Comment by Nick Fredman
In the recent federal budget an Austudy loan scheme was introduced. Austudy was wiped out altogether for 38,000 students. The HECS tertiary tax was increased 3.6% (twice the level of inflation) and made even more inequitable by giving those rich enough to pay up front a 25% instead of a 15% discount.
The conditions surely exist for a mass fight back by students, yet the education campaign this year has been relatively small. The fundamental reason is the domination of the student movement by the National Union of Students, an organisation locked into a pro-ALP framework that prevents consistent defence of students' interests.
The latest NUS-called National Day of Action was just before a budget that was certain to put the boot further into education, yet it mustered barely 1000 students nationally. A proposal for an August 13 National Day of Action and a week of action following it was presented to the NUS National Executive but never adopted, and NUS did very little work in coordinating or building those actions which did occur, with the exception of Victoria. Even there, the action was smaller than previous ones.
The loans scheme was wholeheartedly opposed earlier in the year, when the government could easily distance itself from it. Now NUS is pulling back. Rather than mount even a belated campaign of protests against Labor's latest attack on free education, the National Executive has decided instead to call for an October National Day of Action against the Liberals' education policies.
When a $250 Higher Education Administration Charge was announced in 1986, there was an immediate fight back. When HECS was introduced in 1989, the campaign was already in decline, and this year opposition to the loans scheme, funding cuts and fees has been limited.
The history of NUS explains why. It was set up in 1987 by ALP students in order to demobilise the student movement. It was a shaky, illegitimate structure until enough of the student left was coopted into thinking they could best campaign for free education by building NUS. They were wrong. In 1988 NUS called off a boycott campaign against the administration charge, and in 1989 it diverted the campaign against HECS into a pointless High Court legal challenge.
Last year a "national campaign" for more Austudy consisted of glossy posters that exhorted students to "write, phone or fax" an MP.
With the student movement demobilised, recently the ALP leaders of NUS have allowed the left caucus, Left Alliance, a little more room to campaign, to let some steam off student anger. Left laimed that this represents a "move to the left" by NUS. That's another illusion, as anyone familiar with NUS's record should realise by now.
Frustration with a blocked movement has led to a search for short cuts to building a mass campaign. One is the view that we should struggle to "change NUS from within". After five years of this approach, particularly by Left Alliance, NUS executives are controlled by the ALP nationally and in all states except Victoria. NUS is thoroughly bureaucratic, and any "interventionism" involves secret factional deals and compromises.
NUS, despite its name, is not a union at all, but a peak council of student unions, just as the ACTU is a peak council of trade unions, and hence many times removed from accountability. This was reinforced by constitutional changes last year, which made explicit that NUS represents student organisations, not students, reduced the number of delegates and made possible campus affiliation through student council vote rather than referendum. Blatant bullying and fraud are also common at NUS conferences.
Another illusion is that students do not need a mass campaign at all, because "militant action" of the already radicalised will do the trick. Espoused mainly by the International Socialist Organisation, the idea is that cops have to be charged and buildings, intersections or anything else handy have to be seized regardless of the size or the context of an action. This "militant" posturing has further narrowed the campaign and thus played into the hands of NUS and the ALP government.
There are no instant formulas for reviving the campaign, but there has to be a decisive break with Labor and a linking with all sectors under attack. For one thing, the Carmichael Report and Labor's youth wages plan should be denounced by the student movement. In recent student actions organised by Left Alliance, only the Liberals' very similar youth wage scheme has been denounced.
An effective mass student campaign will require student activists to go outside the framework of the NUS bureaucracy. Independent forms of organising, such as broad, open activist conferences that can set up campaigning coalitions (such as the 1987 conference that organised the National Free Education Coalition) will have to be developed. Only a mass-based and militant student movement, linked to other progressive movements, can win gains and indeed be the basis for real national student organisation.
Instead of supporting NUS, the student left needs to expose its workings and collaboration with the ALP. To oppose the further consolidation of NUS is the best way to defend student unionism and ensure a chance of relaunching a student fight back.