Jason Clare has a brave vision for reform but lacks money to pay for it

Chair of the Universities Accord review Mary O’Kane. Photo: Hollie Adams

Mary O’Kane’s Universities Accord review, released on Sunday, is a visionary and comprehensive prescription for Australia’s tertiary education system over the next 25 years.

It meets the need for a realistic plan to raise the nation’s knowledge and skill levels, and to prep the economy to perform in an era of rapidly changing technology.

The only problem is that there’s no chance that the Albanese government will commit, in the short term, the money required to pay for it. It could be implemented over the long term, but there’s a negligibly small chance that it can survive changes of minister, changes of government and the general stresses of the political environment which that would require.

First, why is the plan worth supporting? Its key virtue is that it takes a holistic view of the two facets of tertiary education – higher and vocational – and brings together many good ideas about how to make these two disparate systems work together for the benefit of students, the business sector and Australia’s increasingly sophisticated skill needs.

It’s a plan to mesh numerous proposals for post-school education such as short courses that “stack” into full degrees, lifelong learning, degree apprenticeships, and the alignment of courses more closely to economic requirements.

It reflects Education Minister Jason Clare’s powerful commitment to offering opportunity to the disadvantaged by proposing a needs-based approach to university funding, with higher course subsidies available to universities that have more students who need greater educational resources.

It also aims to lift Australia’s research performance and keep the ultimate focus of research on economic, environmental and social goals.

And it proposes a radical new way of administering the higher education system with a new government body, the Australian Tertiary Education Commission, with statutory power to fund and regulate higher education. (The ATEC recommendation does need careful consideration because of its potential impact on regulatory effectiveness.)

Clare is the clear guiding hand behind the review’s report. It reflects his vision for tertiary education. Speaking to The Australian, Clare acknowledged the huge challenge of initiating a reform which won’t be complete for many, many years.

“In order for us to succeed here, I’ve got to acknowledge that long term plans mean multiple ministers and multiple governments. And sometimes reform can start off, and then you get a new minister, you get a new government, and the report just gathers dust on the shelf,” he said.

But Clare argued that one of the benefits of the proposed commission to oversee tertiary education was that it would “help to steer and drive reform over the long term”.

Right from the start of this review, in November 2022, it’s been clear that the Albanese government would not commit any significant funding to higher education reform, even to undo the impact of the Morrison government’s Job Ready Graduates scheme which cut higher education course subsidies and raised fees on some degrees (now over $16,000 a year).

That has been Clare’s fundamental challenge in steering this reform process. It appears that’s why the review was given the unusual name of a “universities accord”. It was seeking to create a lasting blueprint for tertiary education which would be widely accepted and attract sufficiently strong reserves of support to be successfully implemented over a long period.

That qualifies as a hope, but it’s not a strategy. It makes it more likely that, instead of these visionary and worthwhile changes becoming known to history as the “Clare reforms”, they’ll be remembered as “Clare’s brave idea”.