Labor students lock out left from the National Union of Students

A coalition of Labor and self-described independent student unionists across Australia is planning to lock out pro-Palestine and socialist activists from the National Union of Students (NUS) at the body’s upcoming National Conference.

The conference, taking place in Ballarat on 8–12 December, will elect NUS office-bearer positions for 2026. This year, Socialist Alternative members hold three of those positions: queer, vocational education, and education (which I hold). We have used those positions to fight for a left-wing and activist national union. In particular, we pushed for the NUS to take an uncompromising and principled position of solidarity with the Palestinian people as our own government colluded in the Gaza genocide.

Ahead of the National Conference, student Labor members of the right and left factions, along with nominal independents (for example, the group that runs the student guild at Curtin University) have signed a deal that will totally exclude socialist pro-Palestine activists from any office-bearer positions for 2026, even though Socialist Alternative has nearly 30 percent of the delegates at this year’s conference and is the second biggest faction in the NUS.

The point of the lock-out, I was told by one of the Labor students who arranged it, is to have a national student union that won’t criticise or embarrass the Labor government but will instead cheer it on from the sidelines. They told me that Labor ministers wouldn’t want to meet with the NUS if it were anti-government.

For starters, I consider it a job well done if our work in the NUS this year has made government ministers feel nervous at the prospect of meeting with us for fear of being publicly criticised. To any student who’s been living under the Albanese government rather than under a rock, it’s obvious that Labor deserves no praise from us.

From the first, Labor has stood by Israel and its genocidal campaign in Gaza. More than just rhetorical support, the Australian government has continued to supply key components for Israel’s fleet of F-35 fighter jets as the bodies of Palestinians pile up. In Australia, Labor state governments have ramped up police powers and attacked the right to protest. They tear down public housing while hundreds of thousands, many students among them, struggle to keep a roof over their heads.

The role of unions—on university campuses and in workplaces—should be to organise against any attack on our collective rights, wherever it comes from. Unions are meant to fight for a better world and to stand in solidarity with the struggles of the oppressed, be they students, workers, migrants, Indigenous people, or Palestinians.

Today, that means campaigning against the Anthony Albaneses and Penny Wongs of the world. If the national student union refuses to even criticise the government—especially one so bankrupt as our current Labor government—it is fighting with both hands tied behind its back. More accurately, it is refusing to fight at all. That is what Labor students have set out to establish at this year’s National Conference.

It makes sense when you remember that these students are the future Anthony Albaneses and Penny Wongs. For them, student unions are about building their careers and honing their craft as political operators. Those careers depend on their ability to shield the ALP from criticism, especially from the left, and build up the Labor Party machine on the campuses. It’s been harder to do that when socialists in the National Union of Students have spent the last year publicly condemning Labor for its complicity in a genocide.

Socialists in the NUS

This past year, the socialists in the NUS co-convened a People’s Inquiry that publicly exposed attacks on free speech by university bosses. We called a nationwide student strike that led university and high-school students off their campuses and into the streets to demand justice for Palestine.

Most significantly, we organised the National Student Referendum on Palestine, in which more than 5,000 students voted on campuses across the country to condemn our universities’ and our government’s complicity in Israel’s genocide. This was the first nationwide student vote in decades, as reported on SBS program The Feed.

Compare this with the achievements of our fellow NUS office-bearers in the ALP. Welfare Officer Lucy Fawcett, a member of the Labor right faction Student Unity, gave a presentation at the NUS Education Conference in July, which revealed that, after seven whole months in the position, all she had accomplished was launching a Student Wellbeing Survey that not even 100 students completed.

This is typical of Labor students in the unions. Run some pointless survey that no-one will ever read so you can say you’ve been hard at it, “advocating” for students. Throw a couple of free food events into the mix and you can say you’ve been “combating food insecurity“. The only thing close to an actual campaign initiated by Labor students in the NUS this year was a thinly veiled “vote Labor” campaign for the federal election.

It’s a tale of two strategies. The socialist approach to student unions is to build them up as activist bodies that mobilise students to put them in the best position to defend their rights and win more. Labor students and other aspirational types see the unions as stepping stones to a career in parliament or in the trade union officialdom, so they suck up to university bosses and Labor politicians in particular.

Student life today

Sadly, Lucy has yet to publish the results of the Student Wellbeing Survey, so we can only imagine what fascinating insights it might contain. Let’s be real, though: you don’t need a Google Forms questionnaire to know that life is shit for students.

The cost-of-living crisis is hitting young people like a ton of bricks, and university life gets worse every year. On several campuses, university bosses are planning major cuts to courses and staff. The very idea that higher education should be a fulfilling experience is giving way to a transactional and corporatised university model based on the grim accumulation of microcredentials.

Broader political questions affect students, too. Globally, the far right has risen, and in Australia, it is increasingly setting the tone. Hatemongers like Pauline Hanson, whose One Nation party is now polling around up to 18 percent, are growing their base with a hardened racism that blames migrants, including international students, for the housing crisis.

And then there’s Gaza: the crime of the century, carried out with the backing of the Albanese government. Students have watched in horror as it unfolded, and we have also thrown ourselves into the Palestine solidarity movement. We have protested, petitioned, donated, camped, rallied, locked on, turned up, fundraised, organised, learned, and educated—done everything we can to demand an end to the slaughter.

Our universities have responded with surveillance, censorship, and repression. When challenged on their connections with the weapons companies that made the desolation of the Gaza Strip possible, our sandstone institutions have acted like tin-pot dictatorships.

It is hard to imagine a situation in which an activist and left-wing student union movement—one that organised students into a force to be reckoned with—could be more sorely needed. Students don’t occupy the same position of strategic strength that workers do, but we do have power. In our numbers, we can disrupt, kick up a fuss, shut down a busy street. Our actions can inspire broader numbers in society to fight. Student unions are in a position to mobilise that potential and show students their power.

Through our efforts in the NUS and in local student unions, socialists have shown what that could look like. We fought to make Palestine a live issue on the campuses. We pushed back on university attempts to silence political speech. At the ANU in Canberra, socialist students organised an impressive anti-cuts campaign this year, which toppled Vice-Chancellor Genevieve Bell and forced the university to shelve a planned “restructure”.

Rebuilding our unions

Labor students like to tell socialists that the ordinary student isn’t interested in protests or activism. They defend their conservative approach to student unionism behind the claim that they’re much more in touch with the needs and interests of real students, who supposedly want nothing more than an occasional sausage sizzle.

Yet for every single student who filled in the NUS Student Wellbeing Survey, 50 turned up to vote in the National Student Referendum on Palestine, so the idea that “ordinary students” aren’t interested in protests just doesn’t hold water. In addition to the SBS report, the vote was featured on Al Jazeera’s live news broadcast, giving the NUS more high-profile media coverage than it has had in years.

And while it’s true that not every university student wants to attend a rally these days, our unions should see this as a challenge to overcome, not a situation to gloat about. Any student unionist worth their salt should be seriously thinking about the next steps we need to take to rebuild an activist culture on the campuses where students feel empowered to fight for their rights and to demand more from a system that offers us less and less. That’s the approach that socialists take.

And that’s exactly why the Labor students and their mates have teamed up to keep socialists out of the NUS next year. With two state elections in 2026 and the possibility that the Albanese government will send Australian troops to occupy the Gaza Strip, Labor students don’t want an NUS that can bring students out onto the streets to publicly condemn their own party. Their vision for the NUS is a troop of aspirational cheerleaders for the party of government.

The campaigns organised by the socialists and pro-Palestine activists in the NUS, like the National Student Referendum on Palestine, demonstrate the potential for rebuilding a combative left-wing tradition on the university campuses. The situation in Australia today demands it. That is the goal that Socialist Alternative members in campus clubs across the country are working towards, inside and outside the NUS.