Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

You can hear the senator over there. He is doing everything he can to avoid any scrutiny or accept any blame. This is what children do before they realise they have to accept responsibility for their actions. This is a childlike government that wants to come in here and pretend that they have arrived and everything will sort itself out. They were on their watch and failed to do anything to prevent that blow-out.

The average debt went up to $10,000 from $5,800, nearly doubling. That is 124 per cent growth in the cost to those students of the debt that they have acquired in going in to do these sorts of courses. That is what has been going on. There is lots of evidence that there is a huge number of problems in this area. We have been hearing it all over the country. Some of the stories that we have heard nearly break your heart. They reveal the ugly side of human beings: greedy, selfish, self-interested people who have chosen to exploit others for whatever short-term personal gain they can get for themselves. The evidence we heard in Sydney related to companies that decided to set themselves up as training organisations and went out to the area of Waterloo. They targeted an underprivileged community. They walked through there, doorknocking and saying: 'Would you like a free laptop or a free iPad? Just sign this form and we'll give you the course that you've always dreamed of.' One of them was hairdressing management. The problem was you did not get to learn how to do hairdressing before you got to be the hairdressing manager, but those are the sorts of courses they were offering.

People signed up. The evidence we heard was that, when people signed up to this, they did not realise that, in doing so, they had incurred a debt. People who are on a low or fixed income and do not engage with the Taxation Office might not ever know that they have got that debt until such time as they earn enough to participate in communicating with the taxation office. Or perhaps in their demise their family finds out that this is a debt that has been sitting there and accruing over a period of time. These are the stories that the committee has been hearing. That is what has been happening while this government was in and took its eye off the ball. It was not paying attention, and that has happened to thousands of Australians.

Finally they got onto it. They figured out that it was a problem and they had better do something about it, so on 1 April we had the minister, representing himself as 'The Fixer', who came in and said: 'Oh, we can fix it. I'll tell you what we'll do. We'll sort it out, and this is how we're going to fix it.' They banned VET providers from offering inducements such as free laptops, cash and vouchers. It is good that they did that. They said that VET providers and their markets could no longer market VET FEE-HELP supported training as free or government funded. They were no longer allowed to mislead students into in any way believing that VET FEE-HELP is not a loan and not expected to be paid back. It goes on.

They came in here and said: 'We fixed it. Everything's fine.' Except here it is, the last week of parliament, and they have rushed in this report. They have rushed in amendments close to the end of this sitting period. While the debate is on here they have rushed in these amendments because they are trying to fix up what they already said they had fixed. The problem is they are doing this is in haste. They are not allowing fulsome and careful consideration of this piece of legislation. It has implications for thousands and thousands of Australians across this country. I tell you what: the 10,000 or 12,000 people in Victoria who have lost their qualifications while dodgy operators were operating under the scheme that the government oversaw will not be real happy with this government that says it is going to be all things to all people and then breaks every promise that it makes anyway.

I am very concerned about this dodgy piece of legislation that has come in. It is half-cooked. It is not properly considered. As Senator Xenophon said in his remarks earlier today, it is a mess. What can we do about a government that acts in this way? We can bring in some amendments to try to fix up the mess that they are offering here—fix the inadequate response which I fear may lead to the same sort of outcomes we have seen since April.

In his second reading speech, Senator Carr indicated a number of amendments that call on the government to do a few very important things. One of those was to appoint a national VET ombudsman with the power to investigate consumer complaints, because one of the things we were finding was that when people had problems they could not actually go and get those problems dealt with in a quick way. There were delays and delays and delays. There was nowhere easy for them to access. That is a critical thing that needs to happen, as we have suggested in our amendments. We also call for a national VET ombudsman to have the power to investigate consumer complaints and order registered training organisations that have been found to act unscrupulously to refund course fees to the student. We believe that the ombudsman should also be able to order RTOs to refund the course fee to the government and have the students' VET FEE-HELP fees waived in cases where the course fees are being paid by the government and the student has accrued a VET FEE-HELP debt.

As Senator Xenophon says, the mechanisms around that, which look like they are going to be by regulation, are critical to making sure that we are not back here on 1 April next year trying to fix up the next lot of mess that they are implementing in this area. They told us they had fixed it in April, but we have testimony after testimony, not only in our committee but also on the public record in a range of newspapers, citing what is going on still because they failed in their legislative reform the first time. Fairfax Media reported that one of the nation's biggest private colleges, Careers Australia, enrolled 2,762 students using VET FEE-HELP. Guess how many they graduated? Of 2,762 students, how many do you reckon they graduated?

Senator Carol Brown interjecting—

Senator Brown, it was 300. These figures were disputed by Careers Australia. We had a hearing in Melbourne. We were told that a broker had targeted Vietnamese students studying English at a community centre by offering inducements. This is after they said they had fixed it—in the member for Sturt's model of 'the fixer'. The Age investigation revealed that brokers operating for the Phoenix Institute of Australia—and you would have heard about that last week in the paper—offered free laptops for disabled public housing tenants in rural Euroa. So much for the disincentive of the legislative reform that the government undertook on 1 April this year, when the minister stood up and said he had fixed it and sorted it.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission have got involved. It is so bad that they have commenced court action against Unique International College in Sydney. They are alleging that the college sent sales people into Aboriginal communities and handed out free laptops in return for their signatures on applications for online diplomas. There are pages and pages of these sorts of stories. Cornerstone Investment paid $46 million for VET FEE-HELP in 2014 for 4,000 students. Guess how many they graduated?