Students are right to disrupt business as usual

A taste of real democracy was served up on the ABC’s QandA program on Monday night. Students from campus Education Action Groups disrupted the normal functioning of the program to protest against education minister Christopher Pyne’s support for fee increases and a deregulated higher education model resembling that of the United States.

The activists asked some hard hitting questions before unfurling a banner and chanting, “No cuts, no fees, no corporate universities!”

In a rare example of people power on QandA, the students were able to force the show into a musical interlude while host Tony Jones desperately attempted to restore order.

Jones complained that the students didn’t respect democracy. Democracy is about the majority having a say and exercising control over what happens in society. Students, however, have been systematically locked out of discussions about the future of higher education. We have had no input into either the Commission of Audit or the Kemp-Norton review.

The commission recommends that students pay 34 percent more of the cost of education and that the government’s contribution be decreased accordingly. The Australian government’s contribution is already one of the six lowest in the OECD. This proposal would push the ranking even lower.

High fees and debt repayments are already a well-documented deterrent to many people gaining an education. Yet the commission also recommends that student debt repayments begin as soon as a graduate earns the minimum wage as opposed to the current threshold of $53,345 per year.

The Kemp-Norton review calls for the deregulation of fees and the admission of private institutions into the government scheme. This would lead to a situation similar to that in the United States where working class students are priced out of well-resourced universities and are instead forced into tin-pot colleges, only to graduate with degrees that are close to valueless in terms of gaining employment.

If only a fraction of the recommendations of the review and the commission are adopted – and given Pyne’s enthusiastic reception we should expect at least a fraction – the impact will be severe.

Students are angry and eager to have our voices heard. As Sydney University SRC education officer Ridah Hassan, one of the participants on QandA, said to Pyne: “We want education to be available for everyone, not just the rich. How can you possibly justify forcing decent education out of reach of poorer and working class students?”

Far from the planned format of QandA representing an opportunity for students to finally enter the discussion on higher education in a meaningful way, Pyne dodged and weaved and sneered at the questions put to him by concerned students. This is par for the course on QandA.

The program claims to be a forum for rigorous democratic debate and discussion. Yet its panels are hand-picked and consistently dominated by right wing politicians, commentators, and business people. The audience questions are carefully stage-managed to provide a platform for the pundits to rattle off their vacuous “talking points” of the hour.

It is an exercise in sanitation, with Tony Jones – playing a more cheery version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’s Nurse Ratched – keeping everything within well-defined bounds of “respectability”. The scumbags intent on destroying the lives of workers and the poor are treated with utmost deference. Hot tempers are the cause of embarrassment and provoke tut-tutting, pleas for restraint or even scolding. You can feel yourself being quietly lobotomised as the “experts” and celebrities politely engage in what they term a “mature conversation” – a flapping of mouths that challenges little and changes nothing.

Monday’s protest cut through this farce.

It resonated well beyond the ABC studios. Since airing, most major media outlets have run pieces on the episode and social media has been clogged with discussion. The overwhelming majority of comments have been sympathetic to the activists.

If we want anything resembling real change – something that actually challenges the neoliberal consensus that infects mainstream politics – we need to disrupt business as usual and cease the charade of having “polite and orderly discussion” with those that want to savage our living conditions.

The National Union of Students has called a post-budget national day of protest on 21 May as part of the national “Abbott and Pyne, hands off our education” campaign. There will be protests in every major city.

[Sarah Garnham is the National Union of Students education officer.]