Public ideas

Universities matter

Bill Shorten, now Vice Chancellor of the University of Canberra, reminds us how the community benefits from a well-supported tertiary education sector.

The media have directed attention to a one percent tax on business profits to fund universities – an idea Bill Shorten put forward in his 2026 University of Canberra Aitkin Lecture.

That’s an unfortunate focus, because it can come across as the plea of another mendicant putting a case in the pre-budget period, disregarding Shorten’s main observations in that lecture, which is about the way higher education has developed and changed in Australia.

His most telling observation concerns the Morrison government’s war on education and learning, when universities were deliberately excluded from the “JobKeeper” support that was provided to other sectors, resulting in 40 000 staff losing their jobs. Had that happened in any other sector there would have been outrage, but “the community simply didn’t care”.

If tertiary education is just another market commodity, it may not matter. If people want a university education they can pay for it, using the well-funded HECS system. If universities can’t satisfy that demand, then they can quietly go the way of the fax machine and coal-fired-power stations.

But that is to see higher education as a commodified private good, rather than as a community investment. Shorten repeats a message that Don Aitkin emphasized over his 11 years as Vice Chancellor, that tertiary education is about teaching students how to learn, how to approach problems and opportunities, and how to think critically and creatively. In a world buffeted by accelerating technical change the content they learn today will soon date, but those skills, which Aitkin saw as the basis of an education for professionals, don’t date. Without a firm basis in those skills, today’s “job ready” graduate is tomorrow’s JobSeeker applicant.

Because their benefits are enjoyed by the community at large, including in the form of an adaptive and resilient economy, they are a public good we should all value.

The idea behind high university fees is that a degree is a pathway to high personal incomes. That ignores the reality that the premium income enjoyed by graduates has fallen or disappeared. That’s not a design fault: rather it’s the success of a system that has seen more people enjoy the benefits of tertiary education.

But public funding has taken the opposite course. Shorten puts it succinctly:

The underwriting of the higher education system has moved from a situation in 1990 where the government would pay 90 percent of a student’s course to now, on average, below 50 percent.

The way we restore that public funding doesn’t matter much – a tax on corporate profits is one possible way. The important issue is that the community comes to value tertiary education as a public good, that we see our universities as part of our common wealth.

Shorten’s lecture covers a large amount of detail about how universities can re-establish that relevance, so that the community sees them as something worth defending. He has done thorough justice to Don Aitkin’s vision, while adding his own political insights.

Democracy’s health

Worldwide democracy is backsliding, including in the USA. We should not be complacent about Australia’s high ranking on indicators of democracy’s health.

Maybe Australians who are into international comparisons can draw smug comfort from the Democratic Report 2026, compiled by researchers at the University of Gothenburg V-Dem Institute. It ranks Australia at position #12 among 179 countries, and as only 1 of 22 unreservedly “liberal democracies”.

Its main concern is with democratic backsliding throughout the world. To quote its pithy dot-point summary:

Writing in The Conversation Robert Finkeldey of the University of Technology Sydney summarizes the report’s methodology and findings, while warning against any complacent interpretation of its high ranking for Australia: New study shows global democracy hasn’t been this bad since 1978. Australia should be worried.

He notes that in Australia trust in our political parties has been declining, and that while our overall rank is #12, our rank for “egalitarianism” is #26. He writes that “the gap between the haves and the have-nots has been widening for decades”. Although he does not elaborate on this point, it is a warning that far-right authoritarianism is nurtured by the grievances of people who feel they have been left behind, manifest in the growing support for One Nation.

He might also have mentioned the subservience of our public service, covered elsewhere in this roundup. The authors of the report consider a “rigorous and impartial administration” as the most important of all indicators indicating the health of democracy. And there has been the Albanese government’s ham-fisted attempt to restrict freedom of information provisions – fortunately dropped when the government found that supporting legislative changes would not make it through the Senate.

Notably the report places a large emphasis on trends to autocratization in the USA. Its slide down the ranks is off a high base, but it has been dramatic in its speed, particularly the rapid transfer of power from the legislature to the executive, and the supine attitude of the country’s courts in allowing this to happen. With local variations these same mechanisms achieving separation of powers are a basic feature in other democracies, including our own. If they are not safe in the USA, where we believed they were anchored on the bedrock of a written constitution, where are they safe?