Opinion
The Australian Universities Accord has moved Australian higher education into an era of system stewardship. ATEC, compacts, managed growth and needs-based funding all signal the Commonwealth’s intent to both shape and curate.
Australia has been busy building new machinery for the system stewardship of tertiary education. But we have not yet examined the architecture of the wider system to be stewarded. Or dared to ask whether the current form of Australian higher education is truly fit for the purpose of delivering the national task now being described. If we are to do so, we really should look at the institutions within the system and ask whether they are geared towards the outcomes we seek.
There may be good reasons why these questions have not yet been asked.
The current system has been unprecedently occupied. So much has happened in Australian higher education that it’s hard to believe that the Accord final report was only published at the end of February 2024. We’ve rapidly progressed through an Accord Implementation Advisory Committee, draft legislation and an Interim ATEC. Then legislation passed establishing an empowered ATEC and its inaugural Commissioners. First-wave Accord measures such as changes to HELP indexation, Fee-Free Uni Ready courses, Commonwealth Prac Payments, SSAF changes – and the legislative arrangements needed to enable the operation of a brand-new university in South Australia were all put in place. HELP indexation cap changes were introduced and backdated, as were measures to reduce student debt by 20% and to raise repayment thresholds by over 23%. Demand driven funding for First Nations, low-SES and regional and remote students are among the elements of new needs-based funding and a managed growth funding system now rolling out.
Those elements, if they were all that had happened in two years, would be a lot to occupy the system.
But they’re only part of a far more complex picture.
Through this same period, international student numbers became embroiled in a pre-election migration and housing debate, leading to the attempted amendment of the ESOS Act to cap numbers, were it not for its defeat in parliament. Ministerial directions 107 and 111 effectively limited numbers in the absence of hard caps and the lexicon of Australian international education expanded to include concepts such as the National Planning Level and NOSCs. Student Safety – always of paramount concern for universities, took on even greater relevance as it suddenly evolved to become a national regulatory issue, not just an institutional policy issue. A national student ombudsman was created, and the government also legislated the National Higher Education Code to Prevent and Respond to Gender-based Violence – signalling another shift from institutional self-regulation to the application of national minimum standards. Jillian Segal was announced as the first Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism in July 2024, a parliamentary inquiry into antisemitism at Australian universities reported in February 2025, and a national plan to combat antisemitism was released in July 2025. An Expert Council on University Governance was announced in January 2025. By October 2025, the Minister had announced that new governance principles would be embedded through Commonwealth regulation, including the Higher Education Standards Framework and Threshold Standards. With 47 recommendations, the Australian Human Rights Commission’s Respect@Uni final report was released in February 2026 – positing racism to be deeply embedded and systemic across the sector. These matters all became intertwined in public debate – shifting the focus in Australian universities from research and education to preservation of institutional legitimacy and social license.
In a little over two short years, the Australian tertiary education sector has had to deal with international student caps and visa processing regimes. With student debt, placement poverty and gender-based violence. With racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia and with Palestine-linked protest. With executive pay, wage underpayment and governance inquiries. With the rise of artificial intelligence. With deficits, institutional restructures, job losses and leadership transitions. With new Vice Chancellors, new lobby groups and even new universities. With ATEC’s arrival, new funding levers, the dawn of tertiary harmonisation and the still yet unresolved future of JRG and research investment.
That is *a lot* of concentrated change, manifest in a very short time.
A series of one-two punches rapidly following on from the softening up precipitated by a hopeful and optimistic Accord. Since February 2024, higher education has entered a phase where its value and its very legitimacy are being constantly questioned. Such a cauldron of pressure does not afford much time for learning institutions to breathe, to think, or to strategise for the future. And yet that is precisely what they should be doing at this transitional time.
The Accord was at its very best when it dared ask big architectural questions. It floated, even if it did not finally settle, the possibility of a National Regional University. It tested, but did not manage to land, the idea of pooling international student-derived revenue or broader own-source revenue into a strategic national fund. Of course, this was all back in a pre-capped international student numbers ideological time. The Accord rightly returned to mission-based compacts with meaning. It proposed a system steward that must be able to think beyond institutional self-interest. Those ideas were deliberate and provocative. They were likely signposts for thinking that believes that the current education architecture in Australia may not be quite equal to the challenge of delivering against an Australian national objective where 80 per cent of the working-age population have measurable tertiary education attainment by 2050. This is symptomatic of a desire to catalyse the necessary change to create a system which embraces lofty goals and disruptive thinking.
The Accord was similarly at its best when it cherished spiky thoughts as challenges – as a means to stretch considerations beyond current norms, not as outcomes.
With so much externally foisted change imposed on the system, perhaps it is time now to pause for a moment, before any headlong rush to stewardship, and to more deeply contemplate what type of system we wish to architect and have in place for the future – and with what components. To move from a perpetually reactionary stance to determine where measures of disruption could be most beneficial. If systemic change is to flow from the Commonwealth to the States, then perhaps one first topic for deeper contemplation is the nature of Australian institutions, and within that, the role to be played by the Australian National University.
If Australia could contemplate creating a second national university, as was an Accord consideration, it should logically also be prepared to ask what is to become of the first.
This is in no way an attack on the ANU, rather it is a policy question about national function. For 80 years, the ANU has advanced scholarship and contributed to national capability. Precisely because of that legacy, its contemporary role should not be left to continued assumption. The ANU has served generations of Australians very well. An ANU may be what Australians now need.
The two are not automatically the same.
An Australian tertiary education system which embraces lofty goals and disruptive thinking could hold space for a rethought national university function. A differentiated national university function. One of higher value than the continuity of an institutional form conceived at the close of the Second World War. Australia – and the Australian education system – should be willing to ask whether its national university could be reimagined with redefined purpose. That reimagining could envisage a national university designed and funded for combining national capability and federal purpose. An institution advancing and balancing regional access and differentiated mission, public accountability and institutional sustainability.
An ANU, with a deliberate, federated membership, distinct role and mission, could present as a national university architecture fit for a more publicly accountable Accord-era tertiary system.
Or it may not.
This is not the prescription of an answer – it is the suggestion of entertaining a possibility.
That is the nature of ideas – some are worth pursuit – and some can be safely run to ground without consequence. It would be nice, though to raise our gaze from the torrent of scrutiny, oversight and review and to turn our minds to thinking on how best we might seek to shape the future.
Turning our thinking in such a direction could be a welcome, and timely, return to considering spiky ideas and big challenge.
Australian tertiary education is now firmly in the Accord era. System stewardship is a reality. ATEC should put such thinking back on the table. One meaningful compact ATEC must make with the nation is a willingness to actively examine institutional architecture and not just the flow of funding and policies through it.
Emeritus Professor David Lloyd was Vice Chancellor & President of the University of South Australia from 2013-2026 and Founding Co-Vice Chancellor of Adelaide University 2024-2026. Hi is now Principal of BlueRange Advisory.