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

John Kaye

It is worth casting back to one seminal moment in the history of the current attacks on higher education and TAFE and public schools. It happened in the UK when Margaret Thatcher was trying to do to the then Leader of the Conservative Party, Edward Heath, exactly what Kim Beazley tried to do to Simon Crean. But unfortunately, Margaret Thatcher was successful. It happened at a seaside town in England. Edward Heath was at the microphone talking about the policies that the Conservative Party needed to develop for the next election to toss Labour out, and that those policies needed to talk to the average British person. Margaret Thatcher - so the story goes - climbed up onto the stage, elbowed him out of the way, hurled a book down on the podium and declared: 'These are the only policies the Conservative Party needs to take government'. The book was by Frederick von Hayek and was called The Road to Serfdom. It was at that moment that there was a seminal change in what was and what was not acceptable in political discourse about a whole range of things, but particularly about education.

Hayek's thesis, as I understand it, was that the very act of defining social justice would inevitably lead to tyranny. By the path of state intervention, the state becomes more powerful and eventually you have a totalitarian state. Liberty can only be guaranteed to the citizenry only if you forbid the state from intervening in the economy or in society in any way whatsoever.

When Thatcher threw that book down on the podium, she let loose a vial of ideological virus, that neo-liberal or economic rationalist virus, that rapidly spread. It found a lot of willing viral hosts over the years. It immediately spread to Ronald Reagan who was hungry for the disease, and implemented it through various 'reforms' to education and other social services in the United States, and also to Georges I and II Bush, and to our very own John Howard.

You can't say John Howard imported the virus of neo-liberalism into Australia, but he has certainly been a keen, willing proponent of it.
To talk about education, you need to look at three reasons why this economic rationalist virus has been so successful at capturing the public debate in Australia.

The first one is that the idea of reducing state intervention in the economy really suits corporate power. Not only because it allows more profits to go into private pockets, and less to be taken in taxation, but also because it deregulates the economy.

The second reason is that it creates, by a variety of mechanisms, a depoliticisation of society, a compliant society, that won't naturally argue against what is going on.
The third reason is that it feed the power dynamics of class stratification, by saying that the wealthy are more powerful, and so therefore they can get more wealthy.

It facilitates the transmission of advantage from parent to child by removing the right of the state through public education to create opportunities for children from poorer and working class backgrounds. By weakening that intervention, neo-liberalism feeds the desire of advantaged parents to pass their social, economic and educational advantage on to their children.

The basic ideas that drive neo-liberalism are that greed should be played out in a market place, and that all services should be user-paid, or paid at their full cost, particularly when provided by a private provider.
This stands in stark opposition to what we all believe.

Neo-liberalism holds that these ideas are somehow superior to cooperation, to communities working together for their own mutual benefit, and certainly superior to the public provision of free services.
This is about higher education, schools and TAFE, but it could be about anything - for example, about how the Pharmaceutical Benefit Scheme is being undermined by the proposed US-Australia Free Trade Agreement.
We could be talking about the ABC, about TELSTRA, about welfare provision.

This set of activities has two things in common. The first is that they are excellent examples of how we as a society got together and worked for the common good, and along the way we produced socially just outcomes, addressed the needs of those people not able to look after themselves, or came from families that couldn't provide high quality services.

The second common factor is that they are under savage attack from the Howard government.

The big debate of the 21st century is going to be about protecting the advances we have made in social justice over the last century and protecting our ability to respond to the environmental challenges that we will inevitably face over the next 50 years. We will be trying to protecting those important attributes of civil society from the attacks of neo-liberalism.

This is one of the reasons why the Greens are doing so well at the moment - we have been a voice against neo-liberalism and a voice for those collective activities in our society.

Certainly it is the neo-liberal agenda that is causing havoc in education, at the school level, in TAFE and in universities.

It is central to maintaining a just society that we maintain a well-funded public education system across all three sectors. Central to defeating neo-liberalism is mounting a strong campaign on the specific issue of the universities, school funding and TAFE funding.

On Budget night, the government produced this document, Backing Australia's Future. You know you're in trouble because it's got velcro in it. Any document held together by velcro is bound to be bad. It's got lots of glossies in it, lots of nice sounding words.

The National Tertiary Education Union analysis shows that most damaging proposal in this document is the deregulation of fees, the raising of the maximum fee that a university can charge to 120 per cent of the Higher Education Contribution Scheme fee, and allowing up to 50 per cent of the students in any given course to be full fee paying.

We all knew in our heart that fees and HECS were barriers to participation by people from disadvantage backgrounds. When I went to the University of Melbourne in 1972, the Law Faculty had enrolled 72 students, of whom 71 went to private schools, and one went to a public school. That shows what fees can do to access for people from disadvantaged backgrounds. People who come from backgrounds where there isn't a history of education or investment in education, or where there isn't plenty of money or intellectual capital floating around the place, are going to be shy of investing in education by racking up large amounts of debt either through HECS or full fees.

We now know this is a fact because the document produced by the Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs - Brendan Nelson's department - demonstrated this. This document was sat on, hidden in the department for 12 months, and the Minister edited out important sections, but it was eventually extracted from the government like a rotten tooth.

It shows that as HECS repayment thresholds were decreased and HECS charges increased, the participation rates of disadvantaged students in higher education has decreased.

This is a shocking phenomenon. The current 'reforms' will create two classes of students - those who do well at the Higher School Certificate and those who have wealthy parents.

You can bet your bottom dollar that those who have wealthy parents will eventually dominate. This is the thin edge of the wedge. The incursion of full fees onto universities is just around the corner in terms of wholesale implementation.

What are these two classes of students and universities that we will create?

The outer suburban universities will not be able to avail themselves of full fees. They will not have the catchment base to get people to pay that sort of money. We are talking serious dollars here. The University of Melbourne let the cat out of the bag - $150,000 for a law degree. For a successful lawyer, it is probably not a lot of money. But for somebody living in south-western Sydney, who's never had a family member go to university, that is a lot of money, and is inevitably defeating barrier to entry.

The sandstone universities will be able to attract full fee paying students from wealthy families, but the outer-suburban universities and rural universities will not, they will be starved back to being teaching-only universities on a lower quality scale.

The second aspect of neo-liberalism is the idea of creating a compliant society. The Howard government has been very keen on Australian Workplace Agreements - individual non-union contracts. By a process of blackmail, they've been trying to force these onto universities, so that university staff will have to bargain on a one-on-one basis with their managers to get their next pay rise.

I am an academic and I rely very heavily for the critical comments that I make about my own institution on the fact that I collectively bargain. What is going on here is an attempt to break down the protection of collective bargaining. And it is not just at the academic level. The idea of voluntary student unionism, stopping universities from collecting fees other than for education, stopping universities from insisting on compulsory membership of the student unions will destroy student unionism. Why is student unionism important? I used to work in the office of Lee Rhiannon. Everyone in the office except for myself and Lee had a background in student politics. It is an excellent training ground, where a lot of people cut their teeth on political activism.

The third aspect of neo-liberalism is corporate control, and certainly Backing Australia's Future has a corporate control time bomb written into it - the attempt to destroy the ability of staff and student representatives to represent the best interests of their constituencies. By forcing the university councils to behave more like corporate boards, the Nelson 'reforms' are attempting to turn universities into a corporate sector. Once you take the staff and student representatives off the councils, take the political appointees off the councils, what is left? It is the corporate representatives, and universities are rich pickings for the corporate sector. There is a lot of intellectual property and brain power that can be harnessed for the corporate sector. Universities produce the office fodder for the corporate sector. There is a desire to discipline the universities to make them comply with and serve the corporate sector in a more direct fashion.

An interesting idea here is the one of blackmail. The federal government does not have legislative control over universities. So it is holding $404 million for 2004-07 in its back pocket, and saying: 'Unless you reform your workplace practices and your governance - use AWAs and corporatise your council - we are not going to give you this money.
Blackmail, like economic rationalism, is also a virus. I notice that the ALP is offering $504 million in its package for universities if they 'modernise'. The Coalition wants to 'incentivate' universities, and the ALP wants to 'modernise' them.

When this document first came out, there were obvious things wrong with it. Nelson says it is great because there is an additional $1.46 billion over three years for universities - until you realise that the $1.46 billion has to be measured against the $5 billion that was lost by universities since Howard came to office in 1996. If you are wondering why it is that university lecture theatres have students sitting in the aisles, why the staff are totally over-stressed, it is because the staff-student ratios have declined by 20 per cent. On average, every academic has to dal with 20 per cent more students. But that is not evenly distributed, and in some universities the increased student load per academic is as high as 70 per cent.

Besides this decline in staff-student ratios, the quality of buildings and courses is also declining. That is part of the $5 billion that has been lost. So the $1.46 billion is a minor give back. But it is not even that. Half of that $1.46 billion - $712 million - has been clawed out of the universities and put into the new package and then 'given back'. It is a classic Peter Costello 'rob and give' strategy. And then there is $404 million of blackmail money. That leaves only $349 million over three years - about $110 million each year - spread out between about 30 universities. We are talking about a couple of million dollars per university per year.

The group of eight 'sandstone' universities - who are unsurprisingly enthusiastic about this package - will get more, and the outer-suburban and rural universities will get less. The University of Western Sydney, by one set of figures, will be worse off by $34 million, against a ballooning cost structure.

And it is not just universities. TAFE colleges are also suffering. Figures from the last state budget papers show that the Carr Labor government has reduced its investment in TAFE students by 25 per cent in real terms in the last five years.

So if you are wondering why TAFE is being casualised, and why TAFE teachers are having such a hard time, it is simply a funding issue. On top of the funding we now have the fees issue - $28 million in fees extracted from people who simply can't afford to pay that much. On top of that, the NSW restructure of TAFE management could be the beginning of the end for TAFE.

Then there is the issue of public schools which are savagely under-funded. You can see this by teachers' salaries, which were 150 per cent of average weekly pay in 1972, but are now down to 106 per cent. Compared to the average Australian, public school teachers have fallen back by 50 per cent over the last three decades.

There is also the issue of children with special needs. We simply do not allocate the funds to educate children with special needs in a meaningful way. The only reason there are good outcomes is because teachers work damn hard and compensate for the lack of funding.

And there is the overwhelming bias of funding to private education. This is a distressing example of the competitive agenda and shows how morally bankrupt the competitive agenda really is.

In NSW alone the federal government alone gives $780 million each year to private schools and the state government adds another $580 million. To give one single example, Trinity Grammar, by the year 2004, will get $3.7 million from the federal government and a little less from the state each year. That is a 247 per cent increase on their funding compared to 2001.

I like to ask public school teachers: 'What would you do if we increased funding per student by 247 per cent?' There is an awful lot that public school teachers could do with that amount.

There are alternatives to this gloomy picture. At the 2001 federal election and the 2003 NSW election, the Greens and others like the Progressive Labour Party, were able to find the real funds needed for public education by playing the 'budget surplus' game. I felt we should have said that we would create a budget deficit, but nonetheless, without touching the budget surplus, we were able to find an additional $4.2 billion each year for higher education, TAFE and schools. One thing we are committed to is a free university and TAFE sector. People say, 'No, you can't get rid of HECS. Up until now we understand what you are saying, but no John, you've really left the world of reality. HECS is there to stay'.

But it is nonsense. If people say that to you, quote the following figure to them: the $4 tax cut, the 'cup of coffee and a Mars bar' that Costello gave to us this year, is worth $4 billion per year. To remove university fees entirely would cost $2.2 billion, or perhaps less. That is a little over half the tax cut. The rest of the tax cut would get rid of TAFE fees. Free tertiary education is there for all Australians for $4 per week - give up one cup of coffee and one Mars bar, and you've got free tertiary education.

I think our time for this debate is coming. I've been debating about funding for private schools for five years now. At first I had rotten tomatoes thrown at me, and now they are a little more explosive from some sectors. But we are beginning to hear the language for a priority for the public sector coming through. It is our task to speak to the average university students and the average parents, say to them: 'There is huge benefit, not just for you and your family, but for the society you and your children will grow up in, in having a well-funded public education sector.'

John Kaye lectures in engineering at the University of New South Wales


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