Anne McEwen (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I wish to bring to the attention of the Senate tonight some facts about the impact of the government’s so-called VSU legislation, legislation that prevents higher education institutions from collecting a universal fee for student services. It is now some eight months since this extreme legislation was rammed through the Senate after a guillotine debate. In the 12 months I have been a senator, there has been a lot of legislation go through the Senate chamber that I have disagreed with, but I think the so-called VSU legislation was a stand-out in terms of the government using its Senate majority to secure a particularly insidious outcome that might have satisfied a few government senators and members but which the majority of Australians did not ask for and indeed have never asked for.

Some people say that those members and senators who supported the legislation were motivated by revenge because they could not control the student organisations of which they were members, and active members at that. There is no doubt some veracity in that view, and it is a view that I have expressed myself, but with the benefit of a bit more experience in the Senate chamber I now take a more expansive, more generous, view of their underlying motivation. I believe that the legislation was part of this government’s multifaceted agenda to create an Australia where fear rules in the workplace, where education only serves capital and is not seen as a social good in and of itself, where you are punished for being different and where government senators and members use their power to doggedly pursue a dreary, narrow-minded conservative ideology.

As we have seen time and again, when government members vote to restrict debate in this chamber or vote to refuse or curtail references to Senate committees, this government does all that it can to curb dissent, and shutting up the nay-sayers is of course a major tool in the armoury of extremist conservative governments like this one. Where were the traditional repositories of dissent against conservatism in this country? Student organisations and trade unions. Which organisations have been targeted by this government? Student organisations and trade unions.

I would like to speak a bit about the effect of the government’s legislation on student unions in my home state of South Australia, where we have some 67,000 students enrolled in our three universities. I would also like to take this opportunity to acknowledge that, for one of our universities, Flinders University, 2006 is their 40th anniversary. Flinders University was named after a visionary and bold explorer, Matthew Flinders. It still has a deserved reputation for providing a progressive education experience for its students. During its 40 years, both staff and students at Flinders University have also participated in social activism in a way that has sometimes been, I have to admit, a little confronting for staid South Australians.

The infamous month-long occupation of the administration offices of the university in 1974, when students protested over assessment and disciplinary matters, springs to mind. The key role that Professor Brian Medlin and Flinders University students played in the Vietnam War moratoriums a few years earlier is another example of the engagement of students in progressive social movements. No doubt Professor Medlin, who unfortunately died last year, would be appalled to see what is happening to the student organisations at his former university.

With the introduction of the VSU legislation, the six student organisations at Flinders University have agreed to amalgamate into one organisation. Inevitably there have been job losses as a result, with the concomitant loss of a number of experienced and knowledgeable staff. But, as we know, the government do not care about people losing their jobs. We saw that when they introduced their ‘sack anyone for any reason, whenever you like,’ Work Choices legislation.

From the amalgamation of the student organisations at Flinders University the objective of both the university and the student body is that they continue to provide as many essential services as possible without having to charge students on a fee-for-service basis. These essential services—primarily welfare, financial counselling and advocacy—will rely on university funding to continue, funding that the university would previously have spent on actual education delivery. Unlike the government, the university and its student body understand that some students will always need additional non-academic assistance to continue and complete their degrees. Unlike the government, the university and its student organisations understand that those kinds of services will not be supported by private enterprise, and students who need welfare or financial counselling advice are unlikely to be in a position to pay for that assistance.

Students at Flinders University have also lost food discounts, some catering services and the staff support and research provided to student advocates to enable those advocates to represent student interests at the university, higher education and community forums. Sadly, the future of the student organisation’s very innovative parent centre is in doubt. This centre provides low-cost occasional child care for students who are unable to access more regular child care because of their economic or other circumstances. Of the students who use the parent centre, more than 30 per cent come from identified low-socioeconomic backgrounds and would not be able to attend university if they did not have that childcare facility.

Whether the free employment services that each of the three university student unions provide for students will continue to be provided is also doubtful. Flinders and Adelaide universities are looking to merge their employment services, but they have to do this in a climate where there is no guaranteed income and where the $80 million too-little-too-late VSU transition fund that bought the vote of the doormats in the National Party is not being released until 2007 and is anyway being limited to sport and recreational facilities. The additional $10 million to encourage local businesses to maintain key services at regional campuses is simply an admission by the government that providing services to students on campus is a difficult proposition because students are sometimes on campus for fewer than 40 weeks a year. Student organisations had figured that out a long time ago and had adapted their business to suit the academic year. But now the taxpayer has to fork out another $10 million to prop up private businesses, all because of the government’s incompetence.

One of the very important services that student organisations provide is their annual orientation programs for new students. In my experience as an administrator in a student union, it is students from regional and rural areas and from overseas who most benefit from orientation programs and so it is those students who will be most disadvantaged when programs are inevitably cut because they can no longer be funded. Student organisations will find it difficult to provide the free or subsidised social and information events that are part of the orientation programs specifically designed to assist students in adapting to life away from home.

One of the earliest and, in my view, most disturbing casualties of the push to wreck student organisations is the curtailment of the ability of student unions to continue regularly publishing, or publishing at all, their student newspapers. At the University of Adelaide the student publication On Dit has a long and proud history of challenging the status quo—sometimes outrageously, I have to admit—but always from the point of view that if someone does not challenge the status quo progress is not possible. I find it very satisfying that many members of the press gallery in this building today were contributors to, or editors of, On Dit when they were students at Adelaide university. I do not think they are quite as radical now as they were then, but at least they still care about the responsibility they have to influence public opinion through the media.

At Flinders University the Empire Times also has a radical tradition. There is no doubt that student organisation newspapers sail close to the wind in terms of acceptable reporting, tastefulness and relevance from time to time, and conservative critics will find plenty of ammunition if they want to run the line that either On Dit or Empire Times have, at times, reported irresponsibly on important issues or, indeed, reported responsibly on very unimportant issues. However, the fact that student newspapers generate that debate is the important thing. In the past they have made us contemplate what is and is not the role of media in society. Empire Times has been in publication for 37 years and, if it survives at all, On Dit will have been in publication for 70 years in 2007. That is a tradition that we should value; we should not be acquiescing to destroying it. To survive, student newspapers will have to become different kinds of publications and will undoubtedly have to accept advertising. And that, of course, will compromise their independence.

It is early days in terms of the impact of the VSU legislation on our student organisations and on our universities and the students who attend them. The full impact of this legislation will not be apparent until 2007 and beyond. In preparing this speech, I was heartened by the ‘never say die’ attitude— (Time expired)