As the Gillard Government prepares to hand down its 2013 budget, thousands of university students converge in Melbourne to protest the multi-million dollar cuts to the nation's tertiary education sector. Georgie Moore was there.

by GEORGIE MOORE

Thousands of students rallied in Melbourne today against the Gillard Government’s $2.3 billion  higher education funding cuts.

Chants of “education should be free, no cuts, no fees” drowned out speeches by the protest’s organisers, the National Union of Students, slamming the scrapping of the 10 per cent HECS discount for upfront fees and the conversion of student-start up scholarships to loans.

The National Tertiary Education Union joined the protest, concerned about the impacts of what it claims is a $900m efficiency dividend on already overstretched staff.

“So that will mean bigger class sizes, cuts to courses and units, higher staff-student ratios, more casualisation of academic work… all these problems that are there already, but this will exacerbate some of them,” said NTEU State Secretary Colin Ward.

The unions did not expect a short-term victory from the rally and instead drew the education battle lines ahead of September’s federal election.

“So there’s nothing we can do about it [today]. What we’re doing is making sure that the government knows people are pissed off about these cuts,” said NUS National Education Officer Clare Keyes-Liley.

The protest stopped traffic as it marched along Swanston Street towards Federation Square for speeches by the NTEU and Greens candidates.

The NTEU will hold an executive meeting this Friday to determine its campaign strategy for the federal election and to decide whether it will formally endorse Greens MP for Melbourne, Adam Bandt, and independent Tasmanian MP, Andrew Wilkie, for re-election.

The next protest against the cuts will be held on May 30.