Posted by John, January 2nd, 2011 - under Universities.

Tags: Education, Higher education

The Greens proposed abolishing University fees for students and the reactionaries from the Labor Party, the Liberals and the media went crazy. They raised the clarion call of conservatism – where’s the money coming from?

Yet figures from the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations in a briefing to the re-elected Gillard Government show the cost would only be $23 billion over 4 years.

The vast bulk of that – about $15 billion – would come from forgiving all current Higher Education Contributions Scheme debts. (For international readers HECS is Australia’s study now pay later through the tax system scheme).

The ongoing cost of making Universities free would only be about $2.5 billion a year.

The Whitlam Government abolished University fees in 1973. I was one of its first beneficiaries.

The rationale for doing this was to increase working class participation in higher education.

To be internationally competitive Australian capitalism needed to match the education levels of its competitors and trading partners. Cost free universities seemingly provided that opportunity.

But the move had little impact on the sons and daughters of blue collar workers who as a generalisation continued to shun higher education for vocations. The children of white collar workers took up the offer with more gusto.

The proletarianisation of the student population over the course of the second half of the last century was and is a global phenomenon. Despite the wet dreams of reactionaries, that will continue. The real question is who bears the cost of training the next generation of educated workers.

The Hawke Labor Government answered that question in 1989 by introducing HECS, a scheme designed to recoup some of the cost of higher education from students. Again this was painted as a social equity move but again it has had little success in attracting students from low socioeconomic backgrounds.

Liberal and Labor Governments have embraced the neoliberal agenda of educational privatisation with gusto. The most recent examples from the market fundamentalists of Labor include more money for rich private schools, My School and proposals to give principals and boards autocratic educational market enhancing powers.

The need for more educated workers flows from the growing technologicalisation of capital. The increase in the organic composition of capital is inherent to competitive capitalism. In crude terms competition forces capitalists to spend more and more on capital relative to labour.

Now this can occur even though at the same time wages are increasing. This is relevant for University graduates whose expectation is that they have postponed earning opportunities for 3 or more years to make more money with their degree over their lifetime.

A university degree can give a graduate the skills to ride the technological train or its offspins (eg tax law advice to big business to use an example close to my heart) and gain the financial rewards.

And yet, despite 16 years of free universities in Australia between 1973 and 1989 (or rather the cost being borne by taxpayers) the social composition of students changed little. That is because you cannot address social disadvantage when someone is 18 years old.

Any attempt to increase the number of students going to University from working class backgrounds and into productive and service sectors of Universities like engineering, nursing, teaching and the like must begin in primary education and flow through to the secondary system.

Yet the same neoliberal agenda that infects Universities infects schooling. The last 30 years have seen a move away from the public provision of education without cost to a hybrid system of public and private systems, with more and more money going to private schools at the expense of public schools, and within that shift an increase to well off private schools.

There needs to be much more money going to working class schools – public schools and poor private (often Catholic) schools.

This extra money would pay for more and better paid teachers and infrastructure. But to do that requires a challenge to the very basis of the politics of the Labor and Liberal parties – that the market best satisfies human need.

The Greens do that with their cradle to grave public education proposals. An important part of their higher education and vocational policies is a living allowance that frees students from the need to have jobs while studying.

And the conservative jackals howl ‘We can’t afford it.’ Well, actually we can.

Labor’s initial Resource Super Profits Tax on the latest estimates could have yielded up to $24 billion a year in revenue.

That’s more than enough to pay for free higher education and proper living allowances, more and better paid school teachers and improved educational infrastructure for all working class schools.

The Greens want Labor to do nothing more than adopt its initial resource rent tax, the tax Labor itself defended before it capitulated to the mining maggots and got rid of its Prime Minister for one even more compliant to big business.

Extending this economic rent tax from the resource sector to all monopoly or oligopoly sectors would raise many many billions more – including much much more for public health and transport and addressing climate change as well as for public education.

Social justice – if that is possible under the current conditions of Australian capitalism – and the ongoing success of the bosses’ own system demand a massive injection of funds into public education from pre-school to University.

Where is the money coming from? From those who have been freeloading on us for the last 3 neoliberal decades – business and the rich.

Neither neoliberal party will do that unless forced to. Education won’t be saved unless teachers and other workers across all parts of the education sector take real and prolonged industrial action for better pay and conditions, more staff and more infrastructure funding.