Comment by Sean Healy
The national conference of the National Union of Students (NUS), held December 8-12, showed clearly the distance NUS still has to travel before it can really claim to be "the national voice of students" that effectively defends students' rights and interests.
It also showed the desperate need for the left within NUS to have a clear strategy of what it's seeking to do with NUS and how it can achieve a greater degree of unity in doing so.
For most (the Liberals, the various Labor sub-factions and grouplets, even unfortunately at times the left), NUS national conference is a circus, a kiddie version of federal parliament. What counts is the deals for office-bearer positions; little else matters.
For example, in spite of more than 200 policy motions being submitted, only about a dozen were discussed at conference. As soon as the election results were announced on the last day, the right-wing factions withdrew some of their delegates, denying the conference a quorum and ending the conference early. The other 190-odd policy motions just lapsed, not discussed at all.
What this meant was that no more than token discussion on any policy to do with education issues and none on what NUS should be organising in 1998 to oppose the government's education restructuring.
There was no discussion of environment policy in spite of lots being submitted. Only half of the policy on women's rights was put to floor and then only because it was put en bloc without discussion. And policy committing NUS to supporting the rights of the East Timorese wasn't even discussed. So much for the things that do matter.
The irony is that some will claim that this conference was a "victory" for the left.
If you looked only at the results of the office-bearers' elections, it could have been much worse: Left Alliance won the education officer's position, Non-Aligned Left won both the welfare and the part-time environment officers, and an attempt by right-wing factions to keep the left out of the office-bearers' positions was defeated.
There were even some useful constitutional measures passed (such as expanding the size of the national education committee and expanding NUS's work with postgraduate students).
But in the context of a federal government hell-bent on gutting public education (amongst other things), the lack of any real perspective on how to fight back from the annual conference of the National Union of Students made it a major setback for the left and shows how much still has to change with our "national representative voice".
The NUS conference also revealed the need for greater agreement amongst the left itself about what it's trying to do, whether in a specific conference or in NUS in general. Proposals by Resistance and others to try to reach such an agreement were all knocked back.
Disunity amongst the left and the lack of any common strategy have only assisted the continued domination of NUS by the Labor factions. And so the left ends up caught playing Labor's games and with an almost exclusive focus on positions. What counts is getting a "left voice" in NUS; what that "voice" says becomes of little account.
The only way the left stands any chance of seriously changing NUS into a more activist and relevant organisation is if it is more united, if it has a common vision (which it currently doesn't) and, fundamentally, if the different left factions are able to re-form into a single left caucus.
If not, the circus merry-go-round will just keep spinning, Labor will retain its domination, NUS conference will remain just a training ground for budding bureaucrats and right-wing politicians, and NUS will not be a real force for uniting students to struggle against the government's agenda, as it could be.
[Sean Healy is the national coordinator of the socialist youth organisation Resistance, and attended the NUS national conference.]