Kim Carr (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister Assisting the Leader for Science) Share this | Hansard source

in this bill. The new amendments require a number of new administrative activities in determining the loan balance for each provider. The minister has explained they will do that on the basis of averaging eight months' activity applied over the whole year. That is essentially the principle. They will have to determine what is and is not a qualified VET course. They will have to establish a system of payment to providers for payments in arrears and establish a process to suspend payments to providers who have a record of poor performance, although I believe we will have some real issues about determining that record, particularly given the history in the last two years.

I am told that the new amendment allowed us to carve out providers for courses of particular industries, and we have seen that carried today. I am sure the chamber will excuse me when I treat, with some scepticism, the department's claims, which are reflected in the government's advice to us last night, that this would be too difficult, given all these other things. I have sought advice, overnight, from experts as well, and I am reminded that TAFE prices are already published. Private provider courses are supposed to be published. We had experience of one particular college that said it was a model. It appeared before the Senate inquiry, and we asked the question: where are your prices, and, of course, they could not be found. We now discover that the ACCC is still looking for a whole lot of other things that this 'model provider' claimed it had provided.

It is not hard to establish how it could be put in place, given the current regulations to require the publication of prices, and for TAFE that already occurs. There is a second way that this can be done. Our university students are currently charged according to three broad bands of subjects that they study. At university, in this country, the maximum amount that university students are required to pay is $10,440 per year for law, for commerce, for dentistry, for medicine and for veterinary science. It is $8,900 for engineering, science, allied health, agriculture and mathematics. It is $6,256 for education, nursing and humanities. It is not hard. Those models are in place now and have been for some considerable time.

There is another little problem with this question about, 'It's too hard for us to work out what prices to charge.' In New South Wales, the Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal currently reviews all VET courses in that state, and their findings are published for every course in the state. In Victoria, TAFEs charge between $5,000 and $7,000 for low-cost courses such as business or IT. There are fee-for-service courses processes. At Holmesglen, one of the more expensive courses, nursing, is at $20,000; early childhood is $10,000; and disability is $9,000. So it strikes me that it is not hard to identify what the prices actually are. But more than that, where else within the Commonwealth do we allow people to charge whatever they like and the Commonwealth picks up the bill? Where does that occur?

There is, of course, a situation now where we are having online business diplomas with minimum operating cost and people being charged up to $20,000 for them. They are actually more expensive under the VET system now than the price people are charged to do medicine. This is particularly the case when you end up with double-diploma enrolments and the like. That is if people actually know they are enrolled. We have at the moment a cost structure which is way over the odds and has increased to extraordinary levels in the last two years.

My proposal here is that we reduce, not increase prices. We put a price cap in to control the cost of running these programs. You can use TAFE as a model. You could use the university system as a model which allows for the provision of quality training which leads to real jobs and real qualifications and still provides a reasonable profit for private operators but not these superprofits these companies have been getting. They are reliant on government subsidies through this scheme for up to 80 per cent of their revenue. You have to remember that it is not jus the Commonwealth that is tipping into this; the states are tipping in as well.

The government has a responsibility to ensure the value for taxpayers' money. We in this chamber now all accept that there are abuses and that it is better to seek boundaries for the expenditure of public moneys. We protect the most privileged professions like medicine through setting of fees at universities. We have no trouble with that. Administratively there is no difficulty whatsoever. It may well be that those same schedules could equally be applied in the VET sector with very little modification. But it appears that it is too difficult to protect the most vulnerable in the vocational education system— (Time expired)