In the early months of 1988, John Dawkins, Commonwealth Minister for Employment, Education and Training, visited most of the country’s universities to promote his plans for higher education. His message was that they must play their part as Australia rebuilt its battered economy. The shrinking demand for commodity exports had exposed the backwardness of protected domestic industries; there was an urgent need to train a more skilled workforce and develop the new technologies of advanced manufacturing. These were tasks for the universities, but they were among the most complacent and insular of the nation’s coddled workplaces—or so Dawkins claimed, and as soon as he took charge of his new portfolio in July 1987, he set about shaking them up. Shortly before the end of the year he laid out a comprehensive program that would ensure higher education played its part in the nation’s economic renewal.
In taking this message to the universities, the Minister emphasised that his plans would restore growth in higher education and provide new opportunities, especially to those currently shut out of the halls of learning. As he did so, he encountered vehement protest from students angered by his proposal to finance this expansion by charging the beneficiaries. Sometimes he confronted his critics, and sometimes he had to be rescued from angry demonstrators. This hostility was disconcerting to a Labor politician who had cut his political teeth as a student activist, notwithstanding his claim that his own generation had campaigned on behalf of the oppressed and disadvantaged, the present one to defend its privileges.1
As John Dawkins made his way to address a graduation ceremony at Roseworthy Agricultural College in April 1988, he could expect a friendlier reception. It was at this small and secluded institution on the plains north of Adelaide that he had begun his own tertiary education two decades earlier. Roseworthy was far removed from his comfortable boyhood home in Perth, where he completed secondary education at a prestigious private school, but he did not feel ready to proceed to the University of Western Australia, and holidays on his family’s rural properties attracted him to the prospect of a life on the land. Dawkins flourished in the hands-on training at Roseworthy. He was elected president of the students’ representative council and worked with its progressive principal to liberalise archaic rules once thought appropriate for an exclusively masculine and residential college. In relating these experiences to the graduating class of 1988, he declared that the lessons learned while acquiring his Diploma of Agriculture were far more valuable than those provided by a subsequent degree in economics.2
Although John Dawkins did not become a farmer after completing the course at Roseworthy, he had found his vocation. Several years older than his new classmates at the University of Western Australia and a good deal more confident, he became president of the economics students’ society at the end of his first year in 1968, then education officer of the Student Guild and subsequently a student representative on the University Senate. His interests were not confined to student politics, for he had begun attending meetings of the Labor Party when at Roseworthy, met Gough Whitlam and was attracted to that ascendant Leader of the Opposition’s program of comprehensive reform. Impressed also by Bill Hayden’s Fabian tract on The Implications of Democratic Socialism, which he read on its publication in 1968, Dawkins helped organise Fabian Society forums in Western Australia. Although he marched in the mass protests against the Vietnam War, he was already drawn to the Fabians’ strategy of change from within. Kim Beazley, then also active in Guild politics, remembered him from this time as ‘obsessed with structures’; he was forever devising plans to improve the representation and treatment of students. With this bent for practical improvement went an inclination to shake things up and a distinct lack of respect for those in charge. He spoke out at the Senate against lax academic practices and criticised the smugness and cronyism that he saw among the professoriate.3
With its imposing buildings set out on expansive lawns and gardens alongside the Swan estuary, the campanile clock tower and rich texture of limestone with terra-cotta tiles paying homage to the Mediterranean climate, the University of Western Australia was undoubtedly fortunate. It began as a free university and the students still paid lower fees than in the east, yet there were fewer than 7000 of them when Dawkins enrolled, and it remained the only university in a state with a population of more than a million. Through it passed those who would enter lucrative professions such as medicine and law, and in it were formed friendships and connections that assisted their careers. Dawkins was born into this circle of privilege, his father a leading surgeon and his mother a Lee-Steere, one of the ‘six hungry families’ that had acquired wealth and power in the colonial period. He conspicuously turned his back on that heritage when he stood as a Labor candidate for the state parliament in 1971 and then, upon graduation, became a union organiser. As secretary of the state branch of the Federated Brick, Tile and Pottery Industrial Union, he won an award in 1973 for the porcelain workers employed by one of his uncle Sir Ernest Lee-Steere’s companies.4
In the following year Dawkins won election to the Commonwealth parliament for the new federal electorate of Tangney. Still only twenty-seven years old, he had an insider’s view of the Whitlam government’s mounting difficulties and sided with the Prime Minister when he was challenged in Caucus for sacking Jim Cairns from the ministry during the Loans Affair—this signalled Dawkins’ break with the Labor Left. He was among the casualties in the election that followed the Dismissal at the end of 1975, but won pre-selection for the Labor seat of Fremantle in a tight contest with Kim Beazley when Beazley’s father vacated it in 1977. Back in Canberra, he attracted attention for the ferocity of his attacks on the probity of government ministers and prominent Liberal businessmen in Western Australia whom he accused of tax avoidance.
Bill Hayden brought him into the shadow ministry following the 1980 election, and Dawkins supported Hayden against Bob Hawke’s challenge for the leadership in 1982. When Hayden finally succumbed to Hawke on the eve of the 1983 election, he negotiated for his ablest allies—Dawkins, Peter Walsh and Neal Blewett—to be looked after. Accordingly, Dawkins became Minister for Finance in the first Hawke ministry, then Minister for Trade in the second. Following the 1987 election, he was given the portfolio of Education.
He had been shadow Minister for Education from 1980 until the beginning of 1983, when Hayden shifted him to Industry and Commerce; this was a significant promotion, for Education was still seen as a lesser responsibility away from the main action. That was not how John Dawkins saw it. From the outset he knew that education was vital to improvement of the country’s economic prospects. As he explained in the fullest account of Labor’s policy while shadow minister, the Fraser government had sacrificed the country’s manufacturing industries to a foreign-financed resources boom and neglected the skills needed to build an enterprising and independent nation; the collapse of the minerals boom brought a sharp increase in youth unemployment and an urgent need to lift educational participation and outcomes. Dawkins was particularly concerned with the distortion of the ‘needs principle’ that the Whitlam government introduced in funding schools as the Fraser government increased its assistance to non-government schools at the expense of government ones—grants to the private schools, with a quarter of all enrolments, amounted to half of the Commonwealth’s spending on schools by 1983. Fraser had also frozen funding for higher education, leaving the universities adrift.5
But while Dawkins was committed to restoring the public sector and ensuring equality of educational opportunity, he made it clear that the Commonwealth was not going to simply provide money for the states to spend on their current education systems. Nor should the universities expect a return to the open chequebook of the Whitlam years. A new Labor government would prepare a statement of national objectives for all levels of education, one that set out their economic, social and cultural tasks, with funding agreements tied to accountability for outcomes. Here, in 1983, Dawkins was enunciating themes and methods that would run through all of his ministerial responsibilities. There was an urgent need for reform that would advance equity and efficiency. Economic regeneration could not occur while so many were denied productive roles; denial of educational opportunity perpetuated privilege and squandered talent; the Commonwealth Government alone had the capacity to put the national interest before sectional interests, and to do so it had to hold the providers accountable for clearly specified objectives.
The education policy that Dawkins developed for the 1983 election was expansive but conceived in markedly different circumstances than those that framed Whitlam’s hectic episode of profligate social democracy. Sustained economic growth had given way to a febrile cycle of stalled recoveries and a disastrous balance of trade. Fiscal constraints made it impossible to expect a major injection of public spending. In any case, the need to increase participation required a reorientation of the educational system. If more students were to complete secondary education, then the curriculum must be made more practical and less academic. If universities were going to play their part, they too would need to reorient their teaching and research.
As a minister, Dawkins was described as ‘a man with a mania for doing’. Each time he took up a portfolio, he set about doing things, and each time he did them, his appetite increased; by his own admission, once he discovered what could be done, his response was to think ‘Well, what could I do next?’6 As Minister for Finance, he sat alongside Paul Keating on the Expenditure Review Committee as it bore down on government outlays. He wanted to undertake tax reform, but Keating had that responsibility returned to the Treasury, and in compensation Dawkins was made responsible for public sector reform. After examining the new methods of public management being introduced overseas, he applied the principles of efficiency and effectiveness to the Commonwealth public service, imposing management techniques of the private sector to increase its responsiveness and accountability. As Minister for Trade he developed a global marketing plan that identified sectors of advanced manufacturing with export potential, redirected effort to Asian markets and convened a meeting of agricultural-producing countries at Cairns to promote trade liberalisation.
Throughout this period Dawkins pushed for a corresponding resolution in the Education portfolio. Critics of the Minister, Susan Ryan, saw her as more interested in equity than efficiency—indeed, Peter Walsh, who followed Dawkins as Minister for Finance, condemned her as ‘an unreconstructed Whitlamite’.7 Ryan undoubtedly pursued the goals of increasing educational participation and promoting affirmative action with enthusiasm, but was loath to yield any savings to the Expenditure Review Committee. An Arts graduate who had worked as a schoolteacher and then a university tutor, she was more confident in directing the school sector than higher education, where she relied on advice from the Commonwealth Tertiary Education Commission. Dawkins became critical of the Commission while Finance minister. Apart from its status as a statutory agency reporting independently from the Education Department, which violated the principle of accountability enshrined in his public sector management reforms, he thought it too close to the institutions it funded. Accordingly, he insisted that when the government provided additional university places, it did so at a marginal rate in order to force greater efficiency.
When he assumed the Trade portfolio, Dawkins also became Minister for Youth Affairs and, despite Ryan’s opposition, reduced youth unemployment benefits to parity with the allowance paid to needy students so that there would be no disincentive to study. He prevailed again by establishing education as an export industry, allowing educational providers to recruit fee-paying overseas students. He and Peter Walsh wanted to introduce fees for domestic students, but here Ryan thwarted them by appealing to the Caucus. Instead the government imposed a Higher Education Administrative Charge of $250 a year, a small sum but a clear breach of the Whitlam legacy of free university study.8
Dawkins was determined to go further, for he was convinced that a new educational order was vital to microeconomic reform. He made his view known to Bob Hawke before the 1987 election and was rewarded after it by appointment to a new and enlarged Department of Employment, Education and Training.9 There is little evidence that Hawke took a personal interest in higher education—it finds no place in his memoirs and is conspicuously absent from those of other ministers, including some who had worked as academics before entering parliament. Nor is it included in such influential accounts of the period as Paul Kelly’s End of Certainty.10 The changes that swept over higher education were certainly newsworthy, but they lacked the theatre of the Accord and the Summit, or the clear import of decisions such as floating the dollar. It was not easy to discern the issues at stake from the polemical exchanges between Dawkins and the country’s vice-chancellors, and it seemed to many that what was proposed was simply a corollary of the macroeconomic reform initiated in 1983, akin to the efficiency measures imposed on other sectors.
Dawkins certainly thought so, and he had the backing of both Hawke and Keating, but what he had in mind was very much of his own design, stamped by his personal experience of higher education and pursued with a distinctive determination. National politics is no place for the faint-hearted, but Dawkins stood out for his confrontational manner and lack of self-doubt. Two years earlier he had raised eyebrows when he defied a picket line of teachers at his children’s school in the Canberra suburb of Telopea Park. The teachers were protesting against the Australian Capital Territory’s staff cuts, but he derided their claim to be defending educational standards in ‘this spoilt little Territory’.11 Even as he prepared to take on the custodians of the country’s universities, Dawkins took aim at the promoters of a re-enactment of the First Fleet that had set sail to Sydney Harbour for the Bicentenary but was stranded at Rio de Janeiro with a cash-flow problem. To insist that this private venture should not be given government assistance was understandable, even if the commemoration of the Bicentenary lay outside his portfolio; to describe it as ‘a tasteless and insensitive farce’ stirred up accusations of unpatriotic spleen that the Prime Minister was quick to disown.12
His colleague Neal Blewett would recall Dawkins as ‘besides Keating the great reforming minister in the Labor governments’, but he lacked some of the Treasurer’s advantages. Keating was a ferocious protagonist who thrived on polemics, but with a coruscating virtuosity that enabled him to direct the theatre of public debate. Those who tried to emulate him lacked the thespian touch, the mordant flair for the vernacular that made him so effective. As a member of Keating’s entourage observed, ‘when Dawkins was ferocious he was sometimes just unpleasant’.13 In Blewett’s words, ‘Dawkins was a man whose zeal and ambition for change were yoked to an abrasive and pugnacious approach that added to the turbulence that swirled around him. A moody, self-contained figure, contemptuous of both the foolish and the spineless, he was little loved in the caucus or even in his own centre-left faction, surviving on his talents alone.’14
He was about to embark on his most ambitious crusade.