Zoe Kenny
On March 16, federal education minister Brendan Nelson introduced his anti-student union legislation, euphemistically referred to as "voluntary student unionism" (VSU), into federal parliament. VSU is a strategic part of Nelson's higher education "reforms", which started to come into effect last year when HECS fees were increased and up-front-fee-paying places were introduced for undergraduate courses.
The "reforms" are ultimately aimed at creating a fully privatised user-pays system, meaning that quality, well-resourced education — which should be a fundamental right for all people — will become an exclusive privilege, only accessible to the wealthy.
The government claims that its cut-backs to education are necessary because of a lack of available funds, but this is a blatant lie. The real problem lies with the government's priorities. At the same time that higher education, health and welfare are under attack, the government has managed to find hundreds of millions of dollars to help occupy Iraq. It is getting deeper into this war and has just deployed an extra 450 troops there, diverting even more money into the military. "Money for education not war" needs to be a central demand of the campaign against VSU.
This discriminatory privatisation plan sparked a number of student protests last year. It is the desire of Nelson and the Coalition to quieten further dissent and prevent these protests from developing into a wider campaign against the government's "reforms" that has motivated the push to introduce VSU. VSU will make it easier for the Howard government to implement further attacks on higher education by destroying the organisations that students can use to resist these attacks.
However, VSU is not only about destroying the ability of student unions to resist the attacks on higher education. The aim of VSU is to eliminate the ability of student unions to campaign politically at all. Student unions have often campaigned on a broad range of issues — against the occupation of Iraq, against racism in the form of mandatory detention of refugees and the dispossession of Indigenous people — and these campaigns have been a source of irritation for the government. VSU is designed to put a lid on these campaigns.
It is critical for students to defend the right to campaign politically for our own interests and indeed for the interests of all people. This campaign has already begun, but there are some people involved in the student campaign against VSU who believe that in order to win, we need to stay away from politics. They argue that we can save our unions by building up an image of them as being apolitical service providers. Whilst services are important and should be defended, we need to strongly reject the argument that student unions cannot campaign around political issues.
Even Nelson himself has admitted that he may be willing to negotiate on the issue of student services, particularly because of the widespread condemnation of this aspect of VSU by many vice-chancellors and politicians (even members of the National Party are prepared to defend services). But on the issue of the right of student unions to campaign politically Nelson is adamantly opposed, claiming "No student should be forced to pay a fee that supports any kind of political organisation or quasi-social organisation".
VSU is really about destroying the political voice of students and knocking out another one of the government's opponents. VSU is an attack on democracy and we will not be silenced!
[Zoe Kenny is the national coordinator of the socialist youth organisation Resistance. Visit <http://www.resistance.org.au>.]
From Green Left Weekly, April 13, 2005.
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