Professor Simon Marginson (University of Melbourne Centre for the Study of Higher Education) is engaged in major federally funded research into the institutional character of the globally networked university, including the role of higher education in forming social capital. He is also part of a team examining international student security in the global education market.

In the performative game that elections have become, come polling day we will be little the wiser about what the next government will do in higher education. There is no longer a clear line of accountability between party platform/policies, the act of voting, and policy implementation.

A number of factors have contributed to this. During an election, parties ‘me-too’ each other to prevent themselves being wedged into unacceptable positions by their opponents. Most public statements are worked over by the spin doctors so that they become largely meaningless. There are few clear-cut spending commitments and the focus is on marketing leaders as personalities.

After elections, incoming governments discover fiscal ‘black holes’ that render spending and taxing policies inoperative, and specific promises become treated as ‘non-core’. The electorate realises this can happen and understandably has become more sceptical about statements made prior to the poll.

Between elections governments develop policies for reasons other than their own survival. They govern as well as politick. There will be a change in higher education policy, whoever is elected, because the current Prime Minister (who has had a strong hand on Coalition policy in this sector since 1996) is leaving, either now or within the next term of government.

Australian public funding of higher education is now at 0.8 per cent of GDP (2004) and this is 25th of the 29 OECD nations. The issues for an incoming government have piled up.

They include the hyper-dependence of the higher education system on the international market (a product of partial indexation and government funding below the level of cost); the fall in throughput from year 12 to universities; the downward pressures on basic research due to both public funding trends and the extended skew to commercialisation, and the state of student financing which is at its lowest ebb since the 1960s and forces many students into the workforce for longer hours than their study commitments permit.

Labor has promised to abolish full fees for domestic students and compensate the universities. This could cost $1 billion and more once 2008 enrolments and pipeline are built into the equation. Naturally Labor has avoided costing the promise and avoided the more difficult issue of how the research-intensive universities will compete on the global scale once domestic full fees are taken away.

My hunch though is that if Labor is elected serious large-scale higher education reform will have to wait to a second term of government. Changes to federal-state relations, hospitals and early childhood education are likely to come first.