BY
GRANT COLEMAN
On March 5, high school, campus and TAFE students across Australia will act together with US students in refusing to attend classes. We will be calling for “books not bombs” and demanding that Australian troops be brought home from the Gulf now. Here are five reasons why you should join the strike on March 5.
1. War will kill thousands of Iraqi people.
Although US President George Bush, British PM Tony Blair and PM John Howard talk of liberating the people of Iraq, the Australian Navy is still enforcing a 12-year UN blockade that has killed more than a 500,000 Iraqi children. The blockade obstructs the passage of food and essential medicines.
Now our government wants to liberate these people by bombing them. Howard has committed more combat troops to Iraq than have been sent to any war since the Vietnam War. Australian warplanes and intelligence will be directly responsible for the deaths of many Iraqi people, in particular many Iraqi children.
2. The government is attacking higher education.
Federal education minister Brendan Nelson last week presented his university “reform” package, known as the Crossroads Review, to cabinet. This package concerns alternative models of funding for higher education. Although the exact details haven't yet been publicised, it's clear that it will massively shift the burden of funding higher education onto students and away from public funding.
Crossroads includes plans to free up the sandstone universities such as Sydney University, the University of Western Australia and Melbourne University to charge higher fees for popular courses such as medicine and law. This will more than likely put such courses out of reach for poorer students. It is also likely that these fee hikes would be followed by similar hikes across all courses.
Crossroads also proposes to lift the 25% cap on full-fee paying positions. This will result in people with lower marks but more money being admitted to courses that their more-qualified-but-poorer peers will miss out on.
Academics and administrative staff will also suffer attacks. Staff wanting more research funding will be asked to sign a no-strike agreement before the money being granted.
3. Public money should be spent on books not bombs.
Education should be free and publicly funded. The current funding “crisis” that the legislation is meant to deal with was created by successive federal governments. Since its election in 1996, the Coalition government has cut more than $1 billion from higher education funding. Yet the government has continued to increase so-called defence spending. This financial year, the military received an extra $500 million. This increase will double next year.
So while the war industry receives massive public handouts, students get to enjoy crammed tutorials, fewer teachers, outdated text books and tens of thousands of dollars worth of debt at the end of it all. That is, if we have any time left to study after working a part-time job to subsidise the pathetic pocket money dealt out as the Youth Allowance.
4. It is a war for oil.
So who benefits from a war on Iraq? US and British oil companies, that's who. Iraq's oil reserves are the second largest in the world, after Saudi Arabia's. After US-forced “regime change” in Iraq, the lucrative oil deals that France and Russia have with the Iraqi government would be null and void and US and British oil companies, such as ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco, would be tripping over themselves to shore up contracts.
The US “suddenly” discovered the need for “regime change” at roughly the same time its oil deals with Venezuela and Saudi Arabia started to look shaky. The Saudi regime is under pressure from the Saudi people because of its extremely generous deals with past and present US administrations. In Venezuela, the US is faced with a progressive government led by Hugo Chavez, who has made it clear that he will not put the interests of ExxonMobil over the needs of the Venezuelan poor.
5. We can stop this war.
A war on Iraq is highly dependent on the unity of the “alliance of the willing mass murderers” —the Australian, British and US governments. We can break this alliance. Signs of weakness are already showing. The people of Australia came out in record numbers over the weekend of February 14-16, demanding that troops be brought home now! Ultimately, it will be the strength of independent political action by people like us that can stop this war. Governments fear one thing above all else — people power.
Anti-war organising is springing up in neighbourhoods, high schools, TAFEs and universities. People are realising that if the government won't stop the war then the people must stop the government. Students helped to build a movement that could end the Vietnam War — we can and must do this again, to stop the war on Iraq!
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From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, February 26, 2003.
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