The Governance of Education in Australia: Centralization and Politics

The centralization of power in the state and federal legislatures and in their associated professional bureaucracies is a notable feature of both educational and general political decision making in Australia. In this paper “governance” refers to the process of exercising authoritative control, “politics” to public policy making and its resolution. Formal public participation in Australian educational decision making is shown to be minimal, being limited to representation by elected members in the state and federal legislatures. There is no local governmental structure or tax for education. The existing structures and their origins are explained. Two hypotheses derived from the work of Iannaccone are tested. The first states that the longer educational issues remain unsolved in the extra‐legal social networks and lower level legal areas the more likely it is that decisions on these questions will be made by central government departments and agencies. The second states that the more that questions of educational policy are resolved by central departments and agencies the more likely it is that educational policies will become undifferentiated from other kinds of politics or from politics as relating to other policy areas of government. An examination of political developments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries supports both hypotheses.