Ewen Jones (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the National Vocational Education and Training Regulator Amendment Bill 2015. What is the problem we are trying to fix? Well, there are a few issues I have with Vocational Education and Training, or VET. I am the current chair of the House Standing Committee on Education and Employment. We completed another inquiry into TAFE last year. I say 'another inquiry' because there seem to have been a huge number of inquiries into this field by this place. When we were in Sydney and in other places around Australia, people who gave evidence often spoke of the Senate inquiry from 2001 and the great words and recommendations which came from that inquiry. When asked which of those recommendations had been implemented, and no-one could tell me a single thing which had made it into practice. We even had a Senate inquiry into TAFE and VET running concurrently with ours. I came continually to the same spot on the issue surrounding what we, as a federal government, can actually deliver for TAFE primarily, and VET in general. One of the real problems for TAFE is its acronym. It is synonymous with vocational education and training and therefore it is actually the victim of its own success. Everyone refers to the sector as TAFE and not VET. TAFE gets the blame and the credit travels very slowly.

I will move away from the legislation and speak about why ASQA needs to be a bolder and more prominent body for a moment, and I will address the base reason we have issues in VET at present. Once upon a time, TAFE was the only real player in town. You went there for everything. It was an institution but it was a hybrid form of education with a hybrid form of instructors and teachers. The old saying is that a camel is a horse designed by a committee. I see TAFE as an organisation which started off as a basic instrument and has had bits and pieces attached to it over time with soft wire and chewing gum.

During our inquiry, we saw so much good at TAFEs all over the country. We saw teachers and instructors who cared very deeply about their students and the future of the organisation. We saw fantastic facilities and central locations which are so good for students. We saw students proud to wear their 'I go to TAFE' t-shirts and polos. We saw a commitment to education and to turning out job-ready people who understand their job and why their training is important. We also saw, however, the pressure the organisation was under with inflexible workplace arrangements.

These facilities were also completely uncompetitive with others in the sector. We saw the other side of having great premises—the cost of maintaining building which are decades old, and in which it is almost impossible to make technology compliant and which are hugely expensive to air condition. We saw that open competitive tendering for services had eroded non-capital intensive courses, as they were being won by alternative suppliers of services, leaving TAFE with the high capital cost courses to maintain. If you can provide training with a laptop and a data projector, you can make a great living. If you have to provide the latest MIG and TIG welders, lathes, refrigeration equipment—as the member for Swan said earlier—vehicle hoists, plasma cutters and the like, your margins will be forever squeezed, and your business model will never be challenged by a private sector employer. The capital cost is too high. We saw with TAFE an organisation which took its community service obligation seriously. They know they are a part of our communities and that was even more evident in regional communities. Again, this is not a commercial consideration that its competitors need to take into account. We saw poor use of these expensive assets as well. They can and should do more with what they have. They are a great organisation, but we saw people coming to them with commercial kitchen facilities and asking if they could run courses at night or during holidays, because the TAFEs can be closed for an awful long time. There is a massive amount of investment there, but the TAFE organisation said no—they were not prepared to let other organisations use their facilities, even though there would be no-one else there at the time. That, to me, is inconsistent and wrong for TAFE.

Finally, what I saw was that TAFE was an organisation without a champion. To me it looked like schools were loved by state governments and universities were loved by federal governments, but TAFE was like the unwanted stepchild in the corner. It needs attention but it does not get anywhere near the same attention as the other two.

This is exposed in funding as well. We provide the state governments with massive amounts of money each year for VET, yet we as the inquiry committee were unable to find out—and I do not think the minister can find out—from state governments exactly how much of that money gets to TAFE. What comes up here is: why are we in this parliament continually working in this area when just about everything, with the exception of our funding, is ignored by state governments? One person said to me that, without federal government involvement, we would still not have national recognition of skills and qualifications. That astounds me. This is why ASQA must be brought to the table, to ensure that we have a national approach to VET.

The other side of the coin is the private providers of VET. While the vast, overwhelming majority of providers go about their business with the interests of their students at the core of their business model, we do see exceptions. These are the flies in the ointment which must be called out and penalised. Again, during our committee inquiry last year, we also heard, as the member for Wills just said, some of the most unbelievable stories about taxpayers' money and, indeed, the money of the people seeking qualification being completely wasted.

We heard about a provider who specialised in training for underground mining. They conducted darkness training by getting the students to sit under a table and then throwing a black blanket over the top of it—to find out whether they could handle the pitch-blackness of a mine. We heard of a provider who trained people in driving trucks on mine sites. They did this in simulators only. This one guy passed the training and was accepted onto a mine. He got out to the mine site and, to get into the big tipper trucks, he had to climb up a ladder. That is when he found out he had severe vertigo. He froze completely. The site had to be shut down while they brought an EWP, a scissor lift, on the back of a tilt tray through the site to go and talk him down. Think of the massive cost of those big trucks and the amount of money that goes through those sites. That this person could get onto a mine site without finding out whether or not he could handle heights, even on a ladder, seems unbelievable to me.

We also heard about the predatory practices of some organisations. Recently, a constituent in my electorate, Ms Susan Stephenson, contacted my office regarding her son Mitchell. Mitchell has been trying to get into work for some time and was hoping to get a position with a warehouse company, which would have given him work while studying and made him less of a burden on the welfare system. The provider did not put him through enough course modules for the right tickets, and he was then left to try and get the job when he was technically unskilled. Mitchell was put through a certificate IV. He was told by the provider that he had to; otherwise, he would lose his benefits. He had told his provider a few months earlier of his plans to do IT, but they still put him through the cert IV before he studied for a cert III. Today, to get that job he still needs a cert III. He and his mum had to come up with $5,200 of cold, hard cash to do the training while working only part-time. My office put Ms Stephenson on to the new National Training Complaints Hotline; and, the next day, the provider was on the phone trying to sort things out. But it should not have got to that stage. Ms Stephenson told me:

I think anything that is going to make these training organisations more accountable will be of benefit to young people. I'm sure there are plenty of young people who are still in Mitchell's situation that because no one jumped up and down about it for them, they are stuck not being able to look at changing to study something they are more likely to get a job in.

On Friday, at my office, I am meeting with a constituent who applied to complete a cert III in an area in which she wanted to improve. As the member for Wills, the member for Cunningham and just about everyone who has spoken in this debate has shown, these stories abound. Her application was rejected because they had it in their records that she already had a cert III. She has never done any VET training before in her life but had filled out a form or something like that somewhere along the line.

We all have heard the stories about these kinds of traders. They see a program and they see an opportunity and they see money to be made. They do not care about the individual. We can go on and on about the student making an informed choice here. But, if you are a desperate 19-year-old and you have a choice of 18 weeks training for a cert III in what you want to do or three weeks for a course where you get a trip to Bali—I know what I would have done when I was a 19-year-old. This is especially so as the people making the sale know exactly how to pitch the idea so that they carry credibility. It is only down the track that the error is detected and regret sets in.

In the end, what we are talking about here is the worst kind of threat. You can lose your money, but what these predators are stealing is people's opportunity. We need to ensure that the cracks in the system, which will never, ever completely disappear, are as small as we can possibly make them and that we react quickly. That is what with legislation goes to. No system is foolproof or perfect. The guy in Nigeria with the $60 million he has to get out of the country and all he needs is your bank details is still getting takers in this country today. If you have a good sales technique, you will find people you can play like a fiddle. What we are all talking about here are taxpayers' funds and the education of our community, and both are precious and should be respected.

What we need to do is to back our good providers and work with them. We have to ensure that our auditing regime is compatible with their business models. Many of these organisations have international students, and the audit process can seem unrelenting and pervasive. It is the guy down the road who operates out of an imported Nissan Skyline that we want to get out of the VET sector, not the providers of quality education.

This bill seeks to improve the quality of Australia's VET system. It will allow ASQA to act faster in responding to emerging quality issues. It will reduce the regulatory burden on consistently high performing training providers. More than anything, this bill allows ASQA to pursue individuals and organisations which want to just rip off people and take the money. It will introduce a quality standard provision. It will allow ASQA to pursue not only RTOs but those claiming to be RTOs.

This sector, to use a colloquial term, needs some love. It has been bashed by dodgy traders who give people and organisations who really care about their students and their futures a bad name.

We need to address the regulatory body to ensure that they can adequately protect not only the people receiving the training but the taxpayer as well. We are putting in another $68 million from the taxpayer to ensure ASQA can play their part. This is on top of the nearly $6 billion this year in support for VET through direct funding for programs, support to the states and territories, and student loans. All this money is courtesy of the taxpayer, who supports it. The taxpayer supports these things because they provide a return to them and our communities.

These amendments continue the government's approach to VET reform. Malcolm White, the acting CEO of TAFE Directors Australia, said in a media release on 25 February 2015:

The legislation is an important step in enabling the regulator to act quickly to address the practices of a few unscrupulous training providers that are damaging the reputation of VET. TDA looks forward to this legislation being supported in both Houses.

We are creating a VET system that supports both the students and the providers, a system that will provide the workforce for Australia's future.

I would like to make one final plea on behalf of TAFE. If we do not watch out, TAFE will end up being a provider of education that is incredibly expensive and of education to the illiterate, the infirm and the disabled, and nobody else. We have an asset in TAFE in this country, and it should be supported, but it has to be supported by the state governments. That is who has to support it, because that is who runs it. We can provide the money, but we have to make sure that we as a parliament stand up here and defend TAFE and drive through COAG the message—the member for Cunningham and I are one on this—that we value VET and we value TAFE for what they do for our community. I do not disagree with a single word of the member for Cunningham's amendment but I question whether this bill is the place for that discussion. I therefore support the bill but not the amendment. ASQA must be supported. ASQA must be Australia-wide and it must be a strong defender and able to move into these places and get these unscrupulous traders out of the game. That is the secret. I thank the House.

See this speech in context