Amid ongoing large protests in support of democratic reforms, Chinese authorities warned of “chaos” on October 2 if protesters carried through their threat to storm Hong Kong government buildings if the region’s Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying did not resign, the Morning Star said that day.
Education
Aboriginal activist Kyol Blakeney has won the position of Student Representative Council (SRC) president at the University of Sydney.
The ticket that supported him, “Grassroots”, was backed by progressive Greens, independents and socialists. It beat the Labor ticket by a significant margin. University newspaper Honi Soit reported on September 25 that Blakeney had won every voting booth, with 61% of the vote.
Laila Harre, the leader of the newly formed Internet Party, told a September 16 stop-work meeting in west Auckland organised by the FIRST and Unite unions, that state spying was not due to concerns about terrorism, but to target people who “organise for change”.
John Minto is a veteran New Zealand activist who became known as a leader of a powerful anti-apartheid campaign in the 1970s. More recently, he was part of organising some of the largest pro-Palestine demonstrations ever in New Zealand.
The University of New South Wales acting vice chancellor Iain Martin cancelled a Town Hall meeting on September 3, organised to brief staff on the University’s response to proposed fee deregulation.
UNSW students had planned to protest their exclusion from the meeting.
In cancelling the meeting, Martin told staff: “We have been advised this morning by police and security that the meeting was being targeted by protest groups, which we understand were predominately external to UNSW. Our advice is that the intention was to disrupt the Town Hall.”
Ecuador turns military buildings into hospitals, parks
Ecuador will cut its military by 51% over the next 10 years, teleSUR English said on August 28. Ecuadorian defence minister Maria Fernanda Espinosa announced the army´s 516 units would be cut to 252.
The measure aims to optimise Ecuador's military presence nationally. “We know now what we have, how to maintain it, and what we need,” she told the press.
University of Sydney staff, student groups and alumni voiced their opposition to the government’s proposed education reforms at a Sydney Town Hall meeting on August 25.
Twenty-six speakers addressed the proposed fee deregulation. University of Sydney Union board director Edward McMahon put forward an informal motion calling on all university bodies to campaign against deregulation.
“These cuts and reforms are being inflicted, ironically, upon my generation by the people who benefited from the more enlightened education policies of yesteryear,” McMahon said.
Nick Riemer, senior lecturer at the University of Sydney, addressed a Town Hall meeting on August 25 on the proposed deregulation of fees at Australian universities. Riemer is a member of the NTEU Sydney University branch committee.
***
Fee deregulation means the entrenchment of educational disadvantage and the enclosure of knowledge in our society.
That’s not irresponsible exaggeration: it’s an accurate characterisation that follows from the careful modelling done by a number of authorities.
The National Tertiary Education Union released the statement below today.
***
The Minister for Education, Christopher Pyne, has today introduced legislation that if passed would see the most radical changes to the way Australian higher education is regulated and funded in over a generation.
Mr Pyne claims that his Bill will give Australian universities the chance to be the best in the world. However his so called reforms are all about cutting government’s funding commitment to public universities and subsidizing private providers and leaving students with massive debts.
The National Union of Students (NUS) organised a national day of action on August 20 against the federal government's changes to tertiary education.
Students were protesting against the proposals in the federal budget that would lift the cap on fees, increase interest on HECS loans, and make changes to Newstart and Youth Alowance.
Up to 700 people joined the protest in Sydney. Students marched from the University of Technology, Sydney to Town Hall.
Students stopped the march on George St and burned a cardboard effigy of Pyne.
More than 200 staff and students rallied outside Fisher Library at Sydney University on August 13 to protest proposed cuts to the university's library system. The cuts will involve closures and staff redundancies.
"If the university gets its way all four libraries will lose their staff and collections. Two will become little more than post-grad only PC labs," the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) said.
A few months ago, the Daily Telegraph ran a headline, “The Ferals are Revolting”.
That headline is very revealing, not just about the nature of the media, but also about how young people and students are seen in society in general. We are seen these things that are just supposed to work terrible jobs for terrible pay, and whatever our opinions are, they don’t really mean anything and we are just supposed to put up with it.
- Previous page
- Page 36
- Next page