Comment by Marcel Cameron
MELBOURNE — On October 20, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology decided to proceed with the implementation of up-front fees.
The decision ignores the recent referendum in which 10,431 students and staff, 80% of voters, disagreed with the university's decision to introduce up-front fees for some local undergraduates in 1998. The council decision has dramatically exposed the undemocratic way in which the university is run.
RMIT is controlled by a handful of appointed representatives of big business and government. Only four of the 20 members of the university council, the university's highest decision making body, are elected students and staff.
A rally outside the council meeting, attended by around 100 people, did not reflect the strong anti-fees sentiment and the growing impatience of many students and staff.
While it is often difficult to mobilise students and staff during the final week of semester, with exams on the horizon, efforts to publicise the rally were too little, too late.
During the referendum campaign thousands of leaflets and broadsheets were handed out, but the rally was not even mentioned in the campaign material, except for a small caption with the wrong date. Without a clear perspective of building a large rally to maximise the pressure on the council and involve more students and staff in the campaign, a valuable opportunity was squandered.
While the lessons which can be drawn from the RMIT campaign this year are overwhelmingly positive, it also highlights the urgent need for students and staff to develop a strategy for fighting up-front fees, cuts to education and cuts to student income support.
This need for wide ranging-debate is reflected around the country. Key issues include the role of occupations in the overall campaign, how to build the student-staff alliance and how to fight campus administrations while maintaining a strong national campaign directed at the federal government.
Since the election of the Howard government there have been several student activist conferences, all of which have focused on theory with very little time set aside to discuss how we're going to stop governments and administrations from privatising education. It's time to redress this imbalance.
A National Education Activist Conference will be held on November 29-30 at Melbourne University, sponsored by the Student Unionism Network and the National Union of Students.
The conference will review the experiences of student campaigns this year, discuss the impact of government policy and develop strategies to build the movement in defence of public education. The experiences of TAFE and high school students in the campaign will also be addressed.
Resistance believes that the conference needs to come up with concrete proposals to be taken to the NUS national conference in December. Conference organisers are inviting comments on the draft agenda, and volunteers to take workshops and plenary sessions are welcome.
The conference agenda and registration details can be obtained by contacting your NUS state branch or your local Resistance Centre. Attending the conference should be a priority for everyone involved in the campaign to defend public education.