The generation gap

Future premier of Queensland Peter Beattie, seen towards the left carrying a flag, with other students demonstrating in Brisbane against South African apartheid in mid-1971.

Universities were once training grounds for future politicians, but the pool has shrunk in the past two decades as the campuses have drifted away from old allegiances. What does it mean for party politics and the voters?

AT Monash University in the 1960s, Jim Bacon, who would go on to be the Labor premier of Tasmania, takes to walking around campus wearing a Mao cap and carrying his copy of The Little Red Book.

It's the height of the Cold War, conscription, Vietnam and global student activism and Bacon and his comrades dominate campus politics. Some days, at Monash, as many as 1000 students spend hours listening to speakers such as the anti-totalitarian Frank Knopfelmacher or the left-wing Labor MP Jim Cairns.

In 1970 Lynn Arnold, a student at the University of Adelaide and later premier of South Australia, is arrested in the centre of Adelaide as he leads 5000 people in protest against the Vietnam War. It is the fourth time he has been picked up for his anti-war activity.

At St Lucia, University of Queensland students disrupt the politics lectures. They're sick of the theory, they want their own program -- a tutorial on the Viet Cong, perhaps.

In 1979, Tony Abbott, with a little encouragement from B.A. Santamaria, is clearing the lefties from the University of Sydney, but he can't stop the graffiti on the lavatory walls dissing the first conservative president of the Students Representative Council in some time.

It's easy to look back in awe, anger or amazement -- depending on your point of view -- at the student activism of 45, 35, even 25 years ago. Those were the days when student newspapers, such as Lot's Wife at Monash, were run as magazines of radical, some would say extreme, ideas; when Peter Costello and Julia Gillard consecutively battled for the hearts and minds of the nation's students; when undergraduates would turn out en masse on the library lawn, or in the Great Court, or the quad to hear 19-year-olds argue the case against conscription, or apartheid, or Joh Bjelke-Petersen's ban on street marches. Peter Beattie, who would become Queensland's premier, was a street marcher in the 1970s.

Even looking back through the fog of nostalgia, it's clear life on campus is different now. The big ideological battles are over, the raw contest of ideas is as remote as the Soviet Union. Students squeeze campus time between their part-time jobs, their intense social lives and Facebook. They're worried about money and marks, not world peace and Marx.

Says Nick Dyrenfurth, a research fellow at Sydney University: "If someone goes on to the lawn these days with a megaphone, they're likely to be met by groans." The political clubs remain -- and the Middle East can still polarise views on campus -- but the real action is online, often at single-issue organisations focused on climate change or world poverty, peopled by individuals who need no convincing of the cause and who may share no common beliefs or ideals beyond the issue du jour. It's a profound shift with implications for the recruitment and training of the next generation of MPs, and for the politicisation of the next generation of voters.

IT would be a mistake to assume everyone at university in the 60s and 70s was politically engaged. They were not. But politics was in the air, part of the culture, and for many people those days were decisive in influencing the voting patterns of a lifetime.

Says Jim McGinty, a former Labor attorney-general of Western Australia and an active student politician at the University of Western Australia in the early 70s: "You had to think through what you believed in. I remember sitting up for hours arguing the points, going to coffee shops on campus . . . the people I associated with thought we had to think through where we stood."

McGinty was part of a talented group of UWA politicians who went on to political careers in the ALP, Kim Beazley Jr and Bob McMullan among them. That story was replicated elsewhere by Tom Roper, Rob Jolly, and the aforementioned Arnold and Bacon.

Others from both sides would hone their skills on campus a decade or more later: Gillard, Christopher Pyne, Penny Wong, Julie Bishop, Nick Xenophon, Abbott, Andrew Robb, Joe Hockey, Tanya Plibersek, Anthony Albanese, Eric Abetz, Sophie Mirabella. And of course campus politics was a training ground for other professions: Jim Spigelman was president of the Sydney Students Representative Council and went on to be NSW Chief Justice; Robert French, the Chief Justice of the High Court, was a student leader at UWA in the late 60s.

There is still plenty of talent on campus. Indeed, some academics note a renewed interest in politics.

Historian Ann Curthoys, who went to Sydney University as a student in the 60s, agrees it's a different world these days but says she was pleasantly surprised this year: running a course on the 60s, no less, she found the revolutionary flame still alive in some students.

But everyone agrees about the flight from campus-wide activism and many fear that online commitments are unlikely to morph into connections with the main parties. Old-fashioned campus politics were mano-a-mano exercises. Shouting each other down was routine. People remark on the composure of our Prime Minister but perhaps forget that Gillard's skills were honed early in the then Australian Union of Students. Will online leaders, fighting single-issue campaigns learn the broader skills needed for mainstream politics: discussion, compromise and a broader view?

The new generation is unfazed. "I'm not interested in traditional political parties," says Amanda McKenzie, 27, co-founder of the Australian Youth Climate Coalition, which has 56,000 online members.

"Political parties don't have the same resonance for young people as they did in the past."

She and colleague Anna Rose were studying at Monash and Sydney universities, respectively, when they set up the AYCC four years ago because, "we knew we wouldn't have the autonomy and responsibility we wanted if we were part of another organisation". Ditto Will Emmett, the 22-year-old chief executive of the Left Right Think Tank, a coalition of 200 organisations that focuses on issues such as climate change and international aid. Emmett had not been involved in student politics until he came across the think tank and realised it was exactly what he had been looking for.

"I wanted to be part of an organisation that allowed me to have a progressive economic stance and conservative social stance, or vice versa. I wanted to be involved in issues, not the politics of issues."

Neither McKenzie nor Emmett is ready for a quick segue to mainstream politics.

Emmett says: "I can see myself going into politics in 10 or 20 years, but the game would have had to have changed, or I would go in as a game changer. What's on offer at the moment is pretty uninspiring."

McKenzie says: "To be blunt, I don't see politics as the most optimal way to get solutions to problems because of the adversarial system, with one party just opposing the other. At the moment, politics holds no appeal to me."

SO if the old campus politics is dead, who or what killed it? The immediate answer that many offer is the 2006 Howard government decision to ban compulsory membership of student unions.

"The breaking down of student unions has had a massive impact on student politics, which led to involvement with political parties," says Anthony Ashbolt, a professor of history and politics at the University of Wollongong. "It was a direct conduit into politics."

He argues that "the subtext behind getting rid of student unionism was that the Liberals wanted to throttle a breeding ground for future Labor politicians." The Gillard government is in the process of repealing the legislation to allow for a compulsory $250 student services fee to be raised by university administrations, although it will not be used to fund political activity on campus.

But the end of compulsory unionism cannot bear all the blame. Simon Marginson, professor of higher education at the University of Melbourne, notes the decline of traditional student politics echoes the decline of traditional political organisations generally.

"Politics is now being played out in the public communicative space, such as Facebook and Twitter," he says. "Student politics used to be toy parliaments and toy political parties, but they don't need to go through that sort of simulation now, they can go directly into political activity through communicative media."

Technology also has played a part, with many students working long hours to support themselves, or simply disinclined to travel to campus, opting to download lectures from the internet.

Dyrenfurth says: "There is a big demand from students for material to be on the web. People don't stay on campus and that's magnified at the campuses like Monash that are outside the CBD.

"There is no longer the campus culture where people can organise politically."

While technology has changed university life, bigger forces have been at play since the 60s. Until then there had been a tradition of political clubs in Australia's handful of city universities. They mirrored the key threads in mainstream politics -- Labor, Liberal and communist-socialist -- and those ideological divides were replicated in faculty who often engaged directly with the clubs.

Life changed with the radicalisation of students around the ideas of Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, which achieved serious traction, particularly at the newer campuses such as Monash, which lacked the traditions of the older institutions.

Monash was the most rebellious campus, but across the country students were galvanised by the war, conscription and Gough Whitlam. The battle for ideological supremacy was fought at every level. Internal campus debates, such as the future of philosophy at Sydney University or governance at Monash, were played out against the Left-Right divide.

Yet the issues at their core were local and specific, says emeritus professor Kay Saunders, a PhD student at the University of Queensland in the early 70s. The focus then was on fighting the draft, fighting apartheid and fighting the state government's ban on street marches. Saunders recalls the anti-draft movement as "a very masculine movement, boy warriors at the barricades, appallingly sexist", but at least it was concrete. "There is nothing so local and specific now," she says. "How do you mobilise students around global warming? The issues are too global and diffuse." Except online, it would seem.

By the 80s, the ideological battle had crystallised around the future of the Australian Union of Students, which was replaced by the more moderate National Union of Students. The last great surge of activism on campus was in the mid-80s around Labor's education reforms, the introduction of HECS and the "massification" of higher education. There was a limited revival during the first Gulf War but by the time John Howard moved to end compulsory unionism in 2006, the traditional student body politic was all but extinct.

FORTY years ago, campus involvement provided McGinty with the skills that saw him through a lifetime of politics. McGinty had come from a big, Catholic, working-class family living in Bunbury, and was the first of his family to get to university. A year running the Guild of Undergraduates, a sizeable business that covered catering, sports and other services for students, and a year spent as a student representative on the university's governing body, the senate, were transformative experiences.

But he says: "We did not see it as a career path in those days, it just happened. In a sense it created future opportunities but you didn't think of that at the time. These days a lot of graduates go through to become political staffers and move on to parliament. I think it was good that you did what you did but did not think of it leading to a job."

In recent years, the path to politics has narrowed. Ariadne Vromen of Sydney University, says: "They start in Young Labor or Young Liberals, get a job in an electoral office, eventually get preselection and become a politician from there."

Marginson laments the process that can lead to party hacks without enough life experience. Which is why Dyrenfurth, who has co-written with Tim Soutphommasane a book titled All That's Left: What Labor Should Stand For, argues the reduction of Labor's power to train staff and candidates and win over voters is not necessarily a negative.

"There's a culture within the ALP of an increasingly professional class of apparatchiks whose whole university experience is about a political career. They join the club, they work in an electorate office part time, they get their degree and move into the professional ranks. It's an extraordinarily narrow life experience . . . There's nothing to mourn in the passing of that narrow clique."

Dyrenfurth agrees that the Greens have captured young people who once would have voted Labor and that Bob Brown and his colleagues pose a threat to the status of Labor as the party of progressive policy. But he reckons the jury is out on whether that threat will last, whether the Greens will survive the eventual retirement of Brown. He cautions, too, against the power of the new online politics. They sign up but will they stay? "It's easier for someone to step away from the net than it is to step away when it's in your face on campus every day," he says.

Helen Trinca is a former editor of this newspaper's Higher Education supplement; Julie Hare is the section's present editor.