Right on the offensive on campuses
This year has seen a significant advance for the student movement. For the first time in many years there has been a sustained campaign against the government – and we have a real chance of pushing back many of its attacks on higher education.
It remains to be seen whether students will defeat Christopher Pyne entirely, but the campaign has played a major role in undermining the government’s budget and has involved thousands of students in protest for the first time in almost a decade.
One of the things that made the campaign possible was the election of socialists into student unions all across the country at the end of last year. More than 30 members of Socialist Alternative held positions this year. We focused on rebuilding fighting student unions, engaging students in activism and taking on the government.
This year the student union elections have resulted in socialists being locked out of office on campus after campus. This is not the result of a backlash from the student population. In fact, the primary vote for Socialist Alternative candidates increased at many campuses across the country.
Rather it’s the result of a concerted and coordinated effort by the other political factions on campus to keep us out of office via any means necessary. There has been an onslaught of anti-socialist propaganda.
This push has dovetailed with a national campaign by right wing forces, both on and off the campuses, to hinder our activity; to see our members expelled and our clubs shut down.
A Socialist Alternative member at La Trobe is currently facing expulsion for publicly criticising the pro-Israel positions of the general secretary of the student union. At Monash, the Socialist Alternative club has been underhandedly deregistered by the student union on the basis of the spurious charge of “political discrimination”.
The attacks have been helped by friends in high places. At La Trobe, Tony Abbott’s personal lawyer and former head of the Zionist Federation of Australia prepared a 10-page briefing calling for the student’s expulsion. And the first recommendation to shut down the Socialist Alternative club at Monash came from Pyne, who wrote an op-ed piece in the Australian just four days before the decision was made.
It’s fairly predictable that the right have gone on the attack in this way. It’s a reaction against the people who have been at the forefront of the many and successful mobilisations of students against the budget. But the attempts to lock us out of student unions represent something even fouler.
Deals between factions during campus elections are rife. In general, the types of deals done and the different forces in the mix vary significantly from campus to campus. Although many deals were struck in the current round of elections, keeping the socialists out was a common theme. In fact, it was the so-called “left” factions (Labor left and Grassroots left) who most steadfastly refused, almost across the board, to work with Socialist Alternative.
When the “left” view socialists as a bigger threat than young Liberals and the hard right – as they clearly did at Adelaide uni and lost the election to the right as a result – it makes a mockery of their claim to be progressive.
More concerning than the deals made prior to the elections was the nature of the elections themselves, where the “left” jumped on the bandwagon of the right and went into the elections Cold War style. This was most stark at Sydney and Monash, two campuses where the student unions (and socialists within them) have played a disproportionate role in the anti-budget campaign.
At Sydney Uni, Socialist Alternative ran in alliance with the Labor students against the Grassroots left and assorted right wing “independents”. One of the main promises the Grassroots’ ticket made to voters was to revert the role of the SRC to a service provider and to do away with “alienating” activism and protests.
Service provision is the go-to argument for the right against the left. It is an argument for apolitical, non-combative student unionism – the very opposite of what is needed under an Abbott government.
Two of the favourite lines of Grassroots campaigners throughout the elections were: “The SRC needs to stop focusing on international issues and political issues” and “We are going to ban the ‘Fuck Tony Abbott’ slogan because it’s negative and offensive.” Incredible priorities for so-called “left wing” students.
At Monash, Socialist Alternative ran alone against a super-ticket comprising the Labor left students and the Grassroots left. “Service provision not protest” was again a main talking point for both the Labor students and the Grassroots left and one which they neatly combined with an explicit call to keep socialists out of the union.
For example, the main election message that the Grassroots left sent out over social media implored people to vote for them for them on all the important issues: “Most importantly, please spread the word and come vote to help prevent an MSA run by members of Socialist Alternative.”
Unsurprisingly, Zionists and Liberals all came out to back the Labor left and the Grassroots left on the basis of their strong anti-socialist line. During the elections, online university forums were awash with sexist and racist bile directed at socialists. Far from distancing themselves from it, the Labor left and Grassroots left welcomed the support from the right and began adopting many of their catchphrases, including the claim that socialists are “anti-Semitic” because we support the Palestinians.
The morphing of the “left” into the right in these two elections and many more across the country is not just a case of the Labor left and the grassroots left being spooked by the rampage that right wing students are currently on and cravenly capitulating to it. It also highlights their extreme pettiness and cynical political objectives.
These groupings have been threatened by the prominent role of Socialist Alternative activists in the student unions this year and they care more about their own presence in these institutions than they do about building a sustained campaign against the government.
Socialists have long argued that student unions are more often than not seen as career-building platforms for aspiring young bureaucrats – as the Labor students’ bastardisation of “Solidarity Forever” goes: “for the unions give us jobs”. This round of elections has illustrated that perfectly. These young bureaucrats in “left” garb have moved into action to recapture the maximum number of positions in the unions and in so doing have opportunistically grafted themselves onto the pre-existing right wing campaign against Socialist Alternative.
Socialists will keep fighting for progressive unions and will keep organising against the government.
[Sarah Garnham is the National Union of Students education officer.]
