VET & TAFE campusreview. com. au
The blame game dismantled
M mitchell _ johnm
The federal government lays VET FEE-HELP’ s failure at Labor’ s feet, conveniently ignoring its own policy shortcomings since 2013.
By John Mitchell
What does a government do when the whole country knows its policy has failed? In the case of the current federal government and the VET FEE-HELP program, it issues a discussion paper that describes the policy failure in a sanitised manner, largely blames the mess today on the government that was voted out in 2013, then asks readers to comment on possible solutions that will appeal to people with vested interests in receiving ongoing funding.
The discussion paper,“ Redesigning VET FEE-HELP” was released by the government in early May and contains five main sections, each of which attempt to cast the current government in the best possible light. To begin the case, section one provides a short description of VET FEE-HELP, then takes the reader back to the early days,“ Conception and implementation – 2007 – 2009”, when the Howard government introduced version one of the scheme. This section praises the restrictions placed on the program, for example that“ VET FEE-HELP would only extend to courses for which credit may be transferred to a higher education award”.
Section two is titled“ The 2012 VET FEE-HELP expansion”, which occurred under the previous Gillard Labor government. This section cites“ design flaws” in the 2012 version of the program, including the removal of the credit transfer arrangements mentioned above. Get the picture? In 2012, Labor made policy mistakes, so in 2013 the Coalition was handed the near-impossible task of fixing them.
The third section of the report is interesting in the way it provides details about the program disasters, but it is subtly titled“ Key trends since 2012 expansion”. The unsubtle theme is that the Coalition inherited design flaws initiated by its opponents and any later problems with VET FEE-HELP were mostly the fault of the previous ALP government – in case you didn’ t read section two.
STATISTICS BACKFIRE ON GOVERNMENT The fourth section of the report is even more interesting, for its mischievous title,“ Actions taken since 2012”, after which it doesn’ t list any actions taken by the Coalition government in 2013 – 14. It can list only the Coalition’ s“ 2015 and 2016 reforms”. By the Coalition’ s own admission, the first reforms to VET FEE-HELP it initiated were in 2015 and this year, yet it won office in late 2013 and its own graphs in the discussion paper show that the massive blow-out in student loans occurred on its watch, in 2014 – 15.
Why did the Coalition do nothing in 2013 – 14? Why did the Coalition do so little in 2015? Helpfully, the discussion paper lists in Appendix 1 the four minor actions taken in 2015, including“ the banning of prohibited inducements” such as iPads, which a series of exposes in the national media this year have shown did not work. In summary, no changes were made in 2013 – 14, four changes – including banning iPad bribes – were made in 2015, which numerous media reports suggest were largely ineffective, and 16 changes were made on January 1, 2016, after the horse had well and truly bolted.
Section four of the discussion paper contains what is possibly the most disappointing page and a half of the document. Under the
18