Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

and whether you stand for the ability of university places to not be allocated on the basis of merit. We are also delivering our policies for more places for nurses and early childhood educators. We are doubling the scholarships available to undergraduates. We are committed to rebuilding student services, and we are of course committed to incentives for maths and science, because they are enabling disciplines where we are in such short supply as part of the skills shortage. But, to deliver a full higher education revolution to this country, we will need to do more. This is a government that not only believes in delivering its promises; it believes in delivering on reform—reform that is necessary to make sure that this is a modern nation ready to meet the challenges of the future.

It is interesting to me that when one moves around the higher education community they still talk about the Dawkins reforms. They are still debating and still talking about the Dawkins reforms. There are views in favour, views against, but Dawkins’s name has become synonymous with higher education reform in this country. There will never be a day when higher education policy people will talk about the Nelson reforms or the Bishop reforms, because they never did anything profound to improve our higher education system. Instead, they had years of neglect interspersed periodically by ideological meddling, the high point of which was the imposition of Australian workplace agreements, their industrial relations extremism, on Australian universities. The sorts of things they stand for are extremism in all places. Reform, promise delivery? Never.

In order to deliver the rest of the higher education revolution, we want to be guided by a review that includes the sector.

See this speech in context