Under the bill to create the Australian Tertiary Education Commission there will be three ATEC commissioners: a Chief Commissioner, a First Nations Commissioner, and a Commissioner.

The commissioners will have significant administrative and advisory functions requiring expertise on a wide range of topics. I have covered two of these topics in detail in this series on the ATEC legislation, ATEC’s advice on the Threshold Standards that govern all higher education providers and on per student funding rates. Other subjects on which expertise will be needed include the equity groups, education demand, higher education administration, and research.

It’s not clear, however, that the three commissioners envisaged under the ATEC legislation will have expertise across the full range of fields.

Mapping ATEC functions and advisory roles against statutory selection criteria

In the Universities Accord (Australian Tertiary Education Commission) Bill 2025 sections 56 to 59 set out the qualifications for being a commissioner. All three commissioner roles have a general requirement for appropriate skills, knowledge and experience. Section 59 sets out specific required domains of knowledge and experience that they must collectively have. The table below maps these against the responsibilities of ATEC, as indicated across section 3 of the bill (Objects), section 11 (Functions) and section 41 (Advice and recommendations). 

The Universities Accord Final Report recommended that ATEC be an ‘independent statutory authority … to enable it to provide robust advice and support evidence-based decision making and planning’ (p. 234). This post explores the relationship between ATEC and the government, as set out in the ATEC bill introduced into Parliament last week.

I should say at the start that unelected bodies with significant powers (‘independent’) are not necessarily good things. Government agencies should work within clear goals and rules established by democratic processes.

But independence can be beneficial in ensuring that government (and the broader public) get honest data – the ABS is a model here. Independent bodies can also help governments avoid the temptation to do things that are politically beneficial in the short run but detrimental in the long run – the RBA is a model here. Both the ABS and the RBA make mistakes, but their overall approach is better than letting the government decide whether or not to release vital data or to set interest rates with public opinion in mind.

All legislative references, unless otherwise specified, are to the Universities Accord (Australian Tertiary Education Commission) Bill 2025.

Administration of mission based compacts

The most important ATEC function will be to administer mission based compacts. As noted in a previous post, the content of mission based compacts will be driven by a ministerial statement of short-term and long-term strategic priorities: section 15. However this is not a legislative instrument: section 15(6). This means that neither the Senate nor the House of Representatives can disallow it. I take this as a democratic negative compared to the current system, under which key spending programs, such as equity and research block grants, have their own legislative instruments.

ATEC must prepare its own statement of strategic priorities: section 43. ATEC must take the minister’s priorities into account when performing its functions: section 15(4). Within the limitations of the new framework, this is appropriate in putting ATEC’s direction under the broad control of a person who can be subject to parliamentary questions, even if the ministerial statement of priorities cannot itself be vetoed. ATEC itself will appear before Senate Estimates.

Importantly, the minister will not give directions to ATEC in relation to decisions ATEC makes or in relation to ‘a higher education provider or a class or classes of higher education providers’: section 71(2)(b) & (c). This compares favourably to the current funding agreement system, under which the minister can effectively determine the content: section 30-25 of the Higher Education Support Act 2003. It is also better than the wide power to cancel course registration for international students, including on the basis of the ‘kind of provider’, which was approved by Parliament with modest improvements the same week the ATEC bill was introduced.

Section 71(2) reduces the risk of ministerial discretion being misused to penalise a university or universities in an arbitratry way.

The strongest guard against the misuse of power, however, is having rule-driven programs. On that the ATEC model would be worse than what we have now.