For Australia’s Universities, Over-Regulation is the Price of Virtue Signalling, By Salvatore Babones
Australia's universities say they are over-regulated—and the chief executive of Universities Australia (UA), Luke Sheehy, has just secured a promise from education minister Jason Clare to give his members a break.
A "better regulation" working group composed of "regulators, university peak bodies, unions and student representatives" will lead the charge in reducing regulation and cutting red tape.
The 38 universities that make up Universities Australia must be thrilled with the sudden change in direction that the organisation has taken.
After all, it was just last week that UA called for "the establishment of a national Racism@Uni Working Group to develop a coordinated Action Plan for the sector" in response to a Human Rights Commission report on university racism.
The UA press release expressed enthusiasm for the "consistent standards, stronger accountability and measurable progress across all institutions" that more paperwork could bring.
Indeed, until last week, the old UA was begging for greater regulation any time a woke cause could justify the creation of a new education bureaucracy.
Consider the new Higher Education Gender-based Violence Regulator, a new bureaucracy that was quietly legislated last year with technical support from UA. The government's own estimates put the annual regulatory compliance burden at $173.2 million.
This is a burden that the old UA was happy to bear. The organisation commended and welcomed the plan for the new regulator. In fact, it was UA itself that collected the highly questionable "data" on which the need for a new regulator justified.
And where the government wouldn't satisfy the universities' aspirations for greater regulation, the old UA supplied the regulations itself. For example, the UA 2022-2025 Indigenous Strategy bound its members to an annual cycle of reports, meetings, and consultations on issues affecting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians.
There's no word yet on what direction the new UA will take in 2026. It almost goes without saying that the old UA favoured the creation of a new universities super-regulator, the Australian Tertiary Education Commission (ATEC). The new, anti-regulation UA will have to live with the consequences.
In fact, it seems that just about the only thing that the old UA did not want to see regulated was vice chancellor salaries. …
Salvatore Babones is an associate professor at the University of Sydney and the author of Australia's Universities: Can They Reform?
