A week before we voted, an international trade journal, University World News called higher education, a “key battleground.”
It wasn’t. Apart from culture-warring conservatives and impossibly profligate Greens, all was far too quiet on the higher education front – with the certainty of a revenue cut and no push for alternative operating models. Never has the low ebb of social licence and lack of electoral pull been more evident.
Not that the lobbies did not try – it’s just their messages were variously ignored or adapted to suit main party messages, with migration policy displacing HE priority.
International education became a downward auction on immigration numbers.
New money was mentioned in terms of “the cost of living crisis,” with Labor promising billions in Fee-Free TAFE places and promising more to waive HECS debts. The Coalition announced not much beyond more medicine places and VET in new schools.
Funding for student places was used by Labor to talk up increased low-SES access. The Coalition warned universities of retribution if they did not focus on teaching. As for Job Ready Graduates, Jason Clare said his proposed Australian Tertiary Education Commission would look at it and Sarah Henderson for the Liberals said she would too – but neither committed to changing it.
And research did not rate, leaving the policy wonks to argue over the spoils of indifference in submissions to the Australian Research Council’s program review and Industry Minister Ed Husic’s R&D inquiry.
While the nation falls in behind the proposals for billions more to be allocated to defence, the decades-old call for research funding windfalls were lost in the wind.
All up, the campaign was a ten on the Dorian Wilde scale that compares being ignored as way worse than criticised, in terms of pleas for reform and funding being heard and considered.
And ignored Universities Australia mainly was. This was probably a win, lest Mr Clare and Senator Henderson talk about its members underpaying staff and disregarding student safety to the extent a national ombudsman had to be established. Certainly the Group of Eight copped attention but mainly from critical conservatives who assume its members are way more interested in ideology than education. There is a reason why smart Vice-Chancellors have kept their heads down
As to what happens Monday – it’s the first day of the 2028 campaign.
The system’s urgent needs remain the same, including support to replace diminished international fees and incentives to adapt UG delivery to AI and the way training and education are interacting. But the way lobbies make their cases must change.
The livers of people who drink every time they hear about universities being a vital resource close to collapse are already shot.