A university vice chancellor has told senators they would be “aiding and abetting a fraud on the electorate” if they supported the government’s higher education changes in a vote due this week.

The University of Canberra vice chancellor, Stephen Parker, also extended his attack to the peak body representing universities, saying Universities Australia (UA) had “lost its moral compass” and was engaged in “a strange form of suicide ritual” by endorsing the government’s package to deregulate student fees.

The government signalled it intended to put the bill to a vote before the Senate rose on Thursday for the Christmas break, even as it struggled to win over enough crossbenchers to support the legislation.

The education minister, Christopher Pyne, said the government had shown it was willing to be flexible by agreeing to several crossbench amendments, including scrapping the plan to increase interest rates on student loans and pausing indexation for new mums and dads.

“This week is the vital week,” he told parliament on Monday. “This week is the week that the government will put these bills to the Senate for a vote.”

Pyne said many across the university sector, including UA, were calling for these reforms to be amended and passed.

“In other words, we have united the universities sector,” Pyne said.

“Universities Australia represents all the universities in the country. Universities Australia is calling on the Senate not to defer consideration of this matter but to pass the bill, admittedly with amendments.”

But Parker, who has previously criticised the bill, said on Monday the government’s reforms would “ring the death knell of our peak body”.

He said he would not attend further meetings of Universities Australia, which he said was “an organisation with necrotizing fasciitis – the condition where the body eats its own flesh”.

“Older universities, which have benefited from decades of public money, built a brand at taxpayer expense and who now want to run away with it, will raise their fees more, the stratification of institutions will intensify, competition and dog-eat-dog will be the order of the day, and when they have milked the peak group for what they can get out of it the elites will dance away in a figure eight formation,” Parker said in a speech at the National Alliance for Public Universities forum in Sydney.

“We have just seen a week of bizarre national adverts from UA, presumably aimed at six crossbench senators at the most, full of Orwellian doublespeak that the reforms are fair to students.

“Whether it breaks up soon because the tensions are too great, or it survives until the interest group factions have no more use for it and spit it out, UA is doomed because it has lost its moral compass.”

Parker said he was surprised that he was “the only vice chancellor to say publicly what at least a few actually believe” and urged academia and others to “maintain the fight” against changes that were not put to voters at the 2013 federal election.

“Wake up senators – you know not what you are playing with – you are aiding and abetting a fraud on the electorate,” he said.

Comment has been sought from Universities Australia, which earlier issued a statement supporting fee deregulation but calling for senators to negotiate other changes to the bill to make it fairer.

The Senate continued to debate the bill on Monday night.

The independent senator Jacqui Lambie, who will vote against the bill, appealed to her fellow crossbench senator Ricky Muir.

“I believe his vote will be critical to defeat this radical Liberal plan to increase the cost of university fees,” Lambie said.

“I ask that before Ricky votes that Ricky consider the tens of thousands of children who come from working class backgrounds who will never be given the opportunity to better themselves and improve their lot in life through a university education because the Liberals’ cost will scare them and stop them from even dreaming of a uni degree.

“This legislation is deliberately designed to keep working class people in their place by Liberals who think they are born to rule and lord over normal Australians.”

The Liberal senator Cory Bernardi said nothing in the bill “disallows people from entering the higher education sector”. He said universities should be able to compete on cost, quality and specialties.

“People can then make appropriate choices. That is the hallmark of a responsible and sustainable higher education system,” Bernardi said.

“What we’re quibbling about asking people to pay back some of the costs of their education when they’ve got a job and exceed a threshold salary level.”

The Palmer United party (PUP) leader, Clive Palmer, said he did not support the current plan and expected Muir would also vote against it. The PUP Senate leader, Glenn Lazarus, had used stronger language late last week, telling Guardian Australia the party would not negotiate on funding cuts.