Deregulation, Centrelink and Aboriginal student poverty

By Maddee, Bundjalung, member of Blacademy

As I write this I’ve been on hold to Centrelink’s Aboriginal line for one hour and fifteen minutes (and counting). I have a Centrelink debt after being overpaid. It was an honest mistake, I’m trying to arrange a payment plan to pay the government back the money which will be taken out of my future payments from them (unfortunately they don’t pay me an allowance to stay on hold to their 1800 number for hours at the beginning of every study period), but I have this sick feeling thinking about how if I hadn’t been wrongfully paid the money I’m now paying back I would have been in a lot of trouble last year. I was working as an Indigenous student representative in the University of Melbourne student union (which, thankfully, is a paid job, albeit with a honorarium of around $350 a fortnight for what is sometimes more than full time hours, less than a living wage but more than what a lot of others are paid) for the year in addition to taking on casual and sessional work as a teacher and researcher when I could get it.

This year I’ve started a Ph.D at the University of Melbourne and have had my first informal meetings with my supervisor. As we were discussing my timelines for study in the next six months she mentioned to me that I probably shouldn’t try to work more than two days a week because I should be working on my thesis every day-full time. I was kind of stunned even though I understood her reasoning and was aware that Ph.D’s tend to, you know, take a lot of time. I have been on Newstart (the dole) since graduating in 2013 and because it has been a year since I entered the system and the multiple sources of casual and part time work that I’ve been sustaining all year has slowed down (aka I’m now properly really unemployed instead of just underemployed), I now have to apply for a huge amount of jobs that I can’t actually do in order to get my allowance, and am threatened with the possibility that I’m going to have to go on a work for the dole program. My full-time Ph.D is, contrary to what the University has told me, not counted as work (or even as study) under Newstart.

Alongside this, I may not be accepted to be on a study allowance due to the fact that my discipline is, like lots of disciplines outside of science, medicine, and education, not considered by the department of human services or federal bodies to be one of the vital areas to be prioritised in giving out student benefits. I have not received a commonwealth APA scholarship (the standard Ph.D commonwealth living allowance granted to many PhD students, designated through universities) despite being ranked highly within our school out of a huge amount of applications, due to the downsizing of the arts faculty programs and higher education funding cuts over the years. Many of the senior academics have remarked to me that this increasingly pressurised situation is untenable within the faculty of arts and pushes even some of the more privileged students out of study.

This semester I am not able to teach in my discipline because Ph.D students within the faculty of arts are encouraged not to teach in their first year so that they can focus on their studies. This is because arts Ph.Ds tend to take a long time to complete. Universities, getting a lot of funding and research out of Ph.D cohorts, become impatient with low and/or slow completion rates because they need to balance out the costs and benefits of having the Ph.D students they take on.

Graduate students are squeezed into the university in this way all the time. We are expected to finish on time so that the university can be paid, and expected to teach, produce research, and participate in the academic community, often without being paid at all. In combination, all of this means that we are expected, at times, to be working for the university for free. The institution reaps the benefits of the work I produce, they congratulate themselves every year for meeting targets based on Indigenous presence and achievement, and ultimately they will get paid when I finish my doctorate.

Meanwhile I have no idea how I’m going to make this year financially viable. Even sessional teaching, despite how casualised it is and how insecure it leaves staff members, provides financial security during semester that I can rely on to pay some bills. I also involve myself in community work in various ways, as most Aboriginal people who are studying do, which we often do in unpaid roles.

When I first moved to Melbourne at 18 I was homeless and did not have access to Centrelink at all. I drifted in and out of houses and had intermittent periods with no income and no house of my own, couchsurfing with whoever would allow me to stay with them. When I did have a place, or was able to work, I wasn’t always in a place to be able to manage my own finances. The cracks in student services at the University of Melbourne were already appearing post-the Melbourne Model, the restructure of 2008 that preceded 2014’s next big shift, the Business Improvement Plan, which made and is still making up to 500 professional staff across the whole University redundant and needlessly impacted the health and stress levels of many more. Indigenous services at the University have been patchy and unreliable at best during this 6 year period, and have been restructured 4 times.  While the university funds targets like Aboriginal research, development, ‘partnerships’ and parity, Aboriginal students often have no support navigating study, housing, and the various bureaucracies of University life.

In 2009 when I first came to study, the University had just evicted SHAC, a housing protest by students on Faraday street against housing inequities. I was offered a place living in university housing for $600 a month under a scheme they’d developed in response to the protest, living with five strangers. I refused in favour of my own (what turned out to be quite dangerous and illegal) housing option I’d organised after answering an ad in a Melbourne paper, desperately, which was far cheaper and seemed somehow more reassuring. Melbourne University’s housing programs have since fucked over a lot of Aboriginal students I know and been partly abandoned.

One woman who had been a professional staff member remarked to me that the admin at the university was falling apart and the university with it. At 18, it surprised me. I’m the first person in my family to go to Melbourne University. My family were very impressed with me for getting in. The University has a facade of elitism, prestige, tolerance and worldliness that it cultivates and likes to represent with. It has been hungry for numbers of Aboriginal students in the past few years, keen to demonstrate their capacity for “reconciliation” and “parity”. My grandparents can proudly tell people I go to a sandstone when I sometimes had low expectations placed on me as an Aboriginal young person with mental health issues from a “troubled” family.

My Centrelink case worker has remarked to me in the past that over the last fifteen years that she has been in her job, it becomes more and more impossible. She is constantly having to force people into more and more difficult positions in order to get them their benefits, when we all know that not everyone will be able to get a job, it’s just not possible. I was surprised by the admission from her.

I have not really been studying lately, mostly because I am angry that I would have to do it for free, that if I was really wealthy or really employable or had well off parents that were supporting me then doing my degree would be something that wouldn’t send me broke or cause me unhealthy amounts of stress. I’m angry that I can’t justify doing this at all even though elders in my community have urged me to finish. Obviously my refusal to participate in my expensive degree only hurts me.

I’m not doing so badly right now; which is what I tell myself when I have no money-I’m living day to day with no savings but I still have transport, a bed and a roof and I’m not starving, and my support networks are really strong, which is the biggest privilege of all. When I’m broke I am absolutely certain that people will support me. If I became homeless I know I would be able to survive that. I know that because these possibilities have been present for me for years now and I know how to work with them. I can and most likely will work this year to sustain myself. It’s still hard not to have a meltdown.

This experience has reminded me how dangerous being an undergraduate student was for my health and how many times I nearly had to drop out because I was studying full time and working just enough to cover my rent, how many subjects I failed because I was too tired to read or attend class and I had no support. When I was a student representative I spoke to a lot of Indigenous students who slept rough, had really dangerous living situations, were intellectually brilliant and were treated like actual dirt by the University administration and non-Aboriginal student representative bodies.

It’s not about individual difficulty or one off cases of even just about one government or University policy in isolation, many things combine to create the situation where we can take care of ourselves adequately (let alone do real, good work that we want to do for our communities and have external lives) impossible enough that we can’t go to university. This is the reality for Aboriginal students who go to uni. It’s about our day to day experience, of having to be wary and strategic when dealing with organisations who are supposed to be making it easier. It’s not just about course fees or increases in HECS debt, but as I’m learning, debt does make it worse. It’s terrifying to think of how many Aboriginal students are doing worse off than I am, for longer periods of time.

Open letter on Christopher Pyne’s proposed ‘reforms’ to Higher Education.

We, the undersigned Aboriginal students of Blacademy, register our formal and complete protest against the proposed Federal legislative ‘reforms’ to deregulate Australia’s tertiary education sector. We register our serious concern regarding the current state of the debate, which is one of ideology over substance. We condemn the actions of many of the key actors, in particular, The Federal Government and Universities Australia. In writing this letter, we take it upon ourselves collectively, to speak out against the negligence that policy makers and representatives have shown not just to Aboriginal students, but also to students with disabilities and low SES students.

 

It is the position of Blacademy that our public education system should be properly resourced, and its resourcing through taxpayer investment be held  distinctly apart from private education interests in order to ensure an equitable and a higher standard of educational outcomes for all Australians. We oppose the transformation of Australian universities into profit driven corporations, with a two-tier system that limits accessibility of educational avenues. Such an approach is fundamentally at odds with role that universities have within our society.

 

The concerns of Aboriginal students being priced out of critical avenues to further their educational and employment opportunities have either been treated as an afterthought, or ignored in this debate. Access to tertiary education is about more than seeing higher future returns on income, but also about the ability for us to contribute more to raising the standard of living in our communities, and preserving our unique cultures. It should be common sense to policy makers and common knowledge that Aboriginal students do not have a comparable level of access to tertiary education than the average Australian, and addressing those issues require nuance that is beyond some nebulous concept of ‘scholarships’.

 

It concerns us greatly, how little evidence the Australian Federal Government has presented in its case for the deregulation of the tertiary sector as they pursue a ‘free market’ myth: that opening public universities to an open market automatically creates fair access, quality education and market discipline. This is occurring in a context where the Australian Federal Government is engaging in crony-capitalism, supplying welfare to powerful private interests, and stripping public investment out of services critical to the health and well-being of the Australian public. This has disproportionately impacted funding to vital services for Aboriginal people. The last year of Coalition Government leaves beyond any reasonable doubt, that it is a government that has lied to the Australian public in the most egregious ways possible. It is a government that has provided no evidence to substantiate its claims that deregulation will achieve the desired outcomes.

 

If The United States is the exemplar of deregulation, as Christopher Pyne incessantly proselytizes, then we find little hope in the future of ‘Closing the Gap’. Every major example of the deregulation of tertiary education, be it the United States or Britain, have utterly failed to achieve fair access, leading to a system that disproportionately benefits wealthy families. We find these scenarios completely and utterly unacceptable outcomes to gamble our futures upon.

 

As Aboriginal students, we hereby:

• Call on all Australian Vice-Chancellor’s and University establishments to abandon plans for deregulation.
• We call on the Senate to unequivocally reject the Federal Government’s education reforms.
• We call for a holistic review of education funding that draws from the entire sector and not mere partisan interest for deregulation.
• We demand that any review be evidence and equality based.
• We demand a far greater emphasis on access for the most disadvantaged students.
• We call for a fair and equitable funding structure for students in tertiary education, and unequivocally reject calls to deregulate fees.

 

Blacademy supports accessible education and extends solidarity to Aboriginal students at Universities across Australia. Tertiary education is an investment in our future, not merely future financial returns. Our education should not be reduced to a simple commodity.

Signed:

 

Kyle Webb, Dharug, University of Melbourne.

 

Azlan Martin, Nunga, Edith Cowan University.

 

Maddee Clark, Bundjalung, University of Melbourne.

 

Todd Fernando, Wiradjuri, University of Melbourne.

 

Hannah Armstrong, Moonbird (Palawa), La Trobe University

 

Sharlene Leroy-Dyer, Wiradjuri/Dhurag, University of Newcastle.

 

Kyol Blakeney, Gomeroi, President – University of Sydney Students’ Representative Council

 

Anna Amelia, Guringai – University of New South Wales

 

Alison Whittaker, Gomeroi, University of Technology, Sydney

 

Oscar Monaghan, Murri, University of Sydney, Sydney