Instead of the interest rate being based on inflation as now, it would be set according to the how much it costs the government to lend the students the money.

It costs the government zero percent to fund tertiary education, or it would if it weren't beholden to idiots with economics degrees insisting that federal budgets for a currency-issuing government have to balance.

If universities are deregulated, it will be the market, in the form of the choices students make

... because every cohort of seventeen-year-old high school graduates, and only that cohort, are the best and only determinants of Australia's future year-to-year. And, of course, we'll be raising these kids with the 'invisible hand of the market' rhetoric, so they'll all understand that the only things worth learning are the things that are currently paying the highest market salaries. Law, medicine and petroleum engineering for everyone, and for the dummies we'll have marketing, economics and business.

What an impoverished cretin. He's writing in the AFR, and he doesn't have the first idea about what it means to invest in the future. He's the financial market equivalent of the suckers who believe they can consistently pick winners. It takes no imagination to see where his strategy leads: a failed Australia.