By John Hutnyk
SYDNEY — In various community media, activists have written recently about the planned three-university "advanced technology park" (ATP) targeted for Redfern. The communities involved called, among other things, for a five-year moratorium on the development at a December public meeting.
The planners have so far refused to hear our concerns, although there may be cause to anticipate some success in the campaign. In December Premier John Fahey wrote to the vice-chancellors to tell them that he had been "persuaded by legal advice that the Government should not take a direct involvement, through shareholding or Board membership, in the development and operation of the ATP".
Fahey and other nervous Liberals perhaps fear another Eastern Creek fiasco, as Fahey wanted to avoid anything which might "expose the Government to commercial liabilities beyond those which it was prepared to accept".
The vice-chancellors wrote back to express their disappointment at Fahey's pullout. They were also anxious to have the grant of the Eveleigh rail yards land confirmed.
Fahey was unable to confirm the grant because the Regional Environment Plan was still considering submissions against the development from the Students Representative Council of Sydney University.
The "secret research city", as the National Union of Students called it in a February press release, was stumbling through the bureaucracies, and yet the Senate of Sydney University and the Council at the UTS saw fit to ram through the decision to formally constitute the ATP company (ATP Ltd) — despite ongoing student and community protest.
All this happens against a backdrop of institutional privatisation which changes the character of the university — a transformation which links the research efforts of the tertiary sector solely to the profit-driven motives of industry. The market is the mechanism of control that will govern the ATP and the fate of the three universities.
In their education campaigns, students have often used the slogan knowledge equals power, and knowledge cannot be separated from power in the new corporate universities.
Administrators who were once academics and, perhaps less recently, students and/or people, have become adept at the management of policy and bureaucracy. Motions of intent are
passed before public forums in palatable form for approval "in principle" or "for nothing", and with a covering veneer of accountability.
Sometimes policy decisions are shuffled through committee structures with little notice, while concerned groups or persons are on holiday or otherwise silenced. In 1990, LaTrobe University in Victoria passed a decision to sell four hectares of prime campus land to the mining multinational CRA through four committees in five days while students and academics were on mid-semester break.
In the case of the ATP, despite student and community representations, in the space of a few days the project coordinator and the combined vice-chancellors pushed their policy through.
At the Sydney University Senate meeting, Chancellor Leonie Kramer refused to consider a motion from student members of the Senate to include ethical guidelines for companies intending to pursue research within the park. Vice-Chancellor Don McNicol conceded that sometimes the university would have to put up with community concern about its activities. The deputy vice-chancellor for research, Professor Thom, claimed community feeling had been adequately canvassed. (It hadn't.)
However, other members of the Senate noted that they had not seen any social impact study nor reports on the detail of the community consultations. SRC president Anna Davis argued that Senate could not decide on such an issue without listening to community groups and the concerns of students.
In a submission to the regional environment planning process, community groups and students had outlined their concerns. These included traffic; loss of potential housing (the Eveleigh site had already been assigned for public housing); negative impact upon cultural communities; the influx of white-collar professionals pushing rental prices up; the kind of research to be pursued; the lack of ethical, environmental and social guidelines; ownership of students' intellectual property; a feasibility study which indicated that the project was not financially viable; public resources of the university being opened to private industry control; multinational companies being the sole beneficiaries of the development.
The response of the administration is to single out sections of the student movement for separate "consultations" at which the merits of the development are promoted. Instead of placing the concerns that have been raised before the decision makers (when confronted by Left Alliance activists at a recent "meet-the-people" day, local member Peter Baldwin admitted he was not fully aware of the issues — despite portfolio responsibility for an education initiative in his own electorate!), the administration goes into media management mode. Promotional material and invited speakers
from the USA are fed to the establishment media, and the virtues of high technology are paraded all round.
Action is needed. There are many angles from which we can tackle this venture — there is an urgent need for us to do more research in order to expose the organisers' plans to open up the publicly funded university to the research interests of companies like CSR, Hawker de Havilland and IBM (possible ATP tenants named by organisers). Public meetings to distribute information and develop alternatives for the land are needed (a meeting of students at UTS is planned for April 7), as are discussion groups at all community levels to plan for an Eveleigh that is fit to live in — not a Jetson family space-cadet bunker.