By Sarah Stephen
People will remember Keating's infamous "Get a job" remark to a group of demonstrators taking part in the March 23 national day of action against fees. From Keating's attitude, and the fairly minimal media coverage, you could be forgiven for thinking that this was a fairly insignificant event.
But 15,000 students demonstrating, while another 30,000 boycotted classes, made it the most significant mobilisation for eight years — since 1987, when a mass student-led campaign defeated the up-front Higher Education Administration Charge (HEAC).
The ALP knows this, even if Keating does parade an offhand attitude. Over a decade, the ALP has overseen the dismantling of the education system and the introduction of user-pays.
In 1986 it introduced full up-front fees for overseas students. The first across the board up-front fee was the HEAC, with was sold as a "charge" rather than a fee. These semantics were supposed to make it more palatable.
In response, a free education movement developed in 1987. In March 1987 there was a 25,000-strong NDA. In Sydney 7000 occupied the Education Department.
These mobilisations occurred at the same time as a campaign to boycott the fee. Twelve campuses took part in the boycott. On the University of Queensland, one in four of the 20,000 students boycotted the fee, holding out until May, when the administration expelled 2000 of those students for non-payment. After a mass occupation of the admin building which lasted several days, all students were reinstated without having to pay the fee, a huge victory for the campaign.
This sort of mass action caused the HEAC to be dropped in 1988. The government shifted to the Higher Education Contribution Scheme in 1989. HECS was a soft option. It was something students couldn't boycott because it was deferred.
From the point of view of the government and business, though, HECS was never going to be the most efficient way of making students pay for higher education. In 1993 the collective student HECS debt was $500 million, but most of it is money the government can't get its hands on.
Fees
It's interesting how few students realise how recently HECS was introduced. HECS has ideologically prepared students and the community for further fees.
From 1989 there have been generalised cuts in the level of funding per student; the erosion of infrastructure, services and general and academic staff levels; forced amalgamations of smaller universities; and marginalisation and elimination of courses that are seen to have little or no vocational or commercial value.
There's been a process of commodification through HECS, specific course fees, fees for library services and fee-paying postgraduate courses. On top of that you've got increased corporate input into course content, and private full fee-paying universities like Bond University.
There are more people in education than ever before, but overall funding for higher education was cut by $4 billion between 1983 and 1993, the equivalent of 1% of GDP.
This is a conscious strategy by the Labor government. It's been cutting funding while increasing student numbers and removing legislation restricting fees, forcing individual universities to introduce the fees. This takes the heat off the government.
The government has learned that across the board attacks get across the board responses. It knows it's much harder to build a generalised campaign from isolated, targeted attacks such as up-front fees for particular postgrad courses.
That's why the campaign which is starting to take off at the moment is such a huge breakthrough, because it grew out of one of these isolated attacks — an up-front fee for the legal workshop course on the Australian National University.
The left on ANU played a key role in convincing law students of the need to build a broader campaign involving all students. The campaign grew to involve hundreds of students on the campus in a series of strikes, demonstrations and rallies, culminating in 250 students taking control of the central admin building in a nine-day occupation which inspired students across the country.
There was an NDA on October 13, a few weeks after the occupation had ended, which was very successful. But we recognised that if the campaign was to succeed in defeating up-front fees, it had to become national. This led to a National No Fees Activists' Conference in Melbourne in December. From this conference, two NDAs were called.
National days of action are really important because they give the student movement an opportunity to reflect the real levels of anger, and the numbers of students around the country prepared to protest around this issue. They give us a sense of our collective strength.
But the real challenge the movement faces at the moment is to transform the anger into an ongoing campaign, something that is sustained, that builds upon itself. A campaign that can win is a campaign that aims to develop the broadest possible student and community support against the federal government's strategy to privatise education.
Demands
Most demands fall into one of two categories. Immediate demands are those such as no up-front fees for postgrad courses, no legal workshop fee, no increases to HECS, increase government funding.
Then there are transitional demands like free education, or calls for a fully funded public education system.
These transitional demands are not merely defensive. They call for real, progressive change to government policy. People can agree with them because they can see the overcrowding, the poor resources and universities introducing fees because they're not getting enough funding.
They also start to raise other questions. Who is it that benefits from education? Who should be paying?
Resistance has always argued that because education is a public resource, something which benefits the whole community and facilitates the development of our whole society, it should be paid for by society. Where is the money going to come from? From a truly progressive taxation system.
Those at the top end of the scale, particularly business and industry, reap significant financial benefit from a highly skilled and creative work force; their profits should contribute to a better education system. Yet the ALP government, while crying poor, has cut the company tax rate from 49% to 33% over the last 10 years.
These demands start to raise question about how wealth is distributed within society, what our priorities should be and why we don't have a real say in the decisions about these sorts of things.
It's true that the ALP isn't going to grant us free education in the next six months, or the next three years. The very fact that these demands can't be met without other changes in the rest of society is their whole point. We want people to realise that the struggle against fees for higher education is part of a much broader battle.
Other sectors are facing cuts in wages and conditions. There are cutbacks to a wide range of social services — public transport, schools, hospitals, housing. If the campaign to defeat fees is ever to succeed beyond a few token concessions, we need to link up with all these other sectors.
Reaching out
We have to seriously address how to build the broadest opposition possible that squarely challenges the Labor government. This is what has got us this far and gained us the strength to get at least some concessions.
Students have to be convinced that if they don't fight around the isolated attacks happening now, they will lose much more.
As we convince more students, the key task increasingly becomes to give them the confidence that collectively they can have an impact. Mass actions and activities are central to this.
One of the key tasks is going to be developing broad organising committees. If this means having committees on individual campuses, in cities where there are more than one, as well as cross-campus networks that coordinate activity for the whole city, then we should do this. A number of campuses have found that the cross-campus networks aren't sufficiently accessible to be able to draw in the activists that we need to.
The committees need to involve the broadest range of groups on the basis that they agree with the general aims of the campaign. We mustn't them become subordinated to the politics of any one of these groups. While we welcome the support and participation of the National Union of Students, for example, they are only one component of the student movement and should participate as such.
We need to develop links with the community as the campaign continues. Support from the National Tertiary Education Union for the March 23 NDA was one such step. The success of the ANU occupation was in large part due to the support we were able to get from the local branch of the Community and Public Sector Union and, through it, the Trades and Labour Council.
To further build support within the Canberra community, and to counter some of the media sensationalism, students set up a petition stall in the city centre for four hours each day over the course of two weeks before a community rally held in December. Not only were we able to talk to people about the issues involved, we could much more accurately gauge the level of community support.
We need to organise educationals, debates, public meetings. We need to find the forums to really discuss the issues, the tactics, the next steps for the campaign. We need to provide the opportunities for students getting involved in the campaign for the first time to hear what it's all about.
As for campaigns to win student union positions, they need to fall within our broader strategy. What we should be aiming to do with an election campaign is to use it as a forum for building the no fees campaign, and to put in place a committed activist leadership that is directly accountable to the campaign.
Whether Labor or Liberal can implement their "student pays" system depends entirely on the level of student and community opposition that can be generated. So let's see what we can do.
[Sarah Stephen is a member of Resistance and general secretary of the Students Association at ANU.]