About 200 students and staff members joined a protest at Sydney’s Macquarie University last Wednesday to oppose deep cuts to courses and degrees that will have severe impacts on students and educators’ jobs.
The Macquarie management is cutting courses, and whole degree programs, claiming it needs to save between $40 million and $60 million per year. Majors are being cut to the bone, and students will have no electives in their first-year courses.
In total, 13 of the 24 majors in Arts will be cancelled, along with degrees in Music, History and Planning. The cutting of majors and degrees was discovered by staff on the Universities Admissions Centre website, without any discussion with those responsible for teaching these programs.
Inevitably, this will lead to the sacking of staff, which has not yet been formally announced.
However, the “stopmqcuts” rally organisers, from the pseudo-left Macquarie Socialists, presented the cuts as an issue isolated to the university, divorcing them from the wave of course and job cuts taking place nationally as a direct result of the policies of the just re-elected Albanese Labor government.
Across the country, more than 3,000 job cuts are underway due to Labor’s reactionary reductions to international student enrolments and its continued under-funding of universities.
Despite intense opposition by staff and students, Western Sydney University is eliminating up to 400 jobs, the University of Technology Sydney is cutting 400, the Australian National University 600 and the University of Wollongong at least 150. Other universities announcing cuts include Canberra, Federation, James Cook, Southern Queensland, Griffith, La Trobe, Tasmania and Swinburne.
As a member of the Macquarie University Rank-and-File Committee, I asked to speak at the protest and was refused with the pretext that “we have a full speakers list.” The real reason for the refusal was political, not organisational, as revealed by the line of the protest.
In my remarks to the rally, I planned to call for a broader unified fight across all the universities against the Labor government’s cuts and restructuring, and against similar attacks taking place internationally, spearheaded by the fascistic Trump administration in the United States.
Speakers at the rally, by contrast, presented the restructuring as a Macquarie problem, that could be resolved by putting pressure on the management. A student speaker claimed the budget cuts were “stupid, by stupid idiots who don’t want to engage with the university. We have rich men in board rooms who make decisions who affect all of us… We need to kick up a stink. We need management scared of us.”
The perspective put forward was that the alleged financial crisis at Macquarie was the result of poor decisions by management, by spending money on infrastructure and outside consultants. The million-dollar salary of the vice chancellor was raised, together with the house provided to him by the university.
That covers up the role of the Albanese government, which has drastically capped international student enrolments, joining the Liberal-National Coalition in making them scapegoats for the cost-of-living and housing crisis affecting millions of working-class households.
Labor has intensified the chronic under-resourcing of universities by successive Labor and Liberal-National governments over the past decade and a half since the billions of dollars cut by the last Greens-backed Labor government, that of Gillard and Rudd.
The Albanese government’s financial squeeze is aimed at forcing the universities to integrate themselves more fully into the demands of big business and the military, as set out in Labor’s Universities Accord, which ties funding to “national priorities,” including the AUKUS military preparations for war against China.
Wednesday’s rally was endorsed by the university’s National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) branch committee. The NTEU, the country’s main campus trade union, has opposed any unified struggle against the Labor government’s cuts.
For decades, the NTEU has signed off on enterprise agreements with university managements that have enabled pro-business restructuring.
Steven Hansen, an NTEU member, spoke in support of the rally’s perspective, urging participants to “force the hand” of the Macquarie management by saying, “we will not accept cuts to our program.”
Hansen sought to divert the anger into seeking a new NTEU enterprise bargaining deal with the management, 18 months away, at the end of 2026.
“We have an important opportunity at the end of next year where we go into an enterprise bargaining period,” he said. “Then we can finally legally go on strike. Strikes have been made illegal in this country. During COVID, when they fired 600 staff at this university, we could do very little legally in the union because of the laws, in part passed by the Labor Party themselves. We need to take the opportunity in enterprise bargaining and actually bring the university to a halt.”
That is a cover for the NTEU apparatus, and the union bureaucracy as a whole, as well as the Labor government. In fact, when the COVID-19 pandemic first hit in 2020, the NTEU leadership volunteered to accept the destruction of thousands of jobs. Even after a rank-and-file revolt against that betrayal, the union pushed through deals at individual universities to implement the job cuts.
Moreover, the anti-strike laws, restricting industrial action to union-controlled enterprise bargaining periods, were drawn up by the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) itself in partnership with the Keating Labor government of 1991 to 1996, and reinforced, via the “Fair Work” laws by the ACTU in collaboration with the Rudd and Gillard Labor governments of 2007 to 2013.
At the rally, I intended to warn that the perspective of the NTEU was to work with managements to help them implement the cuts, as it did in 2020, including through so-called voluntary redundancies, all within the framework of enterprise agreements that facilitate such “change proposals” in consultation with the unions.
That is why we are calling for the formation of rank-and-file committees at every university. Our task is not to provide advice to management. University staff, along with students, need to form their own organisations of struggle to develop and fight for demands based on the educational and financial needs of students and staff, not the dictates of the corporate elite enforced by the Labor government.
The Macquarie University Rank-and-File Committee is also fighting for the defence of Randa Abdel-Fattah, a research scholar at Macquarie, and against the suspension of her research grant at the behest of the Albanese government and Zionist groups because of her criticism of the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
The attack on her is part of a wider attempt to silence any criticism of the Gaza atrocity, which has been backed by all the capitalist governments, including Albanese’s, and the underlying plunge into war led by the Trump administration.
Protesters in Australia are not yet being taken off the street and deported as in the US, but all governments are silencing dissent, initially on the false claim that opposition to the genocide is antisemitic.
The Labor government has also helped police the Trump administration’s assault on free speech and public education by advising researchers in Australia to comply with the White House’s 36-page questionnaire to researchers, threatening to cut off US funding unless they attest that their research aligns with US strategic and military interests.
At the rally, I planned to call for a national online mass meeting of staff and students to develop unified industrial and political action to halt all the cuts and the witch hunting of anti-genocide academics and students.
This is part of a broader necessary struggle against capitalism itself and its program of ever-greater corporate wealth and turn to war and authoritarianism. It means a fight to reorganise society along genuinely democratic and egalitarian, that is socialist, lines in the interests of humanity, not the corporate ruling class.
To discuss these issues and how to form rank-and-file committees, please contact the Committee for Public Education (CFPE), the rank-and-file educators’ network.
Contact the CFPE:
Email: cfpe.aus@gmail.com
Facebook: facebook.com/commforpubliceducation
Twitter: CFPE_Australia
Facebook: facebook.com/groups/opposeaeusellout