Last week, the peak lobby group for Australian higher education, Universities Australia, told a Senate committee that it now supported the deregulation of fees proposed by the Abbott Coalition government in its as-yet-blocked May budget.

Universities Australia’s Belinda Robertson told the Senate committee:

The sector has looked carefully and closely at the government’s proposals, and come to the consensus view that fee deregulation is the next logical step in higher education policy, and should not be opposed.

The electorate have expressed hostility to the proposals, and education minister Christopher Pyne is deeply unpopular. A recent Essential poll found that 66% of those surveyed were against the changes; for 18-24 year olds it was a whopping 77%.

Wisely, the opposition and the minor parties have so far obstructed the introduction of Pyne’s US-style fee deregulation model, which would allow universities to charge whatever they like for the degrees they offer – with some degree models already mooted to be priced in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Yet the deregulation move is popular with the so-called “group of eight” universities – who, despite not actually being able to deliver increased wage returns for their graduates, intend to trade on their reputations as “prestige” institutions in a new Australian degree marketplace, where being smart is less important than being rich.

Highly paid GO8 vice-chancellors, such as the University of Sydney’s Michael Spence, have openly campaigned for changes that will see funding cuts for the courses they run, and which will saddle their students with a level of debt unimaginable even to those who may have perhaps supported Labor’s HECS fee-scheme introduction a generation ago. That original HECS charge, which began in 1989 as a $1,000 flat fee, has metastasised into a financial burden on students of 30 to a 100 times its original cost.

A recent address by the GO8’s Michael Gallagher hailed fee deregulation as “a watershed” and a “necessity”. “Everything else has been deregulated,” he crowed, complaining that only the Senate now stood in the way of higher fees for students, and bigger revenues for universities.

The rest of the university lobby has fallen into line.

A protester is arrested during a march through the central business district in Sydney. Photograph: Dan Lewins/EPA

The rationale for university fee deregulation really doesn’t go beyond the economic self-interest of the wealthiest institutions, or the pet ideological projects of a government more committed to an echo-chamber of neoliberal nuttery than a decent education at an affordable price.

Fee hikes will be a disaster for poorer students, pricing the deserving and talented students out of educational opportunity and creating huge debts for students who do commit to degrees. Furthermore, as the US model has shown, increasing fees leads to poorer social outcomes, where talented students drift towards the lucrative professions solely to repay educational debt, rather than towards vocations that innovate, enhance knowledge or improve society.

So, betrayed by their vice-chancellors, if ever there was a time for students to mobilise in defence of education, it is now. The legislation is still before the parliament and has not yet been made law.

Yet after ripples of protest earlier in the year, the lack of recent student action may seem surprising. While students hit the streets in the wake of May’s budget, stormed the Q&A set, heckled and jostled foreign minister Julie Bishop at Sydney University and clashed with police at Melbourne University, the student protest movement is yet to move beyond activist skirmishes into a sustained direct action campaign.

Occupations, sit-ins and strikes could yet tip the political balance against Pyne and vice-chancellors, and save higher education in Australia. Are students not escalating protest because they don’t know how bad it will be?

No. The reasons for student quiescence are many, but their root cause is the demobilisation of the student unions achieved by John Howard, starting in 2005.

With the crucial support of Family First senator Steven Fielding, the Howard government outlawed the collection of money to fund student organisations by the universities, leading to the financial collapse of the traditional structures for student activism – the student representative councils and university clubs and societies.

Although the Gillard government was able to restore student organisations to some level of functionality with Green and independent support in 2010, the five wilderness years were long enough for an entire generation of students to pass through Australian universities without the experience of student activism. The break also restricted the visibility of progressive organising on campuses to the one or two “socialist” parties with enough of their own off-campus resources to staff a stall during O-week; the calcified Marxist-Leninist cadre on offer remains as uncool as it has ever been, and students have avoided it in droves.

A young student in San Francisco campaigns against American involvement in the Vietnam War. Photograph: Photoshot/Getty Images

But while student unionism has been weakened and activist mentorship lost, students still care about the future of Australian higher education. There have been visible numbers of students at the various March in March and March in May rallies and other actions taken against the Abbott government. Perhaps the real issue is that students don’t realise how influential they can be.

Let this be the historical lesson to the students of now. Nation-wide university strikes in France in 1968 seized the streets of French cities and brought revolutionary consciousness to an entire European generation. Student protests in the US against the Vietnam War coincided with the rise of the civil vights movement and together these campaigns seeded a wave of feminism, sexual liberation and environmentalism. Student-led protests broke the military draft in the US and Australia. The student protests in the 1960s against conscription culminated in the Vietnam War Moratorium marches of 1970 – a campaign so socially persuasive that future Labor’s deputy opposition leader Jim Cairns led a march of almost 100,000 in Melbourne against the war.

Governments do tend to moderate policy positions in the face of student dissent – Howard was well aware that the politicised student of today is the political opponent of tomorrow, hence his motivation for the assault on student unions. The Dawkins reforms of the 1980s – which created our current higher education system – were moderate versions of today’s catastrophe. They would have been much worse had they not been so bitterly opposed.

Never has there been a more crucial time for students to seize an activist initiative and take direct action.

A single protesting student can disrupt a university meeting, two can shut down a chancellery, a group can close a campus. Today we again have a conservative government that wants to slash funding to universities, hike student fees, and take Australia to war.

Not only can student action take the fight for better policy to the government; the fate of future generations are depending on it. There is nothing to lose but the very future of quality education in Australia, and, with it, a fairer society.

Correction: this article was amended on 17 October 2014, 03:59pm to reflect the fact that Universities Australia position is to support some but not all aspects of the legislation. It supports deregulation of fees but opposes the funding cuts proposed by the government.