The People’s Inquiry into Campus Free Speech on Palestine is a grassroots initiative bringing together students, activists, academics and legal experts to assess the state of free speech on Australian university campuses in relation to Palestine. 
The People’s Inquiry has been initiated in response to the worsening climate of repression and censorship of campus-based Palestine activism.

Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi, who is a patron of the People’s Inquiry, announced the launch in a <a href="https://greens.org.au/news/media-release/peoples-inquiry-campus-free-speech-palestine-launches-today">joint statement</a> with members from the Australian Palestine Advocacy Network (APAN), the Jewish Council of Australia, Students for Palestine and the National Union of Students. 
“University campuses should be political spaces where students and staff are encouraged to speak out on issues of social, racial and environmental justice, not shut down”, wrote Senator Faruqi in the statement.
“The People’s Inquiry is a critical pushback by and for the people against the suppression of free speech and the criminalisation of solidarity with Palestinians”, APAN wrote. “Advocating for an end to Israel’s decades of oppression of Palestinians is not hate speech—it is a fight for justice and liberation.”
Just as they have in social justice movements of the past, university students have played a prominent role in the Palestine solidarity movement, marching in the streets, organising historic student general meetings and establishing protest encampments. This has, in turn, made university campuses sites of intensifying repression and censorship. Students and staff have found that even expressing support for the Palestinian people can attract threats of disciplinary action. 
The University of Sydney shut down a bake sale fundraiser for Gaza under its draconian Campus Access Policy, introduced in response to last year’s Gaza solidarity encampment. Three students at RMIT were told by the university that their keffiyehs posed a safety risk by provoking “anticipatory anxiety”—whatever that means.
A page on Monash University’s website titled “A proud history” reads: “In the 1970s the foundation campus at Clayton became the centre for student protest in Australia, and this philosophy of challenging the status quo permeated the University”. But nine Monash students who challenged the status quo of their university’s links with weapons companies at the Monash encampment were not even allowed to set foot on a central part of the campus, let alone permeate it. 
The People’s Inquiry aims to shine a light on these concerning attempts to curtail freedom of speech and assembly.
It will convene while the Labor-led joint Commission of Inquiry into Antisemitism at Australian Universities is piling pressure on universities to restrict political expression and protest activity. For instance, the commission has recommended that universities adopt a definition of antisemitism that “closely aligns” with the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition, which includes calling the state of Israel a “racist endeavour”. On campuses in the United States and United Kingdom, the definition has been used as justification to shut down criticism of Israel and brand it as hate speech. 
Similar scenes have played out in the United States, where university heads were hauled into Congressional committee hearings and grilled over their failure to crack down on pro-Palestine students swiftly and severely enough. Since returning to power, President Donald Trump has launched investigations into antisemitism at five US universities and has called for the deportation of foreign students who participate in pro-Palestine protests.
Students, university staff members and organisations are invited to make submissions via the inquiry’s <a href="https://www.palestineinquiry.com/">website</a>, where more information can be found. In particular, the inquiry is interested in submissions relating to the infringement or restriction of political communication or activity concerning Palestine on university campuses. The panel will include Lama Qasem, executive member of APAN; Professor Linda Briskman of Western Sydney University; and Professor Gill Boehringer, former head of the Law School of Macquarie University. 
James McVicar is the 2025 education officer for the National Union of Students and is a panelist for the People’s Inquiry into Campus Free Speech on Palestine.

James McVicar

People’s Inquiry into Campus Free Speech on Palestine launches

This year has experienced the largest campus mobilisations for Palestine in Australian history. Thousands of students have marched, walked out of class, organised occupations and taken part in mass meetings to demand an end to the horrors we’re witnessing in Gaza. 
We attend classes at universities with direct links to companies profiting from genocide. At times this fact confronts us starkly, for instance University of Queensland students who might, between classes, wander past the Boeing Research and Technology Centre—run by one of the world’s largest weapons manufacturers and a major supplier to Israel. Elsewhere, complicity comes in the form of hidden partnerships and investment portfolios. All of this has sparked justified outrage. 
The first major student actions were nationwide walkouts, organised by Students for Palestine. These started in November last year when thousands of high school and university students ditched class to rally in the city. More than 1,000 students occupied Melbourne Central mall, raising Palestinian flags and chanting to demand that the government drop its support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The strikes continued this year in every major city in Australia. Why should students attend class as usual when every school and university in Gaza has been shut down? 
The right-wing media and politicians campaigned vitriolically against us. After the first student strikes, the Daily Telegraph wheeled out a psychologist to tell us that we couldn’t possibly understand what was happening in Gaza: “Young people’s brains aren’t fully developed yet”. The Victorian and NSW premiers told students that if they wanted to understand and change the world, they should stay in school. We didn’t listen. 
Next came the wave of Gaza solidarity encampments. Brave students at Columbia University in New York fought the Biden administration, university management and the police to maintain their encampment. Students for Palestine activists at Sydney University followed suit, pitching tents and sparking a movement that spread across the country. This movement was about the crimes of the Israeli government. But it was also about the crimes of universities that produce the research for weapons companies that arm Israel’s genocide and partner with the Israeli institutions that produce the propaganda required to generate support for it. 
On every campus where an encampment sprung up, there was an outpouring of community support. Fresh meals, snacks and toiletries were never in short supply. But support didn’t come just in the form of provisions. It was also made visible by the many people who mobilised when our camps were under attack. At Monash University, a dozen pro-Israel thugs attacked the camp on the first night. When they returned the next week, 70 supporters turned out to defend the encampment. At Sydney University, a planned pro-Israel rally of 200 right-wingers was met with a Palestine solidarity demonstration of more than 500 people. 
At Deakin University, management demanded that students leave under threat of disciplinary action after only six days. Students held out and kept their encampment going strong until the end of the trimester. At ANU, management called the police on students, who were then surrounded by a human chain of security guards and threatened with mass arrests if they refused to pack up the encampment. Students held an impromptu meeting, deciding to defend their camp and calling out for community support. Solidarity won out—after a long stand-off, the police were forced to retreat. 
The camps sprung up across the world. In Sydney, we woke one morning to find a video of a young boy holding a sign, hand-painted on a piece of cardboard, reading: “Thank you for the students of University of Sydney. Your voice have reached Gaza”.
More university students got involved in the movement for Palestine in semester two, as student general meetings swept the country. Everywhere they happened, hundreds of students turned out to call on their universities to cut ties with weapons companies and Israeli institutions. 
The University of Queensland kicked things off. On the night of the meeting, the registration line stretched across the campus, and by the time the vote was called students had filled two huge lecture theatres. More than 1,500 students voted to support Palestine and demand the university cut ties with the major arms dealer Boeing. When the meeting finished, students marched to the chancellery in what was probably the biggest ever campus demonstration for Palestine. 
Other campuses followed suit. More than 800 students mobilised at Sydney University, and 300 at the University of Western Australia. Two hundred attended at the University of Adelaide despite the right-wing student union’s attempt to stop the meeting altogether. A similarly obstructionist student union leadership couldn’t prevent 600 students from showing up at Melbourne University. On many campuses, students had to defy management’s attempts to stifle organising attempts. At Queensland University of Technology, university administrators called the police, who told activists they would remove from campus anyone who didn’t fit into the official meeting rooms.
The huge numbers at these meetings demonstrated that support for Palestine has grown rapidly over the past year. But we still have a major fight on our hands. 
Universities have cracked down hard on pro-Palestine activism—dozens of students have faced university disciplinary proceedings due to their activism this year. Now, under pressure from the Australian government and Zionist organisations, vice-chancellors are introducing harsh new rules like the campus access policies at Melbourne and Sydney University. These limit free speech on campus by restricting students’ right to organise protests. We now have less freedom of expression at university than we have in the streets. At Sydney University, the recent Hodgkinson External Review, commissioned to determine how to better repress dissent, recommends banning lecture announcements, the displaying of banners and protesting inside. 
The past year has proved that students won’t give up easily. Gaza has shown us the lengths our government and universities will go to shut down opposition to their support for Israel during a genocide. That they feel compelled to repress the student movement shows us that we are having an impact. We won’t stop fighting for Palestine.

Yasmine Johnson

A year of student activism for Palestine

Sydney’s Condell Park High School recently banned a year twelve Palestinian student from his school formal for wearing a keffiyeh to his graduation ceremony. 
On the school’s website, the <a>principal’s message</a> reads: “We are proud of our diverse student population”. So proud that he is disciplining one of those students for displaying an item of immense cultural significance.
In an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald, the student said he was being punished for “making a political statement in a public school”. The Department of Education that ordered the keffiyeh ban and Condell Park administrators who enforced it are making a political statement of their own—that it’s not acceptable to express solidarity with those suffering a genocide, even if they’re one’s own family and friends. 
The ban caused outrage amongst students and staff at the school. High-schoolers and Uni Students for Palestine, with support from the affected student, called a protest outside Condell Park High on Tuesday, 26 November.
Noura, a Palestinian year twelve student and protest organiser, told Red Flag that she was protesting “to put pressure on the school to demand an apology for the student and let him go to his formal. He’s had to endure watching his family back home experience a genocide. He deserves to go to his formal wearing a keffiyeh”.
A year nine student at the rally said to Red Flag: “It feels amazing to be here! Everyone posted a photo online to say bring the keffiyehs, wear it on your bag. And if you get in trouble, don’t listen to them”. 
Eva, a year twelve student and activist with High School Students for Palestine who spoke at the rally, pointed out, “This is not the first time institutions are repressing support for Palestine. The NSW State Library security removed me for wearing a keffiyeh this year!”
School administrators attempted to deter people from protesting. They pulled students into meetings, and warned staff not to join the rally, ordering that the school would be under lockdown until 6:30pm. The affected student made a point of blaming the Department of Education, not the regular staff or students, who have no say in this and have been intimidated into silence. 
Despite these measures, the students were not cowed. The day before the rally, about a third of all senior school students wore keffiyehs on their bags in protest of the ban. More than 50 Palestine supporters joined the rally; as school finished, students flooded outside wearing keffiyehs and waving Palestinian flags. They held handwritten placards that read: “We all belong” and “Say no to racism”. Students riding the school bus chanted out the windows in support. 
But the Department of Education and Condell Park have doubled down. The affected student prepared a statement for the rally that said he had been told he could attend the formal only if he did not wear the keffiyeh, and that the school refused to apologise. Later, he was told that he must apologise in order to attend the formal (he refused). Dozens of students who wore keffiyehs to the event in solidarity with the student and Palestine had them confiscated at the door or were refused entry. 
Students made it clear that they will not be intimidated. They will continue to wear their keffiyehs with pride and speak up for Palestine.

Gina Elias

Condell Park High School students protest keffiyeh ban

One hundred and thirty-seven staff at the University of Wollongong are facing the sack by Christmas. According to information provided to the National Tertiary Education Union local branch, these sackings are the first of three rounds. To add insult to injury, the union was told that some staff will receive their letters on 20 December. 
On 8 November, students received an email from management announcing that 25 study disciplines were facing cuts under the “UOW Transformation” plan. These cuts are being forced through under the managerial leadership of Interim Vice-Chancellor John Dewar. The former chair of Universities Australia has a notorious track record of slashing jobs and streamlining courses, including sacking hundreds of staff at La Trobe University when the pandemic hit. Dewar also helped implement the “Melbourne model”, in which 96 undergraduate courses were reduced to just six when he was provost of Melbourne University in 2011.
The UOW Transformation plan stipulates that cuts will be made to entire study disciplines, such as cultural studies and human geography. Languages will no longer be offered in 2025, forcing an entire cohort of staff out of a job, and leaving students already enrolled in language courses in the lurch. Additionally, the university plans to reduce subject offerings and jobs in disciplines including history, maths, statistics, physics and engineering. 
These cuts are part of a longer-term plan to overhaul UOW’s degree structure. This overhaul, set to be implemented by 2026, will create a new type of “comprehensive” degree for non-accredited courses. The degree will be more generic and standardised, and follow an 8-8-8 subject structure: all students enrolled in a Bachelor of Arts will be required to study eight of the same core subjects, regardless of their chosen major and minor. This will limit the amount of specialist subjects the university needs to offer at any given time. Disturbingly, the document outlining the restructure flags a potential “no-major option” for degrees. The university is likely to cut professional staff numbers as part of this process, citing that the current degree structure is “complex for UOW staff to administer”. 
These attacks are part of a longer-term trend in the commodification of degrees and the corporatisation of universities. Scandalously, Dewar is a partner in consultancy firm KordaMentha, the same firm that has been awarded two contracts to advise the UOW in its slash and burn policies. Universities function like any other corporation, primarily interested in raising revenue, undermining staff pay and conditions, and gaining lucrative research partnerships. Citing a loss in revenue of $35 million less than forecast due to lower international student enrolments, management is attacking staff and students to boost margins. 
NTEU members held a rally to protest the cuts on 20 November to coincide with the university’s academic senate hearing. Student activists are planning to fight the cuts into the new year.
Follow @fight_uow_cuts on Instagram to get involved in the campaign.

Megan Guy

University of Wollongong to sack 137 staff by Christmas

Swinburne University in Melbourne’s east has recently imposed shocking new measures to restrict the religious freedoms of Muslim students and community members on campus.
It began by enforcing swipe card access to the prayer room, restricting access to many who make use of the facility. The closest mosque is more than ten kilometres from Hawthorn, so for years local residents have gone to Swinburne to pray. Most other areas of campus, such as the library and student lounge, remain accessible to the public.
Alarms were installed on the prayer room doors to prevent them from being propped open. To escalate even further, the university sent in campus security to guard the entrance and then enter the room during prayers to check IDs.
Most insultingly, the university removed the Islamic Society’s chosen prayer leader and replaced them with its own hand-picked Imam, to run the large Friday payer. This was done with little to no consultation. As the Islamic Society pointed out in a statement, no other club or society on campus is subject to university appointment of their leaders or speakers.
Multiple Muslim students at Swinburne told Red Flag they believed the university’s crackdown on prayer room access, and imposition of the Imam, was at least partly because the student-led Friday prayers regularly discuss Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people.
Things came to a head at a Friday prayer in October, when students prevented the university-appointed Imam from taking over and leading the prayer. The University responded by sending in security guards. Then, in a major crackdown, it announced that the prayer room would be closed for Friday prayers until students accepted the university-appointed Imam. The university also opened investigations into student prayer leaders.
Students defied this attack, holding protest-prayers outdoors on two consecutive Fridays that were attended by more than 200 students, staff and community members. Speakers at the prayers highlighted the rise in Islamophobia on campus and in broader society, spoke about links to the persecution of Muslims overseas and asserted the basic right of students to control their own affairs.
Thanks in part to pressure from the students, including a petition with hundreds of signatures, the university has since allowed use of the prayer room. However, restrictive swipe card access and surveillance from campus security remain.
These moves against the Muslim community are just one example of <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/universities-are-repressing-palestine-solidarity-activism">the repressive climate on university campuses today</a>. Swinburne is among the most repressive campuses in the country, calling the police against socialist and Palestine activists three times this year for the supposed crime of leafleting on campus without permission. Across the country, universities are responding to pro-Palestine activism with new restrictions on students’ rights. These attacks aren’t aimed exclusively at protest actions, but against pro-Palestine speech in general.

James Gallagher

Swinburne University cracks down on Muslim students’ rights

Left-wing activists have achieved a big victory in the recent Student Representative Council elections at the University of New South Wales. Activists from the Socialist Alternative and Students for Palestine clubs contested the election together as Left Action—Free Palestine, competing against a crowded field of Labor, Liberal and moderate independent students. Left Action candidates won seven of the twelve undergraduate representative positions, as well as receiving more than 60 percent of the vote for every office bearer position they contested, including the Education, Environment and Welfare offices, who each received more than 3,000 votes. 
The Liberal Party-backed ticket failed to secure a single position, and the Labor affiliated groups who held a majority of the council in 2024 were reduced to just four of twelve voting positions and a single office bearer. 
This victory comes off the back of the student general meeting for Palestine held in September, in which more than 600 students voted for UNSW to divest from weapons companies and to support a free Palestine. Members of the Palestine solidarity campaign are a minority of the student body, but after a year of activism, this group has grown into an active, confident and driven force on the campus. 
Palestine was not the only issue that drove students to vote for Left Action. Arguments for a free and fully funded higher education sector, and university subsidisation of food and student accommodation struck a chord with many students who have been affected by Sydney’s skyrocketing rents and cost-of-living crisis. 
One factor that likely impacted the outcome was that the Labor campaign split prior to the election. This was, at least in part, because the majority faction was trying to drive the socialist left out of the SRC, according to individuals involved in the split. Their plan was to work alongside the Liberals to mobilise a right-wing college vote. In the end, the right-wing vote failed to substantially grow, while the left’s vote doubled. 
This victory for the left comes at an important time for student unionism. Like many universities around the country, UNSW has begun cracking down on Palestine activism, threatening to discipline students and <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/palestine-solidarity-club-suspended-at-unsw">suspending the Students for Palestine club</a>. Also, vice-chancellors are gearing up for cutbacks to staff and courses in the coming months. Using the student council’s resources to challenge these attacks and continue to fight for Palestine will be essential in the year ahead.

Jamie Tyers

UNSW student elections: left wins big

If you walked past Mark McGowan, former premier of Western Australia, and gave him a serve for his role in locking up Indigenous children, you would probably feel pretty good about yourself. If it was filmed and put online, you might even end up in a segment on the Project. If you happened to do it at Curtin University in Western Australia, you’d probably be suspended. This is what happened to a student at Curtin last month, one of many students across the country facing discipline over justified acts of protest. 
<a>Red Flag has covered</a> the increased repression on campuses in the wake of the Gaza solidarity encampments. In response to the Palestine solidarity movement, universities changed their policies and student charters to make it even harder to speak out against the genocide in Gaza. We are now seeing the impact of these changes, as well as the political impact of the parliamentary inquiry into antisemitism on campuses. The historic student general meetings (SGM), in which thousands of students nationwide have voted in solidarity with Palestine, have also kicked off a new wave of repression. 
There are dozens of examples of universities repressing pro-Palestine activism in just the last few months. Here are a few of them. The Students for Palestine club at the University of New South Wales has been suspended in the wake of the SGM. The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology has launched disciplinary proceedings against three students for their participation in a political meeting at that campus. The University of Sydney shut down a bake sale raising funds for Gazans and has brought misconduct charges against students for organising a Palestine solidarity protest on campus, including an anti-Zionist Jewish student. Melbourne University is hunting down students who occupied the office of a pro-Israel lecturer. The vice-chancellor interfered in the student union elections at the University of Technology Sydney to ban mention of the word “genocide”. And at the Australian National University, the spending of elected student union officers is being audited because they promoted Palestine solidarity. Not only students: two academics at the University of Sydney are being accused of racial vilification over their support for Palestine. 
Up and down the country, space for student activism—almost a rite of passage for young people—is narrowing, and those who dare to speak out against the genocide in Gaza are being dragged through misconduct hearings. It’s difficult to grasp the full scale of this, as many universities impose confidentiality clauses that prevent students from speaking publicly about their repression.
The political backdrop for these attacks is a hysterical campaign by the mainstream media, the Labor government, the Liberals and Zionist organisations against Palestine solidarity activism. This resulted, among other things, in a Senate committee about a supposed wave of antisemitism on campuses. Many of the submissions to the committee made the well-rehearsed argument that any criticism of Israel amounts to a racist attack on Jewish people. The purpose here is to accuse pro-Palestine activists of being antisemites who must be stopped.
University of Sydney vice-chancellor Mark Scott in particular was accused of not doing enough to suppress this supposed problem. Submissions and commentators, including opposition leader Peter Dutton, attacked him for not instantly shutting down the Gaza solidarity encampment on his campus. Jillian Segal, the recently appointed special envoy to combat antisemitism, wrote a submission to the Senate hearing which stated that there is a “pervasive hatred” of Jewish people at the University of Sydney, and that antisemitism is an “embedded” part of university culture. Her accusation is based on a few interviews with Jewish staff and students, all of whom support Israel and are opposed to the anti-war movement. In the months after the campaign against Scott began, the university launched a witch-hunt against known Palestine solidarity activists.
In the initial months of Israel’s war on Gaza, there was a more liberal approach on the campuses. Even when the solidarity encampments were established, most universities chose not to shut them down or bring in the cops, as we saw in the United States. Scott even said he wouldn’t ban political expression and respected the right of students to protest. But a hardline approach has since been adopted by the administrations, who have fallen into line with the anti-Palestine campaign.
Universities are some of the country’s largest institutions that help to manufacture the ideological material of Australian society, as well as the literal material of weapons research in partnership with weapons companies and other imperialist nations like the United States and Israel. This is all far more important to administrations than academic freedom and open political expression. Those who run the universities form part of Australia’s elite: they come from it, and they contribute to it. For instance, RMIT vice-chancellor Alec Cameron is a long-term member of the ultra-conservative, boys-only, Australian Club. Sydney University’s chancellor, Belinda Hutchinson, sits on the board of Thales Australia, a major weapons manufacturer. Many vice-chancellors earn more than a million dollars a year. 
So when a hegemonic political line is established by the Australian elite, university management will toe it. There is a common view of universities as oases of open expression, where ideas flow freely, common sense is challenged, and diversity and debate flourish. This is much overstated. Our universities are embedded in Australian capitalism; they are economically and ideologically beholden to it. Ideas deemed too dangerous to the status quo have historically been repressed.
The Australian establishment ardently backs Israel, regardless of the atrocities it commits, because it is a loyal member of the Western imperialist bloc. The Palestine solidarity movement of the last year has threatened the ideological myth of Israel as a defender of democracy and freedom. The federal and state governments, as well as the billionaire-backed mainstream media, have denounced the movement from day one. Universities, which can feel the pressure of upholding their liberal image, took a looser stance to begin with. But now they have fallen into line.
The excuses that universities have used to justify the repression in recent months are astonishing. For instance, in suspending the Students for Palestine club at UNSW, Arc, the body that oversees clubs and student life, alleged that the mere presence of pro-Palestine posters caused damage to the “psychosocial safety” of the university community. It’s pretty jarring to anyone who has watched footage of dead Gazan babies being pulled from bombed buildings to hear that putting up posters advertising a student meeting is a threat to “psychosocial safety”.
Student activists at the UTS in Sydney have also apparently harmed the psyches of staff and students by handing out a leaflet for an event titled “exposing UTS ties to genocide”. Students were informed by security that the vice-chancellor said the use of the word would be “triggering”. 
At RMIT, students who made use of an empty lecture theatre for a political meeting after a Palestine solidarity rally received disciplinary hearing notices that insinuate the students were celebrating terrorist attacks on Israel. They imply that the mere sight of a keffiyeh caused anxiety and threatened the wellbeing of staff and students. 
The phrase “From the river to the sea” has been banned by multiple universities, including ANU, where students were warned that the phrase was “harmful”, and at Monash, where banners and placards with the phrase were seized. Monash has also disciplined two students for putting up pro-Palestine stickers—one was dragged out of class by security. 
As mentioned, some universities have altered their campus policy guidelines to restrict protests by demanding that students first seek approval from management. While they refuse to spell it out, the motive for this is to shut down pro-Palestine activism. For instance, at Sydney University, the new Campus Access Policy has been used only to shut down Palestine-related events, such as a bake sale, or discipline students who organised a Palestine rally. Other non-Palestine-related events that broke the new guidelines have not been touched. 
RMIT is altering its “Property Management Procedure” and the “Health, Safety and Wellbeing Policy”. The changes will give unilateral power to the director of Property Services to bar room bookings or “protest or protest related activity” that might cause “financial or reputational” damage to the university. Like the Campus Access Policy, it also prohibits camping—a clear reference to the encampments. 
According to an anonymous staff member who works in the policy department, an earlier draft of the policy changes was so restrictive and undemocratic that the policy team rebelled against the directives of management, which was forced to revise the policy. This staff member also reported that the emails about the policy included “Palestine protests” in the subject line. 
Last month, Swinburne University in Melbourne’s inner east made the extraordinary move to remove the Islamic Student Society’s chosen prayer leader and replace them with a university-appointed chaplain, and stationed guards at the entrance to the prayer rooms to bar those without a student card. Students feel that this act of religious repression happened because the students frequently make references to Palestinian oppression in their prayers. 
It’s a terrible precedent that a university can interfere with students’ religious freedoms. And it highlights the real social problem in the wake of Israel’s genocide in Gaza: the ramping up of Islamophobia. Jewish students have not had their prayers or events shut down by any university across the country. There has been no enquiry into the impacts of the war on Muslim students. This again speaks to the selective outrage and enforcement of restrictions by university administrations. 
Universities frequently celebrate the struggles of the past. Students learn about the movements against the Vietnam War and South African apartheid in history degrees. Universities use photos of protests from the ’70s and ’80s in their advertising material to future students. UNSW proudly displays a bronze statue of Nelson Mandela. But university managements opposed those movements when they were happening, and they are repressing the students who are confronting the modern equivalents. 
The absurdity at the heart of this issue is that the students and staff who are facing repression are those calling simply for peace, for an end to the war. Yet they are being suspended, expelled, harassed and intimidated. Some staff may even lose their jobs for speaking up for Palestine. The universities are telling us that right is wrong and wrong is right. This is the reality of campus life for socially progressive students and staff. It’s a reality that must be challenged.

Anneke Demanuele

Universities are repressing Palestine solidarity activism

The Students for Palestine club at the University of New South Wales has been suspended. This is just the latest in a wave of attacks on Palestine solidarity activists across the country.
Arc, the body that oversees clubs and student life at UNSW, accused the Students for Palestine club of breaching campus policy by putting up posters, hanging banners, running stalls without bookings and allegedly harassing students by leafleting and making announcements in lectures. While these activities are simply the bread and butter of building any sort of activist life on campus, Arc outrageously claims that they harm the “psychosocial safety” of students. 
In a meeting with club members, Arc representatives objected to our use of the word genocide in promotional material or protest speeches, suggesting that it may be offensive to some students. This is like saying it would have been wrong to criticise apartheid South Africa in the 1980s because students who supported that regime would find it upsetting. 
The suspension follows a historic student general meeting organised by Students for Palestine, which was the largest Palestine solidarity event ever to take place at UNSW. More than 600 students voted to oppose the university’s ties to weapons companies and the genocide in Gaza. 
The suspension will be reviewed in January 2025 but is unlikely to be lifted as Arc has stated that more allegations against the club are still being investigated. It seems likely that university management played a hand in the suspension. Disciplinary proceedings were initiated by Arc shortly after management sent an email alerting students and staff to alleged breaches of the student code of conduct at the student general meeting. Arc staff have also indicated to us that university executives have taken an interest in the suspension case. 
This is an attack on the ability of students to organise a Palestine solidarity campaign on campus. Recently, the university banned a speak-out to commemorate one year of the genocide in Gaza. Despite this, students at UNSW are determined to continue the fight to oppose our university’s ties to this genocide. No matter what the university accuses us of, we know we are on the right side of history—and we will not be silenced.

Emma Terry

Palestine solidarity club suspended at UNSW

The university management at RMIT in Melbourne has introduced a policy to prevent or severely limit campus protests, meetings and political organising. 
The move comes after a year of Palestine solidarity activism, during which students demanded that the university cut economic ties with Israel and close the Sir Lawrence Wackett Centre, at which research for weapons companies is conducted.
One aspect of the policy is restricting the use of classrooms. No room may be booked for “protest or protest-related activity”. Events likely to put RMIT’s “financial or repetitional” risk will have their bookings revoked. This applies to “any other events or activities as required”—an open-ended clause allowing management to shut down whatever they want.
The policy is a blatant attack against Students for Palestine and socialists, but could have wider implications.
Will pointing out RMIT’s ties to weapons companies count as causing reputational damage? What about teachers who strike or protest for better pay and working conditions—will they be denied the right to meeting spaces to discuss their demands?
Another clause in the policy bans sleeping or camping on campus—a clear response to the Gaza Solidarity Camp, which RMIT students ran for a month earlier this year. 
Students will also not be allowed to “set up or maintain a structure”. What counts as a structure is unclear, but it might even include information stalls commonly used to collect signatures on petitions and display leaflets. 
This policy has not been made official, but management has started intimidation tactics. When the Socialist Alternative Club hosted a public meeting about events in Palestine over the last year, RMIT attempted to make us pay for security.
We refused, but management still dispatched a security guard to wait for us in the meeting room. The guard claimed to be there “for our protection,” but it was a clear attempt to intimidate. A guard was also watching the lifts near the room, and two more guards stood at the stairs—they turned away a non-student who wanted to attend the meeting. 
While RMIT student activists have stood firm in the face of the intimidation, the pressure will likely mount next year. 
Attacks on student organising across Australia are part of a broader crackdown on Palestine solidarity activism. We must keep the solidarity movement alive—and we will need to build our numbers to stand against the intimidation.

Auley Ryan

Attacks on political organising spread to RMIT

The same scene is playing out in more than 70 university campuses across Argentina: students fill gymnasiums, outdoor spaces, lecture theatres and streets. They sit, stand, drape themselves, drink maté, a herbal tea. They’re occupying their universities, and they’re planning a fight. “The students have awoken”, hospital worker and socialist Cesar Latorre told Red Flag via WhatsApp.
In February, far-right President Javier Milei cut university funding by 71 percent. Students responded with mass protests, including a million-strong march in April. In early October, Congress passed a bill to increase funding for state universities and to raise staff salaries to deal with the effects of inflation, which reached an annual rate of 236 percent in August and left many university staff impoverished. Milei threatened to block the bill, so students and staff held another set of nationwide mass rallies to defend it on 2 October. In the early hours of the following day, Milei vetoed the bill.
And so, on 5 October, at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) Philosophy and Letters campus, students crowded around Ari, a young socialist holding a microphone. “They tell us we need to take the money from someone else”, she said. Milei has insisted that if universities want proper funding, Congress will have to take it from other sections of the budget, likely pension or welfare payments.
“If you want to know, in the opinion of the students, and of the teachers, where the money will come from for the increase in the budget for universities”, Ari declared, “we have to take it from the IMF, the church and the multinationals!” The crowd of students and teachers roared.
The occupations began in early October in the Philosophy and Letters faculty and the Psychology faculty of the UBA. The banners hanging from the buildings read, in big black letters, “tomada”, meaning “taken”. It’s more apt than “occupied”, because what the students are doing goes beyond a conventional sit-in. They’ve taken over the running of the faculties, establishing committees to take responsibility for cleaning, security, holding lessons and organising food.
During the day, they bring in supportive teachers to give lessons in the street, blocking off roads with their desks. Staff are allowed to clock in for their shifts (so that they get paid) but are promptly sent home. Senior staff, like the faculty deans, are banned altogether. As it gets dark, crowds move to the thrum of street drums, and barbecue smoke lingers.
When Milei vetoed the bill, students in Buenos Aires convened mass assemblies and debated what to do. They overwhelmingly voted to “take” despite their lack of experience in doing it: the last occupations of this scale happened in 2018. Socialist groups have a significant presence at universities nationwide, leading the argument for occupying alongside independent left-wing students. Now, they’re trying to draw more unaligned students into the committees and leadership of the occupations.
Student unions across Argentina are run by students from right-wing political traditions. In many places, the student union leaders argued against occupations while attempting to portray themselves as oppositional to Milei. Some of these leaders are Peronists, a nationalist political current that dominates the trade unions and ran the government before Milei came to office, presiding over an inflation crisis and austerity for workers.
The most significant political group in the student unions is the Radical Civic Union, a traditional centre-right party. But despite the weight of these groups in official student politics, videos posted online show vote after vote being carried nearly unanimously for occupying, from Buenos Aires to the remote provinces, with glee on the students’ faces and cheers filling the gymnasiums.
Universities are one of Milei’s favourite punching bags for his right-wing culture war rhetoric. In a speech to the World Economic Forum earlier this year, he said that public education is where “leftist educational curricula proliferate, openly anti-capitalist and anti-liberal, in a country where what is needed is more capitalism and more freedom”.
His attack on public education stems partly from his ideological opposition to universities, but more from his desire to slash and burn as many public services as possible—from hospitals to airlines, oil refineries to cinemas. In fact, at the same time as the students were marching in defence of the Congress-approved education bill, Milei was <a href="https://twitter.com/wolfofwallst/status/1841516226272784774">meeting</a>
with Jordan Belfort, the criminal stockbroker turned free market culture warrior whose fall from grace was depicted in the film The Wolf of Wall Street.
Milei has systematically tried to divide the population and turn them against each other to dampen the prospects of a fight against his government. He’s tried to turn workers and middle-class people against the poor by complaining that they don’t work hard enough to deserve welfare benefits.
He has attacked state employees by using the “drain the swamp” rhetoric of former US President Donald Trump, painting public services and those who administer them as a bloated bureaucracy stealing from the country.
When cutting funding to the arts, he painted them as luxuries undeserving of public support. Now, he’s portraying universities as elite institutions that serve “no-one but the children of the rich and those of the upper-middle class”.
It isn’t true. According to economist Daniel Schteingart, Argentina’s university population has <a href="https://twitter.com/danyscht">increased</a>
from just 275,000 in 1970 to nearly 4 million today, and the expansion of higher education has overwhelmingly benefited the working class. For example, at the National University of La Matanza, in the outer suburbs of Buenos Aires, around 80 percent of students are the first generation in their families to attend university, according to the vice-chancellor.
Argentina’s working class remains highly organised compared to most other countries, with a unionisation rate of around 40 percent for formal workers. This, along with a considerable presence of socialists in some important unions, helped to push union officials into calling two general strikes in January and May. Those strikes defeated some of the harshest aspects of Milei’s program, including the privatisation of the state airline and the state oil company.
But since then, the General Confederation of Workers (CGT), Argentina’s main union body, has refused to call a third general strike. The CGT is linked to the centre-right Peronist party. Milei’s draconian attacks on the right to unionise, compulsory union membership and dues, and union control over pension funds threaten the social position of top CGT officials. Yet the CGT officials prefer to negotiate with the government while Milei’s attacks devastate workers’ living standards.
The poverty rate is now at a two-decade high of 53 percent. Substantial public spending cuts have slowed the rate of consumer price inflation but also caused a recession. In addition to Milei’s mass lay-offs in the public sector, there have been huge job cuts in the private sector. Without the call for a third general strike, which could unite the union movement, resistance has become increasingly restricted to the better organised sections of the working class like healthcare workers, public sector employees, teachers and aviation workers.
The failure of the CGT to continue a serious fight has emboldened Milei. He sees an opportunity to privatise industries he failed to sell immediately after taking office. For example, the important victory that the first two general strikes achieved in stopping the privatisation of Aerolineas Argentinas is now at risk of being undone. Aviation workers are well organised and have held several days of strike action, causing major disruption to the economy.
In a significant act of solidarity, the Brazilian aviation workers’ union declared that it would not allow its members to operate domestic Argentine flights. And on 30 October, broader layers of transport workers will hold a 24-hour national strike. This will be supported by a 36-hour national public sector strike scheduled to start the day before and carry over into the next.
There has been an ebb in action since the general strike in May. But the students have provided a new spark to the broader movement and have pulled university workers into the fight. On 21 October, university workers began a 48-hour national strike. Workers in one of the big university unions voted to extend the 48-hour strike to an entire week and said that supporting the student movement was one of the main reasons for extending the strike. And while a recent 24-hour strike was passive and didn’t include a march, the week-long strike will include open, public classes held in the streets.
Student assemblies in the streets outside university buildings will decide the future of the occupations over the coming weeks. Can they sustain the movement into November—and will workers’ strikes spread?

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