David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

This Higher Education Support Amendment (VET FEE-HELP Reform) Bill 2015 is an open-and-shut case. If ever a bill needed to pass, this is it. If ever there were a scheme that needed reform and tightening up, having its boundaries well and truly set and enforced, this is it.

Members on the other side have called on the minister for a widespread audit, but the minister cannot issue an audit. The Australian National Audit Office is the office responsible for that. Given the amount of press and coverage that this sector of government funding has received, I am sure the Australian National Audit Office is shining up the microscope and getting new batteries in the torch. I would be very surprised if they do not do a thorough audit of this.

But we have witnessed a decline in standards at the same time as an explosion in providers. Some of the figures the member for Wills mentioned I have read too. The $5 billion worth of debt accumulated in three years with the tripling of fees? For goodness sake, this is just not adequate at all. In fact it is a scandal. I support this legislation. To see fees rise from $699 million to $1.7 billion in one year tells you something. To have 44 per cent more providers from one year to the next is like a stampede of people who are trying to get access to easy money. It has not meant that there has been an explosion of quality vocational education and training providers.

Part of the problem that the fees these unscrupulous providers have charged is that 40 per cent of the people who get trained by them are never going to reach the threshold of earnings to trigger repayments. It is a problem because the HECS debts and the VET FEE-HELP loans are a liability to the government and, naturally, the taxpayer—because, when you are talking about the government, you mean the Australian taxpayer. It is billions and billions of dollars.

We do not like to regulate fees and I hate to say it, but we really need to clamp down on the outrageous fees that are being charged. Usually, if you set a limit on fees, people will charge the maximum available in the regulation. One would hope the competitive nature of education would mean there would be competition in fees, but it seems to have been open slather.

There are two stories that I found particularly disingenuous and illustrated how crooked some of these people are. In Cairns there were two providers offering the same course. Funnily enough, they were registered at the same address. One charged $12,750 on the VET FEE-HELP, but, for the same diploma of management from the same provider, you could get it direct if you paid up front $3,420. That is outrageous. In Sydney a diploma of business had an up front fee of $7,000—or you could go online and apply for a VET FEE-HELP loan, take it out, do the same thing through the same RTO and be charged $4,800. How outrageous is this?

Also in the spotlight is ASQA. It is their job to supervise this, so they are already investigating at least 23 RTOs, but I suspect there will be many more. When I looked back at this I was horrified to see all of these things happening. I looked into where this scheme came from. It was introduced in 2009, and I hate to say it but the regulation and the oversight of yet another scheme from that era has brought everyone into disrepute.

There has been a lot of action already. A ban on inducements was introduced on 1 April, so you cannot offer to sign up people on the promise of a free phone or an iPad, and withdrawal fees that were waved in front of people who realise that they were being scammed and wanted to withdraw—they were hitting them up with extensive withdrawal fees—have been banned as well. You can no longer advertise. These brokers cannot walk around train stations or areas of shopping centres and advise potential students or people to sign up to a course and call it free. The brokers must also disclose the name of the provider and disclose their commission.

There was also a phenomenon where they were getting people signed up on a promise of an iPad or an iPhone or some other inducement and claiming the whole loan up-front, and then the person would drop out but the loan had been paid. The unsuspecting person who signed up would not hear anything more until he or she is notified that he or she has a massive loan. There are sensible guidelines like prerequisite skills, namely, a certain level of literacy and numeracy is required and, like many contracts that you sign, there is a cooling-off period. These are all common sense mechanisms. Also, in regard to picking on vulnerable, inexperienced people, they cannot sign up anyone under the age of 18 unless they are formally declared under legislation and are receiving independent payments from DSS or unless they have their legal guardian or parent signing permission.

We can also, with this legislation, levy infringement notices that come with a hefty fine. I say: throw the book at them. I would take them to court. If they have been in breach of consumer laws and, in New South Wales, Fair Trading Regulations, I would go after them hammer and tongs to try to get the money back so that the taxpayer gets money that has been received under false pretences, and also, as a punishment, they should get a fine as well. Suspend them, cancel the debt and demand that the costs be repaid.

I suspect ASQA is going to be extremely busy. One in ten RTOs have already been cancelled, and there are many more that will be found out to be quite shady and shonky in their dealings. Amongst all of the RTOs in my part of the world, in the Lyne electorate, we have the North Coast TAFE. They are in Taree, they are in Port Macquarie and they do a great job. I have been up to the TAFE myself. It is co-located with the University of Newcastle, and it enjoys a very high reputation in town and in the region. Years ago, TAFE was historically the only provider in the VET space. Competition has been good for them because they have a great product, and they have become more flexible and nimble compared to some of the private RTOs who are actually responding to industry requirements a lot quicker than TAFE. The TAFE has not been involved in any of these shady dealings. They are quite above board, and I would like to hope that, as a result of this exposure of some of the shonky tradings, in the competitive market place people realise the value that they will get out of the TAFE.

We could go on with many more stories, but the essential thing is that I support this legislation. The sooner that it comes into force the sooner that the whole VET training space will be better off for students, and the taxpayer will not be ripped off as much.

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