BY GRANT COLEMAN
In the June 5 Melbourne Age, federal education minister Brendan Nelson has claimed to be the victim of a scare campaign, arguing that student protesters have not stuck to the facts in condemning his package of reforms to higher education. However, Nelson, with a thousand words of comment at his disposal, simply repeated the same hype, lies, and half-truths he has used to justify his wholesale attack on public education.
One of Nelson's claims was that "at the heart [of the package] is $1.5 billion in new money for our universities". However, recent research conducted by the National Tertiary Education Union has disputed how new this money is.
In a paper analysing Nelson's blueprint, the NTEU claims that the new Commonwealth Grants Scheme (CGS) funding model "will provide universities with a lower level of baseline operating income than would be the case under the current base operating grant arrangements".
Under the CGS, the government will reduce its funding of each student place by $477. Based on government projections for 2005 enrolments, this will save $584 million on operating grants.
According to NTEU president Dr Carolyn Allport, the government "has also failed to acknowledge that it will save $128 million on payments for over-enrolments, which are being phased out beginning in 2005 — taken together, this means that [Nelson's paper] Backing Australia's Future will only deliver $753 million in genuinely new funding."
But Nelson's blueprint will tie CGS funds to industrial attacks on the NTEU. If universities want to get $404 million of this funding increase, they must first demonstrate that they are "actively offering individual employment arrangements to employees".
Deregulation
Nelson is proposing that universities be able to increase fees by up to 30%. In the Age, Nelson argues that "Students will have greater choice and be able to make informed decisions about which course and institution will offer them the best value for money". He enthusiastically claims that his proposals "will create not a two-tiered but a 38-tiered system."
But students are not consumers. We do not pick and choose which university we go to on the basis of "value for money". We want a one-tier, free, quality, education system. The right to education should not be left at the whim of the market.
What is really at the heart of the reform package is an attempt to reduce the publicly funded portion of undergraduate degrees. Nelson claims that "even after these changes wash through the universities, students will contribute only just over a quarter of the cost of their education".
However, the NTEU argues that by 2005, even before fees are deregulated, students will pay an average of 44% of their course costs. If universities implement the possible 30% increase in fees, this will increase the burden on students to 56%. Student contributions will vary from 28% for an agriculture degree to 105% for a law degree. Even students studying in the "protected" areas of nursing (28%) and education (35%) will pay more than a quarter of the cost of their education.
User pays
The neoliberal objection to publicly funded higher education is based on the argument that taxpayers who do not attend universities should not have to subsidise those who do.
Certainly, those with higher qualifications generally get a higher wage or salary than those without — but they also pay higher taxes.
The main fault with the user pays argument is that it paints the student as the "user" of the improved skills and knowledge that are acquired through higher education. The real "user" of higher education is the corporation that eventually employs a well-trained university or TAFE graduate and makes profits from their labour. A genuine "user-pays" model would increase corporate taxes to their previous level of 49% and use the increased income to pay for universal education, health care and welfare systems.
Full fees
Nelson is also proposing to increase the number of full-fee paying places from 25% of undergraduate places to 50%. In the Age, Nelson argued that it is unfair that students from poorer backgrounds don't have the opportunity to buy a place if they didn't get above the cut-off score. He is proposing a $50,000 loan to be paid back at an interest rate of 3.5%.
Nelson gave an example in the Age of "a young woman at Frankston High School, [who] may have her heart set on studying law at Melbourne University. She works extremely hard and receives a VCE score of 99.3. The kid in front of her at school gets 99.4 and gets a HECS place. The government is now prepared to lend the young woman from Frankston money to allow her to do law."
This fictional young woman, however, would be much better off if Nelson increased the number of publicly funded places. Currently, thousands of students that want to attend university are turned away because the government is not funding enough places to meet the demand.
Towards the end of the article Nelson lets loose with racist baiting, claiming that Australian students are victims of "reverse elitism" because "the merit-based allocation of HECS places [denies] opportunities to Australians who want to pay their own way, while we welcome fee-paying students from overseas."
Nelson does not consider a fairer way of equalising the situation: abolishing overseas student fees and re-instating a program of educating Third World students free of charge. This could go some way to compensate for the Asian and Pacific wealth Canberra has plundered over the years.
Rather than being the victim of a scare campaign, Nelson is running one. He is trying to confuse and isolate students and staff campaigning to defend public education, using false, misleading, racist and at times utterly bizarre arguments.
He must not succeed. We can ensure he does not by organising a broad campaign for free education — not deregulation.
[Grant Coleman is the Wollongong Resistance organiser. More information on the Nelson Review is available at the NTEU's web site <http://www.nteu.org.au>.]
From Green Left Weekly, June 18, 2003.
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