Opinion
The AHEIA conference speech by Universities Australia CEO Luke Sheehy was notable in three respects, its forthright tone and its two related themes. Sheehy bluntly framed the primary tension between UA and Government as being the erosion of institutional autonomy: “universities are not departments of state, they are independent institutions”, exampling the risk of mission-based compacts becoming instruments of control rather than partnerships.
The second related theme was escalation in regulatory burden: “you cannot regulate institutions into boldness” with “some universities … now navigating more than 300 separate legislative, regulatory and reporting obligations”, diverting resources from core university purpose. This article examines the ‘regulatory burden’ claim, testing its validity and impacts, and its connection with the apex issue – institutional autonomy.
Three Hundred Obligations?
The speech text cites no source for the claim. The ‘watch lists’ of institutional audit and risk committees are not public. There is no independent national authoritative source using defined counting rules responsible for audit of university ‘legislative, regulatory and reporting obligations’. With no public inventory of obligations per university, the next best option is to make a credible order‑of‑magnitude estimate, using AI tools[1].
Whilst there are common national regulatory obligations, others are specific to each State. Both university-specific and business/entity general obligations were in scope. The order of magnitude estimates was generated only for NSW as the example State.
Results encompassing the federal and NSW state legislative landscape for a typical NSW public university identified ~95 discrete legislative, regulatory and reporting instruments that apply simultaneously covering university-specific and general business entity obligations. As example: the Higher Education Support Act 2003 and TEQSA registration conditions, through to the NSW Government Sector Finance Act, the Ombudsman Act, environmental planning laws, payroll tax, food safety regulations and the Modern Slavery Act (overlapping national and State).
The ‘300-95’ gap is best explained by imperfect definitional scope and ill-defined (non-existent!) ‘counting rules’. Each instrument is a container, not a single obligation. The Higher Education Support Act generates ~15 to 20 separate reporting cycles, data collections, compliance conditions and ministerial directions. The Higher Education Threshold Standards span seven regulatory domains, each with multiple sub-standards that must be demonstrated continuously. The ESOS Act for international students generates layered obligations across student visa monitoring, PRISMS reporting, CRICOS maintenance, tuition protection mechanisms and provider default levy. Every professional discipline housed in a university – medicine, law, nursing, engineering, teaching, psychology, pharmacy, dentistry, accounting – adds a separate accreditation body with its own standards, site visit cycle, program approval process and annual reporting obligation. None of these accreditation regimes appear in the count of 95.
When individual reporting cycles, sub-regulatory instruments, ministerial directions, Treasury Directions, ARC and NHMRC grant conditions, TEQSA conditions of registration, and professional accreditation standards are counted separately – as experienced inside universities – each requiring dedicated staff time, governance oversight and legal review; 300+ may be conservative. It’s directionally credible.
It reflects a system that has added obligations one at a time, each individually justifiable, never accounting for the cumulative weight. So, what’s the trajectory?
New/extended obligations since 2022
The NSW order‑of‑magnitude estimate illustrates a significant rate of recent regulatory growth. Against a pre-existing 2022 baseline of ~55 established legislative and regulatory instruments, ~40 additional obligations were identified made up of ~22 that are wholly new and ~18 that have been materially extended or strengthened since 2022.
A second independent AI analysis of NSW Unis ‘obligations’ using like prompts arrived at a different but directionally similar conclusion as an’ order‑of‑magnitude estimate’. This analysis indicated a 2022 total baseline obligation of between 210-280 depending on how ‘obligation’ is defined (Act, regulation, code or reporting cycle). It estimated an increase of between 65-95 either fully new, or expanded reporting/data requirements, and extended compliance frameworks since 2022. Growth and directionally >300.
A third independent AI analysis indicates NSW institutions compliance registers map over 330 discrete regulatory instruments, recognising the estimate is definitionally fraught, and again confirming the same growth and complexity since 2022.
Many of these new/extended obligations are defensible in isolation. The gender-based violence code, psychosocial risk management duty, foreign interference guidelines all address real and serious problems. Sheehy states "regulation doesn't come without a cost. Compliance …drives risk aversion (and) changes the character of institutions."
Cutting regulatory costs for the private sector
One week prior to Sheehy’s speech, the Treasurer announced "the broadest productivity push in a budget since the 1990s" with multiple ambitious explicit actions e.g. reforms to cut regulatory costs by $10.2 billion every year, unnecessary red tape in the financial sector alone will be cut by $780 million per year, environmental approvals will be accelerated through the AI-assisted Investor Front Door, and a "tell us once" digital government approach to eliminate duplicative information submissions etc.
The expanded obligations applied to universities runs contrary to what the budget's productivity logic condemns. Sheehy’s observation was "every hour spent feeding those systems is an hour not spent on teaching, research or supporting students".
With an important caveat
The Treasurer’s red tape reductions are almost entirely about process efficiency: e.g. removing duplicative reporting, eliminating tariffs, streamlining approvals. Most of the university obligations added since 2022 address perceived substantive failures – underpayment of staff, governance breakdowns, campus sexual violence, foreign interference risks, racism on campus. No university VC is going to argue against the gender-based violence code as "unnecessary red tape." This is what makes the university burden difficult to contest and easy to accumulate.
But the (lost) productivity logic is sound – inefficient and duplicative compliance costs are a drag on national economic performance that governments have a responsibility to address. Demonstrably this has not yet been comprehensively applied to universities. A sector employing roughly 130,000 people and generating more than $40 billion in annual economic activity is not a second-order productivity consideration.
Better Regulation Working Group (BRWG)
Commendably, the government has not ignored the sector’s concerns. In early 2026, the Minister established the BRWG, co‑chaired by the Department of Education and Universities Australia, with a Ministerial mandate to identify “practical, commonsense actions able to be implemented quickly” and “make a real difference to providers”.
The HE Accord Final Report acknowledged that universities operate in a complex and overlapping regulatory environment that creates duplication, inefficiency, and diverts attention from teaching and research. It framed solutions in terms of better system stewardship and regulatory coherence, calling for simplification and alignment of reporting requirements. But it made no dedicated deregulatory recommendations. Where it addressed regulation, the net effect was to expand oversight, not reduce it.
The BRWG therefore emerged not from the Accord, but as a reactive concession once the cumulative weight of Accord implementation became clear. It lacks the analytical foundation that a specific Accord recommendation(s) on regulatory burden would have provided. Sheehy warns that “this (BRWG) process can’t become just another exercise in talking about regulation while adding more of it”. The BRWG’s design reveals.
Membership: Regulators, peak bodies, unions, and student representatives. This means regulators whose reporting requirements are under review sit on the body reviewing them. It’s a body built for consensus, not for regulators to relinquish reporting lines.
Scope and speed: The emphasis is on quick wins and practical actions. It pre‑excludes the largest sources of new burden: e.g. the ATEC compact regime, TEQSA’s expanding standards, the gender‑based violence code, and recent Fair Work changes, all recently enacted. Streamlining processes, reducing duplication between data collections, aligning timelines is all useful but not proportionate to the scale of the problem.
Authority: The BRWG has no statutory powers, no budget, and no ability to bind regulators. Any legislative or regulatory amendments must pass through the same processes that created the burden in the first place. At best, it may be persuasive but won’t stop “funders, stewards and regulators” from continuing to add load.
For reimagined governance – get way more serious
The Budget's productivity package at least sets out what a serious response looks like. An equivalent intent for higher education would require an independent, cross-portfolio audit of the total compliance burden on universities, conducted with like rigour as a Productivity Commission review of a regulated industry. Cost reduction targets would be set under a government-led regulatory reform mandate, with the net impact tracked.
Despite UA calls to reimagine higher education governance and written appeals to the Treasurer, it’s unlikely to happen. All forces flow against this ideal and practice – why?
What’s regulatory burden got to do with institutional autonomy?
Regulatory obligations are not merely administrative inconvenience. Each one represents a decision made outside the institution about how the institution must allocate its attention, its resources, and its governance capacity. The cumulative effect is not just a heavier inbox. It is a progressive reorientation of institutional decision-making away from academic judgment and toward compliance logic.
Autonomy is not about what a university is permitted to do, it’s what it can decide for itself. A university that retains formal legal independence but spends an increasing proportion of its governance bandwidth demonstrating compliance with externally mandated standards – on student support, gender-based violence, workplace composition, foreign interference, credit recognition, mission alignment, equity cohort targets – is an institution whose effective autonomy is being incrementally hollowed out without any one single legislative act being challenged or contested. Drops to tide.
A BRWG designed to operate at the margins (cue alignment/cohesion) is not built to turn back the accumulated regulatory load of external prescription, arriving one defensible obligation at a time. It’s a soothing valve, not intended to re-cast what the Accord's architecture has made structural in now ATEC's management of an accelerating compact regime. All of which is worthy of its own analysis.
[1] Disclaimer – Content following is AI derived – checked at high level but not at full verification levels