THE eagerly awaited Bradley review of higher education is on track to be submitted to government and released in December, paving the way for the Government to respond in February, Education Minister Julia Gillard said tonight.

Giving the Sir Robert Menzies Oration at Melbourne University tonight, Ms Gillard also made it clear that boosting the university participation rates of the poor and disadvantaged was a key policy goal, and that she was also looking for major changes.

"Piecemeal change won't be enough in a world where higher education is such an important determinant of prosperity and social equity,” she said.

"I want to create a system where there are the right incentives to encourage universities to provide the best possible education to all our young people, and a system which properly supports individuals to study so they are able to invest in their human capital over the course of their life. And we must deliver equity,” Ms Gillard said.

"Economically, our nation will be the poorer if we do not make the most of the talents and potentials of all our people. Morally, our nation will be the weaker if we leave unanswered for another 60 years Robert Menzies' challenge to provide educational equity."

News that the Bradley review is on schedule will relieve a university sector that is already worried it is facing a difficult 2009 as funding is squeezed by inflation and tumbling investment returns, while any funding boost from Bradley isn't expected to be delivered until 2010.

In her speech, Ms Gillard drew on the election of Barack Obama as the next US President as symbolic of the potential of education to overcome disadvantage.

In his book "Dreams From My Father,” Senator Obama says that while living in Indonesia his mother took a job at the US embassy in Jakarta so she could afford to enrol him in a correspondence course to boost his chances of getting into a good secondary school. She later sent him to live with his grandparents in Hawaii, where he was able to attend an elite US preparatory school.

"His mother understood that as a member of a minority he needed the edge that only education could provide. And she knew that overcoming that disadvantage took hard work,” Ms Gillard said.

She also agreed with Rupert Murdoch's comments in the first Boyer lecture earlier this week that missing out on education was a form of "injustice to individuals and a future burden to our society.”

While the John Dawkins reforms of 1984-1992 had created a mass higher education system in Australia, Ms Gillard said the problem of disadvantage still had not been overcome.

"The task now is to expand access and opportunity to everyone, regardless of the family or community they come from,” Ms Gillard said.