Victoria Park resident and guild vice-president Sam Cavallaro said they wanted to show their anger towards PM Gillard’s ‘right-wing agenda’.
‘Gillard, as the head of the Federal Government, is responsible for cutting funding to single parents and to universities as well as locking up refugees and denying equal marriage rights,’ he said.
Senator Mark Bishop told the gathering that funding for universities had increased by more than 60 per cent between 2007 and 2012, and funding would continue to grow, albeit at a slower rate over the next two years.
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READ NOW‘The decline in government revenue from taxation required a reassessment of the huge and growing university spending,’ he said.
‘One of those decisions has been to apply an efficiency dividend for universities of 2 per cent in 2014 and 1.25 per cent in 2015.
‘There have been hard decisions to make across a number of federal government departments to properly resource our classrooms, teachers and schoolchildren.’
Mr Bishop said the decision to apply the efficiency dividend to universities over the next two years was about balancing significant investment across the education sector to ensure all children got the best opportunities.
‘This is because you can’t have world- class universities without world-class schools,’ he said.