Liberal students flout affirmative action laws
Since the 1970s, when women's rights areas began to be funded by student unions throughout Australia, progressive students have been obliged to spend more time in defence of the right of women's areas to exist than in campaigns around specific feminist demands. Right-wing students, and their mentors in the Liberal and National parties, the National Civic Council and the right-wing of the ALP, have been hell bent for over 20 years on abolishing women's rooms, committees, collectives and campaigns.
Each new wave of right-wing student politicians takes up the battle against women's rights with new fervour, whipping themselves into a frenzy of outrage about the use of "ordinary" students' money to fund "loony fringe activities" like childcare, security, sexual harassment and women's studies campaigns. Only the dogged efforts of campus feminists has kept the areas running, although their scale on most campuses has been reduced, and on others the right have succeeded in closing them down altogether.
Today student unions have become very large concerns, many with annual turnover in the millions. The University of Queensland Union, for example, employs over 210 people, placing it within the guidelines of the Affirmative Action Agency and rendering it liable to return a report, annually, indicating its attempts at compliance with the federal Affirmative Action (Equal Opportunity for Women) Act.
Young Liberals' Marcus Clarke and Michael Kleinschmidt (treasurer and president of the UQ Union respectively) decided, in the 20-year campus tradition of feminist-baiting, to stick it to the Affirmative Action Agency in 1992. They shredded the agency's standard forms and sent them back with a letter advising them agency to "stop sticking their big brother noses" into the union's affairs.
As a consequence the UQ Union was named in federal Parliament on November 11 as one of only ten employers, nationwide, which did not comply with the meagre requirements of the affirmative action legislation.
The union's affirmative action officer, Fleur Yuille, says Clarke and Kleinshmidt shredded the request and wrote the letter without any consultation within the union, either with other student office-bearers through the student council or executive, or with staff, including herself.
In true Jeff Kennett style the duo told the Courier Mail on November 12 that, "Our reason for taking this action is that we view the relationship between ourselves and our employees as essentially something between us and them and no-one else."
The fact that they view themselves as employers, when clearly it is the union council as representatives of the student body which employs union staff, is an indication of the pumped up egos of these young men. Their wholesale adoption of current Liberal industrial policy gives a further frightening insight into the psyches of the future politicians incubating in our universities.
As usual, the best the Affirmative Action Agency can do is get offending employers named in parliament. As a result the entire UQ Student Union is tarred with the brush meant for Clarke and Kleinschmidt, and the two men revel in a spate of media attention which give them further opportunity to air their anti-women and anti-worker views and claim, falsely, that these views are "union policy".
This incident illustrates, again, that it is not sufficient that employers be required to fill out reports indicating that they may, or may not, be implementing vague affirmative action policies. What is needed are measurable requirements, such as quotas, upon which employers may be judged, not by what they say but by what they do. Discrimination will not be stamped out by a public relations campaign. Conscious sexists such as Clarke and Kleinschmidt will simply shred the PR material.
By Karen Fredericks