BY NATALIE ZIRNGAST & KYLIE MOON
MELBOURNE In a victory for the staff and student campaign against RMIT's bid to provide education and recreational facilities to asylum seekers in detention, RMIT vice chancellor Ruth Dunkin announced on August 8 that the university has withdrawn its tender.
RMIT had joined the Danish-owned private provider of prison services Group 4 Falck to bid for the $100 million contract to run Australia's detention centres.
The campaign against the bid had wide support on campus, and had grown rapidly. The executive of the RMIT branch of the National Tertiary Education Industry Union (NTEU) had unanimously endorsed a motion of "strong and principled opposition to the proposal". The statement was drafted by a meeting of 35 staff who believed that the bid would be used to further legitimise mandatory detention.
Students Against Detention (SAD) was formed as a new refugee-rights activist group on RMIT and organised a 100-strong meeting against the proposal on August 5.
This campaign culminated in heated discussion at an August 7 public forum attended by 250 students and staff.
Most of the forum's participants opposed the bid. RMIT Student Union president Emily Anderson commented that she found a partnership between a public university and a private prison operator "morally disgusting", adding that she was cynical about RMIT's claim that it would not profit from the proposal.
Staff opposition to the bid was emphasised by NTEU RMIT branch president Jeanette Pierce, who stated that,"the NTEU supports the right of staff not to be involved in the project". She asked whether NTEU staff would be expected to be jailers if children tried to escape, given that staff may have a contractual obligation to try to prevent them.
Beginning her speech with an overhead transparency printed with "The road to hell is paved with good intentions", social science lecturer Heather Fraser argued that detention centres are not plausible learning environments.
Mary Kalantzis, dean of the Faculty of Education, Languages, and Community Service (FELCS), which was involved in the tender, defended the bid.
She said that while "everyone at RMIT" was opposed to mandatory detention, "the key issue" was how to make a real difference. She had written letters, she told the meeting, to newspapers opposing mandatory detention, but, because the policy was supported by "a democratically elected government" with bipartisan agreement, this was clearly a minority position.
She argued that RMIT had to "work within the framework of democracy" in order to reform the worst excesses of government policy. Scott Phillips, also from FELCS, stated that "as a compassionate and responsible institution, RMIT addresses real-world problems with real-world solutions".
Arguments supporting the bid sounded increasingly hollow as the debate progressed. Many educators, including the Australian Council of Deans, reject the idea that effective education of detainees is possible. Far from helping detainees, RMIT's involvement could be used by the government and Group 4 to improve the image of detention centres and divide the campaign to free the refugees.
Claims by FELCS that RMIT staff working in the detention centres would not be silenced by Group 4 were quickly exposed when students pointed out that entry into the tendering process required RMIT to sign a confidentiality agreement. FELCS maintained that detainees in the Maribyrnong detention centre supported their proposals. However, students who had visited the Maribyrnong centre that morning said that there was overwhelming opposition from detainees and they had sent a statement of opposition to FELCS which was ignored.
Within days of the meeting, Dunkin explained in a statement emailed to all staff: "As a result of [the August 7] discussion and the many points made, both for and against RMIT's participation in the forthcoming tender, I have decided that the university's further involvement in the process is not appropriate.
"On balance, I believe that RMIT can most effectively participate in this humanitarian task by supporting the education needs of asylum seekers in a variety of other ways. One aspect of the debate that could not be disputed from the discussion yesterday was the collective passion of the RMIT community to improving the position of asylum seekers."
She also stated that, "a taskforce has now been established to examine a range of alternative proposals for the specific provision of education and recreational services to asylum seekers, including those outside of the detention centres and on temporary protection visas".
RMIT is now the third university to reject the proposal, alongside the University of Technology, Sydney and the University of South Australia. RMIT student and SAD activist Vivian Messimeris said: "Group 4's failure to get even one university to come on board their tender demonstrates the power of this growing refugees' rights movement. The number of people opposed to mandatory detention is growing and bodies like universities and governments will increasingly be forced to listen." From Green Left Weekly, August 14, 2002.
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