Just look at what has happened across the dutch with the Oz system of private colleges raping the taxpayer over training. Would it surprise anyone that Jetstar implemented a
VET FEE-HELP system to use the taxpayer to backstop it's cadet program.
The education providers win through a taxpayer subsidised loans and the employers win by increasing the number of inexperienced graduates supplied to industry, suppressing wages.
The scandals that went on in this industry were legendary, a quick google search will reveal anecdotes of massively overpriced, poor to no-existent training fraud within this system.
How VET FEE-HELP debt went from costing taxpayers $325m to $3b
How VET FEE-HELP debt went from costing taxpayers $325m to $3b
The federal government was warned as early as 2012 that unscrupulous providers were rorting the vocational education loans scheme and that there were no safeguards to protect against the abuse of vulnerable students, blowing the scheme out from $325 million to $3 billion in less than three years.
It was not until 2015 that the government took emergency action, freezing payments to the sector. Now, new evidence is emerging of education operators engineering alternative ways to boost lucrative student dollars, as the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission pursues several colleges for the return of hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer funding.
In a 2012 departmental warning, the Gillard government was told specifically that people with disability had been targeted and gifts had been offered as inducements to enrol in courses where student loans under the VET FEE-HELP scheme were available. The government was also told that it had no power under the law as it stood to take action against such practices.
The warning was also ignored under the Abbott government, until several vocational college rorts were exposed in the media and investigations instigated by ACCC and the AFP in 2015. Education minister Simon Birmingham then froze payments to all private providers at 2015 levels and in April 2016 released a discussion paper on redesigning the scheme.
The 2012 warning was contained in a Regulation Impact Statement on the VET FEE HELP redesign, prepared by the then Department of Industry, Innovation, Science, Research and Tertiary Education.
"If the limitations identified with VET FEE‐HELP's quality and accountability framework are not addressed, the potential to damage industry confidence in the quality of VET qualifications and the role of VET FEE‐HELP is high," the document said.
"Complaints to the government have identified instances where people with disability have been targeted for enrolment or gifts have been offered to students as an incentive to enrol in courses where VET FEE‐HELP is available. There are currently no legislative provisions to enable the Government to deter or stop such actions from occurring once it has been identified."
It comes as the fourth minister in a year in the scandal-plagued sector, Karen Andrews, was sworn into office this week.
Questions addressed to Ms Andrews were answered by Mr Birmingham's office.
Mr Birmingham said he would play a "leading role" in the re-design of the scheme, in his former role as vocational education minister Mr Birmingham banned the use of laptops as inducements across the sector.
"We've already introduced more than a dozen measures to clean up Labor's mess that inflated the cost of loans and saddled students with extra debt and saw some providers prey on unwitting and vulnerable Australians," he said.
In a submission to the government's latest discussion paper on redesigning VET FEE-HELP, the Mitchell Institute's Professor Peter Noonan has pointed out that the 2012 warning to government is important because "a key issue is the extent to which the problems with VET FEE‐HELP should have been identified, risk assessed and managed far earlier than they were, including through urgent legislative amendments".
He points out that cost blowouts in the VET budget from rapid enrolment growth were apparent in Victoria in 2011, followed quickly by South Australia in 2012, the states that had moved earliest to introduce demand driven, government-funded VET places.
"Caution was not exercised with the implementation of VET FEE‐HELP even as enrolments, overall loan values and payments to individual providers began to rise rapidly in 2012 before escalating exponentially from 2013 and beyond," Mr Noonan writes.
He also says the states effectively used VET FEE-HELP to shift the cost of skills training to the federal government, even though it is formally a state responsibility.
With Eryk Bagshaw
Another example of the scale of the problem from the ABC:
Careers Australia salespeople accused of enrolling poor students with fake entrance exams