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July 25th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda Australia’s leading universities have threatened to launch an advertising blitz reminiscent of the campaign against the mining tax.
Group of Eight chair Fred Hilmer said on Wednesday that Prime Minister Julia Gillard had failed to take her foot off the throat of universities as promised when it came to over-regulation of the sector.
Professor Hilmer told the National Press Club that if universities were to prosper in the future red tape had to be cut, undergraduate fees deregulated and a national research strategy developed.
Universities themselves were to blame for the current mix of “rose-coloured aspirations, oppressive regulation and scrooge-like funding” because they’d been poor advocates for good government policies, he said.
“I think we are getting close to a time when we’ve got to do pretty much what the mining industry did and just say ‘No’ and take out ads and be absolutely vocal,” Prof Hilmer said after his address, in which he presented his vision for Australian universities.
“If we did that I think we would be listened to.”
Prof Hilmer, the president and vice-chancellor of the University of NSW, said the sector had to play “a lot more aggressively” in the public-policy field.
He acknowledged that for many that involved a big transition because people preferred to negotiate through reasoned discussion. But, he said, that didn’t characterise “political life”.
Prof Hilmer said removing red tape “is the first thing I think we urgently need to do”.
But second on his list is deregulating fees for domestic undergraduate courses “focusing on areas such as business and the professions where the education we provide gives the student high private benefits in terms of salaries”.
Prof Hilmer cited business, law, engineering and medicine degrees as examples of where universities should be allowed to charge higher fees.
The former Fairfax Media CEO said fee “flexibility” would not result in Australian students accruing US-style debts partly because education was cheaper here and subsidised by the government.
But, more importantly, the HECs system meant students repaid fees only “when and if you can afford to”, he said.
When it came to research, Prof Hilmer argued that current policy didn’t adequately recognise the importance of world-class research universities.
“The underlying problem is that we lack a national research strategy that covers long-term funding and whether and where research should be concentrated,” he told the press club.
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