Hi all,

I’m writing from Newcastle, Australia. Sorry that I haven’t been
participating in the global phone link-ups, mostly because of email delays
and time restrictions.

In Australia we have been facing our own version of the Boulogne process,
sometimes called the Melbourne Model and sometimes called the Bradley
reforms. It’s fair to say that both students in general and student
activists in particular are fairly unaware of both the existence of these
attacks on higher education and the impacts that they are having, but
globalisation has pulled Australian universities into the same reforms that
are being initiated in Europe.

The Bradley reforms are focused on the idea of “demand-driven” education,
where instead of gaining a place at a university new students would instead
receive an “education voucher” that they can “spend” at any institution
(and funding would follow the students rather than universities being
directly funded by the state). The idea of education vouchers was first
proposed by Milton Friedman from the Chicago School of Economics and
instead of giving students more freedom, they will turn students, and
education itself, into commodities that universities “compete” for. The
impacts aren’t hard to imagine – a shift in funding away from regional
universities to the cities, specialisation of universities in particular
fields, a shift away from the humanities to more “profitable” faculties,
more intense “image management” and control of dissent by universities, and
the destruction of the idea that education has value in itself.

These reforms aren’t particularly new, and they build on reforms instituted
by the “progressive” Labor government in the 1980s that introduced growing
fees and the commodification of education so that education is now
Australia’s third-biggest export (after coal and iron ore). The biggest
victims of these reforms have been international students, who pay huge
upfront fees, are excluded from social benefits such as social security,
Medicare, transport concessions, etc, have restrictive visa conditions that
restrict their right to work, and go through extraordinary discrimination
in the community. The reforms led to the creation of a whole host of
private institutions that sell substandard education to international
students for huge fees. Unsurprisingly, most of these institutions
collapsed last year.

Another attack on student rights was the introduction of Voluntary Student
Unionism four years ago. VSU meant that instead of having democratic
control of part of our fees, student organisations were defunded and had to
rely on voluntary membership contributions from students, despite the fact
that student unions work for all students. At several universities, student
unions have collapsed since the introduction of VSU. Fortunately, most
student unions have survived the assault.

Australia doesn’t have the same education-focused student movement and
occupations that exists in Europe. This is partly due to isolation, the
advanced state of reforms that already exist, and the fact that students
are working much longer hours than they did in the past. However, it can
also be explained by the fact that student activists spend less effort on
movement-building and direct democracy as they have in the past. Students
are taking direct action in many other ways, either on climate change,
Aboriginal rights, globalisation or refugee rights, but the education
movement has spent so much effort on defensive campaigns that it has
neglected movement-building.

I am keen to spend a lot more effort on education activism this year and
hope to participate in a phone link-up with you soon!

Jonathan Moylan
Education Officer
Newcastle University Students’ Association