9 days to go and whose got a new title?

It is not just the terms ‘NVR’ and ‘ASQA’ that is a bit confusing or new. There are a few other aspects I am trying to clarify in my own mind as well.

First, given there is the option to have ‘short title’ for the actual National Vocational Education and Training Regulator Act 2011 and given our industry’s  love of acronyms I am surprised there isn’t one!

A suggestion would be say .. National VET Regulator ACT 11.

For those of us who will be regulated by the NVR we will become NVR RTOs!

Who is in and who is not is actually quite confusing and almost needs a flowchart along the lines of the “Should you be friends with your parents on facebook?”  maybe .. J

Anyway, in our NVR RTOs we will still have an ‘executive officer’ but we might also have a “high managerial agent”. Both of these terms are explained in detail in Section 3 under definitions but one thing I think is interesting relates to the fact that a person who owns 15% or more and / or is entitled to receive 15% or more of the dividends is deemed to be an ‘executive officer’.

I’m not sure where the 15% figure came from. Maybe that is an amount in other laws?

A high managerial agent of a registered training organisation is defined as “an employee or agent of the organisation with duties of such responsibility that his or her conduct may fairly be assumed to represent the organisation in relation to the business of providing courses.”

I rather like that term. ..It is a shame I own L&M and am not an employee, as I would rather like to be able to introduce myself as .. “Hi, I’m Kathleen, the high managerial agent of L&M.”

The language surrounding the non NVR RTOs and associated Non-Referring States is cumbersome and in my opinion clumsy. Just as one example, under Section 7 it explains the meaning of a non-referring State is “if the State is not a referring State” and then has a note “For the meaning of referring State, see section 5” and Section 5 is very convoluted .. but in this section under (2) it then goes on to say

(2) A State is taken not to be a non‑referring State for the period mentioned in subsection (4) if the Minister determines, by legislative instrument, that the State is covered by this subsection.

Isn’t this a double negative? Wouldn’t it be easier to just say it will be a referring State? But maybe that is just how ACTS have to written.

Tomorrow I will write more about The Minister, the Ministerial Council, and a ‘Chair’