While the size of the debts is unclear, the Commonwealth Actuary has already written down more than $1 billion dollars’ worth of taxpayer-funded loans that will never be repaid.

Established by the Coalition and expanded by Labor, VET FEE HELP granted virtually unregulated access to government subsidies for every person who took out a loan to study.

This created a perverse incentive for some colleges to enrol as many students as they could, often by providing free laptops for substandard online courses, or by signing up vulnerable people without telling them they would have to eventually pay back the government tens of thousands of dollars.