Rachel Evans
On April 26-29, 40 university presidents and office bearers of the National Union of Students attended an NUS-organised "president's summit" in Canberra to discuss the restructuring of student organisations under the Howard government's anti-union "voluntary student unionism" (VSU) legislation.
Under the legislation, which will come into effect on July 1, it will be illegal for universities to levy students fees to support campus student unions and their activities.
The first two days of the conference allowed NUS officer-bearers to talk about the problems they are facing keeping student organisations afloat.
Karla Willis, president of James Cook University, Townsville, said that the JCU administration is saying it will have to charge the student association for providing space on university forms when the association joins new members. "Our administration said if we don't give them money for this service, the federal government will fine us up to $1 million. The NTEU [National Tertiary Education Union] said this is not stipulated in the VSU legislation."
Gerry Georgatos, Murdoch University president, said: "VSU should not deter us. We need a grassroots focus. We can't let the user-pays system crush us. While we lose money, this should not stop us. When we take away the financial focus then we will be less vulnerable. Student associations need a natural and social capital base which is non-financial.
"That's how students won in France. They worked with passion! That inspired others to fight.
"I think we will find it difficult to repeal VSU but we should explain they introduced it to censor us and take our free speech. We have a government that wants no dissent."
Unfortunately, only one hour of the conference was devoted to discussion of campaigning against VSU. No discussion was held about the April 12 national day of action around student poverty. The protest action on that day were considerably smaller than the anti-VSU mobilisations last year.
[Rachel Evans is the NUS national female queer officer.]
From Green Left Weekly, May 3, 2006.
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