This is the sixth and final article in a series on Australian University Governance by Sean Brawley, including:
- Part 1 – The Origins of Governance in Universities Globally
- Part 2 – The Foundations of University Governance in Australia
- Part 3 – Post WWII Stability in Governance
- Part 4 – The Dawkins Revolution – From Coordination to Control
- Part 5 – The Howard Years – The Maturation of Commonwealth Control
- Part 6 – The Governance Settlement
OPINION
Part 6 – The Governance Settlement
A Potted History of Australian University Governance
In the wake of the Howard Government’s National Governance Protocols, State Governments began responding to the requirements attached to s33-15 of the Higher Education Support Act 2003. In Victoria, for example, a 2002 Review of University Governance had already been undertaken and had in fact influenced Nelson’s protocols. The Bracks Labor Government was therefore able to respond quickly with the University Acts (Amendment) Act 2003. The Act used detailed statutory language, establishing clearer institutional objectives and stronger governing body oversight of control and accountability systems, with councils comprising members selected for relevant skills and committed to acting in the interests of the university as a whole.
Following earlier trends in other States, the Victorian amendments also marked the quiet end of one of the oldest features of university governance: the Visitor. Traditionally the Visitor — often the Governor or a Crown representative — served as the final internal arbiter of disputes and interpreter of university statutes, reflecting the medieval conception of universities as self-governing corporations operating under their own jurisdiction. The office remained in title, but its functions were now ceremonial. Reflecting contemporary corporate board practice, the Victorian Act also introduced provisions allowing external council members to be remunerated.
Across the Murray, the Carr Labor Government responded through the University Legislation Amendment Act (2004). The new Act sought to ensure the State’s universities would comply with the protocols “to the extent necessary” to unlock staged increases in Commonwealth Grant Scheme funding worth over $100 million. The changes introduced external majorities, limited council size, imposed corporate-style fiduciary duties, linked disqualification provisions to Part 2D.6 of the Commonwealth Corporations Act (2001), and formalised councils’ strategic, financial and risk oversight roles. As in Victoria, elected staff and student representation was retained but the legislation reiterated the Protocols’ insistence that such council members were elected ad personam.
As the sector was coming to grips with the National Governance Protocols, Brendan Nelson briefly floated an even more ambitious extension of Commonwealth authority. In 2005 he circulated an Issues Paper titled “Rationalising Responsibility for Higher Education in Australia”. The paper introduced the “potential benefits and risks of transferring primary legislative responsibility for universities from the states to the Commonwealth.” Whether this icing on the cake of Commonwealth control was actually needed was debatable. Nelson’s proposal gained little traction from the States — which would ultimately have had to agree to any such transfer of power — and the idea was quietly set aside.
Kevin07 and the “Education Revolution”
When Labor under Kevin Rudd returned to government in 2007, the political framing of higher education policy shifted abruptly. The new government came to office promising an “Education Revolution” to address what it described as a decade of Coalition neglect. University funding and reform under the Howard Government had been characterised by Labor figures as a “national disgrace” or a “national tragedy”. On the campaign trail, Rudd argued: “How can a young person build a deposit for a home if they are carrying a massive education debt? Australia can do better.”
The incoming Minister for Education, Employment and Workplace Relations, Julia Gillard, moved quickly to unwind what Labor characterised as the excesses of the Howard era in higher education. While some academics with governance expertise regarded the National Governance Protocols as a “remarkable benchmark of governance best practice” when assessed against OECD and ASX corporate governance principles, their use as a lever through Commonwealth funding conditions — combined with what Senator Kim Carr described as the Coalition’s “constant demands for the application at universities of their hideous Work Choices principles” — meant they were more widely seen within the sector and the new government as part of a broader culture-war agenda directed at universities.
The controversy surrounding Brendan Nelson’s interventions in Australian Research Council grant approvals sharpened the power of such interpretations. In prosecuting the case against the previous government’s approach, Carr linked governance reform explicitly to academic freedom. Along with Ministerial blocking of research grants, the conditioning of funding on compliance with prescribed governance arrangements were presented as evidence of a “fundamental contempt” for the liberal character of the university. Rhetorically, at least, Labor recast governance yet again: from the language of managerial efficiency and corporate best practice to that of intellectual autonomy and the proper limits of executive power.
Yet the repudiation was selective. Labor removed the conditional funding mechanism and abandoned the formal protocols, but despite critiques that suggested the Nelsonian governance changes had been driven by “mistrust” of the sector, it did not see a need to recast internal university governance away from the corporate approach. Indeed, if the sector had wanted to push back and reclaim a more collegial model of university governance they were given the opportunity to make that case when the Federal Government encouraged Universities Australia (which had changed its name from the Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee in 2007), and the University Chancellors Council (formed in 2004 as the University Chancellors Conference) to develop a new “voluntary code” for university governance.
The “Voluntary Code of Best Practice in University Governance”, endorsed by Commonwealth and State ministers in 2011, did not mark a departure from the governance model established earlier in the decade. In substance there was little daylight between it and the 2003 National Governance Protocols or the legislative reforms as earlier exampled by New South Wales and Victoria. The principal difference lay not in the governance architecture but in tone and legal status: the Code largely restated the same expectations as voluntary sector guidance rather than as compliance conditions attached to Commonwealth funding. In this sense it consolidated rather than reversed the trajectory of the previous decade. The Code embedded the corporate approach and encouraged “comply or explain” reporting in annual reports, while framing these practices as consistent with universities’ statutory character and public mission. Operating alongside each institution’s enabling Act, the Code did not seek to displace legislative arrangements — nor did it need to. Governance had become less politically coercive but more systemically embedded within the sector’s accountability architecture. The visible sanction of funding withdrawal disappeared; in its place stood a shared understanding that institutional legitimacy depended on demonstrable competence in oversight, risk management and strategic stewardship. By 2011 the corporate council model no longer required enforcement: it had become the sector’s own statement of best practice.
Indeed, an emerging issue — reflected in a number of court cases during this period, most notably University of Western Australia v Gray (2009) — was whether university governance should now be viewed through the lens of corporate governance as framed by the Corporations Act (2001). Litigants sought to test whether federal corporate law applied directly to universities. On one level the question was straightforward: was the modern “corporate university” bound by the Corporations Act, or did universities fall within the category of “exempt public authorities” under s57A? The courts declined to provide a definitive answer. While acknowledging the long-standing corporate character of universities — institutions of incorporation whose origins lie in early modern English charters — and noting that such bodies are not identical to modern trading corporations, the courts resolved the cases on narrower procedural or substantive grounds rather than determining the broader constitutional question.
The Bradley Review and TEQSA: Autonomy Recalibrated
Even as the consolidation of internal governance arrangements was being finalised through the Voluntary Code, the policy conversation had already moved beyond the composition and conduct of university councils and back to questions of sector governance.
Rather than withdrawing from Commonwealth steering, the Rudd Government sought to recast it. Influence would no longer be exercised through prescriptive governance protocols or increasingly public confrontation, but through systemic review, negotiated funding compacts and the design of a new regulatory framework. If the protocols had represented one mode of federal control, the so-called “Bradley Review” would represent another — not a withdrawal of authority, but its re-articulation within a more technocratic and system-wide policy settlement.
The 2008 Review of Australian Higher Education, chaired by the former Vice-Chancellor of the University of South Australia, Professor Denise Bradley, was not conceived as a governance review. Its headline concerns were participation, equity, funding and national productivity. At its core was a transformative recommendation: the introduction of a demand-driven funding system for domestic undergraduate places. Yet embedded within this expansionary architecture was another significant recalibration of university governance — one that consolidated recent internal governance developments while reconfiguring the Commonwealth’s relationship with the sector.
Bradley began from a simple proposition: accountability should be clear and should rest where authority lies. The Review affirmed that “primary accountability for performance” rested with the governing body of each institution. Councils, not federal ministers, were responsible for institutional mission, strategy and outcomes. At the same time, the Review acknowledged a structural reality: mission and student load could not be “implemented or applied in any practical sense” without Commonwealth approval of funding levels. Institutional authority was reaffirmed, but it remained fiscally contingent.
The proposed “demand-driven entitlement system” for domestic undergraduates represented a decisive shift in the mechanics of Commonwealth steering. Unlike the Nelson reforms — which introduced competitive pricing and behavioural incentives within a capped system of Commonwealth allocations — Bradley proposed removing the enrolment cap for bachelor places and allowing funding to follow student demand. Control did not disappear. Funding rates, eligibility rules, equity targets and performance incentives remained centrally determined. But the mechanism of steering changed. The Commonwealth moved from rationing places to designing the architecture within which institutional growth would occur.
At the institutional level, the implications were clear. In a demand-driven system, funding would follow student enrolment decisions rather than Commonwealth allocation of places. Outside defined funding components and specific-purpose programs, councils would exercise strategic authority within their legislative charters. Universities would continue to accredit their own courses and bear primary responsibility for academic standards through established internal quality assurance processes. The accountability framework was intended to be “simple, clear and transparent”, reducing bilateral micromanagement while sharpening governing body responsibility.
The removal of enrolment caps nevertheless had important internal governance consequences. With funding tied directly to student demand, governing bodies assumed greater responsibility for managing institutional growth and risk. Councils were required to oversee expansion in student load, monitor academic quality under conditions of scale, scrutinise the financial implications of cross-subsidisation between teaching and research, and respond strategically to intensified competition for students rather than Commonwealth allocation of places. Academic boards remained formally intact as custodians of academic standards, but the balance of institutional influence tilted further toward executive strategy and financial planning.
Alongside the demand-driven funding system, the Rudd and Gillard governments introduced Mission-Based Compacts — negotiated agreements between each university and the Commonwealth that articulated institutional mission, strategic priorities and performance expectations. These compacts drew governing bodies more directly into frameworks of negotiated accountability and formalised the language of institutional mission in Commonwealth-facing policy instruments. Autonomy was expressed through differentiated institutional missions, but within a structured performance dialogue with government. Unlike the more overt ideological interventions of the Howard era — such as workplace reform and voluntary student unionism — the Rudd–Gillard framework embedded Commonwealth steering through metrics, negotiated agreements and regulatory architecture.
If Bradley strengthened institutional responsibility, it simultaneously intensified system governance. The Review characterised existing arrangements across higher education and vocational education and training as “complex and fragmented” and proposed the creation of a new national regulatory body. This was not the first attempt to introduce national oversight. The Australian Universities Quality Agency (AUQA), established in 2000, had already conducted cyclical external audits of universities’ internal quality assurance systems. Operating through peer review rather than statutory authority, AUQA represented an early step toward sector-wide scrutiny of academic quality.
The eventual establishment of the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) in 2011 translated Bradley’s recommendation into a permanent national regulatory authority overseeing accreditation, quality assurance and compliance across the sector.
Domain 6 of the Higher Education Standards Framework required providers to maintain an accountable governing body responsible for institutional direction, financial sustainability, risk oversight and the quality of higher education, but it avoided prescribing specific council structures or compositions, instead emphasising demonstrable governance capability and effective internal assurance mechanisms. TEQSA’s own guidance note (2015) would reinforce this continuity, describing corporate governance as the framework through which organisational direction is set, authority delegated, performance monitored and risk managed. It explicitly cited the Universities Australia Voluntary Code of Best Practice as the relevant reference point. In effect, the broader regulatory architecture linked institutional governance to quality assurance and sector accountability.
The Bradley reforms and the subsequent establishment of TEQSA did not undo the corporate turn of the Nelson years; rather, they rendered it routine. By replacing the overt political coercion of the Governance Protocols with a regulatory framework, the Commonwealth ensured that institutional autonomy became contingent upon demonstrable compliance with nationally prescribed standards. In this sense, governance became less politically visible but more structurally embedded. While this shift aligned more closely with the “system-building” of the Dawkins era than with Nelson’s direct structural interventions, the corporate council model remained fundamentally intact.
This Bradley–TEQSA-Voluntary Code settlement represents the final structural stage in the evolution of Australian university governance to this moment. By the early 2010s, both the institutional architecture of governing councils and the Commonwealth’s framework for sector oversight had assumed the forms that currently persist. The long arc of reform had reached a new equilibrium: universities remained autonomous in law, but that autonomy now operated within a national system defined by fiscal dependence, market exposure, and regulatory assurance. Consequently, the focus of sector debate has shifted away from the design of formal structures — which are now effectively resolved — toward the “governance in practice” that has increasingly animated the past decade.
Corporate and academic governance remain the two formal pillars of university governance, and many observers assume that they operate as separate but equal branches of authority. In practice, and despite some recent calls to restore academic self-governance, they never have been. What we now describe as corporate governance has always held the superior legal position. University councils have historically possessed an overarching authority from which all other powers flow, even if much of that authority has been routinely delegated to executive management and academic bodies. In this sense, understanding a university’s schedule of delegations is today more revealing than examining its Act of incorporation. It is within those delegations that many of the most consequential governance debates of the past decade have occurred — particularly where councils have chosen to withdraw or narrow delegated authority, for example in areas such as senior appointments. At the same time, the lived practice of governance has often been shaped less by formal rules than by behaviour. Many, probably most, senior university leaders would be able to recount instances where the governance principle of “nose in, fingers out” has been subsumed and councils have crossed the “management line” up to their elbows, engaging directly in matters and decisions that earlier governance conventions would have regarded as the prerogative of university executives and/or academic governance.
Series Conclusion — Autonomy and Accountability: The Enduring Tension in University Governance
Eight centuries after the medieval western universities first claimed jurisdiction over their own affairs, the modern Australian university remains a self-governing corporation in law. Yet the context in which that autonomy operates has been transformed.
If the preceding history suggests anything, it is that debates about university governance have rarely been simply about governance. From their origins as self-governing corporations of scholars, Australian universities have existed at the intersection of two competing impulses: the desire of academic communities to regulate their own intellectual life, and the legitimate expectation of governments and societies that publicly funded institutions should serve broader social purposes. Governance structures have therefore always reflected an attempt to mediate this relationship rather than resolve it.
That mediation has taken several distinct forms. The nineteenth-century colonial universities were chartered corporations whose councils exercised authority on behalf of the Crown while protecting a sphere of academic self-rule. The post-war expansion of higher education introduced the “buffer” model in which government funding and coordination were mediated through advisory bodies that preserved institutional autonomy. The Dawkins reforms of the late twentieth century dismantled that arrangement, integrating universities more directly into national economic and social policy. From that moment onward, university governance could no longer be understood solely as an internal institutional matter. It had become part of the architecture of national policy.
The reforms of the Howard, Rudd and Gillard governments did not fundamentally alter that settlement; they refined its mechanisms. The introduction of corporate governance principles, the negotiation of institutional compacts and the creation of TEQSA progressively embedded universities within a framework of performance management, regulatory assurance and market exposure. The language of autonomy remained important, but its meaning had changed. Autonomy no longer implied insulation from external expectation; rather, it described the space within which institutions exercised strategic judgment while operating inside a nationally coordinated system.
Seen in this longer perspective, contemporary debates about university governance often misidentify the source of tension. The most visible disputes — over council composition, academic board authority or the boundaries between governance and management — occur within institutions themselves. Yet the more fundamental constraint on institutional autonomy lies outside them. Australian universities remain legally autonomous corporations, but they operate within a policy environment defined by public funding, national regulation and increasingly competitive global markets. Governance structures mediate these pressures; they cannot eliminate them.
This perspective also helps situate the current policy moment. Senate inquiries into the quality of university governance, proposals to expand TEQSA’s oversight powers and the creation of the Australian Tertiary Education Commission all reflect renewed political attention to the sector. Yet these developments operate largely within the institutional framework established over the past three decades. Even proposals to reintroduce a form of sector “stewardship” through ATEC — often framed as a return to a buffer model — appear to many pundits unlikely to recreate the arm’s-length arrangements of earlier eras. Instead, they sit within a policy architecture in which ministerial priorities, regulatory standards and national performance expectations continue to shape the operating environment of universities.
For this reason the most important questions facing university governance today are less structural than cultural. They concern how governing bodies interpret their responsibilities, how they balance strategic oversight with institutional trust, and how they navigate the boundary between legitimate scrutiny and operational intervention. The formal architecture of governance may now be largely settled, but the practice of governance — the habits, expectations and behaviours through which authority is exercised — continues to evolve.
And so we return to the question that framed this series. What are universities for, and who gets to decide? The history of Australian university governance suggests that the answer has never rested with a single actor. Governments, governing councils, academic communities and the wider public have all sought to shape the purposes of the university. Governance has been the mechanism through which those competing claims are negotiated. The structures may change, the language may evolve, but the underlying tension — between autonomy and accountability, scholarship and service, independence and obligation — is unlikely ever to disappear.