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National Labor Students (NLS) is a democratic socialist student political organisation aligned to the Socialist Left of the Australian Labor Party. With branches at most Australian universities, National Labor Students dominates the majority of campus student unions in New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia and has held the presidency of the National Union of Students since its inception.

Early Labor Clubs and the Australian Student Labor Federation

Australia's national Labor student organisations have existed in various guises since the 1920s, with the first formation, the Australian Student Labor Federation (ASLF), being launched in 1927. In its early years the ASLF was generally unsympathetic to the Australian Labor Party. It was dominated throughout the thirties, forties and early fifties by Marxists, before coming under the influence of left-wing social democrats during the resurgence of popular student and intellectual enthusiasm for Laborism with the leadership of H. V. Evatt.(1) By the 1960s the ASLF was a complex bureaucratic apparatus, particularly strong in New South Wales, where the Sydney University, Macquarie and UNSW Labor Clubs jointly funded an off-campus office.(2) The ASLF was administered by a central executive, with delegates from affiliated Labor Clubs deciding its strategic direction at a national conference each year.

The first university Labor Club was created in April 1925 at Sydney University during the Seaman's Strike of that year, closely followed by Melbourne University Labor Club in August.(1) The early Labor Clubs at the first three universities, Adelaide, Sydney and Melbourne, had an ambivalent relationship to the ALP. By the early 1930s they were firmly the home of Marxist students aligned to the Communist Party of Australia, with the Clubs briefly re-naming themselves Socialist Societies in the mid-1940s. The sixties radicalisation of the student movement shifted the political orientation of the Labor Clubs. Only at Melbourne University did the Aarons-line CPA students maintain control. The Sydney University Labor Club became locked in a struggle between an 'old-guard' loyal to the CPA and an anti-Stalinist group led by Bob Gould and John Percy that succeeded in wresting the club to a Trotskyist orientation.(6) The Monash Labor Club under Albert Langeur adopted a Maoist line and became infamous for its Aid for the NLF campaign that was echoed at La Trobe and Flinders University Labor Clubs.(1) At the University of Queensland and the Australian National University the Labor Clubs became home to the Students for a Democratic Society.(6)

During the 1960s moderate social democrats split to form rival ALP Clubs that were also affiliates of the ASLF. The ALP Clubs tended to have close links to the National Civil Council in Victoria and to right-wing sections of the labour movement in the other states, and its leaderships formed a political machine that dominated the Australian Union of Students.(4) However, the ASLF continued to radicalise and acted as the major forum for student radicalism on campuses until the leftist takeover of the AUS in 1972.(3) The first national student action against the Vietnam War took place at the ASLF national conference in May 1968, when four-hundred delegates from campus Labor Clubs stormed the Prime Minister's Lodge in Canberra. Four out of five members of the ASLF executive were arrested by the Federal Police, who re-convened the conference inside the police station.(5) This swing to radicalism was mirrored in the collapse of the ASLF in 1970, with the departure of radical Labor Clubs to form the short-lived, broad left Revolutionary Socialist Student Alliance.(3)

CALPS and the AUS

National Labor Students traces its direct political origins to the Council of Australian Labor Party Students (CALPS), founded in 1977 as a Labor Left tendency within the Australian Union of Students.(7) While its first three national presidents were Flinders University Labor Club members, by 1979 it had become dominated by the Victorian Socialist Left. (7) After the collapse of the long-standing power-sharing deal between Trotskyist, Maoist and CPA students for control of AUS, CALPS gained a foothold for the first time in National Office when in 1980 it was approached to form a joint leadership pact with the CPA Tertiary Collective.(7) This coalition, dubbed the 'AUS Management', launched the Education Fightback campaign in 1980 that successfully overturned the Fraser government's plans to re-introduce fees.(8) CALPS captured National Office in its own right in 1982, and proceeded under the leadership of final AUS Presidents, including Julia Gillard and Michael O'Connor, to break with radicalism and steer national student unionism towards education, welfare and services provision.(9) The AUS collapsed in 1984 under the weight of a succession of campus disaffiliations and the collapse of its commercial services operations centered on AUS Student Travel, but CALPS continued to dominate student unions throughout the 1980s.(9)

CALPS retreated from the collapse of the AUS into building state-based unions which could then be used to establish a new national student organisation built out of a stable federal structure (Hastings, 181). The CALPS presidents of the Victorian Students’ Union (1986), the Western Australian Post-Secondary Students’ Organisation (1985) and the Queensland Union of Students (1986) came together in late 1986 to announce their intentions to create a national association of student unions out of the newly formed state structures (182). This coincided with an internal movement in CALPS to end its role as a factional vehicle for the Socialist Left and instead move to become a ‘broad church’ ALP student caucus incorporating sections of Labor Right. At its May 1987 national conference, CALPS changed its name to the National Organisation of Labor Students (NOLS) and invited Labor Right students to join (182).

NOLS, the NUS and National Labor Students

This new organisation, NOLS, dominated the vast majority of campus student unions across the country and could, thus, in its own right, form a new national student union that could legitimately claim to be the national representative body for Australian students. Shortly after NOLS’ founding conference, delegates from mainly NOLS and independent university student unions met in Canberra to establish the National Union of Students with Roger Cook (NOLS Left) as its interim president (182). A second conference in December 1987 included delegates from NOLS and Left Alliance and created a formally incorporated National Union of Students. Tracey Ellery from NOLS Left was elected president, continuing a since unbroken chain of Labor Left presidents of NUS.

NOLS did not remain a broad ALP grouping for long. Unlike its CALPS predecessor which had been dominated by the Victorian Socialist Left, the NSW Labor Left would hold a dominant position in NOLS for its entire history (194). This led to an exodus of Labor Right members, led by David Feeney, to form Student Unity in 1991. NOLS and Student Unity continued a ‘sweetheart deal’, trading a left NUS presidency for a right general secretary, throughout NOLS’ existence. In 1998 the Victorian Socialist Left and some WA members split from NOLS to form NOLS Right (known by NOLS members as NOLS Rats, and later changing its name to Australian Labor Students). (194) ALS became the dominant Labor Left faction in Victoria and merged with NOLS to form National Labor Students on 1 January 2006. This new formation has continued to hold the presidency of the National Union of Students ever since.

External links

National Labor Students website [1]

References

1. Hastings, 30 2. The Trouble With Students, 28 3. Hastings, 32 4. Hastings, 34 5. Hastings, 35 6. Hastings, 31 7. Hastings, 170 8. Hastings, 172 9. Hastings, 176