For most of its history, the Australian Labor Party spoke of education as a public good, the “light on the hill”, a vision of collective progress through strong institutions, universal access, and the elevation of ordinary citizens.

Universities, like schools, were part of that public mission. They existed not merely to produce workers but to expand minds, deepen culture, and strengthen democracy.

Today, under a Labor Government, the reality is starkly different. Across the country, universities are slashing courses, closing faculties and shedding thousands of staff. At the University of Technology Sydney, an entire education faculty has been suspended, with all primary and secondary teacher-training degrees mothballed just as NSW faces a chronic teacher shortage.

The pattern is not accidental, but ideological. Disciplines that question, interpret and humanise are being dismantled in favour of those that serve markets and metrics. In the name of “efficiency”, a Labor Government is presiding over the slow asphyxiation of the public university, the very institution once entrusted to enlighten, not merely to produce.

Vice-chancellors frame these decisions as unavoidable responses to financial strain. Yet, behind the curtain, the real architects are not academics or public servants but consultants: KPMG, PwC, Deloitte, EY, and Nous Group. These are the same firms Labor once condemned as the “shadow state” hollowing out the Commonwealth bureaucracy. Now they sit inside university governance, drafting blueprints for mass redundancies and course closures.

Consultants bring a particular worldview. It is not neutral or evidence-based advice, it is ideology: neoliberalism on steroids. In this paradigm, a course is viable only if it generates profit. A staff member’s worth is measured by grant dollars won. A faculty’s survival depends on how it benchmarks against competitors. Social need, training teachers, preserving languages, nurturing culture simply doesn’t count.

At UTS, KPMG’s $4.8 million plan proposed ranking academics by research income and drawing up a “master list” for redundancies. Teacher-training programs were mothballed because enrolments were deemed insufficient, even as the state begged for more teachers. At ANU, Nous Group’s million-dollar “Project Galileo” sought $250 million in “savings”, treating whole schools of music, sociology and political science as expendable. At Wollongong and Tasmania, humanities and language programs vanished, erased not by scholarship but by spreadsheet.

This is not classical neoliberalism, which at least paid lip service to “choice” or “competition”. The consultant model is corporate triage: cut costs, shed “unprofitable” units, standardise everything to the median. What survives is not what the nation needs, but what the model deems cheapest.

In opposition, Labor rightly attacked the Coalition for outsourcing the brain of government to the Big Four. It warned that billions spent on consultants had hollowed out the public service, weakened accountability and ceded democratic control to private firms. Labor promised to restore strong public institutions, led by public servants in the national interest.

Yet in government, Labor has embraced the same paradigm in higher education. Universities are statutory bodies, funded, regulated and accountable to the Commonwealth, not free-floating corporations. But the new generation of vice-chancellors bears little resemblance to the scholar-leaders who once defined the university’s intellectual character. Increasingly, they are professional administrators: career managers drawn from government, media and the corporate world. Their expertise lies not in scholarship or pedagogy but in budgets, branding, and “organisational transformation”.

Mark Scott at the University of Sydney is emblematic, a consummate bureaucrat whose career spans the ABC and the NSW Department of Education, yet without a substantive record in research or teaching. Across the sector, the modern vice-chancellor is less an academic visionary than a chief executive, fluent in managerial jargon and performance metrics, presiding over institutions whose missions have been rewritten in the language of markets. And when these vice-chancellors hire KPMG or Nous to design the very cuts that close faculties, gut research and collapse teacher-training pipelines, Labor does little more than shrug.

Nowhere is the contradiction sharper than in teacher education. The Albanese Government trumpets its National Teacher Workforce Action Plan, scholarships, internships, more funded places. Jason Clare repeats that Australia cannot fix its schools without training more teachers. Yet at UTS, the consultants’ spreadsheets prevailed and teacher education was mothballed. The NSW Labor Government pleaded with the university to reconsider. It didn’t.

What does it say when a Labor Government offers scholarships with one hand while allowing universities to abolish the very courses those scholarships would fund? It says the rhetoric of public service is intact, but the substance has been outsourced.

The consultant paradigm now dominates not just restructures, but governance itself. Nous alumni occupy senior executive roles at Griffith. Big Four partners sit on university councils. At least one in three Australian universities has a consultant or ex-consultant on its governing body. The advisers have become the governors.

This creates a closed loop: consultants are hired to diagnose a financial “crisis”, they draft the cost-cutting plan, embed staff to implement it, then return later to “review” progress. Millions flow out in contracts; thousands of academic jobs disappear. When challenged, vice-chancellors insist on “independent advice”. But independence is fiction, these firms are paid to deliver the outcomes management already wants. As one academic put it, consultants don’t provide analysis; they provide cover.

Labor’s founders saw the ‘light on the hill’ as a beacon of hope, that every generation should be better off, more educated, more equal than the last. Today, under a Labor Government, the only light in higher education seems to be the glow of a consultant’s PowerPoint slide.

The irony is bitter. Labor still speaks of public good, but allows universities to be remade as corporations. It still decries consultant dependency in the bureaucracy, yet looks away as the same firms dismantle our universities. It still promises to fix the teacher shortage, even as it permits faculties that train teachers to vanish.

This is not mere inconsistency. It is betrayal, a surrender of purpose disguised as reform. The party that once championed universal education now presides over its hollowing. The “light on the hill” has dimmed, refracted through a balance sheet where profit has become the only public virtue.

If Labor wishes to reclaim its moral authority, it must break with the consultant paradigm: rebuild public governance, fund socially vital disciplines and restore universities as places of learning, not revenue streams. Until then, its words ring hollow.

The light on the hill was never meant to be an accountant’s lamp.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.