[This is an abridged version of a discussion paper put forward by the socialist youth organisation Resistance for discussion in the student movement.]
This will be a crunch year for tertiary education in this country, one in which the student movement will need a very clear picture of where we're heading and what we're doing.
Resistance believes that there are three key questions that need to be answered:
1. What sort of a campaign do we need?
2. How do we mobilise students, staff and the broader community?
3. What are the necessary elements of such a campaign?
A recent discussion paper circulated by Left Alliance tries to deal with some of these issues. As such, it's a welcome addition to the debate. Some ideas put forward in the paper, such as for campaigns against the enrolment of any full fee-paying students in 1998 and against ancillary fees, are good ones and should be discussed. Others, such as the proposed HECS boycott campaign, we feel will be more difficult to implement.
What sort of a campaign do we need?
To achieve even the immediate aims of the campaign will require a sustained, broad and inclusive campaign of mass action involving not only higher education students and staff but also significant numbers of workers and secondary students.
This approach has sometimes been wrongly caricatured as the "rally after rally" approach. The focus of such a mass action campaign is not simply the rallies, strikes and actions but the sustained work of actively (and not just passively) involving larger numbers of students; its focus is on organising students.
Such an approach means that both lobbying politicians and militant direct actions can be used in specific situations, but only if they act to increase the level of mobilisation and organisation. They're subordinate tactics.
How do we mobilise students, staff and the broader community?
The key issue is the impact government plans will have on the ability of large numbers of people to attend university. Our underlying campaign theme should be to convince students that "you are not going to make it through university unless you fight these attacks".
The pressure is on students to get through university before it gets even harder. We have to address this pressure directly, through outlining the very real impact the government's plans will have on their ability to finish study.
Within the overall campaign, we believe there are four specific sets of demands which need to be raised:
1. immediate reversal of funding cuts and for an increase in public funding to education.
2. introduce a guaranteed minimum wage for students and the unemployed.
3. abolish HECS.
4. no to up-front fees.
It should be stressed that it is the cumulative effect of all of the issues, rather than any one issue, that will have the biggest impact on students' consciousness and our ability to organise them.
Our demands should focus primarily on the federal government, but also should be directed towards forcing university administrations to publicly challenge the government's agenda and to refuse to help implement it.
In addition, the student movement needs to address other issues which affect access to university education. In particular, we need to address the policies of federal and state governments of decreasing funding to public schools whilst increasing it to private schools.
What are the necessary elements of such a campaign?
Resistance believes there are three particular components that the student movement needs to focus on:
1. an ideological counter-offensive against economic rationalism and "user-pays".
Unless the student movement puts forward a consistent and convincing case for fully publicly funded education, it has no chance of mobilising enough support to stop and reverse the attacks.
Ten years of the promotion of the economic rationalist view of the role of education (particularly by Labor in office) means that it now has widespread acceptance amongst staff, students, the community and even sections of the student movement, particularly those aligned with the ALP. This needs to be combated directly.
A focus on rewinning lost ground ideologically also has one other key purpose. If we don't make clear our rejection of the overall bipartisan project for the corporatisation of education, Beazley and Co are in a perfect position to present themselves as true opponents of the Liberals' cuts which "go too far" — and then go on implementing the same agenda when (and if) they're returned to office. We can't allow this to happen.
In opposition to this, the student movement needs to put its own vision, that is, of the reintroduction of a fully publicly funded and universally accessible mass tertiary education system, of a tertiary system which serves social interests, not corporate ones.
However, Resistance doesn't believe that developing such a vision should be counterposed in any way to the organising work we need to do. By doing so, we believe some on the student left risk making the discussion a purely abstract one, with little relevance to either students on campus or to our goals as a movement.
2. rebuilding strong activist groups on university campuses.
A key to our success will be strengthening the activist forces on the ground. In particular, the on-campus activist groups are in need of serious effort and attention.
At present, many of these groups are far weaker than they should be. This has a big impact on the movement's ability to grow and limits the organisational base of the campaign. These groups need to meet regularly, be run democratically and decide on a wide range of activities aimed at publicising actions and educating students; they can't simply be factionalised rumps.
3. building strong alliances with academics, general staff and the community.
There is still a long way to go in strengthening the staff-student alliance. In particular, regular contact and collaboration still needs to be developed at the grassroots between student activists and campus branches of the NTEU. It can't simply be left (as it largely has been) at the "official" level of contact between state and national branches of NUS and the corresponding level of the NTEU.
Concretely, these links should be strengthened by joint staff-student general meetings in the first part of the year, by ongoing staff-student committees and by active student solidarity with staff issues.
The student movement also needs to pay closer attention to reaching out to other sections of the community, in particular high school students. Our ability to reach out and mobilise high school students is not only a valuable way to try to bring the issue out to the broader community but acts to ensure a layer of potential student activists in the future.
Our vision should be for universities which play a role within the community, which act as centres of struggle against capitalism. It's a broader social radicalisation and a broader social challenge to the system that's required if university education is going to be anything else but for profit and driven by the interests of business.
And Resistance believes that will start with us focusing clearly in the here and now on how we can educate, mobilise and organise students to fight the attacks in front of us.