Adelaide Student Politics

Posted 27th April

On the 6th of April, I was made aware that sports had finally decided on disaffiliation from the union. On the evening of the 8th, I spoke to Sports Association (SA) President Andres Munoz-Lamilla about the decision.

The first thing Andres was quick to point out was that this was the result of a long process. ‘We’ve got reports going back twelve years which say this will be better for sports performance, and is necessary to mitigate the political influence of the union’. The way Andres sees it, the Sports Association represents a wide range of people, not just students, and thus it being affiliated to the student union makes less sense than many of the other affiliates.

The first of January 2010 is the agreed upon date for the disaffiliation, the delay being necessary due to the SA employees being on union pay slips for this calendar year. Andres says that monetary arrangements have not yet been finalized, and so he cannot comment on the effect this will have on the SAs budget. This doesn’t seem to worry him: ‘We’re in a sound financial situation. We have a great history of running ourselves, as we don’t play the political game that the union plays’.

Indeed, political reasons seem to be the overwhelming factor in the decision to disaffiliate, on which Andres was happy to spend much time answering my questions. ‘Every August comes the elections. What happens then is that all the student politicians, who have no idea about sports, make promises that they can’t keep. They misled the student body for their own personal agendas. We’ve been waiting for the AUU to reform itself for four years, in order to let affiliates have more of a say in its running. Decreasing the board size from 18 to 16 members is the only difference they are willing to consider. This is not enough: they must let affiliates have a say’.

Apart from the politicization issue, the other concern seems to have been financial. In the 2008 budget, which was the first post-funding agreement budget, the SA got 14%. This figure was reached, according to Andres, without consultation with the SA. The next budget prepared by the union gave the SA an extra $100,000, increasing the pie given to sports by 57% in one year. Andres claims this is an indication of how underfunded sports was at Adelaide, saying that in all other G8 universities the percentage is much higher. Andres was eager to point out the role of current AUU General Manager David Coluccio, saying that ‘only he bought some sense into the whole thing’.

That said, given the SAs ‘sound financial situation’, one can understand the union being conflicted between giving it more money to bring it into line with the other G8 universities, and increasing funding to affiliates who are in worse situations, or to fund other student services. Andres acknowledges the financial difficulties faced by other affiliates, who are unable to pay for a full-time staff member to give the affiliate some institutional experience that stays past the election cycle. This has been a prime factor in the SA’s stability. ‘We’ve had six executive officers in a hundred years. We have stability, and are using other G8 universities as our benchmark’.

At the end of the day, the SAs decision seems to have been vastly supported by its council members, by its president, and by a host of reports which suggest that this course of action is best for the SAs future. As a comparison, few student unions in the country consider sport as part of their operations, and so this move, while revolutionary for Adelaide, appears to be following a national trend.