Legislation commencing 1 January 2019 allows removal of a VET FEE-HELP debt incurred because of inappropriate conduct by a provider or its agent, including conduct after 1 January 2016.

The population this is for was described by a Senate inquiry: people targeted by misleading and deceptive marketing, signed into courses through door-knocking and inducements, drawn disproportionately from those with low literacy, cognitive disability or limited English.

The remedy is an application.

That is a category error, and it is a common one. An opt-in remedy selects for the capabilities whose absence caused the harm. A person who did not understand what they were signing in 2014 is not well placed to discover, a decade later, that a statutory re-credit mechanism exists, obtain records from a provider that has since collapsed, and make a case about conduct. Reporting in 2019 put it plainly: thousands of unfair debts could be wiped, if students knew how.

The modelled process runs 785 days, of which 395 is applicant time — dominated by a step this database has recorded as 365 days that is really a probability, because for many people it never completes at all.

What the Commonwealth already knows. Where it has made a finding that a provider engaged in unacceptable conduct, it knows which provider, in which period, and — from its own enrolment and debt records — which students enrolled. It does not need those students to come forward to identify them. It needs them to come forward to assess them, which is a different and much later step.

The proposal. Where a provider-level finding has been made, the department should write to every student who incurred a debt with that provider in the relevant period, tell them the remedy exists, and offer an assisted pathway. For findings broad enough to cover an entire cohort, remove the debts on the department's own motion, as the ATO demonstrably can.

Who acts: the Commonwealth alone. One department, its own records, its own findings.