Election Diary: Dutton flags intervention in what he sees as ‘woke’ education, but how much could he actually do?

Peter Dutton came perilously close to a DOGE moment on Monday night, when he was asked about getting the “woke” agendas out of the education system.Noting the Commonwealth government “doesn’t own or run a school”, Dutton told a Sky audience in Brisbane that people wondered why there was “a department of thousands and thousands of people in Canberra called the Education Department”.

Unsurprisingly, he dodged when pushed by the press pack on Tuesday on whether the education bureaucrats would be in for the chop under his public service cuts. It’s a fair bet quite a few would be.

“We’ve said we would take waste out of the federal budget and put it back into frontline services.” he said,

He’s indicating overall budget funding for health and education would not be cut.

But that didn’t stop Treasurer Jim Chalmers from declaring Dutton had “threatened cuts to school funding which was right from the DOGE playbook.

"This is DOGE-y Dutton, taking his cues and policies straight from the US in a way that will make Australians worse off.”

Importantly, Dutton is signalling a potentially very interventionist approach on education.

The feds mightn’t run the schools, but they provide much of the wherewithal to pay for them, and “we can condition that funding,” the opposition leader said.

“We should be saying to states and […] to those that are receiving that funding that we want our kids to be taught […] what it is they need to take on as they face the challenges of the world and not to be guided into some sort of an agenda that’s come out of universities.

"And I think there’s a lot of work to do.”

A Dutton government would face some problems trying to work through funding.

The Albanese government recently completed its round of school funding agreements with the states. It attached broad conditions to them, around getting back to the fundamentals and ensuring kids don’t fall behind or, if they do, they are helped to catch up.

Would the Liberals want to try to reopen the funding agreements? New South Wales, South Australia, Queensland and Tasmania have not just heads of agreement with the Commonwealth but bilateral agreements, covering implementation. It might be easier to make changes for Victoria and Western Australia, which don’t yet have the bilateral implementation agreements. But it would be a fraught exercise.

There’s a more general point. This route takes a government only so far. Even when states sign up, it can be hard to keep them to the conditions.

Schools expert Ben Jensen, CEO of the education research and consulting group Learning First, says a federal government’s main levers are through the national curriculum, NAPLAN assessments, and (via the universities) teacher training.

The most obvious is the national curriculum. Opposition education spokeswoman Sarah Henderson has said, “One of the big problems is our national curriculum and we simply need to fix it.” That curriculum, incidentally, was signed off under the former Coalition government exactly three years ago by the acting education minister Stuart Robert.

A Dutton government could redo it but that would involve working with the states. Anyway, the states can go their own way regardless of the national curriculum. Victoria and NSW currently run their own curriculum’s.

All in all, imposing its priorities on the schools system might be a good deal harder than it sounds for a Dutton government.

The universities would clearly be in Dutton’s sights, and there is more scope for intervention here.

The Coalition believes the universities have got the balance wrong between foreign and domestic students. Henderson told this year’s Universities Australia conference, “For too long, universities have relied on a business model which yielded them eye watering revenues which are not sustainable or in line with expectations of the Australian community”.

“We will deliver a tougher student cap than what is proposed by the government focused on excessive numbers of foreign students in metropolitan cities, particularly Melbourne and Sydney where two thirds of foreign students live and study.”

A Dutton government would also restore a much broader right for the minister to intervene on research funding decisions.

And it would require universities to implement an activist approach to combatting antisemitism.

The experience of the former Liberal government on higher education provides a salutary tale for a future one. Under the Abbott government, education minister Christopher Pyne had an ambitious plan for tertiary reform, centred on fee deregulation, but it crashed when it faced the obstacle of the Senate.

In 2020 the Morrison government did get through its Job-Ready Graduates legislation to alter fees. This is now recognised as highly flawed. Henderson has said the Coalition’s position on the scheme hasn’t changed but it would review it “in line with what our legislation said we would do”. It would be extremely surprising if such a review didn’t recommend a rework.