ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to examine how cross-national exchange influenced the development of Australia’s education policies during the 1980s. In Australia, as in the rest of the English-speaking world, interest in the impact of policy borrowing and cross-national exchange is growing. The form of discourse they developed redefined the core functions of the education system in purely economic terms. In the early 1980s the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development warned that the relationship between education and employment was changing in fundamental ways because of changes in both the internal and international economic order in most member countries. The purpose of the income support review was to rationalise the plethora of piecemeal allowances made to or on behalf of young people and to produce a comprehensive youth allowance, which would provide stronger incentives for education participation. John Dawkins’ view of higher education was in conflict with the position traditionally held by most Australian academics.
