Murray Report

Keith Murray, chair of the Report, 1957. [Source: Robert Menzies Institute]

The consequence of the report according to historian Hannah Forsyth was the birth of Australia’s national university system (2014, p. 47).

The appointment of the Committee was an acknowledgement of wartime and post-war changes in the financial relationships between the Commonwealth and states. There was an increasing involvement of the Commonwealth in university funding through providing direct grants, paying the fees of repatriation students and granting Commonwealth scholarships to other students. A number of these earlier provisions of the Commonwealth had been recommended by a report of a committee led by R.C. Mills in 1951. By the mid-1950s there was little doubt that further assistance for universities would be required from the Commonwealth government. Given the rapid increase in youthful populations and the decreased capacity of state governments to meet their obligations, there was no avoiding the pressures. There had been some funding by the Commonwealth of university activity from the 1910s, but the 1950s would see the beginnings of a major expansion.

From the Introduction of the Report

Australian universities in trouble according to the Murray Committee report. 1957. [ Newspaper report, unsourced]

“We have the honour to present to you our report on the Australian universities. We had hoped to find that they were at present adequately staffed and equipped to discharge their heavy responsibilities to the students and to the nation. This is, unfortunately, far from the case. We have outlined what we consider to be the most serious problems in the situation as we see it to-day; they will become even more urgent in the immediate future, faced as the universities are with an increase of over 100 per cent, in their potential enrolments over the next ten years. The time at our disposal has been too short to adequately study all the issues confronting them but we have concentrated our attention on what we consider the most important, and we have made recommendations on what we think should be done immediately to meet a critical situation. Our report is not so polished a work as we should like but we have been so impressed by the need for immediate action, in 1958, 1959, and I960, if the  position is not to become catastrophic that we have felt obliged to present it to you at the earliest possible moment.”

The complete report is available on-line at https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/3702188

Immediate consequences

Following the Committee’s report, in 1959 the Commonwealth constituted the Australian Universities Commission with the continuing responsibility through triennial reports to recommend action to the government on future funding and development. Resulting financial support was helpful, but not generous as the growth in demand for university places accelerated. By 1974, despite constitutional provisions that left responsibility for university education with the states, the federal government under Whitlam Labor overwhelmingly assumed responsiblity for financing Australian public universities. Later in the twentieth century federal governments sought to shift much of this responsibility through the resurrection of university fees, loan schemes and the encouragement of universities to find alternative sources of funding. Nevertheless the Murray Committee’s work was a crucial step in the organising, expansion and modernising of Australian universities.

Note: This entry expands the paragraph written by the late John McLaren (with his consent), in his A Dictionary of Australian Education (1974).