Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister for Education and Training) Share this | Hansard source

If our reforms do not pass, we will be consigning Australian universities and through them, students, to a 'decline into mediocrity'. They are not my words. They are the words of Universities Australia. Universities Australia recognises that the current system is unsustainable. Universities will be stuck with inadequate and unpredictable resources and an unsustainable status quo. Worse still, they will face the continued fear, the continued threat that Senator Carr would get his way and would manage to put a cap back in place in relation to university places. Universities would face that constant fear, as would students, that the vulnerable and the disadvantaged may be denied a place at university because the cap would be reinstituted, as Senator Carr seems to want to do. In fact, as one economist has described it, he wants to bring back 'Moscow on the Molonglo'. He wants to put the bureaucrats back in charge of deciding who goes to university— (Time expired)