ASQA to target those services which are under-performing and are not acting within the guidelines and new quality standards.

What has the government already done? The government has already acted to improve quality in the VET sector. For new providers from 1 January, and existing providers from 1 April, it is compulsory for training providers to make it clear to students exactly what they are signing up for every time their debt increases. The new regulatory standards make training providers responsible for the services delivered by brokers on their behalf. The government has established a direct line for the public to bring forward any complaints or issues that they have. This makes it easier for complaints to be heard and dealt with. There is a national complaints hotline—133873—and an email address—skillin@education.gov.au—as well as information on the government's education website. When people started to be concerned about the massive fraud in Coonamble, they did not know where to go. They contacted me and, with the help of the minister's office, we could deal with it. But this new service will give anyone who has a concern a direct hotline. They can find out whether an organisation is legitimate and they can have the comfort of knowing whether they are doing something that is above board whether they should be wary of what they have been told. I would encourage anyone who believes that they have been targeted by an organisation which has not been clear about the arrangement to be entered into through VET Fee-Help to ring the national complaints hotline and get an investigation under way.

The government has allocated the Australian Skills Quality Authority $68 million over the next four years to enforce these new tough standards. ASQA will be focusing on those RTOs, marketers and brokers who are doing the wrong thing and allowing those who are doing the right thing to get on with the job of providing vocational training in order for people to get into the workforce. The government is looking at further action to ensure that the right level of regulation and compliance exists to deal with those RTOs who are not delivering a quality service. It is important to get the balance right by ensuring that those RTOs who are doing the right thing get on with the job—and the extended period of registration will help with this—and ensuring that those with poor or dodgy practices are identified and brought up to standard. I feel privileged to have been able to speak of this piece of legislation—to take an issue that has been of great concern to my constituents, to support legislation that will alleviate their concerns and that will put some stability into what is an essential service for the people of Australia.

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

I rise to make some comments in relation to the National Vocational Education and Training Regulator Amendment Bill 2015, and I echo the comments made by the member for Parkes. I also have concerns about this sector, and indeed the way in which many students have been left vulnerable and exposed as a result of the failure to properly regulate the provision of such training to these young people. Therefore, anything this bill can do that can provide better oversight for this sector and better accountability to the students—and indeed to the parents of those students, who quite often would be providing support for them—is a good thing.

There is no doubt that there have been some significant concerns about the way in which the VET sector has been operating. Only recently there has been a spate of media reports of unscrupulous registered training organisations preying on vulnerable students and signing them up for large VET FEE-HELP debts. In many cases, the students are not even aware that they have signed up for a course, let alone that they have a significant debt—often around $20,000. It is shameful that we could have a sector that exposes young people to such an awful and vexed situation.

Under VET FEE-HELP, students are able to access up to $97,728 in total for most courses offered by eligible RTOs. One of the real problems with this area is that it has been exacerbated by RTOs employing brokers to recruit students on their behalf and then attempting to distance themselves from the actions of brokers. This bill, the opposition accepts, goes some way to putting responsibility on the RTOs for the actions of brokers. There is also a change to allow a more rapid response to quality standards issues by the minister and the regulator. We will have to wait and see whether the remedial action by the government will have the intended effect in this area, but we certainly hope it does. I share the concerns of members, not only from this side but indeed the previous speaker, the member for Parkes, who raised real concerns about what has happened to young people as a result.

The VET sector is a very important area and a very significant area, not only for young people acquiring skills in a labour market that is changing so rapidly but also to meet the demands in the labour market, to ensure that we can anticipate the emerging demands in skills and to ensure that employers are able to employ people with requisite skills in those areas of demand. Therefore, we have to have a flexible but very robust arrangement so that people are not being ripped off when they seek to undergo training and so that employers are able to find people with requisite skills to fill vacancies in a very fast-changing labour market. It is this critical area that needs to operate effectively. Beyond even the intent of this bill and its effect, we have to examine this whole area as to its effectiveness in delivering what it is intended that it deliver. We have seen already some state governments make some awful decisions about taking out significant resources in the VET sector and also allowing bottom feeders, if I could use that phrase, to come into this area without the expertise, dedication to the students or rigor required to provide the skills necessary for these young students and trainees.

It is an area that I think has had significant challenges. If this bill can in some way mitigate the problems associated with the exploitation of students and the problems with the relationship between the RTOs and the brokers, then that has to be a good thing. But I think more needs to be done, not only at the federal level but at the state level as well. I think there have been too many providers without sufficient standards. As a result, we have seen students undertake mickey mouse courses, left with debt and therefore not better off but worse off. So, there is a lot to be done here, and not only does the Commonwealth have to attend to these issues but state governments also have an obligation to ensure that they defend the VET sector.

I think a terrible thing was done when money was ripped out of the TAFE sector by a series of state governments—the previous Victorian government and indeed the current New South Wales government—but I do not think these problems are purely the result of conservative governments. I think it is an area that needs attention to the extent that concerns may be properly rectified, concerns that the minister is seeking to rectify with the enacting of this bill. The opposition supports them, and we hope that we see fewer students exploited, that we see fewer students ripped off by dodgy providers and that wee see a regime that is there for the students, ensuring that they acquire the skills necessary to be employed in the labour market, to be productive and to be able to contribute to their community and to their country.

Having said that, I think the state governments have to have a rethink in this area, along with some of the efforts by the federal government. I think a lot more could be done to ensure that the training that is provided is going to be something that employers are in need of and something that prospective employees, namely young people looking to enter the labour market, will be better off with—of that examination of the deficiencies in the system is undertaken and proper reform is enacted.

Debate interrupted.