Nick Fredman
The first parliamentary sitting with a Coalition-controlled Senate ended on August 19 with PM John Howard's government failing to achieve one of its key immediate objectives — the early adoption of its so-called voluntary student unionism (VSU) legislation.
Education minister Brendan Nelson was reportedly locked in meetings with Liberal and National Party MPs opposed to the legislation every day of the August 9-19 sitting, but evidently failed to come up with a compromise good enough for the dissenters.
With the barest Senate majority of one, the Howard government reportedly now finds its VSU legislation, which would ban universities from collecting fees on behalf of student organisations on pain of huge fines, is opposed by six Coalition MPs, including at least three senators. Best known and most vocal is Queensland National Party Senator Barnaby Joyce, but the band of Senate rebels also includes NSW National Fiona Nash and even a Liberal — Western Australia's Alan Eggleston.
It's likely that the government wants an early resolution of the VSU issue in order to unite its forces for the bigger battle with the trade unions over industrial relations "reform". However, the brutal nature of the government's attack on student organisations has created contradictions within the Coalition between those moved by an ideological zeal to smash student organisations and those who worry that it will cause a big funding cut to regional universities.
With their party down to 2% voter support across Australia in recent opinion polls, a number of National Party MPs are clearly worried about a voter backlash in regional university towns located in electorates currently held by the Nationals if VSU legislation leads to significant losses in student services and university jobs.
The main factor pushing the dissenters to public opposition has been the campaign against VSU. In the biggest student mobilisations since the Howard government's savage funding cuts to higher education in 1996, 13,000 anti-VSU protesters marched on April 28 and 10,000 marched on August 10.
A broad range of academic, sporting and cultural figures have attacked the government's VSU plans, which have been left with few obvious supporters beyond those sad little groups of Young Liberals that sometimes gather to heckle student rallies.
More broadly, the dissenters among the Coalition MPs must also be feeling the public pressure from being part of a government that is determined to use its control of the Senate to push through a range of measures clearly against the interests of, and rejected by, the majority of voters.
Recent opinion polls have shown that 70% of voters oppose the government's plan to fully privatise Telstra and, following mass union rallies, 60% oppose the government's IR "reforms".
The VSU debate within the Coalition has coincided with Joyce showing some concerns about the planned IR legislation and Liberal MP Alby Schultz opposing the full sale of Telstra.
The dissenters' opposition is very partial — not breaking with the government's neoliberal "free market" agenda, but seeking some cushioning of its impact for their constituencies. They want a slush fund to soften the Telstra privatisation and slightly less harsh IR changes.
In the case of VSU, they want some compensation, in the form of increased government grants to universities or a university-controlled student services fee, to save some of the services and jobs lost as collateral damage as the student organisations are destroyed.
Such conservative "support" for the campaign against VSU has meant that the democratic right of students to control the administration of their own services fees and use them for whatever purposes, political or otherwise, their elected representatives deem necessary, tends to get lost in the public debate.
Some of the more conservative student organisations and anti-VSU campaigners seem to have already conceded this right.
Unfortunately, the announcement by the ALP on August 8 that it was dropping its outright opposition to the legislation and proposing an amendment along the lines of the dissenting Nationals' proposals, and explicitly including university control of a services fee, could led some sections of the anti-VSU campaign to adopt the same stance.
Public mobilisation of opposition to the government's plans and solidarity between the different sectors facing its attacks are the best ways to stop the Coalition's agenda — just as the Fraser Coalition government was prevented from implementing many of its attacks on workers and students, even while it had a Senate majority.
Higher education unions have taken public positions against VSU, educated their memberships about it and supported student days of protest action, but much more could be done to mobilise union members (beyond those working in student organisations!) for such actions.
Generally, student organisations and higher education unions see clearly enough the links between the various attacks on higher education and the Howard government's whole neoliberal agenda. This is particularly so since the VSU push has coincided with the government starting to use its highly restrictive Higher Education Workplace Relations Requirements (HEWRRs) to slash and burn staff entitlements, working conditions and union rights from university enterprise agreements. Silencing student opposition goes with privatising education, goes with smashing the unions.
However, such understanding needs to translate into more united action if the government is to be stopped. For its part, the main higher education union, the National Tertiary Education Union, organised a national day of action against the HEWRRS on June 1 that took up (at the last minute) VSU, but has since seemed mainly focussed on fighting the implementation of the HEWRRS campus by campus.
The NTEU should take advantage of the government's current difficulties and falling popularity. Together with the National Union of Students, the NTEU should call for a national staff and student strike against the HEWRRS and VSU before the end of the academic year.
[Nick Fredman is an NTEU national councillor who works for a student organisation.]
From Green Left Weekly, August 24, 2005.
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