Conference discusses action against education cuts
This year’s National Union of Students (NUS) Education Conference (EdCon), held in Adelaide on 10-12 July, took place in the wake of the most successful national student demonstrations in almost a decade.
The conference represented an excellent opportunity to talk about the future of the campaign against the government’s $2.3 billion cuts to university funding. In particular, it was a chance to start planning for the 20 August national day of action (NDA), the next major action in the campaign.
Seventy Socialist Alternative student members went to the conference; most of the remaining 250 participants came from the two major factions of Labor students.
The argument that Socialist Alternative took to the conference was that the success of 14 May “budget day” NDA showed that students are angry about the cuts and that when NUS gives a lead, they are willing to fight. Moreover, the rallies showed that when we fight, we can have an impact.
The government’s initial confidence in implementing the cuts, with no apparent concern about resistance or backlash, has now wavered partly because of the campaign. Polls now show that the proposed cuts will be a political issue in the coming election. Both Rudd and newly appointed higher education minister Kim Carr have been pressured to announce that they will “reassess the cuts”.
Students need to apply more public pressure to the Labor government to make good on this rhetoric, measly as it is. We need to demand that they reverse the cuts. In the lead-up to the federal election, we need to send a forceful message to both the major parties that students will not quietly tolerate their attacks on education. This means more mobilisations of students in the streets.
Unfortunately, students from the Labor Party, who control NUS and who had a majority at EdCon, strongly resisted having any serious discussions about the anti-cuts campaign. They didn’t schedule any meaningful items on the campaign in the conference agenda. Instead, they attempted to turn a huge portion of the conference to the launch of an alternative campaign to “unlock the vote” for the federal election.
On one level, this is about harnessing free student labour for the Australian Electoral Commission. On a more cynical level, it is an attempt to use the resources of NUS to “unlock the vote” for the very political party that is proposing the cuts to our education system.
Under the leadership of Labor students, NUS has often helped vibrant, successful campaigns to an early grave because of an unwillingness to vigorously oppose Labor Party policy.
EdCon 2013 was saved from becoming just another gravedigger conference by activists determined to continue the campaign with a focus on the 20 August NDA. The agenda was amended to reflect this, and in the end there were many hours devoted to discussing the campaign.
We workshopped and voted for a series of demands for the NDA including: no cuts to funding; more funding; no caps on places; raise student welfare; reinstate start-up scholarships; more Indigenous graduates; and concession cards for international students.
We also discussed and decided upon a whole range of strategies for building the NDA, including extending student solidarity to the university staff union (NTEU), having campus actions to build for the central rallies, using every other NUS event and campaign to build for the NDA, calling on student unions to close for the day and pressuring vice-chancellors to send emails to every student encouraging them to attend the demonstration.
Despite these concrete measures, political differences about strategy that sprang up at the conference were far from resolved. Overall though, it is clear coming out of EdCon that the emphasis for student activists in semester two must be on maintaining the anti-cuts campaign.
Questions of strategy should continue to be debated in the context of the joint work carried out by all student activists in the campus and state-wide education action groups. To make 20 August as successful as it can be will take all of our efforts.
