Adelaide Student Politics

"The real issue is not that corruption was brought up in the media, it's that there was corruption." -Jake Wishart, AUU Board Director, Meeting 22nd Jan, 2009.

In the last Board meeting, a motion was put forward to censure Mark Joyce. His indiscretion was commenting for a press release that was intended to publicise the corrupt way in which this year's NUS delegates were appointed. According to Lavinia Emmett-Grey, this was against the AUU's media policy, and ought to be dealt with severely. As a result, the act of outing the corruption took on almost as much significance as the original dodgy dealings, which was never even admitted as dishonest. The argument was that Mark had taken on a responsibility to work in the best interests of the Board when he became a director, and that he had gone against that by commenting for the press release.

This raised a very interesting question about the AUU Board. Namely, do its best interests lay in clinging to the last shreds of reputation; or in exposing previous bad practice, airing the problems and then rebuilding?

Let's start with a painful fact: the students at Adelaide University don't trust the Union. This is for one of two reasons.

1. The AUU is irrelevant. The majority of students probably know it exists, but don't see what it does for them or why they should get involved. I can see where they're coming from when all they see of it is the occasional event, which they may or may not realise the AUU organised. While ignorance isn't the same as distrust, these students have to know the AUU before they can trust it.
2. The AUU is run by politically-minded factional hacks. While this is not exclusively true - I know some people who are involved in Board purely because they care - that's where the majority and the leadership base come from. While this might not be a problem in itself, it's not a secret that many board members aren't averse to following their interests at the Union's expense. Those students who know what's going on with the Board also know that corruption on Board can - and does - happen. So they don't trust it either.
   

This type of dirty dealing is also well known to the other body with a major interest in the Union's business: the University. If nothing else, the University has a non-voting representative present at every Board meeting, which is where most of the shonkiness is first aired. While this representative rarely says much, it is foolish to think that those University staff who care about the Union are ignorant about how it actually operates.

In the furor about the AUU's media policy at the last meeting, the requirement that Board directors operate in the AUU's best interest was repeatedly raised. Mark commented at one point that he believed his actions to have followed this rule. Despite the President's immediate response ("HOW IS THIS POSSIBLY IN OUR BEST INTERESTS?! To go to the Advertiser? That's absurd!"), this view has a lot of merit. It may be that an attempt to face up to the corruption of the past, deal with it and maintain an honest Board is the only way to regain the trust of those students who have been driven away from the AUU.

The first - but not the hardest - task for the AUU if they are to clean up their act on this front is to face up to the dishonesty and self-interest of the past. Taking responsibility for previous actions would create a much better atmosphere and allow the Board to move on to more important issues. It would also make it harder for directors to get away with such dishonest behaviour in the future. This would require Board directors to re-think some of their behaviour. Some of them don't seem to see how their behaviour could be seen as corrupt, or claim that it was justified by a lack of time. This is ridiculous when it also happens to deliver an advantage to their faction at the national conference, and absurd when it happens as frequently as it does now.

The potential drawback of this tack is that it would make the student community aware that there has been corruption within the Board. However, as we observed before, everyone who cares knows this already, so it wouldn't be the problem that it seems.

The other, harder task for the Board would be to maintain honest operations, free of factional priorities and with nothing other than the best interests of the AUU at heart. This would take a lot of effort - and self-restraint in some cases - and would not deliver immediate results. It would also require some of the quieter voices on board to think about what they're involved with, and to have the courage to say something when they believed that everything was not in order. If combined with other good practices, this has the potential to recreate the rapport between students and the student body and make the Union fill its place on campus, which has been sadly empty for years now.

While an effort to face and deal with corruption could lead to some bad press for the Board in the short term, it would be a worthwhile endeavour for the Board of 2009. It would go some way to clearing the slate, building an improved relationship between the Union and the students and make it a whole lot harder for anyone to mess around in the same way in the future. In the long term, it has great potential to enrich the quality of education and campus life at Adelaide and pave the way for a return to the 'golden days' of the Adelaide University Union.