Bill Shorten's gone back to university.
Not literally; the Labor leader sees the issue of university fees and funding as crucial to the party's election hopes and the future of the nation.
Malcolm Turnbull's elevation to the prime ministership and the potential for an early election has accelerated Labor's policy thinking.
The first polls since Turnbull ousted Tony Abbott show a resurgence in support for the Liberals and a strong personal popularity rating for the prime minister.
His first 10 days in the role have widely been seen in Canberra circles as a breath of fresh air after the best part of five years of turmoil and backroom intrigue plaguing both major parties.
Ministers and backbenchers are glad to be talking once again about the big picture, instead of grumbling to journalists about the ineptitude of the prime minister and his office.
Blocked legislation and unpopular policies are up for review.
As Turnbull said this week: "There will be changes to policies if they don't work as well as we think, or we think others can work better. None of this is written in stone."
For Labor, this new broom is both an opportunity and a challenge.
Polling shows the ALP remains the strongly favoured party of 18 to 34-year-olds.
They represent just over four million voters out of around 15.3 million across all age groups.
Shorten has spent most of the week visiting universities, including his alma mater Monash, to talk up the opposition's plans and remind students and their parents of the coalition government's current policy.
The Abbott government had been unable to get its legislation, designed by the then education minister Christopher Pyne, through the Senate.
Pyne admitted this week that because it was a "new government, effectively" it would be going back to the drawing board on the university changes.
The new minister Simon Birmingham has sent mixed messages about the existing policy.
In one interview he said "policies remain policies" and the government would not be abandoning the principle of universities being freed up to raise more revenue.
But at other times over the past week Birmingham talked up the clean-slate approach.
"If that means we have to compromise, that's what we will do," the South Australian MP said.
Having previously held the portfolio in charge of vocation education and training it's expected Birmingham will seek a broader policy discussion on post-school education.
Labor has opened a separate battlefront on proposals for a federal takeover of the VET sector, saying working cooperatively with the states and guaranteeing funding under a "national priority plan" is a better approach.
Australia's universities were strong backers of the original Abbott government plan to allow them to charge students more for courses, while taking a 20 per cent cut to their public funding.
But they have cooled on the plan and now want the focus to be less on the budget side of things and more on the essential role universities play in the broader economy.
Shorten this week announced Labor's plan to give a legal guarantee for university funding if elected.
The plan would head off the government's originally proposed cut and backed up, in a policy sense, Labor's campaign against "$100,000 degrees".
But the funding amounts to status quo, according to peak body Universities Australia, and a better deal would be to link funding growth not to inflation but the cost of delivering services which is growing at a much faster rate.
Universities say they would still need to find alternative sources of revenue over time to avoid eroding the quality of their teaching programs and want to hear more from Labor.
Shorten has made it central to his election platform to talk up the benefits of science and technology education and linking researchers and industry as a way to boost the economy.
It's also an agenda which is dear to the heart of the new prime minister, but there's huge pressure on Turnbull to find more budget savings rather than enter into new spending promises.
The result of this debate could be crucial to who's head of the class after the election.
