When the government abolished demand driven funding then education minister Simon Birmingham said there would be growth places in 2020, allocated on the basis of to-be-developed performance metrics. These could include, student experience, attrition and completion rates and graduate outcomes. “We have two years to get this right … there is ample time to consult” Senator Birmingham said, (CMM December 19 2017).

Perhaps then but now, not so much. If work on developing the metrics is underway it is being done discretely, very discretely, with no one talking about what the feds will propose for consultation, or when. This seems strange, given Senator Birmingham mentioned performance measures in what sounded like an informal transition brief for successor Dan Tehan (CMM August 28).