Frederico Fuentes
With a Coalition majority in both houses of parliament from July 1 next year, federal education minister Brendan Nelson has signalled his intention to move forward with key elements of his higher education "reform" package previously held up by the non-government parties in the Senate, and vocally opposed by students, staff and university administrations.
First on Nelson's agenda is the introduction of his anti-student organisation legislation, euphemistically referred to as voluntary student unionism (VSU).
The impact such legislation will have is illustrated by the experience of Western Australia, where it was introduced by the previous Coalition state government in 1996. It spelt the almost complete elimination of the student guilds at both Murdoch and Edith Cowan universities.
Although cloaked in the rhetoric of freedom of choice and association, VSU has always been aimed at weakening the ability of students to resist government attacks not just on education but more broadly.
This was made clear by Nelson himself after a November 10 meeting with the Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee, where a number of VCs voiced their opposition to VSU on the grounds that it would leave university administrations to foot the bill for many of the services currently provided by student organisations.
According to the November 11 Australian Financial Review, Nelson responded by saying the government might be willing to compromise by allowing university administrations to impose on students a compulsory fee, as long as the money raised was not used for political campaigning. "No student should be forced to pay a fee that supports any kind of political organisation or quasi-social organisation", the AFR reported him as saying.
Nelson added: "What I am quite interested in doing is seeing that we, nonetheless, have some sort of fee which supports a defined and limited list of essential student services on campus."
Thus he confirmed what most students have known for a long time — VSU is not about "choice".
The idea that a Coalition government is concerned with "choice" is of course laughable. According to figures compiled by the federal education department, over the last 10 years university participation rates for disadvantaged groups have decreased, largely due to fees first introduced by Labor and then rapidly increased by the Howard government. This has left many of the most vulnerable in society without the "choice" of attending university, something which should be a fundamental right for all.
National Union of Students president Jodie Jansen pointed out in a November 19 media release: "Students were right to oppose the HECS increases. The Democrats Youth Poll found 71% of young people said the HECS increases will discourage them from going to university. The polls backs up the disturbing trend in university applications. University applications for next year (the first year after the HECS increases) fell by 8% in Western Australia, 4% in South Australia and Queensland and 3% in NSW."
Nelson has indicated he wants to take control of universities away from state governments and put them under federal control as part of his agenda to "deregulate", that is, privatise, higher education. He also plans to remove the $50,000 cap on loans to encourage more upfront fee places and move further towards a fully user-pays system.
The December 1 Australian's higher education supplement reported that VCs believe that without changes to current funding agreements they would be forced to seek a new round of HECS increases.
The Howard government has presided over a 26% decrease in real funding per publicly subsidised university student, while total HECS debt has reached $9.1 billion, surpassing total credit card debt by almost $2 billion. So it is unlikely to object to further fee increases.
Nelson knows that it will be easier to move forward with his plans if student opposition is hobbled by VSU legislation. That is also why it is crucial that students come out fighting early next year to oppose VSU.
We should not be afraid to say exactly what is at stake, or what needs to be done to fight Nelson's plans.
We need to reject the argument that our campaign should just focus on defending student organisations as important service providers. Those services are important and should be defend, but we must clearly reject any proposal that student organisations cannot campaign around political issues. This is the key issue at stake and Nelson, activists and most students know it.
During the last wave of anti-VSU protests in 1999, it was no surprise that that in the cities whre a political campaign was run the mobilisations of student opposition to VSU were much bigger than in the cities where the campaign limited its argument to just defending the services provided by student organisations.
Some Labor students have been arguing that the fight against VSU is already lost, and that instead of mobilisations against it, students should focus on how we can introduce "cost-cutting measures" or even turn NUS into a trust to hold the organisation's assets until a federal Labor government is elected!
It's true we have some way to go to build a powerful movement to stop Nelson's attacks. The protest rallies against the fee hikes were a good, if modest, start, but they showed we have to work hard to bring large numbers of students on to the streets.
We should not fall into the trap of thinking that students are apathetic or want apolitical service providers. At the University of Western Australia, a student general meeting in late October overwhelmingly voted down a motion moved by Liberal students that would have forbidden the Student Guild from campaigning on political issues.
That is why, in this debate about how the student left should respond to Nelson, Resistance agrees with the key point that Rebecca Barrigos and Vashti Kenway made in a recent statement written on behalf of the Socialist Alternative group: "We need a big, visible broad campaign — one that can break through into all elements of campus life. We need demonstrations, public meetings, campus actions, state actions and national actions. We need to show the Liberals that there is a groundswell of opposition to their attempts to decimate student unionism."
In fighting VSU, we need to bring together all those who oppose VSU. This can best be done by explaining that VSU will make it easier for the Howard government to implement further attacks on equal access to higher education by destroying the organisation that students can use to resist these attacks.
We also need to work closely with the trade unions on campus. Nelson has declared war on them by attempting to bring in individual contracts, and banning strike action that "damages innocent third parties" such as students. University staff's right to organise is also under threat and the National Tertiary Education Union has indicated it will put up a fight.
Fundamentally though, we need to go back to basics. We need to start once again talking to students and convincing them — at stall, in a classroom, in the lecture theatres — that this is a fight worth fighting and that we all need to be involved. We need to build the pool of left activists on campus to reach out to bigger numbers of students.
Occupations, pickets and stunt actions will be important but will not mean much if the anti-VSU campaign is not based on mass meetings where students can decide the direction of the campaign and if we cannot mobilise our numbers on the streets to show other students, the broader community and the government that we will not go away.
[Frederico Fuentes is a member of the national council of the Resistance socialist youth organisation and a Student Guild councillor at the University of Western Australia.]
From Green Left Weekly, December 8, 2004.
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