Education Minister Christopher Pyne has announced that the new government will launch a review into Arts degrees in a bid to find any evidence of skills relevant to later life.

Sources in the Education department say the review is the start of the process to remove Arts faculties from universities across Australia, with Mr Pyne’s eyes set firmly on Parkville’s sandstone institution, which he has said is the “worst of a bad lot”.

The newly sworn in minister took some time out from wishing someone would notice his sex appeal, to put most of the department’s public servants on the investigation, in the hope of speeding up the process.

It is believed that the final plan is to cut all Arts degrees from universities, and to cleanse them of knowledge that cannot be traded on the stockmarket. Students and academics would be sent to the soon-to-be-created economic zone in Australia’s north to work in the mines—the education minister’s idea of a useful life.

Government sources have told Farrago exclusively that Pyne lies awake at night worrying that leftie students studying the Screen Studies subject, Thinking Sex, will learn too much sexual theory and not enough practical knowledge. “Pyne thinks that kind of education is for the back of a commodore you know what I mean? Not a lecture theatre at all,” the source said.

The review will cover arts courses across the country, with the aim of neutralising the wankiness that comes with understanding how to pronounce Foucault, let alone understand what he’s going on about.

Students and academics are alarmed by the idea, with a black market in seminal texts such as Marx’s Communist Manifesto and Simone de Bouvoir’sThe Second Sex, already doing a roaring trade. Textbook dealers have been seen hanging around dark corners of the underground carpark, with security officers turning a blind eye to the weedy hipsters doing business.

Students seem more depressed than usual about the new national direction. “I’ve had to start hiding Bret Easton Ellis novels with a dust cover ofEnterprise Research Planning Systems,” one student told Farrago. “My friends have started assuming I’m just reading porn–and I can’t even say that’s true anymore now that Pyne has got his way, cutting Art, Porn, Blasphemy and Propaganda.”

Some campuses are welcoming the investigation given the $2.3 billion of cuts that were made to the tertiary sector earlier in 2013.

“Arts degrees interest too many students, and we have to face facts–not every 18-year-old has a god given right to learn about True Blood or Mesapotamia in an academic context,” one senior administrator said.

“Much better to save that money and invest it in a rooftop bar to sit on top of the rooftop bar that already exists in Melbourne Law School.”

Government officials expect to table the report in September next year. Current Arts students best graduate quickly.