BY CHRIS PICKERING
WOLLONGONG — The New South Wales TAFE Teachers Association (TAFETA) and the Public Service Association (PSA) union representatives at Wollongong College of TAFE are leading a push to fight job cuts and increases in student fees. Their answer to fee hikes is simple: introduce free education on the ground.
It is commonplace in NSW these days to hear labour movement activists comment on how right-wing the state Labor government is. The government's recently announced plans to integrate and restructure TAFE and the Department of Education and Training (DET) and introduce steep increases in TAFE fees highlight what NSW Premier Bob Carr and his economic rationalist "true believers" really believe in: job cuts and the dismantling of public education.
In the June state budget, the government announced huge increases to TAFE student fees for 2004. The increase, amounting to an extra $27.5 million a year, will not only on be fee hikes, but the imposition of charges for courses previously fee exempt.
TAFE students will see the charges for some graduate diploma courses skyrocketing from $710 to $1650, while some certificate courses will rise from $260 to $750. All fees will be charged up-front.
Rob Long, TAFETA representative at Wollongong College of TAFE and delegate to TAFETA's state council is one of the central leaders of the campaign against the fee increases. As a teacher and unionist, Rob is outraged at the government's attempt to find a "soft" target in the education sector.
"What is most difficult to accept about these changes is that they will have the greatest impact on those who are most disadvantaged and vulnerable in our society ... including the unemployed, people from non-English speaking backgrounds (especially those who have been refugees), young people at risk, women wanting to return to the work force, people with little education, those with very poor literacy and language skills, people with a disability and people from low-income families."
The state government is also planning at least 1000 job cuts to TAFE and DET. Carr's bean counting economic rationalists want all government departments to be subjected to their "shared corporate services" regime of centralising, standardising or outsourcing as many functions across departments as possible.
The government has indicated that the health department will be the next area to face cuts. Widespread job losses across the entire state public sector are firmly on the government's agenda and unionists believe that a "razor gang" task force has been set up to carry the process through.
Government propaganda is running the line that the TAFE/DET job cuts will have two beneficial results for the community: returning more teachers to the classroom and slicing the numbers of public service "bureaucrats".
These two claims have enraged public servants and teachers. The 300 teachers now playing central educational support roles who will be sent back to the classrooms they were seconded from will not be replaced, but will almost certainly take jobs away from contract and short term teachers.
Far from bureaucrats, the 700 public servants facing retrenchment will be clerks working in corporate service areas including finance, administration, human resources, payroll and recruitment. The government plans to increase the number of highly paid departmental bureaucrats.
Fee hikes — as well as being inequitable — are a serious threat to the job security of all workers in TAFE. Many TAFE students cannot afford what the government wants to charge, so it is possible that student enrolments could be sent crashing. Less students paying more could be quite palatable to the government, because it would give it the opportunity to cut even more staff.
Repeated fee increases could pose a threat to the long-term survival of TAFE as a public institution. More education will be carried out by private providers; a trend already occurring.
To fight this attack, PSA members at Wollongong College of TAFE implemented a ban on the collection of enrolment and re-enrolment fees in early July. TAFETA members decided to act in tandem with the PSA, refusing to release collected student enrolment forms to prevent them from being processed by student administration.
PSA members in the other colleges across the Illawarra Institute of TAFE were eager to join the fray. By the end of the first day of the bans at Wollongong, 10 of the remaining 12 colleges had implemented similar bans in coordination with TAFETA. The rapid flow-on of the bans indicates how unionists taking swift, militant action can inspire others to take up the fight. If a similar process were to be implemented statewide, the government's revenue collection from TAFE could be seriously threatened.
Unfortunately, because the bans remained localised to the Illawarra, and a range of other student services were affected by the industrial action, PSA members at Wollongong lifted the bans after several weeks and were followed by members at the other colleges.
We resolved, however, to campaign within the union to extend the bans statewide in order to block the fees in 2004. This proposal has much credence in TAFETA and the PSA after the Illawarra actions.
At its recent annual conference, TAFETA committed to industrial action to block the 2004 fee increases and to pursue the matter with other unions, including the PSA. Since then, TAFETA, via the NSW Labour Council, has initiated a "Let TAFE Live" campaign to assist students to set up campus-based organisations and facilitate the establishment of a TAFE student network to combat the fee increases.
TAFE students have already been getting themselves better organised. A new Illawarra TAFE student organisation has just been established, calling itself the Students of TAFE Action Group. STAG has been organising a protest march to be held in Wollongong at noon on August 13.
Inspired by the establishment of STAG, TAFETA's Rob Long commented that "TAFE students have never been so angered by a Labor government. A Labor government should be committed to free education for all, not just for the wealthy few. It is of great importance that all unions should fight the Carr government in this blatant attack on the most disadvantaged."
Apparently feeling the heat from various union and student protests, including a 300-strong demonstration at Granville TAFE on August 4 directed against visiting education minister and "left"-Labor leader Andrew Refshauge, the government is considering reinstating fee exemptions for several categories of disadvantaged students.
In addition, community and union campaigning in the Riverina region of southern NSW has forced the government to backtrack on plans to break up the region's TAFE institute, which was one of the government's stated aims in their restructuring proposals.
These initial, partial victories show that determined campaigning can be effective and that the government is vulnerable when students, unionists and community-based activists join forces to defend their education system.
TAFETA and PSA activists at Wollongong College are committed to campaigning within their respective unions for a state-wide ban on the collection of all enrolment fees for 2004, not just against the proposed fee increases. We believe that education should be free, and this should be the ultimate goal of our campaign.
[Chris Pickering is a PSA delegate at Wollongong College and a delegate to the South Coast Labour Council.]
From Green Left Weekly, August 13, 2003.
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