Adelaide Student Politics

The Board meeting on August 7th saw yet another election take place (could this be a record for a single year of Board?). After Ellen Ketteridge’s resignation, the position of Student Representation Council President was wide open and letting in the breeze. David Wilkins and Paris Dean were both nominated for the position. Unsurprisingly, Paris – who has done substantial work with the SRC this year and made his intentions to run for their President next year very clear – is now SRC President.

The general SRC elections were also very topical during that meeting. As a result of the current election rules, the elections for everything but the AUU Board (that is, SRC reps, National Union of Students reps, Student Radio Directors and the On Dit editors) will be held separately from the Board elections. While this won’t affect the election process much for most students (there will be two boxes for the ballot papers and the like, but nothing major), it means that there will need to be two returning officers to oversee the election. The AUU has been (amazingly, unexpectedly and belatedly) fortunate in securing the services of a former AEC employee to oversee the Board election, but this left the SRC and other elections bereft of an R.O. Lavinia proposed to the Board that they pass a motion to instate James Moffatt, a Music student at Adelaide Uni (and a friend of mine), as the R.O. A couple of Board directors protested on the basis that it was unlikely that James would have the time, the understanding or the confidence to execute the role properly. Despite this, the desperate need for a returning officer to ensure an operating SRC and membership for the NUS led to James being appointed to the position with a small majority of votes.

A more ongoing issue that was raised is the level of transparency within the AUU. Directors are meant to keep quiet on all the important upcoming issues. This is to keep them free of outside influence and capable of making decisions in the Board’s best interests. For a start, in the context of the AUU Board this seems a little naïve – most of the people seeking to affect Directors’ votes to suit another (factional) agenda are already on the Board and have full access to all that information. Members of the Board from all the factions made their issues with this idea quite clear, pointing out that students can only get information about what’s happening in the AUU through a 2-4 week out of date column that only covers issues that have already been discussed at Board. It was suggested that if students actually care, they would come to the Board meetings and get involved, but this was argued down on the basis that most students would have to put ridiculous amounts of time just finding out when and where the meetings would be. Even then, only Board members know what’s on the agenda before the meeting starts. In essence, this leads to a system where plenty of people know what’s going on – all the people who are already cosy with our student politicians. It’s still difficult for anyone who’s not already involved with student politics to find out anything about what’s really going on.