The sad story of student unions in Australia today

Student union elections are taking place on university campuses across the country. Given that only a minority of students vote in the elections nowadays, it’s fair to say that most students probably don’t know this is happening—or even know the first thing about their campus union.

This year, for example, in the RMIT University Student Union elections, about 6,000 students voted out of a student body of more than 60,000. While that level of suffrage might have been standard for nineteenth-century Prussia, it’s a sign of the general decline of student unionism in Australia.

Student unions used to be famous—even notorious—as political and activist bodies that organised and fought to improve students’ lives and the wider world around them. Today, most student unions don’t organise much more than some pretty sad free food events and occasional parties that are even sadder.

It’s not as though there’s nothing to fight for. Financial precarity is increasingly common for university students. More and more students take on full-time work while they study to make ends meet. And the average student in their 20s leaves university with more than $30,000 of debt, compared to $12,600 in 2006.

Young people are also tuned in to the world around them: the genocide in Gaza has thousands of us outraged, horrified and wondering what on Earth we can do to stop it.

The need for fighting student unions could hardly be more urgent. So why do our unions spend so much time on glorified sausage sizzles?

Student unions and radical politics

Students have always been involved in politics and activism, but it was in the 1960s with the anti-Vietnam War movement that Australian university students burst onto the stage of history. The campuses became a major front in the battle against brutal imperialist war.

In 1971, a mass meeting of Melbourne University students declared their student union building a sanctuary for people evading conscription into the army—the so-called draft dodgers. The next year, Sydney University followed suit. Radicals at Monash University caused an uproar when they started to collect money for the “enemy” in Vietnam, the Communist-led National Liberation Front, in effect committing treason. In the political ferment, the notion that student unions should stay out of politics and focus instead on providing services seemed preposterous.

After the US and Australia withdrew in defeat from Vietnam and the anti-war movement ended, students remained a force to be reckoned with. In 1973, the peak student union body, the Australian Union of Students (AUS, precursor to today’s National Union of Students), declared itself in favour of “the building of a socialist Australia”. The AUS Women’s Department, established in 1975, became an important national forum for the women’s liberation movement. In his essential book It Can’t Happen Here, author Graham Hastings writes:

“The culture of vigorous theoretical debate inside the Women’s Department played a vital role in the development of Australian feminism in the second half of the seventies and papers produced by the Department were cited at international women’s conferences.”

Back when university was still free, the Liberal Fraser government tried twice to introduce fees for higher education, first in 1976 and then again in 1981. Both times it was defeated by national student union campaigns that brought thousands of students into the streets.

In the end, it was the Hawke Labor government that got the better of free education in 1986, introducing a $250 “administrative fee” that paved the way for the system we have today. But Hawke met serious resistance, including a coordinated boycott of the new student fees. Thousands of students across the country refused to pay and risked being unenrolled.

Their capacity to move students into militant action and beat back government attacks made the student unions major targets of conservative lawfare campaigns aimed at destroying them as a political force. Some of the Liberal Party’s most odious creatures—like Tony Abbott, who was president of the University of Sydney student union in 1979—cut their political teeth in these battles.

Young Liberals aren’t highly active in student unions these days, probably in part because, whenever more than two Young Liberals are put together in a room, misogyny happens. But in the 1970s and ’80s, Liberal students led major campaigns against unions taking left-wing political stances. Sometimes the Liberals formed an alliance with right-wing Labor students. Catholic crusader Tony Abbott complained in a student publication:

“When AUS champions the women’s movement; homosexual liberation; the anti-Uranium campaign and anti-Kerr [the governor-general who sacked Whitlam] campaign, it is moving beyond the scope of unionism.”

But among those who did support the existence of student unions—from small-l liberals to Labor students to revolutionary socialists—there were very different ideas about how unions should operate.

Socialists and radicals thought the unions’ strength lay in their ability to mobilise students to fight to improve their lot and combat oppression and injustice. It was under radical control that the AUS took up its call for a socialist Australia.

Moderates in the union argued that the focus should be on welfare provision and student services. This was considered the best way to keep university management on side. Polite advocacy on behalf of students behind closed doors was preferable to disruptive protest.

For many of these moderates, the union was their gateway to a political career, especially to high office inside the Labor Party. Labor is and has long been the dominant force in student union politics. Anthony Albanese got his start at the University of Sydney. His defence minister, Richard Marles, was the general secretary of the National Union of Students in 1989. The 1983 Australian Union of Students president was a Melbourne University student named Julia Gillard.

Student unions today

The decline of militant student unionism has tracked with the broader decline of radical politics and class struggle in Australia. The “service provision” model of student unionism has come to dominate—and with it, a generation of student union leaders for whom the unions are about beers, barbecues and building their careers.

This dovetails with a vision of student unions as partners of the corporate executives who run our universities, even as they push through major cuts to jobs and courses. For example, the student-led No Cuts at ANU campaign fighting against massive attacks at the Australian National University has received virtually no support from the ANU student union, ANUSA. The union accepted management’s dubious justifications for $250 million in cuts and, rather than fight, instead argued that the union should consult with management on how to minimise the impact of the cuts on students’ mental health.

So it’s little wonder that most students today don’t vote in student union elections. Years of moderate and “apolitical” student unionism have lowered expectations so much that barely anyone expects much from their student representatives anyway. This situation ultimately benefits moderate student union groups, who are much more comfortable in elections fought out through social networks and backroom deals rather than open political debate.

And while they often deliberately cultivate an “apolitical” image, student unions, like the ANUSA and many others, are still dominated by the Labor Party machine. Most unions are run by one faction or another of the ALP, particularly the right-wing Student Unity faction, which opposes free education and has an appalling record of reactionary political positions. The student unions are a perfect training ground for aspiring ALP operators to learn the grimy arts of factional warfare and using people to gain power. It’s hardly the sort of environment that might attract young left-wing students who want to fight the system.

Labor’s national dominance is also reflected in its control of the National Union of Students. This year, during the federal election, the NUS ran a barely concealed (and barely noticed) “vote Labor” campaign, telling students to “put the Liberals last”.

The ALP machine’s control over the unions puts it well to the right of many students, a large proportion of whom vote for the Greens, a party that supports free education and other progressive policies, such as climate change and Palestine.

The history of student unionism in Australia proves that this terrible state of affairs can be turned around. The state of the world today demands it. University students are a bigger chunk of the population than we ever have been—there are around 1.6 million of us in the country. We need student unions that can turn us into a force to be reckoned with and revive the best traditions of student activism: fighting against war, oppression and the corporatisation of our universities.