Crisis functions in Australian political rhetoric about education not as a neutral descriptor but as a technology of governance that authorises intervention. Drawing on Knoster’s historicization of the concept ‘crisis’ this paper examines how the meaning of ‘education crisis’ is reworked in the Commonwealth’s parliamentary debate on education between 1960 and 1972. Using RAPID (Reusable and Accessible Public Interest Data) Community Data Lab's Parliament of Australia Hansard dataset this paper traces shifts in the semantic relationship between crisis and education. Corpus analysis reveals growing alignment between crisis discourse and education rhetoric across the period. The paper argues that because of Australia’s federal arrangements, teacher education has become a particularly available target for policy intervention and crisis discourse has legitimised recurring cycles of education reform and inquiry.
