Students, Staff Protest Against Fee Changes
Claire Ollivain reports.
Around two hundred students, staff and members of the community protested on Friday in response to the Liberal government’s proposed fee increases and cuts to higher education. Commencing outside Town Hall on unceded Gadigal land at 1pm, speakers condemned the Coalition for using the economic crisis resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic to justify their continued attacks on education.
The protest came after government plans to double university fees for future arts students and raise them for law and commerce by 28%. While this has been justified as an attempt to encourage more students to pursue degrees in STEM, teaching and nursing that are deemed employable, it also reduces overall funding for courses like maths and environmental science. At USYD this is predicted to result in an extra $50 million in revenue shortfall on top of the $350 million already lost due to the pandemic.
The National Union of Students (NUS) LGBTI officer Dashie Prasad denounced how “this funding structure screws over all students, no matter what they are studying”, indicating that even those who seemingly benefit from fee decreases will have a decreased quality of education. They also highlighted the contradictions in the Liberal government’s policy, questioning “If [they] care about our nurses, if [they] care about our teachers, why is the liberal NSW government considering freezing wage increases to our teachers and our nurses?”
Chaired by the respective Education Officers of the USyd and UNSW Student Representative Councils, Jazz Breen and Shovan Bhattarai, the rally demanded that higher education be made free and accessible for all. Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi condemned the Liberal government’s transformation of the university system into one where “students [are] becoming customers and teachers [are] becoming service providers”. She also argued that if the government wants more people to pursue engineering and science, they should be dismantling the patriarchy as women face barriers to studying those courses.
High school student and activist Will Glen spoke about how prospective university students are looking down the barrel of lifelong debt. He emphasised how Generation Z has been “viciously resistant” in the climate and Black Lives Matter movements, calling for students and staff as well as high school and university students to unite to fight the government.
Protesters then marched to the Liberal Party Headquarters amid a heavy police presence. The President of the USyd SRC Liam Donohoe gave a speech condemning the government’s framing of attacks against the university as a plan for economic recovery. He emphasised that these fee increases would make higher education more exclusionary which would deter Indigenous and working class students from pursuing their passions.
“Universities aren’t about employment... They are supposed to be—as Mehreen told us—institutions of knowledge and learning for its own sake, not for the sake of capitalism.”
Donohoe criticised how the proposed changes meant less funding to the very fields the government is trying to stimulate, including environmental sciences which will see 29% less funding despite the context of the current climate crisis.
“The university system was already broken before 2020 and the last semester has arguably been the worst that we’ve seen ever. We’ve seen staff cuts, wage cuts, course cuts, all while management maintain their high salaries…These attacks are a desperate attempt to conclude the neo-liberalisation of the university. They are declarations of war on students, on critical thinkers, on left-wing people, on young people, on dissidents, and most significantly on the poor.”
Several of the speakers highlighted how the government failed to deregulate university fees in 2014 due to student backlash, calling for people to mobilise en masse to demand free education that will be funded by taxing the rich and corporations.