Senator Carr came out swinging at the Coalition's spending on focus groups, which were used to design a multi-platform advertising campaign launched earlier in December.

"When I was minister for higher education ... I never once initiated advertisements, public advertisements, to try to persuade the Australian people that somehow or another, a lie was good for them. And that's what this government is doing," he said on Saturday.

When probed on whether he himself had ever spent money on market research, Senator Carr gasped: "I didn't spend any money on research."

The Senator backpedalled: "What we do know is that there is a time when government advertising is proper and legitimate, like bushfires and natural disasters. It's important for people to know how to get help but this is not one of those occasions."

The Coalition's youth-focused campaign, launched on television, radio and print in the wake of the Senate's defeat of the reforms, sets out to counter claims about skyrocketing degree costs under a deregulated fee system.

The government confirmed it has forked out $395,000 to research company Orima Research to conduct focus groups on the higher education changes, while the same company had already received $163,000 to conduct "market research on the level of awareness and understanding of the Higher Education System" between October and December.

Expert in political marketing from the Australian National University, Dr Andrew Hughes, said he was shocked at the spending.

Dr Hughes said even if the government had conducted telephone polling, experimental research and research for further advertising instalments in addition to the focus groups, at most that cost would add up to a quarter of a million dollars.

"Even for a campaign for a major brand, that's still a big spend. That would still be a major spend for players like Telstra, Vodafone, Woolworths and Coles," he said.

"But with all the spending, even with experiment focus groups and a survey ... half a million is still pushing it. I would have thought a quarter million dollars; I don't even think you can get to half a million on that scale."

Dr Hughes said the recent splurge may have set a new precedent for political spending on research and advertising, as voters increasingly respond to sophisticated media campaigning.

"It is setting a new standard, but it highlights how much marketing is becoming a part of politics because we are all consumers and we respond to politics as we would anything else in this day and age. So the techniques used are very similar, so we are dealing with modern marketing price."

Political strategist and pollster Mark Textor, echoed this view in a recent interview with ABC's Lateline, when he said television was "tremendously important" to political campaigning.

"If you want to to know what's important to a political party, follow the money. And when you follow the money, where do they spend most of their money? TV."

Chief executive of polling agency UMR, Dr Campbell White, said the huge cost was evidence that the commissioned research would have been extensive.

"It is a huge amount of money ... and most market research agencies would have to get a phenomenal amount of work done for that amount.

"I can see how it could be spent, if you did some telephone surveys, with long interviews and a large number of them ... but it's a pretty hard to reach that figure without having a pretty massive undertaking."

A spokesman for Education Minister Christopher Pyne hit back, saying Labor had been guilty of over-spending in their six years in office.

The spokesman further defended the cash splash, saying the Department of Education had picked up a "consistent lack of understanding of Australia's current higher education system" and "in particular the status of HECS" after attending 45 university open days between July and September.

"The department engaged a specialist research organisation to examine the extent to which this feedback reflected broader views and understanding of the higher education system," said the spokesman.

Polling conducted by UMR for the National Tertiary Education Union shows 74 per cent of the 1000 people surveyed could not recognise screen shots from the publicly-funded adsvertising, Mr Pyne announced earlier this month.

More than half of the total number surveyed said it was "inappropriate and unacceptable" for the government to spend public money to make the case for its higher education.

The spokesman for the Education Minister added "HECs is staying and more generous than ever. It doesn't fit with their or Labors scare."