Mark Coulton (Parkes, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to be speaking on this bill, the Higher Education Support Amendment (VET FEE-HELP Reform) Bill 2015. I acknowledge that this bill has bipartisan support. I will not make any comment as to the amendments that the shadow minister just spoke about; I will leave that to the minister to deal with. But I will say that these issues were very apparent in the time of the previous government, and they chose not to take the action at the time, so I think the shadow minister should be a little measured in her expectations of what might happen. But I will leave those discussions to the minister.

I am a big fan of VET, and I am a supporter of the intention of VET FEE-HELP. Education is the key to solving a lot of the problems that our society deals with, whether it is poverty, skills shortages, health or bigotry. A whole range of things can be overcome when people have an education. The idea that people who may not have had the opportunities at a younger age to have a formal education can undertake higher education and receive a loan from the government to do that seems to me like a good scheme, and I know people who have undertaken higher education under this scheme.

But problems started to be brought to my attention more than 12 months ago, early in 2014. In the first instance, a registered provider from Dubbo came and saw me and explained that unscrupulous providers were signing up people to these courses at a retirement village. His concern was that people were signing up to a debt they did not know about. Obviously the whole concept of VET is to help people improve their skills to get into a higher skilled, better paid job, and the idea that this would be pitched to people who had already retired was just ridiculous. So the alarm bells started to go off there.

Not long after that, I was contacted by several people in Coonamble. The issues that happened in Coonamble made it very clear that this was not just people who had inadvertently done something where they were not really sure of the details. To me, what happened in Coonamble was orchestrated fraud of the Australian taxpayer and of innocent people on a grand scale. What happened in Coonamble was that providers came to town and hired a room at one of the local clubs, and word got around that, if you went to this particular room and signed your name, a $50 bill was handed to you, with the promise of being sent a laptop and an iPad at a later date. It is my understanding that this course that was being offered was at quite a high level, that it was at a value of $14,500, and that many of the people who signed up—there are some reports that some people did not even sign their name, because some of the people that went there and got their $50 were actually illiterate—did not have the skills or the levels of literacy to possibly undertake a course of this complexity. So here you have people walking in, getting their $50 and walking out, not knowing that they now had a $14,500 debt to their name. When they were going to maybe go for a loan to buy a car or a house or something, there would be this debt against their name that they did not realise they had signed up for. Anecdotally, there was talk of about 100 people doing this. At $14,500, that is nearly $1½ million of Commonwealth funds that this unscrupulous operator took out of the town of Coonamble for no positive result. If the Commonwealth government were going to spend $1½ million in Coonamble to help the education of its community, there would be much better ways of doing it than this.

So, following discussions that I had in the early days of this government with Senator Birmingham and subsequent conversations with Minister Hartsuyker, I am pleased that this legislation has come in. This is a rip-off of the Australian people and the Australian Commonwealth government of mammoth proportions. Quite frankly, as well as closing up these loopholes, I would like to see some of these operators pursued and the funds recovered from them, because this was an orchestrated fraud on the most vulnerable people in our society.

I support this bill. The information is all there. The minister would have mentioned that in his introduction of this bill. It would be shocking to find out what the magnitude of this fraud is. I suspect, across the nation, it would be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. I am pleased that we will be closing up the loopholes and that we can make sure that our dollars that go into VET education go to the people that need them, that the courses are appropriate, that the trainers are suitably qualified, and that there is a positive outcome for these people. I support this bill. I will leave commentary on the opposition's amendments for the minister in his summing up.

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