For Australia’s universities, over-regulation is the price of virtue signalling

Australia’s universities say they are over-regulated—and the chief executive of Universities Australia (UA), Luke Sheehy, has just secured a promise from education minister Jason Clare to give his members a break.

A “better regulation” working group composed of “regulators, university peak bodies, unions and student representatives” will lead the charge in reducing regulation and cutting red tape.

The 38 universities that make up Universities Australia must be thrilled with the sudden change in direction that the organisation has taken.

After all, it was just last week that UA called for “the establishment of a national Racism@Uni Working Group to develop a coordinated Action Plan for the sector” in response to a Human Rights Commission report on university racism.

The UA press release expressed enthusiasm for the “consistent standards, stronger accountability and measurable progress across all institutions” that more paperwork could bring.

Indeed, until last week, the old UA was begging for greater regulation any time a woke cause could justify the creation of a new education bureaucracy.

Consider the new Higher Education Gender-based Violence Regulator, a new bureaucracy that was quietly legislated last year with technical support from UA. The government’s own estimates put the annual regulatory compliance burden at $173.2 million.

This is a burden that the old UA was happy to bear. The organisation commended and welcomed the plan for the new regulator. In fact, it was UA itself that collected the highly questionable “data” on which the need for a new regulator justified.

And where the government wouldn’t satisfy the universities’ aspirations for greater regulation, the old UA supplied the regulations itself. For example, the UA 2022-2025 Indigenous Strategy bound its members to an annual cycle of reports, meetings, and consultations on issues affecting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians.

There’s no word yet on what direction the new UA will take in 2026. It almost goes without saying that the old UA favoured the creation of a new universities super-regulator, the Australian Tertiary Education Commission (ATEC). The new, anti-regulation UA will have to live with the consequences.

In fact, it seems that just about the only thing that the old UA did not want to see regulated was vice chancellor salaries.

Luke Sheehy’s new UA is concerned that the high costs of regulation “divert increasing resources into compliance and responding to regulators”, and has concluded that the best way to address this is … to form a committee. With union and student representatives on it.

Good luck.

The reality is that our universities’ love-hate relationship with government regulation is driven by an ideological commitment to twenty-first century social crusades. No one in a position of authority will stare an activist in the face and push back with the simple question: “is that really a problem”?

Those few who do question the activists’ agendas are silenced or sidelined. They are not trusted with administrative positions, unless they keep their views well-hidden indeed.

The result is that there’s no one to save the universities from themselves. Any cause wrapped up in the rhetoric of racism, sexism, homophobia, support for people with disabilities, or support for indigenous peoples must be supported. And the preferred solution is always the creation of a new bureaucracy.

Consider support for students with disabilities. Everyone wants to support the truly disabled. But with one-eighth of our students claiming a disability, are they all truly disabled? Our disability industrial complex thinks so, and has developed a panoply of mandated adjustments to accommodate them.

Do these adjustments help? Probably not. The number one form of disability is “anxiety”, and most anxious students would probably benefit from learning how to manage their anxieties in the low-stakes safety of a university setting. That would certainly be better than taking their anxieties with them into the workforce.

Tough love may sound tough, but the truth is that young people have to learn how to overcome their anxieties, Asian immigrants have to learn to deal with feeling excluded (the number one form of “racism” on campus), young women have to learn how to deal with unwanted attention (the number one form of “sexual harassment” on campus), and self-declared queer people have to learn how to dress appropriately in a business setting.

If universities won’t prepare students for these challenges, the students will have to learn on their own. That’s not caring. It’s coddling. And our universities-as-parents are addicted to coddling their students.

We don’t have bloated university bureaucracies because students demand to be coddled. We have bloated bureaucracies because so many academics and administrators want to coddle. They just can’t help themselves.

Now that the universities have a compliant Labor government in office—one that nearly all of them voted for—it’s time for them to pay the piper. And the piper wants $173.2 million for a new gender safety bureaucracy, to sit alongside the disability bureaucracy, the racial discrimination bureaucracy, and multiple indigenous bureaucracies.

If UA and its member institutions really expect the “better regulation” working group to walk back these commitments, they’ve been coddled indeed.