BY GRANT COLEMAN
At the national conference of the National Union of Students (NUS) in December, the socialist youth organisation Resistance walked out of the left-wing faction called the National Broad Left (NBL). Instead of participating in this faction, Resistance formed its own caucus within the NUS conference.
At the NUS conference, more than 90% of the delegates are organised into factions. All decisions, from the policy of the union to who will be its incoming office bearers, are decided by deals between different factions.
Resistance was one of the main forces behind the formation of the NBL in 1999. We argued for the formation of a united left faction in order to seriously challenge the ALP's domination of NUS.
At the moment, Labor students dominate the union's office bearers and committees, giving them control over the organisation's $4 million annual budget. Instead of using this to campaign for student rights, ALP students use NUS as a lobbying body which can further their own careers.
Without a clear activist perspective, NUS has been mostly ineffective in fighting off Liberal attacks on students. The close links between the NUS elected officials and the ALP has also hampered the union's ability to run campaigns that are contrary to ALP policy.
The formation of the NBL, as a faction uniting left-of-Labor students, was a significant victory. Resistance members saw it as a way of challenging the ALP's bureaucratic stranglehold on the union, and winning it to a left-wing, activist-based perspective.
The NBL's rejection of this perspective, and its refusal to challenge the ALP, led to Resistance leaving the NBL.
Who controls the office bearers?
This problem was highlighted by the differences within the NBL over its attitude towards the incoming office bearers of NUS. There are six national officials — president, general secretary, education officer, women's officer, welfare officer and environment officer. These are all elected from the national conference.
Because the annual national conference of NUS has very limited discussions, most of the decisions of the union, including the budget, are decided by the officials or the national executive.
The ALP participates in NUS through two main factions, the National Organisation of Labor Students (NOLS) which represent the "left" of the ALP, and Unity, which represents the ALP's dominant right-wing faction. At most NUS conferences, these two factions will combine the votes of their members in a "deal" that allocates the office bearer positions between their members, and members of any other factions which participate in the "deal".
However, at last year's conference, all the left factions plus NOLS accounted for a majority of conference votes. Thus Resistance argued that through these factions voting together, the Labor right could be ousted from control of NUS in 2001. Resistance delegates therefore argued that the NBL should only participate in, or support indirectly, a "deal" that excluded the ALP right from any of the office bearer positions.
Such a move would be unprecedented in NUS's history. The ALP left has always insisted that at least one ALP right-wing faction member be elected as an NUS official, even when it was possible to deny them this "trophy".
A risk involved in the perspective put by Resistance was that both ALP factions would vote together to exclude the NBL from an office bearer position, as they did in 1999. But Resistance argued that this was a small price to pay for positioning the NBL as a serious faction fighting for a left-led union. It would signal to new activists that the NBL was not just another faction aimed at getting its members cushy jobs in the NUS officialdom.
The majority of the NBL voted against Resistance's perspective, arguing that giving the right some control over NUS was a necessary compromise in order to ensure that the NBL secured at least one national official. Some activists argued that Resistance's approach was "sectarian", because it would be detrimental to "left unity", i.e., it would have posed a political challenge to NOLS to align itself with the left against the Labor right, something the NOLS factional leaders would be very reluctant to do.
Far from being sectarian, posing this challenge to NOLS would have provided the only principled basis for a relationship between student activists and the ALP "left" — one based on strengthening the left's influence within NUS.
The conservative influence that the ALP exerts over NUS has allowed Howard's agenda for higher education to go largely unchallenged. The most effective way of fighting the Liberals is to ensure a campaigning-oriented NUS, not complete capitulation to the ALP's control over NUS in the name of "left unity".
ALP's strategy of divide and rule
Labor students have traditionally used their division into left and right factions to convince the student left to support NOLS unconditionally. The ALP left constantly ask the non-Labor left to make compromises in order to "limit" the power of the ALP right.
By giving hand outs of token office bearer positions to left-wing factions, the Laborite students have kept control over the union's key decision-making bodies for themselves. At times when the left has been strongest, the ALP has managed to divide the left through fostering petty factional battles among left students for one office bearer position instead of challenging the ALP for the leadership of NUS.
The decision by the NBL to reject Resistance's perspective indicated that it had fallen into the trap of sacrificing a struggle to advance the overall interests of the student left for the certainty of an ALP hand out.
Decision to leave
When it became clear that the majority of those involved in the NBL were not willing to place political pressure on NOLS to support the left office-bearer candidates over the right-wing of the ALP, Resistance left the NBL.
During the NUS conference, the NBL changed its original position and began arguing for NOLS to form a left bloc.
However, Resistance did not decide to leave the NBL based on one incident alone. For some time now, the NBL has been moving away from its original aim of challenging the ALP leadership of NUS. In July 2000 the NBL voted to remove the reference to challenging the ALP's conservative leadership of NUS from its declaration of aims.
Even more importantly however, most independent left activists have left the NBL and it is not attracting new student activists. Nor will it do so if it continues to capitulate to the ALP left, rather than challenge it.
The task for left activists in NUS is to work together to provide a political challenge to the ALP. With the recent events at S11 and with M1 ahead of us, the left should be able to inspire a new layer of students to struggle against the corporatisation of higher education. But we will not convince these students to take up the fight in student organisations if we simply play games with the Labor student bureaucracy.
Instead we should be drawing these people into a united left faction that seriously aims to win control of NUS away from the ALP and transform it into a left-wing led, democratic, accountable and activist-based national student union.
[Grant Coleman is the organiser of Resistance's Fremantle branch. Visit the Resistance web site at <http://www.resistance.org.au>.]