Yesterday, I turned up to the National Day of Action education protests in Sydney wearing a T-shirt that is 17 years old. The T-shirt is a direct souvenir of my experience at an event in 1997 that I would describe as formative; like yesterday's, it was an education rally. Like yesterday's, it took place in the grounds at the University of Technology, Sydney.

Seventeen years ago, the Howard Coalition government had been in government for only one year, yet had already embarked on its policy project to render the Australian higher education system as the only one with declining investment in the OECD. More than 12.5% of funding was cut from the university budget, resulting in universities shedding entire departments, and even closing smaller campuses.

The aim of the cut, made amidst the rhetoric of a cited spending crisis the Liberals insisted (stop me if this sounds familiar) was "a budget black hole", was not, of course, really to redress economic spending, as Howard's own profligate record of electoral pork-barrelling proved. It was a mechanism to actively push cash-strapped university vice-chancellors towards adopting the entirely ideological deregulated fee models that were also offered by Coalition legislation.

Students protest against the Abbott Government's proposed changes to tertiary education at Victoria state parliament. Photograph: Julian Smith/AAP Photograph: JULIAN SMITH/AAPIMAGE

We students had gathered at UTS because then vice-chancellor Tony Blake was mooting plans to introduce upfront fee paying places for wealthy students to buy their way in to university. In the student movement, we called this the "thick but rich" policy, and saw it as the thin end of a wedge to exploit students and financially disenfranchise educational participation that had actually begun when Labor reneged on its commitment to free education in the 1980s, and introduced the HECS fee system in 1989.

In 1997, the rally we attended at UTS charged the University chancellery, announced to the staff that a political occupation was in progress, and while the staff left the premises we set up a camp in the offices which lasted several days. At 2am on the night of Good Friday, police busted the occupation, and I was there as a terrifying raid took place. While we occupiers slept, cops smashed windows with crowbars and unleashed police dogs on students, two of whom were wounded so badly ambulances were called.

Yet the fight was worth it. Followed by a picket of students offering dog-food to police, the campaign registered in the popular consciousness. University councillors reconsidered "thick but rich" and up-front fees did not pass at UTS.

Thousands marched through Sydney's CBD against the Abbott government's budget measures. Photograph: Dean Lewins/AAP Photograph: DEAN LEWINS/AAPIMAGE

I retell this story not merely to remind current students that non-violent direct action works, but also to illustrate that the policy moves that appear most shocking in this current Coalition government's budget have actually been established as a matter of policy, by Liberal and Labor, for some time. Those confounded by the enormity of present cuts and the illogic of a Medicare "co-payment" that charges a flat fee irrespective of means need to look only to the HECS system originally introduced by Labor to see that the unfair principle of "user-pays" taxation has been a cancer growing in one limb of the body politic that Abbott's current government is now prepared to unleash across the whole host.

The principle of HECS (now called ... "HELP") is the same as that of the co-payment. Irrespective of the means they bring as they enter university, students are charged fee standards that are supposedly calculated on what they may earn when they leave depending on their degree programme.

A protester in Melbourne. Photograph: Robert Cianflone/Getty Images Photograph: Robert Cianflone/Getty Images

Last week, the vice chancellor of UWS repeated the truth long acknowledged in the sector: that there are questions to be asked about the present system actively discouraging the participation of poorer students, for whom fees are not only proportionately greater, but for whom debt is a greater financial risk. Exactly the same argument about participation and aversion has been made about Abbott's sick tax. It would be unwise to take Joe Hockey at his word that the sick tax equates to the expenditure of a beer or two; bear in mind that HECS/HELP began in 1987 with a flat $250 fee, yet a student graduating this year for a law degree will do so with accumulated debt of tens of thousands of dollars.

What that first fee introduction signified was the introduction of US-style, user-pays neoliberalism into Australian public policy. In the 1980s, Labor had courted support from the "big end of town" and were loathe to come after corporate Australia to pay for a much needed expansion of the higher education system; because despite the rhetoric of "individual benefit" foistered onto the higher education debate to justify charging students, our society is not one that can actually run without engineers, teachers, scientists, lawyers, accountants, economists, IT people, healthworkers, adminsitrators, managers, researchers or communicators.

User-pays beliefs are now entrenched. Photograph: Julian Smith/AAP Photograph: JULIAN SMITH/AAPIMAGE

Students, then as now, are a soft target of punitive public policies because a romanticised image of student life provokes a particular kind of lifestyle envy.

Neoliberalism's adherents within the Labor party in 1989 were able to convince the unions within its ranks to support the policy moves towards userpays in the education by convincing blue-collar union leaders that higher education was a domain of social elites and taxation spent on education was "middle-class welfare". But as the Australian economy has evolved into a technocracy demanding skilled workers, many blue collar workers are now, of course, either parenting children with HECS/HELP debts or seeing user-pays mechanisms forced on apprenticeships and vocational training.

With user-pays beliefs entrenched, they're also facing down the encroachment of the ideology from everything the Coalition governs - from roads to visits to the doctor.

As this budget is only the first of two more that will be delivered by Abbott's Coalition in government, it is crucial that the anti-government campaigns springing from the trade union movement and the broader community redress the mistake of 1989 and not abandon students to the user-pays nuttery of Christopher Pyne. The beast unleashed on students is the one that will return to bite us all.

My 17-year-old T-shirt, by the way, depicts a human leg in a dog's mouth, the UTS logo and the phrase "where students and police dogs can come together". The fit wasn't flattering, even in 1997, but as a trophy of a resistance to the ideological madness of user-pays and a victory over its manifestation, it's one of the most precious things I own.