BY SHUA GARFIELD
HOBART — Students at the Hobart campus of the University of Tasmania (UTas) will vote in a referendum on whether to remain affiliated to the National Union of Students (NUS) on February 25-March 1.
The Hobart campus is one of two remaining campuses in Tasmania affiliated to NUS. The existence of Tasmania's NUS branch is threatened because a state branch requires at least two affiliated campuses.
Few students are aware of that the referendum has been called. Unlike most referenda held at UTas, the disaffiliation poll was not the result of the presentation of a petition signed by at least 50 students. It was instigated by a handful of Liberal students on the Student Representative Council (SRC) of the Tasmania University Union (TUU). The motion to hold the referendum was put at one of the last meetings of the outgoing 2001 SRC, held during exams, and after the 2002 SRC had been elected.
Holding the referendum in orientation week, which prevents much time for debate, will not help raise students' awareness of the issues at stake either.
However, there are other reasons why many Hobart students are not aware of the referendum. A large number probably do not know much about the state branch of NUS. For as long as anyone can remember, the Tasmanian NUS branch may as well have already been dissolved. Aside from holding a few barbecues and distributing posters for national days of action which it barely involved itself in, the branch does almost nothing.
Supporters of disaffiliation have hypocritically seized on the low level of activity of both the state and national offices of NUS in their campaign for disaffiliation. Yet, they do not support active student organisations themselves.
On a poster published by the TUU to publicise the disaffiliation case, international solidarity officer Donna Powell complains, "NUS is unaccountable to its members. It does not effectively represent students and appears unwilling to reform. In principle, national representation is critically important. Unfortunately NUS is not effectively performing this role... ordinary students don't get a look in! Policy is ignored and not acted upon by the executive".
TUU president Ted Alexander, arguing against disaffiliation on the same poster, states, "NUS provides Tasmanian students with a national voice. Without it we would not be able to keep up with national student issues and would not be able to lobby the federal government to try to get a decent livable youth allowance and stop further cuts to our university".
While Alexander is right that "students need a national voice", NUS has not been providing that.
However, it need not be this way. If a student organisation were led by activists, and sought to help students organising themselves to fight against attacks on education, and support other progressive struggles, it would be immensely valuable to students.
At the moment, NUS is as an ALP-dominated body that only seeks to lobby and "represent", rather than organise and involve students. It cannot become such a body without a complete overhaul of its structures and a change in leadership.
However even within the currently atrophied body of NUS, positions can sometimes be useful for left activists. In 1996, left-wing students won control of the NSW NUS branch. They were able to utilise the union's resources to build campaigns against the introduction of tuition fees and other attacks on higher education, and also to aid and involve people in environmental and international solidarity campaigns.
More recently, a motion passed at the NUS national conference in 2000 to support the May 1 blockades of Australian stock exchanges meant that students on some campuses were able to access NUS funds to help build actions which involved thousands of students.
These examples give a taste of what a national student organisation could do if it were reconstructed by an activist leadership. They also show that smashing NUS would not advance the struggle to create such an activist organisation.
It would be a mistake for progressive UTas students to support disaffiliation from NUS.
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, February 27, 2002.
Visit the