By Sean Healy
More than 10,000 university and secondary students and university staff rallied nationwide on May 8 to demand that the federal government reverse the drastic funding cuts to education implemented in last year's budget. The national day of action was called by the National Union of Students (NUS) and the National Tertiary Education and Industry Union (NTEU).
National media coverage of the actions, speeches on the day and the media conferences held jointly by the NTEU and NUS before May 8 emphasised the impact of the budget cuts and the need for them to be reversed.
Prior to the mobilisations, some activists had argued against targeting the federal government and against the demand of "Reverse the funding cuts" put forward by members of Resistance and others.
The very spirited and angry mood of the demonstrations showed that — contrary to the commentaries in the mainstream media that funding cuts and undergraduate fees are "inevitable" — students and staff are far from willing to lie down on the issue. The clearest examples of the militant mood were the occupations of the administration offices of Melbourne and Sydney universities and of the Mitchell building at Adelaide University.
The campaign this year, while not as large as in 1996, has succeeded in putting pressure on the government and university administrations. The federal government's stated (although still to be seen) commitment to "quarantine" higher education from cuts in this year's budget is one indicator of this.
Responding to the national day of action, minister for education Amanda Vanstone argued that students and staff were "protesting against the opportunities for more kids, who would otherwise not have got in, to get into university".
Vanstone's argument is a fantasy. Rather than increasing access, fees will restrict it for students from less wealthy backgrounds by either forcing universities to cut back on publicly funded places (as Monash University has already decided to do), or lead to even more overcrowded university facilities.
Another indicator of the impact of the student-staff campaign came when the vice-chancellor of the Australian National University said on May 7 that up-front fees for undergraduates would not be implemented at ANU in 1998. He joins the vice-chancellors of Griffith, Newcastle, Latrobe and some other small and regional universities who have promised the same.
These concessions also result from the weaker market position of the smaller, regional and less "prestigious" universities. The demand for places at these universities is far less than in the elite "sandstone" universities. Sydney and Melbourne universities have both decided to implement up-front fees for a proportion of undergraduates from 1998, and the administrations at the universities of NSW and Queensland are likely to follow shortly.
Vice-chancellors of the smaller and regional universities have generally avoided declaring opposition to the deregulation of fees and cuts in public funding. Instead, they have implemented cuts on their campuses to compensate for the loss of fee revenue.
The willingness of vice-chancellors to implement government policy, something Canberra is happy to encourage, means that the focus of the campaign will shift after the federal budget onto individual campuses and against individual administrations.
The national day of action was a big success, both in pushing forward the debate on higher education policy and in attracting new activists to the campaign. [Sean Healy is the national coordinator of the socialist youth organisation Resistance.]