The government’s cuts to higher education funding are the most severe in decades. On Tuesday 20 August there will be demonstrations in every city to protest against these cuts. The demonstrations are an opportunity to send a strong message to Labor and the Liberals in the lead-up to the federal election that their neoliberal agenda for our education system will not be met with silence.

The $2.3 billion in cuts will have a drastic impact on students. On average every Australian student will lose $332 in funding as of next year. By 2017 it will be down by $488. Even more disgracefully, the cuts will have the most negative impact on the poorest students.

Students will no longer be able to access grants from Centrelink to help pay for their books and other study costs. Instead they will have to take out a loan from the government. For a full-time student that means a HECS increase of up to 37 percent. All the while, the government is spending billions violently patrolling our borders and exiling asylum seekers to PNG.

For the last few decades Labor and Liberal have both promoted the privatisation and degradation of our education system. The cuts announced this year are just the latest contribution to this bipartisan project. Australia is now ranked 25 out of 29 comparable countries in terms of university funding per student.

Of the OECD countries that have progressed furthest towards a “user-pays” higher education system, Australia is second only to Chile. As well, there is a continuing trend towards slashing courses, increasing class sizes and casualising university staff.

We need to build big, loud, angry mobilisations on the streets that can force whoever wins the election to reverse the cuts.

Thousands of students and staff have already been made aware of these cuts and thousands are angry about the right wing politics that are dominating this year’s federal election campaign. But we need to continue to spread the word and we need to convince people to turn their anger towards collective protest action on the streets.

On 14 May we plastered our campuses with posters, handed out thousands of leaflets, made thousands of lecture announcements and took every opportunity to talk to people about the issue. We need to do the same in the lead-up to 20 August.