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 five of twelve voting positions. 
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?

Tom Sullivan

Jasmine Duff

Student occupations bloom across Argentina

The University of Technology, Sydney, has banned students from handing out leaflets displaying the word “genocide”. Our university, with ties to weapons companies and Israeli institutions, wants to hide its complicity in Israel’s crimes. 
Last week, we were told that our leaflets for a Students for Palestine forum exposing UTS ties to genocide were a form of hate speech, and anyone handing out the leaflets could be subject to disciplinary action. When we pushed back, the university administration told us that we would be permitted to put up posters, but not hand out leaflets, as being given a piece of paper could be triggering for some students. We were informed that this directive had come directly from the vice-chancellor’s office.
Why? Because apparently the word “genocide”, a term used widely in international law, is a threat to the wellbeing of those who support Israel. The International Court of Justice has declared that Israel’s assault on Gaza is a plausible case of genocide. Many people who have read the genocide convention can see that what’s going on in Gaza fits the definition. 
UTS is using the ruse of “student safety” to limit free speech. Palestine solidarity activism might hurt the feelings of Zionists committed to defending Israel’s crimes against humanity. But this is no reason to restrict anti-war activity. It’s a natural side effect of standing against injustice that those who support the status quo will oppose you. 
The genuine threat to safety and wellbeing in the world is the genocidal apartheid state of Israel, and its backers in major institutions.

Yasmine Johnson

University bans mention of Israeli genocide

Students are occupying more than 70 different faculties of 30 public universities across Argentina. At least twelve faculties in Buenos Aires, the capital, are tomada (taken). The occupations stretch into remote areas in the far north and south of the country. 
The events mark a new stage in an ongoing fight against far-right President Javier Milei, elected last year promising mass privatisations and budget cuts to pay down government debt owed to the International Monetary Fund, while funnelling money to the rich through tax cuts. 
At the beginning of the year, Milei took a chainsaw to public university spending, cutting funding by 71 percent. This provoked mass protests involving 500,000 students in Buenos Aires and large numbers in the rest of the country. 
Last month, politicians voted to increase university workers’ salaries, the purchasing power of which has been undermined by rampant inflation—consumer prices have increased by more than 200 percent in twelve months. 
When Milei threatened to veto the bill, more than 1 million people marched to fight for its passage. But in early October, the president confirmed he would block it. That sparked a wave of protests and occupations by students across the country. 
Carlos Barros, a student activist at the University of Buenos Aires and a member of the Socialist Workers’ Movement, spoke to Red Flag’s Jasmine Duff about how things look on the ground.
--------------------
Why are students occupying?
Students decided to occupy universities because of the ongoing defunding of public education, which has been taking place for several years by all governments but has reached a new level with Milei’s administration. Universities don’t have sufficient funding to increase the salaries of professors and university staff (which are far behind inflation), or to improve the conditions of the buildings used by students. It could result in the eventual cutting of jobs and closure of universities altogether. 
The occupations started when Milei vetoed a bill to increase the funding for universities. The Congress approved the veto with the complicity of representatives from the Radical Civic Union [a liberal political party] and even some of the Peronists [the main political current in the country, dating from the rule of Juan Perón immediately after World War Two]. 
This enraged students all over the country and led to the calling of assemblies at universities. The first were at the faculty of Philosophy and Letters and the faculty of Psychology of the University of Buenos Aires, where hundreds of the students voted to occupy the faculties. In the following days, the occupations spread to other faculties and to universities in the rest of the country. We are witnessing the rise of a new Argentinean student movement, which many have said has been in decline for years. 
Videos circulating online show students taking mass votes, holding debates inside their faculties, and setting up desks on public roads to hold teach-ins. What’s it like inside a faculty occupation?
Basically, an occupation means that students take control over the university. We undertake all of the tasks of the administration of the university, including cleaning, organising lessons, providing food, security, etc. For each task, there are different commissions that students can join and participate in. 
Regarding security, there are always students at the door to stop the dean and other members of the faculty administration from entering the building. The staff of the faculty are only allowed to enter to clock on, but they cannot perform their usual tasks, since they are being performed by the students. Professors cannot hold lessons inside the building, save for a few exceptions. 
Every day, a soup kitchen provides food for the students at the occupation and people who may need it in the neighbourhood. The soup kitchen is supported through donations. Every night, we do activities to entertain ourselves and strengthen our sense of community. There are film screenings, live music, karaoke, games and obviously lots of political discussion. We’re having a great time. We sleep inside classrooms with sleeping bags or mattresses. It is kind of like camping. 
All lessons that students would normally have inside the faculty building are taken outside to the street. Students bring seats and blackboards outside and block the street. We want to continue studying while also protesting and bringing more visibility to this conflict. All lessons must be held outside, save for the cases where specific elements of a classroom are needed or for exams.
Socialist organisations are prominent in the struggle, but many student unions are run by political tendencies and parties that are part of Milei’s government. What role have these student leaders played in the movement, and what debates are taking place?
We are having many debates with the bureaucratic student union leaders and the grassroots of the students movement about how to advance the struggle for our right to public education. Most student unions are led by Peronists or Radicals. They are political forces of the capitalist regime. As such they try to avoid losing control over the student movement and demobilise it while posing as critical of Milei. 
They call for few or no assemblies at all in some cases, decide things without consulting the students or, worse, negotiate with the university authorities behind the students’ backs. 
The Socialist Workers’ Movement and the left are doing our best to radicalise the student movement, and to bring more independent students to participate in their respective assemblies so they can overcome the bureaucracies. 
We are also campaigning for inter-faculty and inter-university assemblies. And we are coordinating actions with the rest of the working-class sectors so we can all agree on a unified plan of struggle to stop this attack by the government.

Inside Argentina’s university occupations

More than 300 students joined a special general meeting for Palestine at the University of Western Australia (UWA) on 2 October, after Students for Palestine submitted a petition with more than 700 student signatures demanding the UWA Student Guild convene it.
Dozens of staff and others from the broader campus community joined the students. Attendance exceeded the venue’s capacity, causing some people to be turned away and forcing others to sit on the floor or in the aisles. 
Students voted overwhelmingly in favour of the motions supporting Palestine, with a small number of Israel supporters speaking and voting against. 
The meeting was one of the key events in the ongoing campaign organised by Students for Palestine to pressure the university to cut its ties with Israel and end its complicity in the Gaza genocide. 
“The ties between the university and Israel are substantial”, recently elected Guild Councillor and Socialist Alternative member Finn Penter told Red Flag. “UWA leads a project that has ‘defence applications’ with L3Harris, a weapons company which supplies over 1600 components for F-35 fighter planes used by Israel. The university also has an exchange program with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem—which has a campus situated on Occupied Palestinian Territory—and an incoming Chancellor who is staunchly pro-Israel. We want our university to help people, the environment and society—not to help Israel’s genocide in Palestine.” 
Students also voted to call for a free Palestine “from the river to sea” and for an end to the genocide. Before this meeting, the UWA Student Guild, which is dominated by a faction of moderate student independents called Spark, had not taken a clear stand against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The previous year’s Guild Council initially responded to Israel’s attacks on Gaza in late 2023 by moving a motion that simply opposed violence in the “ongoing conflict”. This was followed by another motion passed in May, which condemned “the recent military assault in Rafah” but did not name Israel as the perpetrator.
“It’s a huge shift for the position of the Guild”, Danica Rachel, who chaired a snap rally after the meeting, told Red Flag. “What the Guild has said up to this point has been mealy-mouthed and frankly pathetic. But thanks to the SGM, the Guild can finally take a clear position in favour of Palestinian liberation, with equal rights for all from the river to the sea.” 
Credit for the meeting goes to the socialists, activists and left-wing students who connected with and mobilised the considerable sympathy for Palestine and opposition to Israel among students. 
In the week leading up to the meeting, Israel began its bombing campaign in Lebanon, raising the possibility of regional war. Student activists felt it was crucial to respond to this. They moved an extra motion without notice to “condemn Israel for its drive to war in the Middle East” and to identify “Israel [as] the clear aggressor in the region”. The motion passed to roaring applause. 
In the last twelve months, student activism has exploded in solidarity with Palestine around the world and across the country. With this latest mass meeting, UWA students have decisively joined this movement.

Alevine Magila

Hundreds vote against genocide and war at the University of Western Australia

“Resembled a Hitler Youth rally”. Those are the slanderous words that Executive Council of Australian Jewry Deputy President Robert Goot chose to describe the 500-strong student general meeting held by Students for Palestine at the University of New South Wales on 25 September.
Quoted in the Australian last week, Goot’s comment adds another salvo to the barrage of attacks on the student-led Palestine solidarity movement, levelled under the pretext of “combating antisemitism” on campuses.
It was a strange sort of “Hitler Youth rally”, where half the speaking list was Jewish, and the vast majority of attendees voted against a genocide. Two of those Jewish speakers, UNSW associate professor Dr Peter Slezak and Students for Palestine member Milo Riggs, spoke in favour of the motion to stand for a Free Palestine and demand that UNSW sever its ties to weapons companies.
For all the howling about a climate of fear prevailing on campus for Jewish students, and the supposedly Nazi-like nature of Palestine activism, seventeen pro-Israel students attended the meeting draped in Israeli flags and holding a banner that said “Students Supporting Israel”. They were able to participate in the meeting and make their case—they were not harassed or silenced. 
Comments like Goot’s trivialise one of the worst crimes against humanity ever committed. The idea that hundreds of students gathering to vote against genocide and for peace is anything like a rally of Nazis calling for the murder of millions of Jews is beyond offensive and patently absurd. It’s a cynical strategy to deflect criticism of Israel’s atrocities—using the legacy of one genocide to justify another.
Thousands of students across Australia have mobilised because they have watched as Israeli leaders describe Palestinians as “human animals”, pledge to “raze Gaza to the ground”, and then proceed to obliterate human life and vital infrastructure in the Gaza strip. Yet in Australia today, if you attend a mass meeting to register your opposition to this unfolding genocide, it is completely acceptable for a public figure such as Goot to compare you to a Nazi and demand retribution. This will then be published in a major news publication such as the Australian without any challenge from journalists.
Goot was particularly upset by the fact that meeting attendees applauded Dr Slezak’s comment that “Jews should feel uncomfortable. It’s our duty to make them uncomfortable”. The Australian makes out like Dr Slezak was saying Jewish people should be made to feel uncomfortable simply for being Jewish. That couldn’t be further from the truth. 
His point, wilfully taken out of context, was an important one. Israel purports to act in the interests of all Jews, and many pro-Israel Jewish organisations actively promote this idea. But growing number of Jews feel uncomfortable about the crimes Israel is committing in Gaza in their name, and they are right to feel this way. And it is understandable then that they appeal to other Jews to resist this. As Dr Slezak pointed out, this is precisely why there is now a growing constituency of Jewish people who have shunned the lie that Judaism and Israel are synonymous and joined the movement for Palestine.
The foundational Zionist idea—that the only decent response to the Holocaust is to unconditionally defend Israel—is in tatters. In fact, it’s the brutal reality of the genocide in Gaza that has driven many progressive Jews, who know all too well what a genocide looks like, to speak out against Israel. Imploring students to vote in support of Palestine, Riggs, a Jewish student activist, argued that “never again”, a rallying call to prevent future Holocausts, “means never again for anybody”. 
The other part of Dr Slezak’s point about discomfort was to say that the oppressed are not obliged to account for the feelings of their oppressors. If wearing keffiyehs, calling for justice “from the river to the sea”, and mobilising against Israel on an unprecedented scale means that defenders of a genocidal state feel uncomfortable, then so be it. No such handwringing about discomfort is afforded to Israel’s actual victims, nor to the students of Palestinian and Lebanese background who are confronted by students draped in the Israeli flag—the symbol of their oppression. Nor is the discomfort of Russian students who might support the invasion of Ukraine, or Chinese students who might approve of human rights abuses in Xinjiang, afforded the same deference. And nor should it.
Incapable of making, let alone winning, a convincing argument amongst the student body, all that supporters of Israel can do is rile up university administrators and the political establishment to repress pro-Palestine students on bogus charges. While the universities, that are tied to the weapons industry that arms Israel, might relish this line of attack to put activists back in the box for daring to oppose them, they’re sorely mistaken if they think it will stop the movement.


As the campus meetings all over the country demonstrate, students know that the enablers of genocide are not just in Tel Aviv and Washington. They also sit in executive suites and chancelleries right here in Australia, counting their millions as the bombs rain down on children. Thousands of students have mobilised against them this year in Australia’s largest ever campus actions for Palestine. The days where slander like this would deter anyone from standing on the right side of history are over.

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