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

I thank Senator McKenzie, one of this Senate's leading contributors on education policy, for her question. The vet fee help scheme and particularly the changes and opening up of it that the Labor Party introduced in 2012 will go down as one of the most wasteful policy experiments in Australian history, standing alongside the likes of pink batts and school halls.

Senator Wong interjecting—

Senator Wong, I take full responsibility for cleaning up the mess. I will happily take full responsibility for cleaning up the mess.

Let's have a look at what the VET FEE-HELP scheme metric demonstrated. They saw the number of students between 2009 and 2015 jump by some 5,000 per cent. During that time every course cost more than tripled from $4,000 to $14,000.

Senator Wong interjecting—

I know Senator Wong and those opposite do not want to hear about this. That was a massive growth in costs for students. The loans increased by some 11,000 per cent from $26 million initially to $300-odd million in 2012 to $2.9 billion by 2015. It was the expansion that Labor undertook in 2012 that opened it up to rorters and fraudsters without sufficient student protections in place.

Our government put in place 20 reforms over the last couple of years—banning inducements and payments based on student progression. We have driven down the volume of loans this year by hundreds of millions of dollars. Yet we realised that it was still necessary to get those inappropriate providers out of the system, so we had to bring the VET FEE-HELP program to an end and replace it with something that is more credible, is built from the ground up and has all of the appropriate safeguards and protections in place. That is exactly what the Turnbull government is doing to protect students and vocational education in Australia.