Some years ago, I attended conference at an outer-suburban Paris university. The campus was in disrepair, with cracks in the concrete and inadequate facilities. When I remarked on this to my host, he smiled and said, ‘Yes, but in France universities are free.’
Compare this with the architectural splendour of many of our universities, where new buildings keep growing, even as student attendance on campus declines. After a long period of wealth, essentially paid for by international students, our universities face a crisis. Both sides of politics see advantage in cutting the numbers of overseas students without replacing the income they brought.
Under pressure from government, universities, which, with a few exceptions, are publicly owned, now operate like corporations, with large, well-paid management teams, increasingly precarious workforces, and students who are defined as ‘customers’ or ‘clients’. Corporatisation has reached the point where a recent Tasmanian parliamentary review expressed concern that the state’s university was ‘prioritising commercial over community interests in its core functions’.
For financial reasons, universities are required to bid against each other to enrol students, which means considerable funds are spent on marketing, including expensive television advertisements. A more rational system of facilitating student choice would mean considerable savings, with no loss of standards.
The traditional assumptions about a community of scholars have long since died. At most universities, academic boards are pale rubber stamps for the growing army of deputy and pro vice-chancellors who spend their time inventing yet more elaborate systems of accountability and evaluation. Even vice-chancellors need no longer come from academia, as the appointment of Bill Shorten to head the University of Canberra demonstrates.
At the same time, there are ever more attacks on universities from the right, which has seized upon protests sparked by the Gaza War to denounce the failure of universities to protect their students. Yes, there have been cases of egregious anti-Semitism on a few campuses, which have been dealt with poorly. In their haste to rectify this, some universities have developed policies which clearly infringe the right to stage peaceful protests.
More serious is the evidence of sexual assault, underpayment of casual staff, and the growing gap between the staff who provide actual teaching and their high-level managers. This is not only a question of salaries – most vice-chancellors now earn around one million dollars – but of mutual ignorance between teaching and research staff on the one hand and managers on the other. During lockdown, one vice-chancellor boasted of improving the staff-student ratio, by which he meant fewer staff per student.
Ideally. we expect universities to prepare students both for future careers and to be active citizens, as well as promoting research and scholarship. Today there is increasing pressure to reduce scholarly activity to research that can be easily commercialised and to limit teaching to subjects that meet the current demands of the labour market.
Not surprisingly, this has resulted in the wholesale collapse of many humanities areas (as Judith Brett pointed out in an article in the March 2025 issue of The Monthly). Moreover, face-to-face learning, which suffered a body blow during the Covid lockdowns, has only partly returned, as more and more students watch lectures through Zoom and use AI to write essays.
Of course, there are some real advantages to modern technology, especially for students who live in remote areas, have heavy work and family commitments, or want to study a subject only available interstate. But the interaction with fellow students after class and the chance to meet a variety of one’s peers and join in student activities are increasingly lost in the brave new world of the internet.
Students today accumulate considerable debt in return for less face-to-face interaction with their teachers and fellow students. The social skills that are developed through campus activities, and the expansion of one’s world beyond friends met in high school, are victims of increasing reliance on computer screens as the medium of instruction.
Our universities will continue to train first-rate doctors, engineers, and teachers; remarkable research will continue, often by underpaid and vulnerable young scholars. The greatest loss in the current malaise is the recognition that universities contribute to a richer and more informed civic life.
The current government has made some tentative steps towards addressing some of these issues. The Accord, which Education Minister Jason Clare commissioned, places great stress on increasing equity and access to university places. The minister has also established an inquiry into university governance. What the government has not done is provide an adequate solution to the proper financing that is required. If the Liberals win government at the coming election, I suspect their response will be even less adequate. Their shadow minister, Sarah Hendeson, has made some sensible comments about the civic responsibility of universities, but recently the Opposition has become obsessed with attacks on ‘woke’ education and with the question of anti-Semitism on campus.
We need a radical rethink of what a university should look like in the twenty-first century. A good place to start is Raewyn Connell’s The Good University (2019) and the forthcoming book by Graeme Turner: Broken: Universities, politics and the public good.
Kieran Pender
In late 2019, while in opposition, Anthony Albanese gave a major speech to the Chifley Research Centre conference on Labor and democracy. Amid the worst excesses of secrecy under the Morrison government – raids on media outlets, the prosecution of whistleblowers, protracted delays in ‘integrity reform’, with the secret ministries scandal still to come – Albanese outlined Labor’s commitment to transparency. ‘We don’t need a culture of secrecy,’ he said – ‘we need a culture of disclosure. Protect whistleblowers – expand their protections and the public interest test. Reform freedom of information laws so that they can’t be flouted by government.’ As the speech continued, Albanese condemned law enforcement investigations of journalists who were ‘just doing their jobs’. He added: ‘We need to enshrine in law the changes required to protect press freedom.’
As we come to the end of the first Albanese government and approach the federal election, themes of integrity and transparency represent critical unfinished business. Whatever the outcome of the imminent vote, it is essential that the next Australian Parliament act decisively to protect and promote whistleblowing, transparency, and press freedom.
Certainly, Labor has taken some positive steps over the past three years. The National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC) is a landmark development in ensuring integrity in Australian public life. It has had some initial hiccups – the Robodebt referral has been badly mismanaged, and the secrecy necessary for its work has frustrated an expectant public – but the NACC’s impact will be better measured in the years and decades ahead; its establishment, at long last, was a defining reform for the attorney-general, Mark Dreyfus.
Dreyfus has also made some progress on whistleblowing and transparency. Within months of the election, the attorney-general ended the unjust prosecution of Witness K’s lawyer, Bernard Collaery, for his role in exposing Australia’s morally bankrupt espionage against Timor-Leste. The government also helped secure the return of WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange to Australia. To coincide with the NACC becoming operational, Dreyfus drove initial reforms to the federal public sector whistleblowing law, The Public Interest Disclosure Act 2013 (PID Act). A review into more substantial reform is ongoing, and the government has said the right things about the recommendations of an independent review into Australia’s expansive, draconian criminal secrecy regime.
These developments may warrant a pass mark. But the Albanese government has hardly pursued transparency and integrity reform with vigour. Despite a departmental and an independent review of the secrecy regime, meaningful change has been kicked into the long grass of next term. Last October, the government rushed through an extension to secrecy provisions which were due to reach their sunset. Despite its stated commitment to reducing secrecy within the federal bureaucracy, Labor will finish its term with more secrecy provisions on the statute book, rather than fewer. There has been no substantive press freedom reform, while proposed improvements to the Freedom of Information (FOI) scheme languish. Government funding boosts for media diversity and FOI have been welcome, but without underlying reform these are half-measures at best.
The same is true for whistleblowing reform. The PID Act review began public consultation in November 2023. Submissions were made public early last year. But there has been no substantive update, no options paper, no consultation on draft legislation. The 2023 reform to the PID Act was technical in nature – it improved the operation of the regime. That is no doubt important, but it went no way towards addressing the scheme’s deficiencies when it comes to supporting and empowering whistleblowers to speak up.
Despite civil society calls for harmonisation and consistency, Australia’s fragmented whistleblower protection landscape has only been made more piecemeal over the past parliamentary term. The government ignored Kate Jenkins’s recommendation of expanding the PID Act to cover parliamentary staff, instead creating an entirely new whistleblowing regime within the parliamentary standards commissioner regime. Aged care reform came with improved whistleblower protections, but they were only partially aligned with the standards in other regimes. Following the PwC leaks outcry, protections for tax whistleblowers were bolstered, rendering them stronger than those that exist in the private sector. There are now nine federal whistleblowing regimes, each one different in material respects (many overlap and intersect). This is not good for whistleblowers and integrity or for transparency more broadly.
The ongoing prosecution of two whistleblowers, Afghan Files leaker David McBride and tax office employee Richard Boyle, remain a blight on Labor’s transparency record. McBride was sentenced to over five years’ imprisonment last year; his appeal was heard in March. Boyle lost a PID Act defence in a case demonstrating major pitfalls in the law; he will face trial in November.
The most glaring lack of ambition from the Albanese government in this field has been in not committing to establishing a whistleblower protection authority. Described by Dr Helen Haines MP as ‘NACC 2.0’, a specialist authority to oversee and enforce whistleblower protections and support whistleblowers was first recommended by a multi-partisan parliamentary inquiry thirty-one years ago. It has been repeatedly recommended over subsequent decades; Labor even took the idea to the 2019 federal election. Equivalent bodies are proliferating overseas, meaning that Australia is being left behind in pursuing best-practice transparency reform.
In the final sitting week in February 2025, Haines, Andrew Wilkie MP, Senator David Pocock, and Senator Jacqui Lambie introduced a Bill to establish a whistleblower protection authority. For now, Labor’s position – in Dreyfus’s speeches and in its national platform – is only to consider the need for such a body. The need is clear; now is the time for action, perhaps spurred on by minority government negotiations, and with an eye to the cross-bench’s new Bill.
Voters care about integrity and transparency. Polling by Essential Research last year, for the Whistleblower Justice Fund, found that seventy-three per cent of Australians want stronger whistleblowing laws and seventy per cent were opposed to prosecution of whistleblowers. Polling by The Australia Institute and the Human Rights Law Centre in 2023 showed that four out of five Australians support the establishment of a whistleblower protection authority. Support is remarkably steady across demographics and political affiliation.
If Labor is re-elected in May, it is critical that tentativeness on transparency gives way to bold reform. If the Coalition wins government, it will be vital that its transparency champions – Senator Paul Scarr, Senator Andrew Bragg, and Bridget Archer are among those who have championed whistleblowing in the past – ensure swift action. In the event of a minority government of either stripe, it will be incumbent on the cross-bench to ensure that transparency reform is a priority. The whistleblowing private members’ Bill is a promising start.
Transparency and integrity underpin a healthy democracy. Ignoring the failures of our secretive system will only cause greater problems and more scandals, and further undermine public trust in government. That is why these reforms, the unfinished business of the past term, must be enacted in the term ahead. As Albanese put it so aptly in his 2019 speech, ‘Ignoring problems never makes them go away … It just covers them up and raises the cost of inaction in the long run. Dissenters expose corruption and waste. They spark innovation. They start positive social change.’
Hugh White
Australia votes this year at a time when democracy around the world feels more fragile than at any time within the memory of even the oldest among us. These fears are well founded, and we in Australia are not exempt from their implications. But the primary danger does not come, as some claim, from malign authoritarians in Moscow or Beijing – or Washington DC. It comes from the glaring failure of our own political institutions to deliver just and effective policies that address our most pressing problems on the basis of serious, well-informed debate between a range of competing views that broadly reflect those held by the electorate.
That is, after all, what democracy is supposed to deliver, and delivering it well is democracy’s best defence. The strongest argument for the political ideology on which Australia has been built has never been based on abstract questions of political or social theory, but on the supreme practical test of what works. Our society and others like it have flourished because, for a long time, democracy has, most of the time and on most issues, delivered good policies. That is why we revere it. And that is what our democracy has been failing to do for quite a while now. That is why we should worry about it.
There are glaring failures of policy in almost every area of our national life, none more glaring than mismanagement of our international relations. One thing our two major parties agree on as they head towards the 2025 election is that one of the most pressing problems we face is the challenge to the established international order posed by China, Russia, and other powers. Both parties tell us that Australia today faces its most demanding and dangerous international environment since World War II. And they are both absolutely right about that.
Rivalry between the United States and China has driven the risk of nuclear war in Asia higher than we have ever known before. Even if war is avoided, there is no escaping the historic and tectonic shift in Australia’s international setting as China takes America’s place as the leading power in East Asia and the Western Pacific, leaving us more alone than we have ever been. Even before Donald Trump was re-elected, this shift seemed all but inevitable. Now it is happening before our eyes.
Another thing the major parties agree on is to say nothing, and do nothing, about it. They have made this easy for themselves by paying one another the compliment of adopting each other’s policies. Anthony Albanese’s government has eagerly embraced the Coalition’s AUKUS, which now constitutes the whole of Labor’s defence policy and half its foreign policy. AUKUS is, to offer an appropriately aquatic analogy, a flashing fishing lure of a policy: by snapping at the deceptive sparkle of nuclear-powered submarines, we have swallowed the hook of unqualified support for Washington’s dangerously dysfunctional policies towards China. One of its architects, Biden’s National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, recently called AUKUS ‘a strategic marriage between the United States and Australia for half a century’. Quite – and now look at who we are in bed with.
The other half of Labor’s foreign policy is the rapprochement with China. This is a modest but important success, and Peter Dutton has reciprocated Labor’s compliment by adopting this Labor policy as his own. He has even gone a step further, claiming that relations with Beijing would be even better under a Coalition government. That is quite a pirouette from the man who before the last election questioned the patriotism of Albanese and Penny Wong by labelling them the ‘Manchurian Candidates’ because they wanted to repair the damage that he and Scott Morrison had so recklessly inflicted on our most complex and arguably most important relationship. His mind was not changed by a measured analysis of Australia’s national interest, but by his appetite for Chinese-Australians’ votes. Alienating them with his tough-guy talk on China cost the Coalition several marginal seats in 2022.
The effect of this bipartisan pas de deux, with both sides trying to embrace Washington and Beijing at the same time, has been to return Australia to the agreeable illusions of the Gillard-Abbott era. Those were the days when both sides assured us that we could keep relying on China to make us rich while still relying on the United States to keep us safe. Their mantra was, ‘We don’t have to choose between America and China.’ That was demonstrably false a decade ago: it is simply preposterous now. If you doubt that, just ask anyone in Washington or Beijing. They will soon tell you about the choices Australia must make.
By evading those choices, our two major parties do nothing to reduce the very real risks of a major Asian war, with Australia right in the front line. Just as seriously, they do nothing to prepare Australia to make its way without a great and powerful friend in the very different Asia that, war or no war, is coming into being. The way the AUKUS folly will lead to the complete loss of our submarine capability at the very time we will need it most to defend ourselves independently is just one example of this failure.
Still, one can see the appeal from the politicians’ point of view. A bipartisan consensus to talk up the problem and then pretend it isn’t there allows both sides to sound Churchillian but spares them a lot of onerous and politically awkward work. They don’t have to think hard about the way the world is changing and explaining to voters how Australia will have to change as a result.
Still, why don’t they want to do that? Isn’t this the kind of mission that politicians are supposed to hanker after? Why don’t they seize this opportunity, as some of their more distinguished predecessors would have done, to leave their mark on history? Partly it is sheer habit. As the late Owen Harries once wrote, ‘The importance of habit in politics is something never to be underestimated, particularly in the case of people who do not think very much.’ The problem is that their old habits no longer fit new realities.
But there is more to it than that. Albanese seems deeply uncomfortable with this whole area of policy. Sean Carney of The Age spotted this recently: ‘People who’ve worked alongside him – and like him – note his discomfort with geopolitical issues and say that his resort to brief comments and generalities when he’s speaking about defence and foreign affairs matters is the tell.’ That is a disastrous weakness in a leader who himself keeps saying that we face our biggest geopolitical threats since World War II. Dutton, on the other hand, seems to have no interest at all in policy issues as such, except in so far as they offer opportunities for political attack. He seems the least policy-oriented political leader we have ever had.
The problem does not stop at the top. Where on either side of the chamber are the bright young things bursting with new ideas and eager to address the vital issues that their leaders so studiously evade? One must conclude that the party system today actively excludes such people from Parliament, or suppresses them. That is a big problem. How can a parliamentary system framed by two parties fulfil the essential purpose of democracy if these parties do not attract, nurture, and promote people who are passionately determined to debate big policy questions – in the branches, in the party room, in the media, and on the floor of the Parliament?
In the last Parliament, the place to look for such people was on the cross-bench, but the independents tended to steer clear of geopolitics. Let’s hope that in the next one there are more of them and that they are emboldened to engage with these vital issues. You might like to think about that when you vote. The future of our country, and the health of our democracy, may depend on it.
