Hundreds of students at the Australian National University occupied the chancellery building for nine days last September in a battle to prevent the introduction of up-front fees for a postgraduate legal course. This struggle led to the holding of a National No Fees Activists Conference in Melbourne in December, which called for two national days of action in the first half of 1995. A following conference of the National Union of Students (NUS) endorsed the national days of action.
However, the role of NUS in the anti-fees campaign is a matter of some controversy, because NUS is dominated politically by the ALP — the party which, in federal government, is directing the cutbacks to education and attempts to introduce fees. To find out what is happening in the anti-fees campaign, Green Left Weekly interviewed Natasha Simons, the national coordinator of the socialist youth organisation Resistance, many of whose members are student activists at campuses around the country.
Can you tell us what has been happening since the activists conference in December?
At the NUS National Conference, a decision was made to endorse two national days of action (March 23 and May 3) proposed by the No Fees Activists Conference, and to set aside $40,000 of the NUS budget to spend on no fees campaigning. A decision was also made to produce a national education broadsheet for orientation weeks.
Spending of the $40,000 will be kept under the tight control of the NUS National Executive, whose authorisation is required to spend it. So this money has not been given to the broader campaign, which involves many organisations besides NUS, as some people have been claiming. Neither did NUS call the National Days of Action, as is also being claimed; it just endorsed them.
NUS would clearly like to bring successful initiatives like the activists conference under its control. Jamie Parker, the president of NUS (NSW branch) wrote in a letter printed in the December 9 edition of Socialist Worker that the National No Fees Activists Conference was a good experience that should happen every year, but from now on as an NUS conference.
It also appears the NUS conference made a decision to attend cross campus group meetings in each city, and try to turn them into NUS cross campus committees. I don't know whether that was a formal decision or not, but it's what has been happening since the NUS conference. It's obviously important for the ALP, through NUS, to gain some control over the anti-fees campaign.
Can you give some examples of what you mean?
At the first January meeting of the Student Unionism Network (SUN) in Melbourne, over 40 people attended, compared to an average of 10 in the lead-up to the No Fees Conference, which SUN was responsible for organising.
NUS put up a motion that SUN become an NUS cross campus committee. There was opposition to this motion from Resistance members, who argued that NUS is welcome to attend the SUN meetings, but SUN should remain an activist group that is independent from the NUS bureaucracy. The motion was deferred to a future meeting. NUS is funding the education broadsheet that SUN is producing for orientation weeks.
In Brisbane, where the new ALP left UQ Student Union is getting some publicity over lack of places at university, the ALP left within the ALP right-controlled NUS (Queensland branch) have been saying that if only UQ Union affiliated to NUS, the "left" would have the numbers to take control of the NUS state executive.
A Resistance member received a phone call from the newly elected national education officer of NUS, who basically wanted to find out about the Free Education Network (FEN) in Brisbane — how was it going, who went to the meetings, what were they planning etc. This NUS officer said that she had been phoning SRC reps all around the country. She said that NUS wanted to ask activists in cross campus committees to conduct research to bring to the Fee Review Committee, which came out of the ALP national conference last year and is run by Simon Crean's office. NUS already has a big bureaucratic apparatus, but it wants to divert activists from real campaigning.
On January 31, four members of the NUS state executive turned up to a meeting of the FEN, probably the first time this has happened in the history of the network. The first agenda item was reports from the National No Fees Activists Conference and the NUS National Conference. The NUS reps couldn't remember the dates of the national days of action their conference endorsed, and when Resistance members asked the NUS reps about the $40,000, the NUS state president replied that she didn't know anything about it because she'd been sick for most of the conference!
Resistance put forward a draft of a no fees leaflet that would be put out in FEN's name for orientation weeks and asked for the meeting to endorse it. Members of the ISO [International Socialist Organisation], which is very supportive of NUS, argued that we should change the part where the leaflet stated "The No Fees Activists Conference has called a National Day of Action on March 23" to "NUS has called ...".
What's happening about plans for the national days of action?
At Wollongong University on January 23, a student meeting was held to organise the national day of action on March 23. The meeting was heavily attended by NUS, and Student Union reps from many regional campuses were there, as well as people from the Cross Campus Education Network (CCEN) in Sydney.
The meeting decided, against some opposition, that the national day of action on March 23 for all of NSW should be held on Wollongong campus, and that buses should be arranged for students to attend from regional areas and Sydney campuses. This might make some sense if the up-front fee for the legal course at Wollongong campus were going ahead. But it's not, because the course outline was rejected by the university.
The proposal to have the action on Wollongong campus was spearheaded by NUS office bearers. The regional union reps had been lobbied by NUS well before the meeting.
The proposal is quite a clever one from the NUS point of view, because it means the demo will be smaller and remain on campus rather than on the streets, at the same time giving NUS some credibility for organising the action.
The Wollongong meeting also decided that the next meeting of Sydney CCEN should be held at the NUS state offices. This was a point of strong differences in CCEN last year, but with some of the CCEN activists away or not present at the meeting, the motion was passed.
What do you think NUS is trying to accomplish?
NUS is moving fast to take political direction away from independent student activists in the cross campus committees, and place the committees under NUS control. While their tactic for doing this differs in different cities, their national strategy is the same: to put a lid on actions against fees they fear will be outside their control.
There are rumours that NUS may be planning to move its national headquarters from Melbourne to Canberra. One of the key reasons the ANU campaign against fees got off the ground in the first place was because ANU is not affiliated to NUS.
The key point is that the decisions made by a cross campus activists group, or any no fees campaign, can't be held hostage to the pro-ALP agenda of NUS.
It's easy for NUS to go into these cross campus committees at the moment, because they are relatively weak in the absence of student struggles, and because universities haven't yet resumed. It's completely undemocratic to try stitch up the plans for the national days of action before most students are back on campus.
How does the pro-ALP agenda of NUS operate?
One way is in toning down the demands the campaign makes on the government. It's clear that the focus of the national days of action should be against fees and demanding increased funding for universities. After all, it's by reducing funding that the government forces university administrations to introduce fees.
But Resistance is the only left organisation which supports the push for increased funding. This was at the centre of a heated debate in the plenary session of the No Fees Conference, and our motion was lost.
NUS argued against it because they know that would directly hit against Labor's plans for user-pays higher education. The ISO argued against it because NUS would not accept it. Left Alliance argued against it on the basis that increased funding was an "unrealistic" demand.
There are hints of other ploys as well. At ANU, the ISO drew up a leaflet in the name of the Student Association and NUS that said the focus of the days of action was undergraduate fees. This is particularly strange at ANU, where the occupation was against postgraduate fees.
This perspective has not come up anywhere else and was strongly rejected by students attending the first ANU no fees meeting of the year. However, it might seem clever to NUS to run a campaign against undergraduate fees. Among all the options the Labor government is considering, undergraduate fees are right at the bottom of the list. So NUS runs the campaign, Labor comes out and says, "Okay, we won't introduce undergraduate fees", they win some of the student vote in the next elections, and NUS smells like roses.
What about the longer term outlook?
I'd say that these moves by NUS indicate that the federal government is definitely planning to introduce up-front fees. In part, it may do it in sneaky ways, by introducing fees with a new course, so that the people who get into the course will have already had to pay. It looks like they'll probably wait until NUS has more of a grip and then get the universities to introduce the fees. Activists need to be ready for a whole range of tricks, and to fight to keep the campaign independent of the ALP agenda.