Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister for Education and Training) Share this | Hansard source

Last week I announced reforms to the way VET FEE-HELP works which will ensure that over the next decade an estimated $16 billion in unnecessary student loans will not be taken out. That is the scale of the problem that we are confronting and taking action on. Those reforms will ban the offering of up-front inducements or incentives to students. They will make it impossible for providers to levy all of the fees associated with a diploma or advanced diploma up front in one hit at the start of a course. They will stop this notion of miraculously short diplomas occurring. They will eliminate the insidious practices we have seen like nursing home enrolments of people under the VET FEE-HELP scheme. All of these issues, of course, should have and could have been foreseen by those who opened the scheme up in 2012—those sitting opposite—but were not. We are now taking action to clamp down on it and in the process saving taxpayers billions of dollars of unnecessary loans in the future.