Will Australian universities’ warm political feelings survive cold reality?

Australian academics headed on off their holidays this month warmed not only by the summer sun but also by hopes that the higher education review announced by the new Labor government will grant a new lease of life to a sector frozen out by the previous Liberal/National coalition.

The review, to be led by former University of Adelaide vice-chancellor Mary O’Kane, is the first major review of higher education since the Bradley Review of 2008 and is being carried out alongside inquiries into the Australian Research Council (ARC) and the Excellence Research for Australia (ERA) national research audit. When the review reports late this year, it will be the precursor to a formal governmental accord between the universities and the government.

“Accord” has many warm overtones, but it is important to recall that we have been here before. In 2008, the Rudd-Gillard Labor government similarly raised hopes by speaking of an “education revolution”. However, confronted by budgetary pressures in 2012, it announced a A$2.8 billion (£1.6 billion) forward estimates cut to higher education – and subsequent Liberal/National governments continued to make cuts. Looking further back, the accord between the 1980s Hawke Labor government and the Australian Council of Trade Unions also dashed hopes, turning out to be the precursor of sustained wage decline.

Moreover, however genuine the Albanese government’s desire to address the multiple crises in modern Australian higher education, it will not be easy to repair 10 years of neglect and animosity and forge a new, invigorating agenda that can survive the vicissitudes of budget constraints.

The accord process itself is already reversing the animosity, but the neglect will not be so easy to reverse. Between 2010 and 2019, while domestic student enrolments rose by 27 per cent, the share of total university revenue that came from the government, including student loan payments, decreased from 56 per cent to 49 per cent. The difference is made up by a 56 per cent rise in overseas student enrolments, the revenue from which now accounts for 26 per cent of total university income.

Domestic student debt is another festering sore, with 2.9 million graduates having outstanding Hecs-Help loans in 2020-21, totalling more than A$68.7 billion, in an environment of rising inflation and interest rates. Compounding the problem of costs for students was the Morrison government’s decision in 2020 to increase student fees for arts, law and social science students while lowering them for some STEM subjects as a price signal that students should be more vocationally focused. O’Kane has been asked to address the course cost issue, and there is hope among deans of humanities that some redress will be offered.

When it comes to research, financial, political and regulatory issues must all be confronted. On the financial front, successive governments have refused to fund fully academic research, leaving international fees to fill the gap. Additionally, the level of ARC funding has declined from an inflation-adjusted peak of just over A$1 billion in 2012-13 to A$750 million in 2020. Similarly, over the same period, government funding for health research fell from A$936 million to A$828 million in real terms. The uncertainty of the public funds and the over-reliance on international student fees have led to precarious employment becoming commonplace.

In terms of politics, universities and academics have called for the removal of the ministerial power to veto grants, but that is a bridge too far for the new education minister, Jason Clare. Researchers may feel the need to conduct research as they see fit, but governments feel the need to police the use of taxpayer funds for academic research. Nevertheless, Clare has promised not to follow the Liberal/National government’s practice of vetoing grants for populist effect.

Last, in terms of regulation, Clare’s aspiration is that the ERA review will see the exercise retained – it serves a political purpose, after all, in defending taxpayer funds for university research, even if the 2018 addition of an impact and engagement element prompted an underwhelmed reaction from then education minister Dan Tehan. But Clare wants it to embrace a “modern data-driven approach”. That is all very well, but a more holistic strategy for research would be to focus the ARC and ERA reviews on the precarious workforce and other problems beyond the quality of individual outputs. It would also rethink the poor scores for impact in 2018 as a problem that is shared with end users, rather than being the fault of universities alone.

Anthony Albanese comes from a humble background and was the first in his family to gain a degree. It is to be hoped, therefore, that he feels the value of universities more keenly than some of his predecessors have. It is also likely that many Labor voters will support him in his efforts to shore up higher education: voters with education levels beyond Year 12 turned away from the coalition to Labor, the Greens and the independents in the last general election. Nevertheless, even graduates rarely list higher education among their chief political concerns.

Albanese and Clare’s warm words may well run up against the cold reality that confronted Julia Gillard: that when crises come, universities are not vote winners.

Greg McCarthy is emeritus professor of political science at the University of Western Australia.