In responding to a claim by former Monash Vice-Chancellor Richard Larkins that fees should be deregulated, one of Julia Gillard’s spokespeople asserted that

The government has invested a substantial amount of additional funding in the tertiary and research sector that will not just arrest the decline in real funding that occurred under the Coalition but actually begin to turn it around.

Note how the tense changes mid-sentence. Somehow the money they have invested already will at at some point in the future stop real funding declining.

In their first budget, virtually all the new higher education spending was just squeezing out private spending, by cutting student contributions for science and maths and abolishing full-fee places.

In their second budget, all but $82 million of the $533 million in new spending for 2009-10 came from abolishing Coaliton programmes or raiding the Coalition-established Education Investment Fund. Continue reading “Spin on university funding” →