This article attempts a critique of the higher education policy overview, with a particular view to how policy is made through that process. The higher education sector in Australia has become reliant for the answers to its most important policy questions on a process that has not delivered adequate answers, and which becomes less likely to deliver them with each successive iteration. Continually activating that process without addressing the reasons for its failure becomes an exercise in bad faith. The perpetual restructuring of the higher education sector has become an industry in itself. This article argues that the only way forward is a new--and as yet unrealised--policy consensus. The author's concern here is with the development of a self-sustaining policy overview process or cycle, arbitrary in its relationship to the needs and aspirations of higher education in Australia. The author notes the unsustainability of Australia's higher education system as presently configured, and concludes with a discussion of two interdependent phenomena: (1) a perpetual political cycle; and (2) a critically inadequate policy framework. (Contains 7 endnotes.)