Business Law Case Study: Asqa's Shotgun Approach

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1 ASQA's Shotgun Approach Brett Hilder, Argos Consulting A war is going on below the sightlines of the Australian taxpayers. As a combatant, I have been endeavouring to remove the fear related to dealing with the Australian Skills Quality Authority (ASQA) by unravelling its conduct and offering solutions to Registered Training Organisations (RTOs). It is only in this way that training organisations can be better armed. Now I am returning from the front to report, so that the taxpaying public can be better informed. Based on my company’s experience, ASQA appears to have seriously breached the NVR Act, 2011 on multiple occasions, and in so doing, discouraged quality training. In polite legal terms, this is called acting ‘ultra vires’ the…show more content…
For those not connected, ASQA’s actual role as a regulator is to administer the NVR (training) Act, 2011 and encourage quality training by Australian Registered Training Organisations (RTOs). However, the workload now required for compliance with the ‘standards’ is so onerous (and unnecessary) that a business owner must decide between spending money on compliance, OR improving training. The logical decision is to divide the resources and satisfy both. The problem is ASQA will tie an RTO up for months while it tries to comply, and this drags resources away from training delivery. This is where the war begins for many good training organisations, especially those in the private sector. The fact is, ASQA declared war on smaller private RTOs on July 1, 2011. It’s just that most of us weren’t aware of it at the time. What ASQA deem to be compliant is very rubbery as there are no proscribed 'proofs' with which an RTO can work. It is clear that no two of ASQA’s own auditors can be relied upon to agree with what constitutes compliance. Horror stories are rife throughout the training sector of an ASQA auditor finding one approach to a standard, compliant in one instance, and a different auditor finding the same approach…show more content…
So it uses implied threats, especially to private sector RTOs who rely on their reputations and licenses to survive financially. ASQA's approach to regulation appears to be a shotgun approach (fired by a drunk blind man) with a similar likelihood of precision in who it attacks and the damage it does. As a case in point, ASQA suspended my company’s registration. The attendant orders meant that we had to cease all training operations and stop any activity that allowed us to generate any income associated with our scope. It was almost the most severe sanction they could shoot us with. (This approach, of selecting the most punishing from a range of sanctions, is the most common approach to dealing with ‘non-compliant’ RTOs irrespective of their industry reputations and regardless of their compliance with the standards relating to training delivery). All our staff lost their jobs. We had trained over 7000 people over a period of more than a decade. Literally hundreds of employers Australia-wide regarded us as the best provider in our sector scope. Despite ASQA's statements to the contrary, we discovered through FOI, that there were no substantiated complaints about our training from either employers or students with either ASQA or the previous state based regulator. In short ASQA misrepresented us in spectacular fashion in order to justify being completely out of step with expert

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