Students slam privatization

SYDNEY - Mohammed Trad

November 2003

Sydney University staff and students chock the streets during a protest in Sydney in late October. Some 40,000 academic and general staff from Australia's 38 public universities went on a day-long strike following government moves to link higher education funding to industrial conditions.

Like other countries that used to spend on expensive social welfare system, Australia is trying to abandon its socialist economy and pick up recipes from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Student and labor unions protested cuts in the ailing economy blaming the slowing world economy to monopolies of multinational corporations that have out sums of money at the disposal of a few rich people.