Economist Richard Blandy has strong connections to South Australia’s three public universities. Here’s what he thinks of the proposal to merge two of them of them, UniSA and UniAdelaide.

“The proposed amalgamation would, in fact, worsen the probability of Adelaide becoming a pre-eminent higher education city by reducing the spur of competition and the gains from collaboration – where such gains can be seen to exist by people with skin in the game.

“This nonsense could have come straight out of the spiel for the Multifunction Polis.”

For readers under 50 the MFP was an Australian-Japanese idea for a high-tech community in Adelaide, which went nowhere. Still, if Professor Blandy had really wanted to dismiss the idea he would have suggested the State Bank of SA would have loved to fund.