What Price Voluntary Student Unions. (August 10, 2005)

The maelstrom

    Funny isn't it, while the Federal Coalition through its Minister for Education, Science and Training, Brendan Nelson, has the nation's attention trained on whether or not university student unions and the services they provide ought to be supported by compulsory or voluntary fees, the questions of the quality of the universities' research and teaching, the ability of their infrastructure and staffing ratios to provide the best milieu for enhancing the wellbeing of the nation through research and the education of its young -- and not only from a materialistic viewpoint -- are sequestered under a cloak of invisibility.

Whether or not it is a deliberate ploy by the governing Coalition to preoccupy not only the public, but the opposition political parties and the nation's university students and academics, it has been eminently successful.