Following on from its stellar effort in August, ABC’s 7.30 Report last night aired another segment (above) examining the scandal-ridden private vocational educational training (VET) system, the Turnbull Government’s belated efforts to cauterize the wound, and whether the reforms will work:
MICHAEL ATKIN: Some providers have made hundreds of millions of dollars, but it’s left many students with a debt and no qualification, and hit the budget bottom line hard. Last year, it cost the taxpayer a whopping $3 billion.
DR MARY LEAHY, VOCATIONAL EDUCATION RESEARCHER, MELBOURNE UNI: It was an extraordinary situation where a provider could sign a student up, they never actually even start the course, the provider gets $20,000, the student is probably unlikely to earn the amount that would involve paying it back, so the Government – the taxpayer – ends up bearing the cost…
MICHAEL ATKIN: The new system will start next year, and requires all private providers to reapply for taxpayer funding. For the first time, they’ll be assessed on completion rates, employment outcomes, and their track record.
SIMON BIRMINGHAM: We’ve seen people who have come in purely for the purpose, it seems, of taking the taxpayer and vulnerable Australians for a ride. And I want to make sure they are booted out and gone forever.
MICHAEL ATKIN: Under the changes, courses will only be funded if they fill skills shortages and providers can no longer charge what they like – student loans will be capped.
SIMON BIRMINGHAM: Loan caps we’re proposing are set across three bands – $5,000, $10,000, and $15,000, to reflect the different cost of delivery for different programs. Clearly, a diploma in business or management costs a lot less to deliver than a diploma in agriculture or engineering…
DR MARY LEAHY: I am concerned, because I have to say, the companies – some of them have proved to be, ah, very creative, very resilient, very focused on extracting profit – which, in the case of providers – is exactly what their mission is.
MICHAEL ATKIN: Vocational education expert Dr Mary Lay says nothing will change until the focus is firmly on the quality of the education being provided.
DR MARY LEAHY: Unless you address this quality problem, you will end up with a situation where providers will just push students through – the tick-and-flick approach. They get the qualification but, in terms of what they’ve learnt, it may not be a worth a great deal.
Sadly, just as the Government is taking action against the private VET sector, a whole new area of rorting has emerged, with shonky family day care operators fraudulently claiming payments of close to $1 billion over the last two years. From The Australian:
We now learn there has been close to $1 billion fraudulently claimed over the past two years by family daycare operators, mainly by the co-ordinators of these home-based businesses. That’s more than 7 per cent of the total amount of childcare fee subsidies paid out by the commonwealth over the same period…
It’s such a beautiful business.
Declare yourself available to care for children in your home, attend to a bit of paperwork, submit your home for inspection and claim to be working towards a Certificate III in child care.
Then start to claim the fee subsidies from the taxpayer.
What about actually looking after children? That’s not strictly necessary and, let’s face it, organising phantom children is not really very hard, particularly because a lot of family daycare operates on a cash basis…
History doesn’t repeat but it sure does rhyme. Just like the VET rorting, government subsidies for family daycare were paid directly to providers of the services, thus enabling shonks to easily defraud the system and receive government payments without ever minding children.
