By Marina Cameron
The Liberal federal government has launched a vicious attack on public education, building on the groundwork laid by previous state and federal Labor governments.
The government plans to accelerate the privatisation of higher education. The recently appointed West review has been given unrestricted scope to draw up a blueprint for future education policy. Government and big business are pushing for more student charges, and the Business Council of Australia has stated that it will ignore the review if it does not recommend suiting education more to the needs of business (in terms of graduates and research).
This drive is also being extended to secondary education. School closures, increasing class sizes and less teachers will be compounded by new federal legislation and funding cuts that accelerate the shift in funding directly from public to private schools. Studies show growing gaps in exam results, and the percentage even finishing Year 12, between public and private schools, and those from higher and lower socioeconomic backgrounds.
Cutting public secondary education will only worsen inequality. However, governments seem more concerned with channelling the money into the private sector.
Most people have come to expect a decent schooling. Tertiary education is more seen as a privilege. But the massive assault on all public education illustrates the need to demand the right to a quality education, from beginning to end.
Funding
Even before the latest round of cuts, public education funding in Australia trailed the world average and contributed only 40% of university operating costs, compared with 90% in 1980. Since the HECS scheme was introduced in 1987, students have effectively paid for all the expansion of higher education.
Students arriving at university this year face even more of the funding burden. On top of higher HECS and a lower repayment threshold, 60,000 students will have their Austudy payments lowered or cancelled. New students under 25 years old (previously 22) will get less if their parents' income exceeds $22,600.
The government is proposing that from 1998 a Common Youth Allowance replace current Austudy, Abstudy and unemployment benefits for people under 21. This includes proposals to means-test all benefits; cut rent assistance to young unemployed; and reduce the amount that young people can earn while on the allowance (to as little as $60 per week). The CYA is justified as an attempt to "standardise" youth income support. However, benefits will be standardised at a lower level, and the CYA paves the way for later across-the-board cuts.
Universities are increasingly seen as "businesses", institutions to make a profit.They are being encouraged to compete on a domestic and international level, and to find alternatives to government funding — corporate sponsorship, industry funding for research, charging more students more fees. Courses are offered on the basis of what will attract research funding and fee-paying students, while humanities subjects without any direct corporate application are cut.
Guidelines released in December now allow universities to charge students for "extra" administrative services and course material, computer access and supplementary courses to fast-track their degree.
In addition to charging overseas students, each university can now charge fees for 25% of students on top of government/HECS-funded places. The University of Melbourne recently announced degree price tags of between $27,000 and $110,000.
Competition
In order to get ahead, some universities have already indicated that they will cop the government fine for enrolling under their required quota of government/HECS-funded students, allowing them to admit more full fee-paying students. Universities are being encouraged to over-enrol, stretching themselves to compete. From 1998 the government will make a bonus payment to universities for each HECS-only student above yearly target levels.
Monash University vice-chancellor, David Robinson, stated in the Australian on January 11 that he believed this was a deliberate plan to "destabilise" universities "to see which bits drop off". As competition takes hold, the calls will be for more deregulation, to "reform" the system to make it more "efficient".
This will result in a system increasingly tiered between bigger, more established, richer universities, and the rest — and a growth in private providers. There are two private universities already, Bond and Notre Dame, and others are considering contracting out teaching in areas like medical schools. Some companies are even opening up institutions.
The logical extension of privatisation is a system where the focus of government funding moves away from providing operating grants to universities, towards "supporting" students in purchasing vouchers which they spend at the university of their choice. This supposedly makes universities more "responsive" to the needs of the market. The record number of school-leavers this year who changed course preferences on their application forms is being held up by proponents of the voucher system as a wonderful example of how universities are being forced to clean up their act as they enter the "free market".
Extra money spent on advertising and promotion to attract students is little proof of improving education quality. In a poll published in the Australian on January 31, more than a third of academics strongly disagreed that the quality of final year students, teaching and research had improved over the last decade. Fifty five per cent stated that they would not recommend an academic career to anyone.
The West review is part of a bigger drive to push more of the funding burden of social services onto the "users", with little regard for access for students (except in their capacity as "consumers" and a source of funding), for university workers or for the social role of education.
User pays
The government's ideological drive towards user-pays hides the fact that students are paying for the development of an education system which gives more and more to those who have always benefited most, big business.
User-pays is fundamentally inequitable; some can afford to pay more for better service than others. Governments in Australia have been unable to implement up front undergraduate fees so far. The deferred HECS payment was presented as a compromise by Labor in the 1980s. HECS increases, lower repayment thresholds and increased other fees followed. But most important was winning the idea that students should contribute to education costs because they benefit individually.
HECS still hits women, migrants, Aboriginal and poor people harder because of their lower earning capacity. Dramatic drops in applications from school-leavers forced the government to admit, on February 5, that HECS changes discouraged poorer students from applying to go to university or from enrolling in courses with higher HECS (such as science and engineering).
An equitable way of funding education would be to tax people on higher incomes through the federal tax system as they get jobs, and to tax business. Instead successive governments have cut top marginal income tax rates and corporate tax.
There are alternatives to the current re-structuring of education. Rejecting user-pays; massively expanding the tertiary sector; abolishing student fees; making student income support available to all; bolstering funding to secondary education; and tailoring education to social rather than business needs are in the interests of the majority of society. Students, university workers, women, migrants, Aboriginal and poor people, workers saddled with HECS debts (or watching their taxes go to military spending while education withers) should unite to demand these alternatives.
[A national day of action against education cuts is planned for March 26. Telephone the Resistance national office on (02)9690 1230, your local Resistance branch, or your university student council for more information.]