The changed political landscape for Australian universities from June 2022
Welcome to the first blog post in quite a while. This post marks a change in focus for the All the Ducks blog. Previously, posts have been technical and while these will still appear from time to time they will be mixed with posts containing more general observations, particularly on the Australian Higher Education sector.
The first few entries will reflect on a number of landscapes relevant to Australian universities.
This post is being published a little over a month after Australia's federal election. The election resulted in a change of government after about a decade of Coalition government. The incoming Labor government has shown it has quite a different set of priorities and has displayed considerable energy in moving to implement its agenda.
For reasons that are not clear, the commitment of the Coalition government to Higher Education was, depending on your perspective, somewhere between unenthusiastic and hostile. Universities have been experiencing reductions in Federal funding for many years but this accelerated over the last decade.
One relatively recent change in policy that had a very significant impact on the operation and continuing growth of universities was the freeze on government funded undergraduate places by the Morrison government at the end of 2017. Various other policy decisions over their term demonstrated a greater desire to exercise control over university operations than had been seen previously. And it wasn’t only funding.
The ideological perspective of the former government was very much about universities needing to be tightly integrated with national economic and industrial imperatives, often to the detriment of ‘pure’ or ‘blue sky’ research. There was also a willingness to directly intervene in the operation of universities and sector bodies to further the Coalition’s ideology. As government of the day, the Coalition was quite within their bailiwick to pursue these priorities.
This article, titled "Hard lessons: On unis, Coalition has embraced Howard’s way" by George Megalogenis, published about a year ago in the Sydney Morning Herald, provides an interesting overview of the impact of various federal governments over the last thirty or so years. While it goes well beyond discussing higher education developments it does clearly demonstrate the steady reduction in funding to tertiary institutions.
The Covid pandemic compounded the issue with massive reductions in international student enrolments combined with universities being excluded from Jobkeeper funding and international students being excluded from Jobseeker payments.
The long and short of all of this is that the Australian university sector has been through a tough time and is now looking forward to a period where their contribution to the nation will be more appreciated and more actively supported by the national government.
A recent address by the new Federal Education Minister, Jason Clare, outlines some important ways the government will seek to engage with universities.
Michelle Grattan, a well respected journalist, provides her take in this piece from The Conversation where she analyses Clare’s address.
It will be interesting to revisit the Conversation piece in a few years to see how the Labor government has fared.
Why? You might ask why a small technology company, All the Ducks, would publish a piece like this that is not technical. Simply because we think it is important that we reflect on the broad context, trends and developments occurring around us as they shape what we do and how we operate.