The paper makes three claims: first that regulatory state making and market making in higher education is intertwined through a project of market citizenship that shapes the "publicness" of higher education. Second, we argue that these projects of market citizenship are variegated and in Australia has taken the form of accommodation--via regulation tools--between social democratic and market elements, and finally we argue that the effect of this new regulatory state is a strategy to depoliticise the governance of higher education. Policy making appears to be the application of a set of technical rules rather than political decisions about the allocation of values.