By Jorge Jorquera
We know from experience that it is possible to organise mass opposition to the attacks on education. When the ALP federal government began moving towards tertiary fees by introducing the Higher Education Administration Charge in August 1986, the student movement within a month organised the first mass demonstration.
By March 1987, tens of thousands of tertiary students had demonstrated against government policy. In Sydney some 20,000 students marched for free education, ending with a mass occupation of the Education Department building. Demonstrations in solidarity with the Sydney protest attracted tens of thousands nationwide.
At the end of May 1987, several hundred student activists came together at Queensland University to form the National Free Education Coalition. Further actions were planned, and student activists started to coordinate nationally and link up with other sectors hurting under Labor's austerity measures.
However, Labor students — some of them involved in developing peak union structures at the state level since the death of the Australian Union of Students — saw the opportunity to push the formation of a national/federal peak student union. By mid-'87 this process had already developed into an interim NUS executive committee.
At a July meeting of this executive, Labor students proposed that the student movement (through a national peak body) should seek to enter an "Education Accord" with the federal government. For the ALP, NUS was clearly a project for the cooption of the free education movement.
Unfortunately, a significant portion of the student left failed to recognise this. They argued that we should focus on building a national student union to increase our political strength.
This was counterposed to the development of a mass free education campaign. Concessions were made to the ALP students to facilitate the formation of a national student union. A decisive number of student activists became preoccupied with the NUS project, leaving to second priority the building of the free education campaign — which alone could have led to a genuinely mass-based and democratic NUS.
The main failure of this strategy was its lack of emphasis on developing mass campaigns involving the largest and broadest number of students in struggle. Instead what was consolidated was a bureaucratic union tied to the Labor government through its stress on lobbying. The consolidation of NUS coincided, not accidentally, with the decline of the free education campaign. A second round of attacks began with the introduction of the HECS in 1988. Since then NUS has proved, not a weapon for the defence of education and student interests, but a muffler on student protests and fight back. Much more protest against HECS could have developed had NUS not been able to sidetrack the early elements of a campaign into a pointless and expensive High Court challenge.
Today, business circles are pushing for the further privatisation and restriction of tertiary education. Enrolment places are being reduced drastically in relation to the increase in applicants. The government wants to further generalise the "user pays" system.
The challenge for the student left is to find the ways to draw together the broadest possible campaign of opposition to the renewed attacks on education.
The key to this will be putting forward the political demands that are most likely to bring the largest number of people into a campaign to defend and improve the education system.
The attacks affect a wide range of young people — both those in tertiary education and those unable to get a place. In this context the student left should be calling for "Education for All" and demanding:
- Save Austudy
- Increase education funds
- Increase tertiary places.
To focus more narrowly on a campaign around Austudy alone, as the right wing in NUS has suggested — at this stage, when the proposed loans scheme is still ambiguous — will only narrow the number of students brought into action. Without a mass student campaign, we are not only unlikely to be able to save Austudy, but even less likely to be in a position to reverse the rapid decline of the education system.
It is the task of the left to push for a campaign focussed on the sort of demands that will bring thousands of students into united opposition against the new attacks.
Late last year in Melbourne, some 5000 RMIT students marched against overcrowding; at the height of the free education campaign in 1987, RMIT could barely get 500 students onto the streets. Similarly, in Adelaide last year thousands protested against cuts to student transport. Students are increasingly angry at under-funding, over-crowding and cuts to post-secondary education places. The time is ripe for demanding "Education for All".
It is particularly important that the left inside NUS fight to win political leadership and use the vast resources of NUS to organise this much-needed student campaign. If NUS is not to the growing impetus for an education campaign must be built on, and the left must challenge the right wing's hegemony — this time without political compromise.
If NUS won't run a campaign of "Education for All", then the left should be willing and confident enough to go outside NUS, build activist coalitions, build a mass campaign on the basis of the existing student anger and expose NUS in the process — laying the groundwork for rebuilding the student movement and a fighting and democratic national student union.