Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Employment Participation, Apprenticeships and Training) Share this | Hansard source

Before moving that amendment, I start with some general observations. What absolute arrogance from this government and how badly briefed this minister is, who is obviously representing the Deputy Prime Minister in this chamber. Maybe he is not entirely across everything that has been happening. One thing that he appears not to be across is that, when the Deputy Prime Minister was under a lot of pressure—because of colleges collapsing and what was happening to Indian students across Australia and students across Australia finding themselves stranded—two days before announcing her visit to India, she rushed this piece of legislation that we are debating today into the parliament. It is an important piece of legislation, and then it sat there.

We hear from the minister today that somehow this legislation was ready for 12 months. Why did the government wait until 19 August to introduce this piece of legislation if it was ready for 12 months? You know what, Minister—through you, Mr Temporary Chairman—the opposition does not control the government’s legislative agenda; the government does. The government controls the time frame with which legislation is introduced; the government controls when that legislation is brought on for debate. If you had not wasted so much time with broken promises and legislation that you knew did not have the support of the Senate—such as means-testing the private health insurance rebate—and if you had not forced the Senate to waste hours of debate on cutting patient rebates for cataract surgery, which you knew did not have the support of the Senate, only to backflip a couple of months later, and if you instead had used some of that time to deal with and prioritise legislation like this, perhaps the collapse earlier this week could have been prevented, because perhaps some of the processes in this legislation would already have been underway, as long as some of the scrutiny had been properly prioritised.

But, of course, all you can do is give a few whacks around the ears. You did not properly look at what happened. One thing I can advise you of officially, Minister, in case you have not noticed, is that there was a change in leadership in the Liberal Party; there was a reshuffle as a consequence and, yes, there have been some changes in shadow ministerial responsibilities. If that is too complicated for the Rudd Labor government to follow in their pursuit of getting legislation through the parliament, I cannot help them. It is not that complicated.

Finally, those amendments, which we circulated again as a courtesy yesterday in the Senate, had previously been circulated by Senator Mason, who then had responsibility for this legislation. They should not have come as any surprise whatsoever to the government. We understand that the government thinks it can do everything by regulation, but do you know what? On occasions the opposition does not agree. We do not agree with this principle that you have these empty vessel pieces of legislation and you put all of the detail into the regulations. Every now and then we think that something is important enough to be properly integrated into the legislation itself. That is why we move opposition amendment (1), which relates to the risk management approach to re-registration, which we do believe ought to be enshrined into the legislation with the view of ensuring a more rigorous auditing regime during the re-registration process—a re-registration process where state authorities have a proper look at the financials of the various education facilities, properly consider the accreditation level of staff employed, and consider things like the time the providers have been in operation. We think that is an important addition to this legislation and we do commend it to the committee. I now move:

(1)   Schedule 1, item 11, page 5 (after line 7), after subsection 9A(1), insert:

     (1A)    A designated authority for a State must use a risk-management approach when considering whether to recommend that an approved provider should be re-registered.