ALP scuttles Brisbane student demo
By Lana Halpin and Kathy Newnam
BRISBANE — On May 8 a national day of action has been called against the education funding cuts. The Queensland Education Action Network (QEAN) has been meeting over the last month to organise a cross-campus rally to draw together students from across Brisbane, including high school students who are organising a walkout.
Unfortunately, this rally will not be going ahead. On April 21, ALP student politicians stacked a meeting of the QEAN with the aim of scuttling the May 8 rally.
However, the ALP did not have the numbers to call off the rally and was forced to agree to the National Union of Students funding the rally. The ALP said NUS would do nothing to build it. At this point, members of the International Socialist Organisation, arguing that without NUS backing the rally would be failure, decided to vote with the ALP to cancel it.
Office bearers from NUS, University of Queensland Union, Griffith Student Representative Council and Queensland University of Technology student guild, all of whom are aligned to the ALP, instead have decided to organise actions on individual campuses. In practice, this will mean they will not happen on many campuses, and students' anger will be dispersed.
It was under the ALP government that the beginning of the current attacks on education began and free education ended. During the Labor government, ALP student politicians discouraged students from waging a campaign that would embarrass their party in government. This was achieved through the ALP's control of NUS.
Since the election of the federal Coalition government, ALP student politicians have been more willing to allow a fight back. But this has been contingent on the campaign remaining within the ALP's perspective: that the solution to education cuts is the re-election of a Labor government in two years' time.
An independent campaign, which mobilises students around demands that go beyond this, threatens Labor students' control of the campaign. QEAN threatened to lead such an independent campaign, and that is why the ALP sought to undermine it.