Brett Whiteley (Braddon, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

What an afternoon it is going to be. A conga line of tired voices, a bucketful of crocodile tears—here we go again. A long line-up of people who step up to the plate with no idea of the condition that they have left this country in. They have just wiped it from their memories like some sort of formatting of a disk. They have formatted the disk and there is nothing left. Well, in the words of Labor senator, Kim Carr, 'Labor introduced VET FEE-HELP with good intentions, but the scheme contains fundamental weaknesses.' He says they need to be fixed. He says they had good intentions, but that it needs to be fixed—and that is what we are doing, because it is an absolute mess.

The reality here is that this government is about outcomes. Outcomes are important to us, and, to get the best outcomes, all options to deliver those outcomes must be on the table for discussion. As the minister has said, that is what he is doing. We have identified the problem. We have identified that the Labor government set up a system that left the door open to dodgy dealers, to easy money and to operators who are freeloaders sponging off the taxes of hardworking Australians, and we are about fixing it. The minister is about consultation. He is out and about consulting. As far as anyone being asleep over the last 2½ years, can I just say that it is fairly difficult to stay asleep when you are living through a nightmare. That is what we inherited from the Labor government.

There are lots of issues in amongst the problems of the VET sector. It will take time to fix them, but we have gone about that already. We have tightened the rules around marketing and enrolment practices that the previous speaker mentioned. They are the very enrolment and marketing practices that were put in and permitted through legislation initiated by the previous Labor government. We have made providers more accountable for the actions of their agents and put limits on cold canvassing, which has been spoken of, so that people cannot be hassled in their home, at shopping centres, or outside Centrelink.

The Labor Party come to the microphone, or the podium, very regularly with the whole—what shall I say—premise of their debate that this is all of our doing. It is not. The cleaning up of the mess will be of our doing, but this started through legislation that was put in place by the Labor government. We are funding over $6 billion in the VET sector, that is $6,000 million every year. That is a lot of money. It is a lot of taxpayers' money going to a good cause, but the government does not have an infinite bucket of money. There are changes going on around this sector, there is no question about that. We are investing more than $6 billion in it.

I cannot leave this debate without taking up some of the other matters that were raised by the previous two speakers from the opposition. They took this debate outside the VET sector and talked about university cuts. Let's just, for everybody, again put the record straight. As we entered office in 2013 we had to pick up the mess from the Labor government's cut of billions of dollars from higher education funding. We had to fix school funding for the states because at least three states had been gutted by the last-minute cosy deal that the Labor Party tried to get across the line.

Mr Husic interjecting—

Yes, that is true, and we had to clean up that mess. You go and ask the education ministers in those three states. The fact of the matter is, there are no cuts, there are only increases from this government when it comes to the public funding of schools. You cannot cut funding that was never there. You continue to deceive the Australian people.

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