Wake up Australia; wake up academia
‘ … wake up Australia if you want to preserve your children’s life chances. Wake up academia – especially those of you who write about public policy but have been strangely silent on this issue. Wake up Senators – you know not what you are playing with – you are aiding and abetting a fraud on the electorate. Maintain the fight everyone. If the Government won’t take the honourable course of acknowledging these reforms are a gross violation of pre-election promises and put them before the electorate, then we must make sure that they lose that election because of them. …
‘Stand up everyone for public universities, reject the reforms, join us at the table for a sensible conversation, without a gun at our heads, about how to make Australian public higher education great.’
(Professor Stephen Parker, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Canberra, speech at the National Alliance for Public Universities forum, 1.12.14.