By
Zac Hambides–SEP Senate candidate for NSW
13 May 2013
The $2.3 billion in cuts to university education that are being imposed by the Gillard Labor government raise decisive political issues before students, academics and general staff.
Courses, jobs and conditions are threatened by Labor’s “efficiency dividend” that will see universities around the country slash $900 million from their budgets. Another $1.2 billion will be gouged out of the pockets of students seeking higher education through the transformation of the start-up scholarship of $2,000 into a loan that they will be required to pay back. A further $230 million will be extracted by eliminating the discount on early payment of fees.
The rationale given by the Labor government–that the cuts will be used to finance its “revolution” in primary and secondary education–is a lie. The new Gonski funding model is part of a free market, cost-cutting agenda that entrenches the flow of public funds to the wealthiest private schools and lays the foundations for the introduction of a voucher scheme that will further undermine the public education system. The short term costs of establishing the new funding model will be recouped by using “performance rankings”, through NAPLAN tests and teacher rankings, to declare public schools “underperforming” and encourage even more student transfers to the fee-paying private sector. In the US, Britain and New Zealand, similar systems have been used to close down schools, sack teachers and slash working conditions.
Labor’s agenda in tertiary education is to strangle funding and complete the transformation of universities into thoroughly corporatised institutions, which will tailor courses to the needs of business and intensify the push for the removal of any limits on fees. Already, the
This article originally appeared on : World Socialist Web Site