This is the first piece in a five-part series examining the landscape in which universities operate in Australia today, from the perspective of Professor Richard Blythe, who is PVC for the Humanities Faculty at Curtin University.
Opinion
Anthony Albanese never tires of telling us he was raised by a single mum on a disability pension, in public housing in Camperdown — and that public institutions are the reason a working-class kid could become Prime Minister. Jason Clare tells a parallel story: the first in his family to finish school, the first to go to university, a product of Cabramatta Public and Canley Vale High, who says plainly that Gough Whitlam changed what was possible for kids like him.
Both stories are true. Both are moving. And both describe a country that, for a large and growing number of students, no longer exists.
Here is the part the speeches leave out. The very degrees that carried these men out of disadvantage (arts, law, economics), now sit in the funding band the Commonwealth has all but abandoned. Under the Morrison government’s 2021 Job-Ready Graduates scheme, students in arts, humanities, law, commerce and communications pay more than 90 cents in every dollar of the cost of their own education. For that top band, the public contribution has shrunk to barely seven per cent. A three-year arts degree now lands around $50,000 of debt on the student.
That is not a subsidised public place. It is a privately funded degree with a government loan attached.
And it is not a handful of students. On the Innovative Research Universities’ own 2026 analysis, unwinding Job-Ready Graduates would benefit roughly 470,000 students — nearly half a million Australians — studying in the fields the scheme damaged. About 285,000 of them sit in that worst-affected top band, where the public has effectively walked out of the room. Whether you are from Canberra, Sydney or Kununurra, the deal is identical: no meaningful public investment in your higher education. For these students, the “public university” is public in name only.
So where can you still get a genuinely free public university education? Not here. You would have to go to Germany, which abolished tuition outright in 2014. Or Norway, free to all comers. Or – and this is the part that should sting – Brazil and Argentina, whose flagship public universities charge their students nothing, on economies a fraction the size of our free public higher education is not a function of national wealth. It is a function of national will. One of the richest countries on earth, per head, has chosen instead to bill its arts students $50,000.
It wasn’t always so…and it didn’t have to be.
In 1974, Gough Whitlam abolished university fees outright, on the principle that a student’s merit, not a parent’s wealth, should decide who benefits. That high-water mark lasted fifteen years. In 1989, John Dawkins brought back a charge through HECS, and yes, students began paying again. But notice what Dawkins did not do. HECS was a single flat fee, the same for every course, whatever you chose to study. The government collected a contribution; it did not presume to price your choices, to penalise history and reward nursing with a five-figure surcharge. The differential bands came later, under Howard. Whatever its faults, the original HECS bargain left the question of what is worth studying to students and scholars: not to a minister’s notion of a “job-ready” economy.
Job-Ready Graduates broke that compact. It converted the price of a degree into a political instrument – cheaper here, punitively dearer there – and then, by gutting the Commonwealth’s share in the disfavoured fields, quietly turned hundreds of thousands of “public” places into self-funded ones. The verdict is now in, and it is damning: the scheme did not move students into the favoured courses. It simply loaded debt onto the students who studied what they loved. Worse, commencements among the most disadvantaged students have fallen sharply in exactly these high-fee fields. The policy missed its target and hit the vulnerable instead.
Which brings me to the quieter, more corrosive change, and to a document this government would do well to read in full.
In 1932, long before he was Prime Minister, John Curtin wrote a column for The West Australian on the purpose of a university. It is one of the great statements of the public- education ideal in our history, and Jason Clare plainly knows it: the lines he quoted in his 2025 John Curtin lecture – that a university should “look ever forward,” that it should be “the champion always ready to defend the poor and obscure” – are lifted straight from it.
But Clare quotes the soaring parts and skips the argument. Because in that same essay, Curtin warned against precisely the country we have built. He condemned universities that were “schools of privilege.” He insisted that human endeavour must be “tested by its human results and not alone by its pecuniary achievements.” He wrote that an education aimed at the individual’s “competitive struggle for himself against his fellows,” rather than the common good, was merely “sharpening the teeth of wolves.” And he demanded that “the new humanities must be based on the people – not some of the people, the select refined, nice people, but all of them!”
Read that against a $50,000 humanities degree, priced as a deterrent and 93 per cent funded by the student, and ask whose vision is winning.
Curtin went further still. “Above all,” he wrote, “the University must be a citadel for freedom.” The seat of learning “must be a bulwark for liberty,” because “what may be expedient for the State may well be a menace to mankind.” That conviction is why he built the country’s first Universities Commission as an arms-length body, and why Clare himself calls that Commission the “progenitor” of his new Australian Tertiary Education Commission.
It is a revealing comparison, because ATEC is not that citadel. Witness after witness at the Senate inquiry warned it risked becoming just another administrative arm of the Education Department. The minister sets its strategic priorities through a statement Parliament cannot even disallow. And, most tellingly, the government refused to let ATEC advise on student contributions at all. The one body charged with “stewarding” the system is forbidden from recommending a fix to the very fees that have hollowed it out. What may be expedient for the State, indeed.
So here is the contradiction worth naming out loud, and it is not the ordinary kind, the sort that dies of embarrassment the moment it is exposed. A government led by the living proof of what public education can do, quoting Whitlam and Curtin at every anniversary lecture, has left in place a scheme that strips public funding from nearly half a million students, and built its new “independent steward” inside the department, powerless over the fees that matter most. The speeches are not a cover for the policy. They are what makes the policy bearable. Invoking Curtin is not a slip; it is the permission slip – the warm story of opportunity that lets the quiet withdrawal of opportunity pass for progress.
Curtin demanded a citadel for freedom, open to all the people and answerable to none of the political weather. Whitlam demanded access that did not depend on a parent’s bank balance. The test for this government is not its speeches. It is whether a kid from Kununurra, or Cabramatta, or Camperdown can still walk into a genuinely public university…and find that the public has stayed in the room.
Until they fix Job-Ready Graduates, and until they let their own commission speak freely, the honest answer is: increasingly, no.
Professor Richard Blythe is PVC of the Faculty of Humanities at Curtin University