transcript
show notes
Two private colleges in Melbourne reported lessons that were never taught, and Victoria paid
for every hour of them.
On the 5th of July 2015, the timetable at one of them listed six classes. The footage from
that day shows one person entering the building. He was there to clean it.
This episode is about what happens when public money is released by a document rather than by
a person who has seen the thing the document describes. The state paid on hours the provider
reported as delivered, monthly, through a portal, and nothing in the payment step required
anybody to confirm that a class had happened.
It starts with eleven roofs that never had a solar panel on them, and it ends with
$2,007,487.75 that left the Victorian budget between March 2014 and July 2015.
A jury convicted four people after a trial in 2018. Both colleges were suspended in August
2015 and neither registration exists today.
CHAPTERS
00:00 Eleven roofs with no panels on them
02:08 Eleven envelopes
03:47 Two colleges, and a state that paid by the hour
04:27 What the enrolment was worth
06:42 What a college looked like
08:01 An hour is the easiest thing in the world to write down
10:03 Ninety days, and the checks the provider did itself
11:53 The audit they knew was coming
13:34 One set of answers
15:10 Twenty three days
17:01 Four minutes, thirty eight seconds
19:07 Over-inflated
20:39 Thirty four cents each
22:54 The ledger
25:05 Nobody counted the chairs
The subsidies were Victorian, paid under the Victorian Training Guarantee. The offences were
Commonwealth, because the conspiracy ran through a Commonwealth official and regulator.
$48 million was identified for recovery across 62 investigations in the eighteen months after
the state started looking. Identified is not recovered, and no public figure exists for the
years before anybody looked.
The surveillance material, the audit call and the twenty three days are from the ABC's
investigation and are credited on screen where they appear.
Every figure and every quote is from the public record and is sourced on screen. Nothing in
this episode is footage. Every scene is drawn, and no face is shown. The narration is an AI
voice.
SOURCES
The Queen v Arora & Ors [2018] VCC 1563, County Court of Victoria, 21 September 2018
DPP (Cth) v Sharma & Ors [2019] VCC 1851, County Court of Victoria, 14 November 2019
2014 to 2016 VET Funding Contract, Schedule 1, Victorian Department of Education and Training
VET Funding Review, final report, September 2015
Victorian Training Market Report, full year 2015 and full year 2016
Australian Skills Quality Authority media release, 5 August 2015
Clean Energy Regulator prosecution, Melbourne, February 2023
ABC News and 7.30, Paul Farrell, 6 November 2019
Audit This follows Australian public money to the end of the paper trail.
www.auditthispod.com/links
#AuditThis #AusPol #PublicMoney
Audit This takes one story at a time and follows it to the end.
Every episode is built from the public record: court transcripts, sentencing remarks, corruption commission findings, Hansard and auditor general reports. No speculation. No dramatisation.
Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Audit_This
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