The Political Enterprise of Australian Higher Education Funding

The paper examines the role of party politics in shaping policy outcomes in Australian higher education funding over the last four decades. This is of more than merely local interest as the policy formula that evolved, involving partial marketisation to fund, together with the state, mass expansion of the higher education system, entrenched a pragmatic model of domestic ‘fairness’ and international entrepreneurial savvy that has been influential far beyond Australia. Fuller domestic marketisation is currently contested intensely in Australia, with oppositional parties frustrating such a government higher education policy shift. At least three analytical insights arise from the Australian case. Ideational dynamics have notable explanatory significance for policy outcomes. Secondly, political parties have played a key role at certain junctures in framing and institutionalising policy trade-offs. Thirdly, the resulting transformation of universities and other providers into executive-led managerialist market-savvy organisations in turn changed their policy preferences profoundly.