Mehreen Faruqi (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Public universities are in a deep, structural crisis. I have had the privilege of working at a university, teaching students, guiding and supporting them and seeing firsthand how universities can transform lives for the better—not just of those within their walls but of the communities they serve. But now, unfortunately, the opposite is becoming true as universities are run like corporations, where staff and students are being treated as faceless numbers, as pockets to empty and passions to exploit.

VCs are playing right out of this government's playbook—quash and silence any dissent, suppress academic freedom, cut jobs and services wherever possible and, most of all, be beholden to the industry lobbyists and profit-driven, climate-destroying and warmongering interests like the coal and gas corporations and the weapons industry. Universities, which should be beacons of democracy, debate, equity and freedom of speech, have become places where dissent is silenced, free speech is suppressed and staff and students have less and less say in how their institutions are run.

You only need to look at the treatment of students and staff who have stood up and spoken out for justice for Palestine to see our morally bereft and hostile universities have become to activism and protest. Democratic rights have been thrown right out the window. The University of Melbourne is just one example emboldened by this government's complicity in Israel's genocide. It went on a witch-hunt to expel student activists and broke privacy laws when it chose to spy on students and staff. Surveillance is the tool of authoritarian states, not places of learning. A university that spies on its students has lost its moral compass.

Across the country, universities are set to cut more than 3½ thousand jobs. Of these, 1,500 are in New South Wales. These are people whose careers now hang in the balance. There is a tsunami of corporatisation and dismantling of the public mission of our universities. Jobs are being cut left right and centre, while the largesse of the executive class and their corporate consultants is on the rise. Staff are fearful, intimidated, traumatised and disrespected while million-dollar VCs rule the roost. Courses are being closed while student fees and debt just keep increasing.

These decisions that destroy lives and futures are guided not by public interest or the university community but by private consultant firms like KPMG and Nous Group. The consequences have been brutal, with thousands of jobs slashed and courses cut across universities, while these consultants are being paid millions of dollars of public money—funds that are much needed for supporting learning, teaching and research.

Successive Labor and Liberal governments can't wash their hands of this as they are also the architects of this crisis in higher education. They cut funding, froze funding, hiked fees, dog whistled on international students and, for years, ignored the rampant casualisation, insecure work and systemic wage theft that is now amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars, with tens of thousands of staff affected at almost every university across the country, while VC and executive salaries have exploded.

The corporatisation and commodification of public education is obscene. This cooked system that governments and uni managements have created is well overdue for an overhaul—and university communities are going to force you to do this.

Because, when you punish staff and students, when you replace courses with consultants and when you collapse under your own arrogance, you create resistance. You galvanise staff, students and unions. Our universities are the future of our students, our staff, our communities and our society, and we know that a better university built on democracy and equity, run by staff and students, is possible. We will fight for it and we will win.