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 NUS NatCon 2014

We, the undersigned Indigenous students, register our formal protest at the events which have occurred at the National Union of Students’ (NUS) National Conference and their detrimental impact to autonomous Indigenous representation through the peak body of student unionism. We call for the broader disaffiliation of member unions, and seek an increased focus on Indigenous student organisations on member campuses, and an autonomous peak body of Indigenous student unionism.

We understand that this open letter will not forge a change in policy, approach or practice for NUS, but we cannot let this disgrace be unspoken or without reply and condemnation, nor without the opportunity to present an alternative model of Indigenous student unionism, one which is autonomous, outside factional control and self-determining.

Our formal concerns and protest 

Whilst the National Union of Students has had a particularly flawed history of undermining and exploiting Indigenous students and their autonomy (including co-opting previous efforts to build an independent Indigenous student union and a more autonomous portfolio) the recent removal of the already-meagre honorarium for the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Officer has caused grave hurt, disempowerment and concern to Indigenous students in a context of broader cuts by Liberal and Labor governments.

 Despite the fraught history of NUS and Indigenous students, we were nonetheless shocked to learn that National Labor Students (a student branch of Labor Left), Student Unity (a student branch of Labor Right) and the Socialist Alternative (a trotskyist organisation) had voted to strip the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, International and Disability departments of their funding.

Notwithstanding NUS’ poor performance so far in speaking to and acting on a foray of cuts to Indigenous education this year, including the effective end of the long-standing Indigenous Tutorial Assistance Scheme, widespread racism and settler colonialism in proposed and implemented curriculums, and the restructuring of Indigenous accommodation options, the defunding of the department has guaranteed ongoing inaction and silence on Indigenous policy and on the attacks on Indigenous students.

NUS cuts to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander department come at a time of broader Indigenous education cuts and have left us devastated, with few places to turn for representation and the resources to work for equitable and radical changes to Indigenous education, locally and nationally. NUS has left us vulnerable and without defence from widespread failures in Indigenous education over the last decade.

Celeste Liddle, National Indigenous Organiser from the National Tertiary Education Union, has done excellent work in bringing these systemic failures to light, and we encourage you to read her work on them.

 It is not only the removal of resources and honorarium from the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Students department that is of concern, but the expectation that Indigenous students will contribute their uncompensated and disempowered labour to the Union in order to bring it to surplus and to ensure its continued relevance in education advocacy.

In order for us to continue to advocate through established means against the failings in Indigenous education, we are asked to work for free. Without working for free in NUS, we cannot guarantee that the organisation would even acknowledge these problems in Indigenous education. This binds our free labour to the union in exchange for having any national acknowledgement of Indigenous students or policy.

 

Context

NUS has a history of co-opting Indigenous students in order to appear to be engaging these issues, applauding the discussion of Indigenous policy and Indigenous commentary on ‘intersectionality’, but this engagement is shallow and self-serving. NUS’ conduct better reflects their attitudes towards Indigenous students, including the brokering of factional deals with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Students department, the forging of proxy forms for Indigenous students , picketing against Indigenous voters and harassment of Indigenous students. This year, the General Secretary of NUS referred to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Student, Disabilities and International portfolios as ‘useless’.

In light of the heavy focus on the gendered wage gap by NUS campaigns this year (some of which attempted to include a race analysis), this move to remove pay from International, Disabilities and Indigenous representative positions is revealing of their wider attitude to the value of the work of International, Disabled and Indigenous students.

This year, Indigenous students Kyol Blakeney and Anna Amelia rose to speak to NUS’ neglect of Indigenous policy, confronting conference floor on their apathy to Indigenous students and issues. They were met with praise from white students. When those same students rose to condemn the pulling of funding from the department, instead of being met with standing ovations, they were harassed, and accused of being ‘scabs’.

Developing the national NUS Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander position itself was an exercise in demonstrating how quickly mainstream unions and institutions reject Indigenous self-determination and autonomy. The model of autonomy put forward by Indigenous students was compromised by mainstreaming. Mainstream union protection for Indigenous students is frail at best. At worst, and as repeatedly demonstrated, introducing Indigenous peoples as merely a cog of a larger student and factional process is less well-meaning solidarity, as it is a means for self-congratulation.

Our labour and our language has been co-opted into feigning an anti-racist, anti-colonialist, anti-ableist and ‘intersectional’ appearance for a racist, colonialist and ableist union, and its factions. We can no longer allow this to be so.

We will no longer be brought into sessions to provide our Cultural and lived knowledge to benefit an organisation which uses us to perform interpersonal anti-racism as a cheap political trick. We will no longer provide settler-framed images of pity to then be negotiated out of resources and power to implement change, especially now that we can never be reimbursed for the pleasure of that exploitation.

We reject the false choice put on us by NUS and will direct our advocacy and labour away from the union. We seek to use this opportunity to emphasise that there are other choices for Indigenous students than NUS, and that we can and will build them.

We condemn individual vote-carrying members of those factions who complicitly directed their small power to deliver this blow to Indigenous students. We do not accept that your responsibility for this can be directed away to your binding faction. Moreover, we hope that you understand the structural and interpersonal weight of your actions. This is of grave and critical impact to Indigenous students as a whole, Indigenous access to education, and our material resources for autonomy, but also to each of us personally.

NUS cannot escape from the historical and social context of its actions when it chooses to axe the financial recognition of Indigenous contributions to the union. It is distinctly unsettling to see justifications of the greater good and student/worker rights used to justify disempowering Indigenous students in the name of buoying a union surplus. As the stations did to Indigenous jackaroos, as forced labour and separation did to Aboriginal house servants, as the present tethers welfare to forced work and land surrender, NUS seeks to profit from not only Indigenous images, stories, narratives and anti-racist currency, but from the invisible work Indigenous persons, including ourselves, have contributed to the union, while ironically labelling Indigenous student leaders “scabs” for protesting this.

If NUS cannot continue to exist over the next five years without defunding these portfolios, as President Deanna Taylor has suggested, then perhaps it is better to simply let the institution dissolve than to allow another union to be built from the unpaid, co-opted labour of Indigenous students, International Students and Disabled Students.

 

Call to action

As a group of Indigenous student leaders, we recommend to all campuses affiliated to the National Union of Students that it be disaffiliated and defunded immediately in light of the atrocious behaviour towards Indigenous students, disabled students and students of colour demonstrated at NUS National Conference and the culture that has made this behaviour the norm in student political circles. The defunding of national Indigenous, International, and disability representative positions at NatCon this year, and the election of a white South African man to the position of Ethno-Cultural representative, are recent examples in a long line of examples that NUS does not support autonomous politics that it cannot co-opt and control.

We extend our solidarity to all Indigenous students, disabled, students, and people of colour who have been affected by the recent events at NatCon, and recognise their efforts to create empowering and radicalised spaces within an often apolitical framework dominated by white careerists and factionalist power plays which do not support us, include us or value our participation beyond what capital we can produce for them.

We call for the development of a new, independent, self-determined Indigenous student union on a national level. We will no longer provide our work and expertise, Cultural, lived and learned, to the National Union of Students in attempting to secure one sliver of institutional capacity from which they will derive benefit. We can no longer attempt to educate or persuade, as that relies upon a good faith and sincere approach to Indigenous students, which NUS has demonstrated that it does not possess.

We hereby support:

• The disaffiliation of campus unions and student bodies from the National Union of Students
• Formal condemnation of the actions of the National Union of Students by campus unions, student bodies and student networks.
• A block on the sharing of Indigenous knowledge, labour and experience with the National Union of Students
• The development of independent Indigenous student bodies on every campus
• The development of a peak, autonomous Indigenous student union.

We ask for the support of Indigenous and non-Indigenous students nationally in doing this.

Alison Whittaker, Gomeroi, BA/LLB student, former UTSSA Indigenous Officer and Women’s Officer

Maddee Clark, Bundjalung, Indigenous officer of the University of Melbourne Student Union 2014

Azlan Martin, Nunga, BA/Psychology student

Oscar Monaghan, Murri, BA/LLB student USYD, Autonomous Collective Against Racism Officer Bearer 2014

Kyle Webb. Dharug. BA. Indigenous Officer of the University of Melbourne Student Union 2014.

Kyol Blakeney, President of the University of Sydney SRC.