Ged Kearney (Cooper, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Health and Aged Care) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last year I met with some excellent VET, vocational education and training, providers in my electorate. They are registered training organisations that care about their students, that met all accreditation standards and that produced skilled and satisfied workers. They told me they could not compete with dodgy RTOs—RTOs that recruited from overseas, bringing international students to Melbourne by advertising that there were no assessments, no classes to attend, and no practical placements required, and that a certificate would be guaranteed. The only promise they made was that the so-called students could work here. Work visas are not the purview of the vocational education and training system.

The excellent RTO providers are now very pleased—in fact, they're over the moon—about the changes brought about by Labor's recent VET bill. Some years back when I was at the nurses union, a member alerted us to a very unethical situation with an RTO at a nursing home where she worked. The owner of the nursing home had set up an RTO to train aged-care workers. The thing was, in order to gain the required certificate, the students were told they had to do six months clinical placement with no pay, no minimum hours and no industrial protections at all. Basically, the RTO was being used to garner free labour for the provider's own nursing home. These are just two examples of dodgy providers exploiting the system and students for personal gain.

I'm proud to say that the Albanese Labor government is unequivocally committed not only to education but also to the integrity of our education system. We know that having access to a great education from early learning and schools right through to universities and TAFE is the ticket to a lifetime of opportunity. Unfortunately, the vocational education and training sector under the previous government was neglected and overlooked. Upon election it was clear we'd inherited the worst skills crisis in 50 years. The number of people completing apprenticeships had been falling for more than a decade. The VET sector had endured underfunding, deregulation, loose rules of market entry, a complete lack of national cohesion and an obsession for competition at the expense of strategic collaboration. Fixing a fractured skills and training sector is vital to the health of every single sector of our economy.

I'm proud to say that the Albanese government is committed to lifting quality and ensuring the integrity of our vocational education and training sector. The National Vocational Education and Training Regulator Amendment (Strengthening Quality and Integrity in Vocational Education and Training No. 1) Bill 2024 passed by the House just this week continues this critical work. The bill ensures that the Australian Skills Quality Authority has the powers to take swift action to deter and remove non-genuine or unscrupulous registered training organisations and apply greater scrutiny to new RTOs. The bill will support the majority of providers, who are actually doing the right thing. Our VET sector is here for students to build a better future for themselves and to deliver the skills our country so desperately needs.

One of the many wonderful education providers in my electorate is the Preston campus of Melbourne Polytechnic. At this fabulous campus, thousands of local students study at a state-of-the-art facility as they train for a variety of critical industries, ranging from cutting-edge courses in information technology and cybersecurity to community services, health support, age and disability care, hospitality and so much more. I visited recently to see some of this cutting-edge technology when they were training plumbers of the future through virtual reality goggles so they can feel what it's like to crawl in under houses, crawl into tunnels and actually do plumbing work on a virtual reality basis. It's absolutely cutting-edge teaching technology, and that's being delivered at our local TAFE.

Wherever students train, be it through Labor's hugely successful fee-free TAFE program or through private providers, they should be assured they are receiving quality training. We want to ensure Australians and those from overseas that choose to access our VET sector can be confident in the high standards of training delivered. There are over two million Australian students in the VET sector, a sector that supplies half the skills to our economy. We must support it. We must ensure that we weed out dodgy providers who undermine the system and who are trying to take advantage of students. That's why our legislation is so important, and I am very proud to support it.