Nelson review attacks students, staff

BY
GRANT COLEMAN

On March 18 the federal cabinet approved education minister Brendan
Nelson's proposed “reforms” to Australia's higher education system. According
to the March 25 Sydney Morning Herald, implementation of the “Nelson
review” will result in further cuts to government funding of universities.

Throughout the review process, conducted over the last 12 months, universities,
students and staff have called for an immediate injection of $1 billion
into the higher education system followed by future funding to be fixed
at 2% of the gross domestic product.

Nelson's package proposes to gradually inject $1.5 billion, with the
bulk of the funds not available until after 2007. Furthermore, the funding
will be conditional upon “industrial reform, partial fee deregulation and
the opening up of the system to the private sector”, according to the March
25 SMH report.

Despite dressing up the package with so-called sweeteners for rural
and Indigenous students, the basic proposals demonstrate the real agenda
of the Howard government — a further push toward a privatised, user-pays
system of higher education.

Contained in the package is a proposal to implement partial deregulation
of student fees for some courses. This will allow universities to decide
how much they charge with the likely effect being massive increases in
fees across the entire sector.

Currently, students pay a set amount determined by the course they are
studying, not by what university they attend.

Another proposal in the Nelson review is to charge market interest rates
on the fees above that covered by the Higher Education Contributions Scheme
(HECS). So, if course fees increase by $15,000-$30,000, students would
be asked to pay exorbitant interest rates on the $15,000 not covered by
HECS.

National Union of Students president Daniel Kyriacou responded to this
proposal saying it “will lead to massive fee increases. The suggested introduction
of market interest rates to cover these increases will sentence students
to a lifetime of debt repayments.”

He also condemned plans contained in the package to penalise students
who take longer to finish a degree. Nelson has proposed that these students
have their funding withdrawn and be asked to pay full fees. This is to
be monitored by a big brother-like ID card system that will track students'
progress.

“This will affect mature-age students and students from average working
families who, due to financial pressures, are more likely to take longer
to finish their degrees”, said Kyriacou. “This system is designed to create
degree factories but not quality graduates.”

Another of Nelson's proposals is to double the number of places for
fee-paying Australian students. The likely result of this will be that
students who are able to pay will take the places of their better qualified
peers simply because they can afford to pay upfront. Currently, students
who pay full fees are admitted to university even if they fall below cut-off
scores used to assess non-full-fee paying students.

Staff will also come under attack in the May budget. An integral part
of the Nelson package is an attempt to weaken the bargaining power of the
National Tertiary Education Industry Union. One of the proposals is to
move staff from tenured positions to individual contracts. There are also
proposals to tie academic research funding to no-strike agreements.

Kyriacou labelled the Nelson package “the most regressive reforms our
universities have ever seen”. He stated that students would reject the
package “in its entirety”.

“Students are determined to push on in our campaign against these reforms.
We are planning mass demonstrations in the coming weeks”, Kyriacou said.

From Green Left Weekly, March 5, 2003.

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From GLW issue 528