By Sean Healy
With banners proclaiming their allegiance to "socialism, feminism, democracy and unionism", and newsletters declaring the need to "educate, agitate, organise", the National Organisation of Labor Students tried to make a big splash at university orientation weeks this month.
NOLS recognises (and hopes to cash in on) the considerable anger among students at the Coalition federal government. But they're also hoping that students will forget their anger against the previous Labor government.
An article in the o-week edition of NOLS' newsletter Labor Students titled "Liberal Higher Education Horizons" criticises the government's commitment to user-pays principles while ignoring the previous Labor government's promotion of it.
Another article, titled "Maintain Your Wage", condemns the new Workplace Relations Act, particularly the impact of individual contracts on weaker sections of the work force, whilst ignoring Labor's record of doing likewise.
It even criticises, without a hint of irony, a Business Council of Australia document that asserts "a dynamic and competitive business sector drives wealth and job creation", whilst scores of examples of Paul Keating arguing exactly the same thing are ignored.
The contradiction for NOLS is most sharply revealed in the last article's assertion that "the Labor Party is a democratic, socialist party" while the first article begrudgingly recognises the "all-pervasive economic rationalist regime" of the Hawke and Keating years. Neither explains how an ostensibly "socialist" party came to implement economic rationalist policies for 13 years.
Titled "Fight the Liberal Cuts", the newsletter proposes no strategy for doing so, other than asserting that "Labor is the only alternative".
The performance of the federal Labor opposition and the generally conservative role of Labor students during the education campaign last year doesn't bode well for a genuine commitment to mobilising and organising students to fight back. Their propaganda is simply an attempt to pass themselves off as "left" and "socialist".
In the end, NOLS' strategy for "fighting" the Liberals is simply to hope and campaign for Labor's re-election at the next federal poll. This is far from a genuinely "socialist" strategy.