In the long economic boom after World War II the growing role of education broadened the boundaries of modern consumption and the scope for educated labour, underwritten by Keynesian social investment. Educational competition and selection reconciled opportunity with economy, though with growing difficulty. The great advances in public sector provision of education climaxed with the Whitlam Labor Government (1972–1975). It was a more generous regime than those which followed, but its central rubric of ‘equality’ was more ambiguous than it seemed.