Can the education campaign win?
By Natasha Simons
Ten thousand university and high school students took to the streets on August 29 as part of a post-budget national day of action against cuts to education, student fee and HECS increases, and tighter restrictions on Austudy. While spirits were high, the turnout was roughly a third of that on August 7, the previous education national day of action. As a result, student activists around the country have begun a serious discussion about how to move the campaign against Howard's attacks forward.
A poll conducted by the Australian on August 20 revealed that 67% opposed the 5% cuts to university operating grants and 63% opposed HECS increases. This broad public opposition to the attacks is the basis on which many more people can be involved in the campaign.
The education campaign should draw strength from the mobilisation of high school students on August 29. They will be the first layer of university students affected by the HECS changes, and so will be a crucial part of any fight back. High school students were among the most militant opponents of nuclear testing in 1995, and they have already begun to show their strength in this campaign.
The alliance between staff and students should also be strengthened. While the National Tertiary, Education and Industry Union is discussing enterprise bargaining, it opposes the cuts, the changes to HECS and the attacks on Austudy. The fact that the NTEU did not strike on August 29 meant a smaller student turnout because classes were held.
In Perth, the formation of the Education and Training Action Coalition, involving students from campus, high school and TAFE, has helped to broaden and strengthen the campaign. Its September 5 rally was supported by the WA Trades and Labor Council, as well as the metalworkers' and the construction, forestry and mining unions.
In other states, the organising centres for the campaign have been the state-based cross-campus groups and education action groups (EAG) on individual campuses. New people are always joining these committees, but the number who have become committed activists, prepared to put more energy into building the campaign, needs to increase.
Broadening out the organising base of the campaign is key to its success, but this is not an easy task. Campaigns waged by the student movement over the last five years have been sporadic and not sustained in the longer term. In the trade union and social movements, more than a decade of top-level negotiations with management and the ALP has taken away the meaning of struggle, activism and organisation.
In the student movement this has resulted in a low level of political activism, with students prepared to come to demonstrations, but not necessarily to organise the next one. In turn, this has severely limited the flow-on of experience in organising committees, the passing on of lessons and experiences to the next layer of activists. A lot of skills (e.g. speaking at lectures, writing a leaflet, producing posters) have been lost, leaving the new generation of activists in a weaker position.
During this month and next, elections for student representative councils and National Union of Students delegates provide opportunities to strengthen the campaign organising committees. Tickets of education campaign activists are running for the SRC on many campuses, and left groups such as Resistance and Non-Aligned Left are running for NUS delegates.
Instead of being counterposed to organising the campaign, the elections can be a forum to talk about the issues and tell students how they can get involved. If the campaign tickets win, it will give the campaign greater weight and access to valuable resources.
The campaign also needs to: maintain the pressure on opposition parties and independents in the Senate to block the budget; call on the Community and Public Sector Union and DEETYA staff not to implement the cuts; expose vice-chancellors who argue for student fees and HECS increases, and pressure them not to implement the cuts; hold flying pickets against Vanstone and other Liberal Party heavies; hold protest actions at Liberal Party buildings and the $1495 per head Higher Education Conference in Sydney; organise campus forums with the NTEU to discuss the way forward for the alliance and the campaign; and consider state-based cross-campus teach-ins to discuss the next steps.
While cross-campus committees will be working out what local action to call next, they may ask NUS to call another national day of action. This would be useful for committees to build up to, but only if NUS takes building it nationally seriously — the fact that the NUS posters for August 29 arrived only one week before the rallies was a major problem in building them.
The campaign would also be strengthened if the NUS national office facilitated better communication between cross-campus groups (e.g. national telephone link-ups; each committee preparing a regular campaign update that can be sent to other cities; producing a discussion bulletin, open to all students, for campaigning ideas).
Building the activist leadership of the student movement means taking on the ALP. The action (or inaction) of Labor students has a major impact on the campaign because ALP students hold a lot of weight as elected representatives in most student unions and NUS.
On a federal level, the ALP is not going to stand up against the Liberals' policies. It may oppose particular attacks, such as the plans for HECS, but it does not in principle and will not actively oppose the general direction of the Liberals' policies. Indeed, it was the ALP which abolished free education, introduced HECS and paved the way for the Liberals' attacks.
Federal Labor's strategy seems to be to lie low and let the Liberals' damage sink in so that voters choose Labor next time around. This strategy is mirrored by the ALP leadership of the student movement today. While the ALP in Victoria and a few individual members in other states are building the campaign, in most places Labor students are running dead on it, or are using their positions in SRCs and NUS to hinder the mobilisations.
The ALP-run Queensland branch of NUS has put little effort into building the campaign and even told some students that the NUS-called August 29 action in Brisbane had been cancelled. As a result, no more than 200 students participated.
At the ANU in Canberra, ALP SRC president William Mackerras has actively undermined the EAG, including denying it funds and phoning John Howard to apologise for student actions against the budget.
At Tasmania University, ALP students argue that too many demonstrations would demoralise and tire students — this after just one national day of action.
In most states, ALP student leaders have been largely absent from most of the cross-campus committees. Neither have they made any effort to mobilise high school students or contribute to the discussion about future campaign directions.
It is crucial that non-ALP campaign activists recognise the impact the Labor Party has in the student movement. Where the ALP — the group with greatest resources through its positions on SRCs and NUS — is not building each action in the campaign, it puts even more pressure on other activists.
The Non-Aligned Left-run NSW branch of NUS exemplifies how an activist-run union can make a huge difference. It's no coincidence that the August 7 demonstration in Sydney was the biggest in the country: in contrast to the ALP-controlled branches of NUS, the NSW branch worked to build it.
The ALP's action (or inaction) in the education campaign counts for a lot because it has access to resources that most of the campaign organising groups do not. In SRCs it runs, it can (and has) blocked access to money that should be used to build the campaign. At Curtin University in Perth, for example, the ALP-run SRC refused to fund buses to the August 7 demonstration, leaving it up to the cross-campus committee to organise.
In addition, all ALP students, campaign activists or not, want to see the ALP re-elected federally. They therefore want to prevent a genuine activist leadership from coming to the fore of the campaign and from making headway against the ALP. Such a leadership threatens not only their jobs in NUS and student unions, but opens the potential for a real fight back against, not only the Liberals' policies, but federal Labor's as well.
What sort of a campaign can win? The massive student and worker strikes in France in late 1995 are perhaps the best example. Facing similar attacks on their education system, after the budget was passed French students escalated their campaign against the government. Students mounted a campaign based on a strategy of mobilising the largest number of people possible, involving strikes, rallies, marches, occupations and expanded organising meetings. They linked up with the workers' movement, also angry about the budget's attacks on the public sector, and with school students and the broader community.
On the November 21 national day of action in France, 200,000 people took to the streets. Three days later, 400,000 students marched alongside public servants as the majority of France's 5 million public sector workers went on strike. By persistently building their campaign and linking it to workers' campaigns, they forced the government to back down.
We must learn from this example. The French students' victory was a result of years of hard work, with many setbacks and losses along the way. It took more than a few national days of action and required a lot of determination by activists to keep the pressure up and the momentum going.
We won't have a victory overnight, or after a few demonstrations either. The next action against the Howard government's attacks, whatever form it takes, should be seen as another step in an ongoing campaign to draw more and more people into increasing the pressure on the Liberals.
[Natasha Simons is the national coordinator of Resistance.]