Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Pardon? Give peas a chance! That would identify the schools where most of the students actually can't cook, which would then give ASQA the evidentiary basis to shut those courses down. At the moment, the random enforcement model of ASQA turning up and checking if the paperwork is in order is not working; it doesn't work. Even the dodgy providers can get their filing cabinets sorted and make sure the students have signed the right forms, but it doesn't actually find the schools that aren't training people and providing any quality. I think it's worth a try. The payment could be from the student or the training provider. It's a relatively small amount of money in the scheme of the fees paid and the market. It would be a few hundred bucks, I guess, per student, and different models could be designed with industry. But political leadership is needed to force this change in policy and model.

This concept is not something I thought up. I think it was in a report from around 2007 or 2008 that the Rudd government was looking at. I think it was some work by Professor Peter Noonan at that point, and it included a range of other changes. They were pretty good changes, which the government could well look at going back to, if they're looking for inspiration. Some of that quite rightly was put on hold during the global financial crisis—not wanting to impose any extra regulatory burden—and was never revisited. I think there are more creative ideas that the government really needs to look at if they're going to be serious about improving the quality of regulation through ASQA, because these piecemeal little governance changes are not actually going to do anything significant to address the quality concerns. Aside from that, I'm sure the bill's great.

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