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

I might have to take Senator Sterle's advice and make it two lottery tickets, now. I thank Senator Williams for his question and for putting it on the Hansard record that, sadly, I lost the bet in standing up for my footy team a little while ago.

The government is very serious about making sure our vocational education and training sector is the best it can be, but, sadly, this government has inherited a number of problems. Today we have yet more evidence of the importance of the reforms that our government has implemented and is implementing in some of the media coverage relating to vocational education and training. What we have done today is to implement a number of reforms to Labor's VET FEE-HELP scheme. On 12 March we announced a suite of eight reforms to fix it up, which are complemented by other measures this government has put in place in providing additional funding to the regulator, ASQA. From 1 April we banned inducements; from 1 July we banned withdrawal fees. We also banned providers and their agents from engaging in misleading marketing claims. We tightened the rules around brokers and we have ensured that providers must have written agreements with those brokers. From 1 January, assuming legislation passes this place, we will be in a position to have even stronger reforms to make sure that VET providers will not be allowed to charge students up-front fees for the entirety of their course, but that in fact the incentive will be for them to progress students through that course.

The providers will have to issue a student with an invoice at least 14 days prior to each census date to give students time to withdraw from that course. There will be a minimum standard in terms of the educational capacity of a student enrolled in a high-level diploma or advanced diploma program and students will have to have the permission of a parent or guardian where they are under 18. You may think many of these reforms seem like common sense, and you may wonder why the Labor Party did not introduce them when they put the scheme in in the first place. You wonder why it is that Senator Carr did not have the foresight to see— (Time expired)