Apparently, the release of the Bradley review report on the cash-strapped higher education sector is imminent. Luke Slattery in The Australian says that the report is:

expected to recommend a new sectoral architecture. High on her agenda are the goals of increasing participation and access; undergirding quality; addressing concerns about institutional viability in regional, remote and outer-suburban Australia; and in broad terms creating a durable, vital and forward-looking sector. But to some extent neither her expected recommendations nor those already in the public domain from the Cutler innovation review (Bradley is likely to echo Cutler on the need to fund research at its full cost) matter half so much as the Rudd Government's response.

There are also reports that the Bradley Review of higher education will recommend student deregulation --- the abolition of quotas on students numbers-- in the form of a shift away from the centralised allocation of government-funded places by granting students an entitlement they could take to whatever university would admit them.

It appears unlikely that there will be fee deregulation even though the core problem is to end the chronic underfunding of universities.