There is a 12-month freeze on applications to accredit new training courses. But it only applies to private providers; government schools, public universities and TAFEs are exempt.
Assistant Minister for International Education Julian Hill says it will give the Australian Skills Quality Authority (ASQA) time “to address sector integrity issue” plus “greater capacity to assess the integrity of potential new market entrants and analyse market oversaturation within the international VET and ELICOS sectors.”
Perhaps ASQA is still catching up on Australian National Audit Office recommendations in its not entirely complimentary October 2024 report, which reported the regulator, “has not established appropriate arrangements to manage fraud risk.”
But the new regulation also gives the government more evidence that it is on to crook colleges who give people here to work cover to pretend they are students, which is helpful in the political argument over immigration.
Fraud in VET is undoubted – it has gone on for decades. There were the hairdressing and cooking courses that were a path to permanent residency 15 years ago. Plus the whole private sector was tarred by the 2014-2015 VET FEE HELP disgrace, when Australians were gulled into signing up for courses they did not want – the thieves got the student funding, the victims got the study debt. It cost the Commonwealth $1bn or so to cancel the loans. (There should have been a Royal Commission into how government mismanaged the mess).
While nobody much remembers the details, both sets of scandals are now a core community memory that private VET is full of fraudsters – even though the sector delivers three quarters of training places, mostly in short job-specific courses.
And so the government can exclude private trainers when it suits public providers, with unionised workforces – think Free TAFE. And think how the Government’s visa settings have upended ELICOS, enrolments were down 35% in March.
At best, legit private VET is collateral damage in immigration politics and policy but its loss is the VET public sector’s gain.