OPINION
As Parliament considers the creation of the Australian Tertiary Education Commission (ATEC), debate has focused sharply on questions of independence and design. But Australia’s earlier experience with tertiary education commissions suggests that their durability will depend as much on how governments choose to live with the institution as it will on autonomy and architecture.
The Senate inquiry into the legislation to establish the ATEC is now well advanced, with the Bill before Parliament and a substantial body of submissions received from across and beyond the sector.
For anyone familiar with the mood music of the past 12 months, the submissions make for familiar reading. They range across questions of independence, ministerial direction, appointments, system coherence, relations with existing bodies such as TEQSA, and a concern that ATEC should not become another short-lived reform layered onto an already complex system.
Much of the commentary has settled, understandably, on questions of independence. The driving concern is whether ATEC can offer advice that is genuinely long-term and system-wide and not drawn too closely to the priorities of the government of the day. These are serious questions. But there is a risk that the debate becomes narrowly architectural, focused on statutory safeguards rather than on how commissions of this kind have behaved over time.
What has attracted a little less attention is Australia’s own experience with earlier tertiary education commissions. There is useful insight here. We have built institutions like this before, lived with them, relied on them, and eventually dismantled them.
These episodes are often mentioned in passing but rarely examined closely for what they tell us about why such bodies initially work, and why they struggle to endure.
This history does not offer a simple warning or a ready-made blueprint. It does, however, complicate the idea that independence alone is decisive. Experience suggests that much depends on whether governments are willing to live with the buffering institutions they create once political and fiscal pressures mount, or the politics of the day moves in another direction.
Australia’s first national tertiary education body, the Australian Universities Commission (AUC), was established in 1959 following the Murray Review. From today’s vantage point, the system it oversaw was small and relatively straightforward. Higher education at the time comprised ten universities, two university colleges, and around 36,000 students. The AUC’s major contribution was the introduction of triennial funding, which brought a welcome degree of predictability and stability to university finances.
But the AUC’s remit was limited. It focused primarily on funding advice, while broader policy responsibility remained elsewhere in the Commonwealth. As participation expanded and institutional diversity increased, new commissions were added for advanced education and later for TAFE. By the mid-1970s, this fragmented architecture was struggling to cope with rapid growth, rising expectations around access and equity, and increasingly blurred boundaries between sectors.
In what now looks remarkably familiar, the Commonwealth Tertiary Education Commission (CTEC) was created in 1977 in response to those pressures. CTEC was intended to take a system-wide view across universities, Colleges of Advanced Education, and TAFE, and to provide longer-range planning and advice alongside its funding role.
For much of its first decade, CTEC worked reasonably well. It absorbed the expertise and institutional memory of its predecessors, developed substantial analytical and planning capacity, and provided a stable focal point for tertiary education policy during a period of significant expansion and structural change.
Several conditions helped. Institutions were heavily reliant on Commonwealth funding that flowed through the Commission. CTEC had the space to think beyond the annual budget cycle and to bring evidence to bear on system-level questions about growth, distribution, and capacity. And, for a time, it operated as a buffer between political ambition and institutional reality, translating priorities into plans and moderating volatility.
This positioning gave CTEC authority. It was not perfect, but it was trusted enough by government, respected enough by institutions, and embedded enough in the policy machinery to play a genuinely coordinating role.
By the mid-1980s, the context had shifted. Fiscal constraint sharpened and tertiary education was increasingly viewed through the lens of labour markets, productivity, and industry policy. Expectations multiplied, even as resources tightened.
CTEC’s remit expanded accordingly. However, its room to manoeuvre narrowed considerably. Funding guidelines became more prescriptive. Terms of reference changed. Appointments became more tightly managed.
The Commission was asked to do more, faster, and with less, while exercising less judgement of its own, a dynamic that progressively eroded its authority.
As is common for political institutions, this was not a sudden collapse, but rather a gradual hollowing-out. As pressures mounted, CTEC’s deliberative processes, once valued, were increasingly seen as slow and insufficiently responsive. When the Dawkins reforms arrived, policy authority was recentralised within a new education and employment super-department. CTEC was replaced by an internal advisory body and formally dissolved in 1988.
The lesson here is not simply that independence matters. It is that commissions of this kind depend on durable political settlements about their role and purpose that cross political divides and endure over time. CTEC did not falter because it lacked statutory form or technical competence. It faltered when governments wanted the benefits of a buffering institution without the patience to live with one.
ATEC is being established in an environment that will test it in similar ways. Public finances are constrained. Expectations are high. Ministerial interest in outcomes is intense. But our politics are deeply contested. Under these conditions, legislative design can only take us so far. The effectiveness of the Commission will depend just as much on whether successive governments are willing to tolerate advice that is long-term, system-focused, and occasionally inconvenient. Recent experience suggests this cannot be taken for granted.
Australia’s earlier commissions show that such bodies can add real value. They also show how quickly that value can be eroded when politics changes. As Parliament finalises the design of ATEC, it is worth keeping this history in mind alongside more familiar debates about independence and control.
Keelin George is Executive Director (DVCA) and Professor Rorden Wilkinson is Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) at Macquarie University.