Students fight up-front fees
By Sarah Stephen
CANBERRA — A recommendation calling for the introduction of fees of up to $12,000 for the professional component of the Australian National University's law degree is being reconsidered after a large and angry response from students in the law faculty.
However the protests haven't been isolated to the law faculty as many students recognise that such a move threatens everyone's access to higher education. As soon as the proposal became known on August 5, a 400-strong student demonstration, outside the university's chancellery building, voted to go on strike on August 10.
Law faculty members supported the students' protest by refusing to cross student picket lines outside entrances to law lectures across the campus. Most law lectures were cancelled and more than 200 students maintained the pickets throughout the day. A demonstration the same afternoon drew a crowd of 300.
An editorial in the August 11 Canberra Times, called on students to be "realistic". It claimed that although free education may have been viable when it was introduced by the Whitlam government in the 1970s, "the Australia of the mid-1990s is a very different place ... while the values of equity and fairness ... should remain paramount, the means of achieving an equitable education system and a fairer society are not the same as they were 20 years ago". Currently, a mere 3.7% of the budget is spent on higher education.
A recently released report, Resource Allocation in Higher Education, written by the Department of Employment, Education and Training and the government's advisory body, the Higher Education Council, has raised as an option the introduction of fees for under-graduate degrees. The protests will be stepped up at ANU in the lead up to August 19 when Council will make a decision on the up-front fee.