By Justin Randell
PERTH — University of Western Australia students will vote in a referendum on April 14-16 to decide whether the Student Guild will stay affiliated to the National Union of Students.
The Liberals have inundated the campus with anti-affiliation material, including leaflets, broadsheets, "Just Say NO" T-shirts and large card posters in five colours, in an attempt to convince students the campus should disaffiliate.
The Liberals' tactics have not been limited to mounting an argument, however. Copies of the most recent issue of the guild's newspaper Pelican were saturated with water and destroyed when it contained an editorial calling on students to vote for continued affiliation. The Liberal club also tried to sabotage the NUS-sponsored March 26 national day of action against education cuts by cancelling the buses intended to transport students to the central rally.
The difficulties that pro-affiliation campaigners face are multiplied by the role the Labor Party-dominated NUS has played in student politics. Alison Fullam, Resistance activist on UWA, said "Resistance supports continued affiliation, but given NUS's record of bureaucracy and general irrelevance to students in the fight against user-pays education, it is not surprising that disaffiliation is on the agenda."
Resistance argues that NUS must be defended against the Liberals' attacks, but that the left also needs to fight to make NUS a democratic, campaigning student union. "If this were the nature of NUS now, any attack on it would be seen by students as an attack on their interests, and the campaign to defend NUS would be joined by the majority of students", Fullam said. As it is, the Liberals could win disaffiliation on the back of general student apathy about NUS.
It is becoming clearer that the only way to ensure the survival of NUS is to replace the ALP's domination and misleadership of it with student activists who are willing to campaign in defence of students' rights.