Talk presented in Workshop 8: Universities for the rich - the privatisation of Australia's Higher Education sector, at the Now We The People conference, University of Technology, Sydney, 24.8.03

Anna York

The main aspects of the Nelson Review for students are the debt and the fees. This is not the first step, but way down the path of deregulation of university fees. This is the big fat arse end of the wedge, this is where it is happening.

The whole notion that the funding for universities will not come from the government or the community but from the students is obviously linked to this ideology that education is an individual benefit, not a community benefit. As graduates we somehow leave university with this license to earn a million dollars and so we owe it to the government to pay this money back. We all know this is not the case. Apart from the fact that fees are a deterrent at the very beginning, university students don't go off and earn a million dollars. Yes, lawyers and doctors and other high paid professions do graduate from universities, but so do social workers, teachers, and university academics. And not all lawyers are corporate scum.

University graduates have two ways of paying for their tuition at the moment - either through HECS, a deferred fee of about one-third of the cost, with the government paying two-thirds, and you pay after graduation through the tax system. The second way, introduced in 1996, is the full upfront fee, by which you pay at the start of each year the full cost of the degree. In return you get into university with a lower entrance mark. Basically you buy your place in the university.

When the government introduced this system they assured us that this gap in marks for university entrance would never go above five. At the University of NSW there are now courses where students are paying their way into courses with a gap of up to 25 marks lower than students who can't afford to pay up front fees. This is the scheme that they will increase, to make up to 50 per cent of students in a course full up-front fee paying students.

If you pay HECS up front, you can get a discount.There is no interest charged on HECS at present. But the new scheme will charge interest on loans up to $50,000. It will be the current inflation rate plus 3.5 per cent.
NUS argues that this new loans and full fee scheme will have a double impact. Those who get the high marks who will be able to get the HECS places are those who went to the private schools. Statistically those private schools get over 90 in their entrance ranking. Those who didn't, who mostly get 80 to 85 points in their entrance ranking, mostly go to public schools, will have to cough up the full fees to go to university.
In fact, this is not an opportunity for rich kids to buy their way into university. It is a double hit on those kids that don't have the money. Their families will have to take out loans to buy into this scheme.

Universities now have a discretion to use full fee places for up 25 per cent of nay course. In reality, only 2-3 per cent of domestic students are taking up that option. But with the introduction of a loans scheme, and increasing the full fee paying places to 50 per cent, the government is trying to herd students into that scheme. It is actually very unpopular. It depends on the course. Sydney University Vet Science and Dentistry pretty much operate on up front domestic fee students. It depends on the university. The expansion of this scheme is aimed at shepherding students into this system.

That is what we are fighting at the student level. We are fighting while the government is repeatedly attacking us for our student representation and unionism. In 1999, we fought the federal government effort to introduce voluntary student unionism. We won that campaign resoundingly. It is no coincidence that the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission brought us to court at the beginning of 2003 and tried to tell NUS and student unions around the country that we were breaching the Trade Practices Act by collecting fees off students.

I spend all of last week at the University of Western Sydney fighting the administration so that they would release their fees to the student organisation which were going into involuntary administration. This university administration, UTS, has withheld student association fees. There are students down in the Association office right now trying to prepare for the demonstration we are going to have on Wednesday with no photocopier, no toner, no phones - because the university has withheld their fees. The week before I was at Macquarie University fighting their administration to release their fees. We are crippled. If student unions don't receive their fees released, they cannot pass on their affiliation fees to the National Union of Students.

We are fighting these attacks at the same time that these Nelson Review 'reforms' are being introduced. I disagree that the time for this debate is coming. The time is now. This is not the thin edge of the wedge, it is the fat edge of the wedge.

If this end point on the road to deregulation happens now, it is going to be very difficult to reverse in the future. If universities have their main source of revenue form students. If the mindset that education is an individual benefit is introduced, then we lose the idea that it is a community benefit, and we lose the concept that it is up tot he entire community to fund education, then we are in big trouble.

We are in a crisis now.
We saw the polls after budget night, where about 80 per cent of those polled said they would be willing to pay more tax to fund a public education system. UWS did their own polling last week, which showed that about 70 per cent of Western Sydney residents think that UWS is important for their community and would be willing to fight for it.
People want a quality public education system. It is a question of how we get out there and get them to fight for it. We can't sit around and wait for the debate to come up in the public discourse, it has to happen right now.

How do we build better alliances between the unions, the students and the community to create a stronger voice?

How do we tie that into other social justice fights, like the Medicare Alliance campaign for public health?

We don't want to fight them for space in the public discourse. We want don't want to push the Medicare people out of the front page so that we can get our story up there. Similarly, we had to struggle at the start of the year with the peace movement. The day that students had their first big rally happened to be the day that Baghdad fell. Again, we lost a good three or four months of that public discourse about the importance of public education. How do we tie into those other movements at a time when the Bill is going to come into the lower house in the next session, in September? It could be voted on by the end of the year.

There are little alliances forming. There is a strong commitment in the student movement to fight this to the very end. You would have seen this with the Sydney University Senate action about a month ago. We are willing to do this, but we desperately need help. That's not just the students, that's the staff as well.

An alliance has formed up in the Tertiary Education Alliance of NSW. It is a baby step, and it has helped us a little to share resources, we have a web site. NUS along with other unions are holding a national day of action next Wednesday, August 27. Join us at UTS at 1 pm.

But is there an awareness among your colleagues and friends about the crisis we are in? How do we mobilise or get people involved?


In discussion

Anna York: We already have a dramatic demographic change in university students. Many are there because they are privileged, especially in the city universities. That does present a problem for NUS in organising. In terms of student organising, we are all in there. There are differences among political groupings about how to best fight, or where and when, but we are pretty solid at the moment.

John Kaye: For the first time ever since the Commonwealth took over funding for universities in 1972, the Commonwealth government will spend more on private schools than it will on its own universities. That gives you a measure on how outrageous the funding levels are.

Anna York: NUS research shows that Australia is the third or fourth highest OECD country in terms of charging fees. We are right up there before this package comes in. If you then compare across the OECD for graduate financial return (not social return), we are right down the bottom. In terms of starting salary right after you graduate, we don't compare.

John Kaye: I acknowledge what the ALP has done to public education over the years, particularly the NSW government selling off public schools and using private finance to build new schools and the $586 each year it gives to private school. As far as the inter-governmental inquiry into schools is concerned, we should engage with that, but one huge caveat I have is the philosophy at the political level that 'we don't care what the final mix is between public and private'. We had four Education Ministers on the record that it is not their role to determine what the final mix is between public and private schools. Kemp was the most aggressive, Nelson has been almost as aggressive, and two Labor state education ministers. I fear that inquiry will be derailed at the political level. The reason why it is happening is that the private school lobby is enormously powerful, including the Catholic system.

Anna York: We don't have our own voice. I am a member of the ALP, but I think it is time to stop looking to the ALP for the alternative and to bring that up in the people's organisations, the unions, whatever. It is time that we came up with a viable alternative as the Greens have done to fund tertiary education, using our own language and words to voice it. As long as we sit around saying we want to stop this, we want to stop that, there hasn't yet been a successful voice promoting an alternative, either in the everyday words, or in the overall sense of how to fund education or what education is.

Klaas Woldring: We can fund education and a lot more by abolishing the States. We have to insist on education a s a right, and push for a better system than we had in 1990. We should be saying that the Opposition should block supply to get action. What is happening now is much more reprehensible than what happened in 1975. Take the initiative, block supply.

I am a Associate Professor, I ask my colleagues why don't you down tools and bring the university to a halt? They say, oh, we are not even members of the union. But if we shut a university, it would be world news. Then we would see something happen. Where is the radicalism? It may be among the students, but not among the academics.

John Kaye: I disagree that we have to focus our lobbying on politicians. When I said our time is coming, I didn't mean the time for a campaign. We need the campaign now. I mean that for those of us opposing neo-liberalism the day is dawning when we can turn things around. But it won't be turned around by supporting Mark Latham, Simon Crean or getting a change of leeches. I don't think the answer lies in any political party, not even my own political party, the Greens. The answer lies in the hearts and minds of the mums and dads in the suburbs and rural areas. We have to effect that sea change that says, we are a community, not an economy. The primary vehicle I would encourage people to use is the news papers. The most democratic communications organ in Australia, in the world, is the letters to the editor page - ongoing arguments about why the neo-liberal agenda is failing, why public education is important, why the funding of private schools is a tragedy, why what is happening to TAFE is threatening not only our economic future but our future as a just society. If we all wrote one letter a week and just kept blasting it out, it might not ever get published, but someone else's letter does, and sooner or later we break through by doing that.

Trish Mullins: the scary thing is people's attitudes and the shift of ideology, where even young people say that HECS is fair enough. They've already swallowed that, instead of the idea that the tax system is the most effective and fair way to have people pay back and go towards community good, with all the gender equity consequences that go with it. It is important for us to use all the community forums that we are in to push the concept of collective good and the community rather than the economic approach, that it is affordable to have a good health system and education system, accessible and free for all. That's the primary thing we should push for. Letters to the editor are good, parliament plays a small role, but in our own community groups, our newsletters, our articles, any conference we are at, talking to our relatives and children. When our children say it is fair enough to pay a bit for that, we need to talk to them about why it is important to do it differently. This is not just a 'this year thing', it is an ongoing thing.

Anna York is the NSW President of the National Union of Students