Australia: Benefits and Limits of the Centralized Approach

The Federation and Higher Education

Australia is a federation of seven states based on geographic territories carved out by British colonization after 1788. In 1901, it became a self-governing dominion of the British Empire with nationhood status. The federal constitution was negotiated between the colonies in 1890–1900 when states’ rights were paramount. Since 1901, Australia has gained fuller sovereignty in relation to the United Kingdom but the constitutional framework of federation has changed a little. In the founding constitution, all matters were subject to state jurisdiction unless an exception was made, for example, the role of national government in defence and foreign trade. In legal terms, education was, and in large part still is, a state rather than national government responsibility.

This would suggest that as in fellow federated British settler state Canada, the country often most similar to Australia, the higher education system is likely to be engaged in complex federal/state relationships and issues of double jurisdiction. Perhaps surprisingly, this is not so. Consistent with the evolution of the Australian polity in other spheres—notably in economic management and especially in taxing [Page 127]power—in the last 60 years in higher education, the national government has become overwhelmingly dominant in each of policy, funding and regulation. Higher education is more unitary than in federal systems elsewhere. That is the main story. However, as will be discussed, there are exceptions and caveats. The states retain their foundational legal and political identities in Australia. They remain the seat of much of service provision and, in constitutional terms, cannot be permanently excluded from higher education.

Although Australia has exhibited remarkable stability in governance and society in the modern period, the nature of the federation has altered. The state-dominated constitutional framework of 1901 has proven obsolete in the face of the nation-building agendas of a modernising state; in this case, a British-heritage settler state located off the south-eastern edge of Asia. It has proven very difficult to shift the legal structure of the constitution, and the political economy, including higher education provision, has evolved alongside and partly separated from the legal structure.

Since 1901, there has been a drift of power to the federal/national (‘Commonwealth') government, associated with changes in the expectations, scale and machinery of government; industrial and social modernization; and changes in Australia's place in the world. The process of centralization was quickened during the national emergency in World War II, when Japanese troops occupied New Guinea immediately North of Australia, and was consolidated in four years of post-war reconstruction policy after 1945 (Macintyre 2015). The decisive moment, and the continuing condition of the growth of national power, was the national government's monopoly over income taxation in 1942. The partial shift in the national/state balance of functions and powers has been manifest more in the realpolitik and the power of money than in the formal legal framework but also supported by accumulated High Court decisions and by a handful of constitutional amendments, although only some of the successive referendum proposals to expand the powers of the national government have won electoral support. Australian federalism, and within it, higher education, have been shaped at the intersection of heterogeneous systems of law and political economy, sometimes in synergy and sometimes in tension. Although the law started with foundational advantages, it came to be led by political economy. Yet law can still set limits.[Page

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