University educators, students and teachers participated in a strong public meeting on Sunday to discuss the Australian Labor government’s restructuring of universities, accompanied by the destruction of some 4,000 jobs, and its connection to the dictatorial and militarist agenda that the Trump regime is spearheading internationally.
Held in Sydney and online, the meeting was entitled “Oppose Labor’s ‘national priorities’ university restructuring and job cuts.” More than 100 people joined the meeting, called by the rank-and-file committees at Western Sydney and Macquarie universities, the Committee for Public Education (CFPE)—the educators’ rank-and-file network—and the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE), the youth movement of the Socialist Equality Party.
Chairing the event, Macquarie University Rank-and-File Committee member Carolyn Kennett explained that it was called to “clarify what is at stake in the assault on university education and its transformation to meet the needs of the corporate elite and the war machine.”
The opening speaker, joining online from the United States, was David Rye, a teacher and a member of both the IYSSE National Committee and the Educators Rank-and File Committee in the US.
Rye outlined the deep attacks on public education in the US, headed by the Trump administration, and the social opposition this has engendered, reflected in the most recent 7 million-strong “No Kings” demonstrations.
“Trump and his government have made a particular target of universities, educators and students,” Rye explained. “Among the first targets of his administration since the beginning of his presidency have been students of international backgrounds, and universities at which there were campus protests.”
Most recently, Trump had threatened to defund universities that refused to sign a “compact” that sought to establish Nazi-style ideological control over their courses.
As shown by the “No Kings” protests, the more Trump deepened his dictatorial plots, “the more hated he becomes.”
But there was a critical issue: the popular anger at Trump found no expression in the political establishment, where the Democratic Party had collaborated in his administration’s legislation, budgets and cabinet nominees, and the trade unions had opposed any mobilisation of workers, even in defence of their own members.
The IYSSE and committees of educators in the US had taken up the defence of those impacted by the Trump government’s attacks as a major initiative, fighting to connect the struggle for the democratic rights of students and educators with the social rights of the working class.
“The only way democratic rights can be defended under conditions where the ruling class is abandoning and declaring war on its now-distant democratic heritage, is through a turn deep into the working class, and the fight for socialism.”
The second speaker, Zach Diotte, the president of the IYSSE club at Western Sydney University (WSU), emphasised that “university staff and students across Australia face a historic attack on jobs, conditions, and courses, spearheaded by the Albanese Labor government and enforced by the trade unions.”
The restructuring was “binding higher education ever more closely to the preparations for war, with universities serving as hubs for weapons research, military partnerships and pro-imperialist propaganda.
“These processes directly threaten not only the education but the very future of young people. This is why the IYSSE supports the formation of joint rank-and-file committees uniting workers and youth to wage a real struggle.”
Diotte explained how pseudo-left groups like Socialist Alternative’s “WSU Socialists” covered up how the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) leaders had agreed to the restructuring, “even handing out NTEU leaflets at WSU.”
The final speaker was Mike Head, a member of the SEP National Committee and the WSU Rank-and-File Committee. He began by explaining that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s fawning praise of Trump at their meeting in Washington just three days after the latest huge “No Kings” demonstrations, itself pointed to the connections between the Labor government’s restructuring of the universities and the Trump regime’s agenda.
“At the White House, Albanese not only hailed and solidarised himself with Trump. He declared that the Labor government was taking the 70-year post-World War II alliance with US imperialism to ‘the next level’ by signing a critical minerals agreement that is clearly directed against China in preparation for war.”
Head warned that every imperialist government globally was remilitarising, including those in Japan, Germany and the UK, intensifying the threat of another world war.
Head said the Labor government’s Universities Accord report, handed down last year, insisted that universities must focus both their teaching and research on meeting the needs of business and the AUKUS military plan for war against China.
“From January 1, each university’s funding will be tied to a ‘mission-based compact’ with the government’s new Australian Tertiary Education Commission to contribute to ‘national priorities.’
“This language is similar to that of the Trump administration. This month the White House sent a letter to universities, titled the ‘Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,’ demanding that they advance the ‘national interests and priorities of the U.S. government’ or be defunded.”
Far from opposing the underlying political agenda, the two main campus trade union apparatuses, the NTEU and the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU), were assisting the Labor government and the university managements to impose it.
“The union machines have opposed any unified action by university staff and students against this offensive. They are isolating protests and struggles at individual universities and trying to blame ‘mismanagement’ by vice-chancellors for the devastating job cuts, in order to deflect attention away from the Labor government.”
At the same time, the union officials were working closely with the same managements to stifle resistance. With the agreement of the unions, hundreds of jobs were being eliminated, including at WSU, by “voluntary” redundancies and “spill and fill” processes that force workers to compete against each other for fewer jobs as the result of restructuring.
“Political conclusions need to be drawn,” Head said. “The fight against job destruction, the suppression of wages and the militarisation of education cannot be waged within the framework of the NTEU, CPSU and other unions.
“That is why we must develop rank-and-file committees (RFCs) as the new forms of organisation of the working class. Democratically-elected committees of university workers and students can elaborate and fight for demands based on their interests, and those of high-quality education, not the dictates of the corporate elites and their parliamentary and trade union servants.
“Through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC), they can link up with the educators’ RFCs in the US and elsewhere, and with workers in every industry worldwide. This fight can be won only on an international scale.
“Through the IWA-RFC, RFCs can lay the foundations for overturning capitalism itself and establishing genuine democratic and socialist workers’ governments.
“Increasingly clearly, that is the only alternative to the plunge of capitalism worldwide into fascistic forms of rule and another catastrophic world war.”
Important questions and discussion developed in the Q and A period, both in person and online. A young person said it was time for socialists to “get serious” about the threat of war and climate change.
A student commented on the role of the military in schools, noting that “so many of my friends from public school wanted to join the army for a funded degree as traditional means of paying for degrees are too expensive to pay for.”
Teachers posted comments about the militarisation and intolerable workloads in schools.
A student asked how to go about forming a rank-and-file committee. In reply, CFPE national convenor Sue Phillips said the first step was for educators to join the CFPE and for students to join the IYSSE.
Phillips said the conditions in the schools, exacerbated by Labor’s continued underfunding, were leading to an exodus of teachers, with only 1 in 3 saying they would stay in the profession until retirement.
“At the same time, the Albanese Labor government is transforming education—from universities, high schools down to primary schools—under the banner of ‘national priorities’.”
Answering a series of questions, Rye spoke on the opposition of the US education union bureaucrats to any strike action against the Trump regime, even the ICE immigration raids in schools. As a result, there was a change in consciousness among workers and youth about the need to fight the capitalist system itself.
The international character of the struggle was underscored by Tom Peters, a leading member of the Socialist Equality Group in New Zealand. He spoke about last week’s strike by over 100,000 public sector workers, including teachers and health workers—the largest in the country for four decades—and the need to build rank-and-file committees and a new socialist leadership in the working class.