‘Additional opportunities and choice for Australian students’

The Coalition's education policies

The Liberal and National Parties entered the 1996 election with what was essentially a platform of no change to education programs, except for a promise to provide more leeway and more money for new private schools. Nevertheless, on taking office the new Government changed the forward projections on which the budget was based, ‘discovering’ an $8 billion deficit. This became the pretext for policy changes, and the new Minister for Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs, Senator Amanda Vanstone, made it clear that education and training would not be exempted from ‘the national savings task’. In August 1996 Vanstone announced a package of new policies which reduced government outlays and pushed the higher education system further towards the model chosen by the previous Labor Government, that of a market of competing institutions.

Up to the mid-1980s higher education was largely publicly funded, but since then fee-based courses, commercial services and other private income have increased markedly, from 10 per cent (1983) to 40 per cent (1994) of all income.