En Passant

The following is a statement by the Victorian branch of the National Tertiary Education Union on La Trobe University’s shocking decision to suspend Roz Ward for a Facebook post that the Australian flag is racist. Roz has been a key person in the Safe Schools anti-bullying campaign for school students. The Murdoch owned Australian newspaper has run a witch hunt against her for her Marxist views, all with the aim of destroying Safe Schools which teaches respect and understanding for LGBTIQ students. McCarthyism is alive and well in Australia and La Trobe University’s decision is yet another example.

About 30 students in Sydney were protesting against Education Minister Christopher Pyne and his attacks on Universities. Here is the ABC video of a policeman pepper spraying the students. This is what their ‘democracy’ looks like.

Free education was won through consistent protest in the 1970s and can be won back now through consistent protest writes John Rainford in Green Left Weekly.

If you support Palestine, and if you support free speech, I call on you to support Socialist Alternative at Monash University and across Australia in defence of Palestine, in opposition to Pyne’s higher education armaggedon and to join the fight against political repression.

Hand in hand with this mind numbing educational socialisation goes the body numbing thump thump thump of discipline. They want to brutalise kids’ bodies to brutalise kids’ minds. We need to resist both.

The 2014 Abbott-Hockey Budget has managed to unite millions against the Young Liberals Student Club currently in government. Socialist Alternative has been active in organising the fight against their bosses’ Budget. That is why they are under attack from the likes of Pyne. Who would you believe? Christopher Pyne or Socialist Alterantive?

In short, if we were serious about education, then our education discussion wouldn’t be focused on demonizing teachers and coming up with radical schemes to undermine traditional public schools. It would instead be focused on mounting a new war on poverty and thus directly addressing the biggest education problem of all.

I have a suggestion for Australian Education Union Federal President Angelo Gavrielatos and Federal Secretary Susan Hopgood.

Organise a general strike to defend public education. Threaten to shut down all the public schools from the first day of term 1 in 2014. You have 2 months to build the campaign and win the support of teachers across Australia to strike if the Abbott government doesn’t back down. Get cracking.

I have a suggestion for teachers. Irrespective of what your leaders do, organise a general strike to defend public education.

By launching at this school Abbott was sending a clear message to the education reactionaries and homophobes across the country – it will be open slather on quality education and gays under a Liberal government. It is time to divorce state funding from schools of hate.