Introduction to Learning, Teaching and Social Justice in Higher Education

[Extract] If social justice can broadly be defined as the fair distribution of goods and burdens across society, it is clear from the outset that it is a term which can be interpreted in many different ways. Nevertheless, in what has been called the social liberal project of nation building undertaken in Australia, education has consistently been associated with (albeit different interpretations of) the principles of inclusiveness and equity. Since the expansion of the university sector in the post war period under Prime Minister Robert Menzies through a series of Commonwealth Government reports and changing policy frameworks over the decades of the 1970s and 1980s, to the massive expansion and rationalisation under Dawkins in the 1990s, there has been a progressive transformation of Australia's higher education system.