Most affiliates fill their office-bearer positions through an AGM. The Sports Association (SA) differs is that it holds yearly elections over a three day period, in which voting is open to all students. These elections took place from the 25th to the 27th of May, with results being declared last Friday (the 29th).
2008-09 President Andres Munoz-Lamilla (Athletics) faced a leadership challenge, as University employee Husam Seif (Sailing) was contesting the position. The position of Deputy President was also contested between Husam and Tim Collin (Hockey). In the end, Husam lost out on both positions.
This election sees Andres entering his eighth year of involvement with the SA. Former (acting) AUU President Emilio Roberts was unopposed in his bid for the position of Honorary Treasurer.
Several positions are still unfilled.
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.
Presidential (re-)Elections, Sexualidit style
As student politics is really boring stuff, despite what the people involved seem to think when they’re doing the headless-chicken-dance around campus, I’m going to make the most of this edition as a chance to ‘sex up’ what’s been going on a little, in the tradition of respectable newspapers like the New York Times.
As the vote counters and scrutineers sequestered themselves away in the next room to determine the fate of the Board for the rest of this year, talk of back room deals and intervention by the Australian National Union of Students abounded among those left to stew. At long last, we were rescued by the declaration that Lavinia Emmett-Grey is to hold the office of President until the end of next year, or at least until the next power coup. The vote was counted at ten votes to four, making it a secure power base for the time being.
The reports of all the office holders paled in comparison to the riveting drama of a presidential election, but even then there were some interesting snippets of information. In an exclusive report, On Dit can reveal that the University and the AUU are ‘very close’ to signing off on the funding agreement. The details of this agreement are suspiciously hush-hush, but there are enough rumours going around that this crack journalist could piece together some idea of what it contains. It involves the University giving the AUU money in exchange for letting the National Wine Centre run the food outlets around campus. (*gasp!* If you want to know a little more, look back a couple of issues to when I didn’t know what I wasn’t meant to say). This is clearly a deal to be watched closely.
All the affiliates claim to be moving along nicely with their agendas. This is clearly a good thing, but your AUU correspondent wonders just what will happen when these agendas collide with that of the Board, as will no doubt happen in the near future.