The problem with Australian universities is not that they are ‘Woke’ in the typical sense. Politics is never that simple.

The problem is capture: a publicly funded sector that still talks the language of the common good while treating identity politics as if it were the common good.

I have been working as a barista in regional NSW. It is bloody hard work. In a tight-knit place like Gunning it is also rewarding. The contrast with the product line on campus is hard to miss.

My previous university now offers a graduate certificate in LGBTQIA+ policy, billed as ‘Australia’s first postgraduate course focused on LGBTQIA+ policy and advocacy’. It promises to help professionals ‘challenge structural barriers and lead the design of inclusive, equitable systems’ in government, not-for-profits, community organisations, and the media.

Imagine the outcry if taxpayers underwrote a graduate certificate in curbing identity politics. That thought experiment tells you more than the marketing copy. One course is treated as public virtue. The reverse would be treated as a scandal. That is not a marketplace of ideas. It is a one-way bet, funded in part by the Commonwealth.

Here is another small window on the same habit. A university recently unveiled a purpose-designed Women’s Room: quiet study, free menstrual products, a place to breastfeed, a couch and a cup of tea. Fine, as far as it goes. The catch is the door policy. It is open to students who identify as women. Provision for women has been rewritten as a gender-identity entitlement. That is not a trivial wording change. It is the substitution of an ideological category for a sex-based one, and it is now treated as unremarkable campus infrastructure.

I drove to Canberra for an address at the National Press Club by Professor Carolyn Evans, chair of Universities Australia and incoming vice-chancellor of the University of Melbourne. I expected a non-event. Yet the room was packed.

People often confuse the Press Club with leftist journalism. In my limited experience, that is the exception, not the rule. The better frame comes from the study of regulation: capture.

Regulation is supposed to serve the public interest – the common good in a liberal democracy. Withhold police operational details if release would put officers at unnecessary risk. Publish them if officers were helping criminals. The test is the public, not the institution.

On a continuum from heavy state control to industry self-regulation, each model has its uses. The recurring failure is capture. In its milder form, regulators start protecting the industry rather than the public. At the sharper end, a sector and its lobby defend their own orthodoxy and call it the national interest.

Universities Australia is the sector’s peak lobby. Evans is about to run one of the country’s most prestigious universities. That is why her answer mattered.

I asked her this:

‘Universities Australia has advanced identity politics across the sector. With taxpayers contributing over $21 billion annually, how does this partisan agenda represent value for money?’

She deflected. She spoke about Indigenous participation and inclusiveness. She did not meet the question.

To be fair, the wider speech was not a sermon. She quoted John Curtin and Sir Robert Menzies. She warned against command and control from Canberra. On that point she is right. It is a poor way to run universities.

However, she also called for academic freedom and, in the same breath, for legal protection of university autonomy against ‘creeping regulation’ and Populist backlash.

But Populism is hardly the problem. Why aren’t universities setting themselves against identity politics? Evans can see capture when it wears a ministerial badge. She cannot see it when it wears an inclusion lanyard.

The gap is what she cannot see. Academic freedom is not only threatened by ministers and regulators. It is threatened when campus orthodoxy decides which questions are legitimate. Identity politics does not merely add new topics. It treats dissent as harm, converts contested moral claims into professional credentials, and makes career-minded people keep their heads down.

Most of what I heard today sounded like a brief for why conservative or classical-liberal objections get in the way of a progressive program.

That is now a national habit. Equal opportunity, the liberal promise that people should not be locked out by class, sex, race or religion, has been displaced by equity of outcome, the demand that institutions engineer matching results. The second is not a small adjustment to the first. It is a different theory of justice, and it has become the operating language of much of the sector.

Career academics know this and many will not say it. Hiring, grants, promotions, and complaint processes reward the right vocabulary. Voice your doubts too clearly and you do not win a debate. You risk the file. So, the people best placed to call the bluff have the most to lose by doing so.

When Evans opened, she spent minutes on an Acknowledgement of Country and on those once denied higher education because of who they were. Historical exclusion is real and worth naming. What does not follow is the present habit of sorting living students and staff into identity ranks and calling that inclusion.

Still less does it follow that Professor Evan’s folded Islamophobia and Antisemitism into the same moral package. After the Bondi massacre, in which alleged terrorists targeted a Jewish Hanukkah gathering and killed 15 people, such conflation is not sophistication. It is my view that this is ideology refusing to look at a particular crime. It ought to be called out. I did not leave the room convinced the sector’s leadership can do it.

Taxpayers contributed $21.2 billion in government assistance to universities in 2024. To be sure, it wasn’t all spent on identity politics. But the public-interest question is narrower and harder to dodge. Why should any of that money underwrite partisan ideology, political correctness, and administrative fashions the sector will not submit to open contest?

A university that had not been captured would look ordinary by older standards. It would argue about sex, gender, race, and faith instead of credentialing one side. It would keep women’s spaces actually for women where the purpose is sex-based. It would treat equal opportunity as the rule and engineered outcomes as a claim to be proved, not a piety. It would protect students and staff who say so.

Given today’s polite bows to Curtin and Menzies, I doubt it will be the peak body, or the coming generation of vice-chancellors, who say this out loud. The question for the rest of us is simple. To what extent has taxpayer investment in higher education been captured by a political agenda the sector can no longer recognise as political?

My issue is that our university leaders are not unintelligent. However, they live in echo chambers where the echoes have become so prevalent, they have lost all sense of reality.

Dr Michael de Percy @FlaneurPolitiq is the Spectator Australia’s Canberra Press Gallery Correspondent. If you would like to support his writing, or read more of Michael, please visit his website.

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