• At the current time, though most university government funding comes from the federal government, for Constitutional reasons the states are primarily responsible for university accreditation and governance.
• The Commonwealth wants to eliminate these obstacles to its policy agenda.
• The Commonwealth argues in favour of policy consistency.
• However consistency is not a virtue if policies are identical but bad in every state.
• Unfortunately the Commonwealth has a history of bad higher education policies which have created problems across the country while being ‘consistent’.
• Federalism quarantines bad policy.
• Federalism allows policy experimentation, which the Commonwealth implicitly admits by copying aspects of Victorian policy.
• State governments are better able to monitor universities than the Commonwealth, and have less clustered legislative agendas to make necessary changes.
• Centralised power over universities creates threats to academic freedom that are much reduced by the current division of power.
• History shows that where national consistency is valuable it can be achieved through cooperation between governments, without creating long-term shifts in power or preventing states from withdrawing if things go badly.

Andrew Norton is a Research Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies and Editor of POLICY magazine.