This is Part 3 in a five-part series on the state of the modern public university in Australia by Curtin Humanities PVC Richard Blythe. In Part 2, the bill was the barrier — and the body built to remove it had been given everything except the key. This is why: the machinery of the new commission, and the danger built into it.
Opinion
The new Australian Tertiary Education Commission (ATEC) was meant to be the fix. It is the centrepiece of the Universities Accord — a steward, a buffer between government and the sector, the body that would hold the system steady above the churn of politics. So why can't it simply lower the student's bill? To answer that, you have to see what kind of machine it actually is — and to see that, you have to know what it replaced.
For nearly thirty years, from 1959 to 1988, Australia governed its universities through a buffer body — a statutory commission that sat between government and the sector and carried expert advice and long-range planning upward, so that scholarly judgement, not the political mood of the decade, mediated what governments asked of universities. Robert Menzies, a Liberal, created it on the recommendation of the Murray review and legislated its independence — insisting it was "utterly undesirable that any government in a free country should tell a university what and how it is to teach." In the Cold War, with the politicised science of the dictatorships fresh in memory, an independent university was treated as a mark of a free society. Successive governments of both stripes kept the buffer in place for a generation — until the Dawkins reforms abolished it in 1988. This was never a partisan idea. It was a national one.
The new commission is described as the heir to that tradition. Structurally, it is its inversion.
The Minister issues a statement of strategic priorities that drives what universities must commit to — and writes it so that Parliament cannot even disallow it. Everything the Commission does, it must do within that statement. Its staff are departmental. And on the one thing that matters most here — the student-fee settings at the heart of the bill — it may advise only if the Minister invites it to.
Look at the shape of that. The body is built like Curtin's. But the current runs the other way. Advice no longer flows up from the sector to inform government; direction now flows down from the minister to instruct the sector. That is not a steward. It is a conveyor belt — and it explains exactly why the Commission cannot lower the bill. The lever that sets it was never handed over. It stayed on the Minister's desk.
Defenders will say the independence is real, and in one sense they are right. The Commissioners are independent statutory officers, named in the Act, removable only for cause. That matters. But independent people are not the same as an independent mandate. The Chief Commissioner has pointed to Jobs and Skills Australia as the model that proves the design works — and it is worth being precise about that, because it proves less than it seems. Jobs and Skills Australia advises. It publishes independent analysis and government does what it will with it. The new Commission administers — it allocates places, shapes the compacts, gives effect to the settings that decide what a degree costs and who may study it; at least that is what it is supposed to do. Advisory independence is enough for a body that only advises. It is not enough for one that governs. You cannot borrow the independence guarantee of an advice-giving body to secure a decision-making one; the job is different, so the protection has to be different.
The Commissioner offers three further reassurances, and they are worth taking seriously, because each is offered in good faith — and each, looked at closely, turns out to be goodwill rather than guarantee. First, an MOU signed with the department on day one, setting out, in his words, "the elements of independence." But an MOU is an administrative agreement — by his own account it governs services, IT and HR support and the commission's navigation of the public service — and it is not binding law. It can be revised, or left to wither, by a future Minister and Secretary who simply see the relationship differently. It records independence at one point in time; it does not entrench it across a generation.
Second, the Statement of Strategic Priorities — the document that drives what universities must do — will, he says, be developed collaboratively, with the sector consulted and the commission closely involved. Very likely it will, under this minister. But nothing in the Act requires it: the statement remains the minister's instrument, and remains beyond Parliament's power to disallow. And the same is true of the third reassurance, the mission-based compacts negotiated university by university — because a negotiation is only as free as the frame around it, and that frame is the minister's priorities. Under a collaborative minister, "negotiation" means partnership. Under an antagonistic one, it means: here are the terms, now let us discuss your compliance. Consultation is a courtesy the current office-holders extend, not an obligation the next ones inherit — and the word "negotiation" does not change when the power behind it does.
Notice what every one of these has in common. Each protection depends on the goodwill of whoever holds the office. None of them binds a minister who chooses to withhold it. That is the missing piece the whole design skirts: there is no protection from political interference written into the structure itself — only a set of conventions that hold precisely as long as the people in the chairs want them to.
And here is the danger — the one I suspect the Minister himself has not fully reckoned with. It is not bad faith. I do not believe he is acting in bad faith. It is that a structure like this does not need bad faith to do its damage. Once built, it runs on its own. A minister can sincerely believe in independence and sincerely build a machine that concentrates power in his own office, and the sincerity changes nothing — because the next minister inherits the machine, not the intentions. Build a lever that lets one office decide what universities teach, whom they enrol and what a degree costs, and you have not armed this minister. You have armed the office, for good hands and bad alike. That is what makes it so hard to undo tomorrow.
Which brings me to a question I want to put to the Education Minister in good faith — because I think he, of all people, can answer it.
He has made university governance his signature cause. He referred the ANU to the regulator over governance concerns. He has issued binding principles requiring every university in the country to demonstrate three things: accountability, independence, and transparency. He plainly believes in them; he has staked his standing on them.
So hold the new Commission up against his own three words. A body told to steward what a degree costs and who may study it, yet barred from advising on the fee unless the Minister invites it — answerable for the system, denied the lever that runs it: is that accountable? A body whose own officers are drawn from the very department it is meant to hold at arm’s length: is that independent? A system driven by one document — the Minister’s statement of priorities — written so that Parliament may not question or disallow it, the most powerful instrument made the least visible: is that transparent?
I do not ask this to trap him. I ask because he already knows the answer — he wrote the test. The man auditing the sector's governance is, at the very same moment, building the largest change in the relationship between government and universities since the Dawkins reforms of the late 1980s — and it would not pass the test he set for everyone else.
That is not an accusation. It is an opening. He is better than the structure he has built, and he is the one person positioned to prove it. The answer is not to flip the current so that the sector rules instead — that only swaps one captured interest for another. It is to build a body genuinely at arm's length from all three of the parties with a stake in this — government, the sector, and the generation whose future it decides — so that no single hand, this Minister's or any successor's, can reach past it to the lever. The key can be handed over. It can even be built into a lock that no future Minister can quietly pick.
How you build that lock is the question we end on. But before the repair, there is one more thing this same lever is being used to do — one more loss, larger and harder to reverse than any bill. That is where we go next.