Mrs DE-ANNE KELLY —My question is addressed to the Minister for Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs. Is the minister aware of concern from the university sector about the impact of Labor's higher education policies on the quality of educa tion? What plans does the government have to promote quality in Australian universities?

Dr KEMP (Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs;Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for the Public Service) —I thank the member for Dawson for her question. The principal objectives of the government's policies for education are to provide more opportunities for qualified young Australians to enter university and to ensure that universities are funded to provide a quality education. This year there are more domestic students on university campuses than ever before, and universities' revenues at $8.55 billion are higher than ever before.

The member for Werriwa, the opposition spokesperson on education, has said very little on the topic of his portfolio, although he has given a great deal of advice to other members of his frontbench. What he has said and what the Labor Party has said has now been roundly condemned by one of Australia's leading Vice-Chancellors, Professor Alan Gilbert of Melbourne University. In a speech yesterday in Melbourne, Professor Gilbert said that Labor's policy position on universities:

. . . was bereft of attention to quality, deficient and unconvincing.

Again referring to Labor's policy, Professor Gilbert said:

It will need to be fundamentally reconfigured or it will threaten seriously the quality of Australia's universities.

That is a very clear statement by one of Australia's leading Vice-Chancellors, one of the leaders of higher education in this country, about the total failure of the Labor Party to come to grips with what is needed to provide quality university education to young Australians. Already, Labor's higher education policies have been rejected. Labor's dangerous policies on education are fooling no-one. They threaten the quality of the universities and the extra places that the universities have created.

Another very significant statement was made yesterday by the Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee, which endorsed this government's policy position of increasing the total resourcing of universities through a mixture of public and private sources, including tuition fees which this government has introduced to give Australian students the same rights that overseas students have to access the courses which form their first preference. That policy has already opened the doors to hundreds of students who would otherwise have been denied the opportunity to study the courses they wanted.

The Vice-Chancellors' statement is very deliberate and very clear, and it is rejecting the Labor Party's policy on higher education to abolish those undergraduate fees and those undergraduate opportunities. That is what the Vice-Chancellors of Australia's 37 universities have said. They support the coalition's policy to provide a range of funding sources for Australian universities and they reject the policy of the Australian Labor Party. And as the Labor Party now look down that long, dark track towards another election defeat, they might well consider that the neglect that the member for Werriwa has given to university education and to education generally is now beginning to reap its inevitable consequences, that all those people in this country who care for quality education, who care to open the doors of Australia's universities to qualified young people, who want Australia's universities to be better funded, are rejecting the alternative offered by the Australian Labor Party and supporting that offered by the federal coalition.

Mr Howard —Mr Speaker, I ask that further questions be placed on the Notice Paper .