The Importance Of University Fee Deregulation

I was brought up to believe that the single most precious thing you can give someone is an education. Our former prime minister Gough Whitlam put a similar value on it, and he made university education free for anyone who was willing to take it on. That was 40 years ago, and much has changed for education in Australia. But his underlying values of accessibility and fairness still govern what happens in education today. And that’s exactly why university fee deregulation appears so out of place. It goes against some of our most fundamental values.

But first, let me provide some context. University fee deregulation, if you don’t know already, means removing the current restrictions that prevent universities from charging above a specified amount for a course. At the moment, deregulation reforms have already been rejected twice, but are still up for debate later this year. If the reforms were to be passed by the senate, we could see the cost of courses such as engineering, and law rise steeply and in excess of $100,000. To charge such an exorbitant amount of money, for something

Currently, universities across Australia collaborate with each other in a countless number of ways, and it benefits both the universities and the public. What university fee deregulation does, is it breeds a sort of competition that discourages collaboration. It makes universities more likely to guard and secure their links to industries and other partnerships. According to associate professor Lucas Walsh at Monash University, these collaborations offer a wealth of knowledge to universities that is beyond money. Deregulation, he says, would limit the incentives and opportunities for universities to work together. So it only seems counter-intuitive to do something that would discourage universities from collaborating, when we should be seeking to promote