Scott Buchholz (Wright, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Skills and Training) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The VET Student Loans (Miscellaneous Measures) Bill 2025 is an uncontroversial bill. It's a bill on which I've worked closely with the minister. The minister's office has provided briefings with the department. The bill seeks to remedy an oversight in the original bill, which was introduced in 2017. There's a degree of retrospectivity within the bill. It seeks to offer protection to around 200,000 registered training organisations that, when applying for student loans for their vocational students, inadvertently picked up their tax file number. It would have been prudent to ensure that that tax file number was then no longer viewed by the provider. This anomaly was subsequently picked up by the department in a review. As a result, I want to offer my thanks to the department for the work that they have done in getting to the bottom of what was an oversight. It was picked up in a standard review, and, as a result, the extra funding that was required to address the anomaly has been borne within an internal machination of the department.

In seeking stakeholder engagement with a number of people who were affected, all are of the same opinion—none of them share any great concern. This is in essence, as I said, an uncontroversial bill. The government are to be offered the due compliment that they deserve for the way that they have worked cooperatively in this space to fix an anomaly. I notice that the bill has been referred to the Federation Chamber, where the minister will offer his kind remarks and, I dare say, acknowledge the department for finding the oversight.

Debate adjourned.