National Day of Inaction: Rebuilding Student Activism in Sydney
The National Union of Students held their tri-annual National Day of Action yesterday. In Sydney, you won’t have noticed, and that’s not just because of the rain.
Australia’s student union movement is in dire straits. The Howard Government’s 2005 introduction of Voluntary Student Unionism, or ‘VSU’, hamstrung the resources — and thus, the organising and campaigning power — of student representative organisations. The Rudd-Gillard introduction of a Student Services and Amenities Fee (SSAF) in 2010 provided a half-hearted injection of funds into a dying movement, but as the funding is distributed by the universities themselves, it’s forced student activists to genuflect to university management in order to keep their organisations alive.
Student politics currently shoulders a large amount of public image baggage, some deserved, and some not. It’s undeniable truth that aspiring activists across Australia use their campus’s SRCs and Unions as springboards to launch themselves into the Rio-esque pool of career-centric State and Federal politics. The National Union of Students (NUS) National Conference is renowned for being a farcical mess of factional groups and brazen celebrations of the very pettiest power. The University of Sydney has already seen their 2016 SRC elections degenerate into bizarre and inexplicable power-sharing arrangements between Labor and Liberal candidates, and the polls still aren’t open.
However, there is a deep need for legitimate student activists and genuine student politics. The Hobbesian choice of begging for SSAF funding or ceasing to exist has seen independent student unions wound up and incorporated into university structures on many campuses, eliminating almost any shred of believable autonomy for students. Those that remain independent have had to violently corporatise, shedding the mantles of radical change agendas in order to collect enough funding to stay afloat. This collapse has meant that well-meaning and fiercely idealistic student activists have been unable to carry the weight of campaigning against unconscionable decisions from governments and vice-chancellors, having to watch as their contributions are outstripped 5 to 1 by other sympathetic organisations. When student activists stand alone, like they did yesterday at the August 24th National Day of Action in Sydney, attendance is embarrassing — and the campaign achieves precious little for students. The current crop of Sydney-based student politicians seem to be completely unaware of the simple fact that they can’t run giant, spectacular campaigns while their organisational structure is collapsing around them.
The National Union in Sydney is more focused on minor protests like the NDA than actively solving their major problem; funding. In 2015, 20 of 39 affiliated student organisations paid their affiliation fees to the National Union. To shore up their financial disaster, the NUS is running to unaffiliated organisations to get them to join — and to existing member organisations to get them to stay — most recently signing up Macquarie University’s SRC and Western Sydney University’s SRC, and losing Wollongong University’s WUSA. Instead, their focus should be on publicly and loudly lobbying Labor and the Coalition for the reintroduction of compulsory student unionism — solving the funding crisis student activists are facing at a legislative level rather than taking the specter of VSU and the half-measure of the SSAF as unchangeable fact.
If the NUS continues to patch its problems with cash injections from new affiliates — themselves facing a cash shortage — then the very foundation of the organisation, and the existence of principled student activism in Sydney, is little more than a wish and a prayer. If student activism is going to be rebuilt, then its most diligent supporters need to fight for a legitimate foundation, the return of compulsory student unionism. The future of the NUS is assuredly not spending evaporating cash on fifty students standing in the rain.
