Adelaide Student Politics

Posted: 12th of August

Sometimes in student politics, good things to run on are hard to find. Several years ago, Labor Right candidate Josh Rayner looked at the assets controlled by the AUU, and had an idea. He ran a ticket promising to cut the cost of textbooks on sale at Unibooks, which is owned by the union. After he became AUU President, Josh delivered. That year saw lower textbook costs for students, with Unibooks footing the bill. The not-for-profit bookstore endured massive losses, and has since harboured a grudge against student oversight.

It has been almost three months since the June board meeting. June saw moves to privatise Unibooks suffering a conclusive defeat, in the process dealing a body blow to Labor Right Board director Andrew Anson, who spent significant political capital on the issue. The motion was put forward following a recommendation by the Unibooks Board, which was brought forward by AUU General Manager David Coluccio. The proposal, moved by Andrew and seconded by Liberal Mark Joyce, involved Unibooks paying (sorry, ‘donating’) $750,000 to the AUU in thanks for it relinquishing its ownership and passing it onto the University. It is worth noting that the University had at this stage only offered 'in principle' support to such a deal, with acceptance by the AUU Board being the first step down the road to a change in ownership. Not that that made much difference in the end.

As mover, Andrew had a chance to speak to the motion. His main arguments were that it would ensure the long-term viability of the union to accept the offer, and that he had been assured that this was a good motion. Andrew seemed resigned to a loss from the start, saying that many had already formed their minds on the issue. He called on others to debate and discuss said motion in order to arrive at the right conclusion.

More substantial arguments for the sale of Unibooks were then made by GM David Coluccio. Firstly, there was the issue of the financial windfall to the union. Secondly, it would cost the union almost nothing. And thirdly, he claimed the proposal offered long-term security to Unibooks, whose board currently rates the danger posed by student oversight to at least, one assumes, ¾ of a million dollars. He assured those present that the not-for-profit status of the bookseller would remain. With less on its mind, Unibooks would be able to use some of the money it has set aside in case of student interference to provide further discounts to students. In a nutshell, Unibooks was trying to divest itself of the student risk, giving the Union a tempting cash prize for its compliance.

Once Yasmin Freschi, an Independent, made her case against the proposal, the case was fairly much lost. The Liberals and Labor Right didn’t have the numbers without the independents, many of whom at this stage seemed deeply unimpressed. Yasmin made the point that it was odd that the AUU’s own asset was giving it money in order to belong to someone else. She said that the university was effectively getting something for free.

The Left then picked up the attack. They said they ran in student elections on a promise to keep Unibooks in student hands, and they intended to honour it.

Several other points were then argued, by both the Left and the Independents. Most Board directors who weren’t in favour had something to say on the issue:

• It was pointed out that the Unibooks Board had not come to the meeting to argue their case.
• It was raised that the money being offered, strictly speaking, already belonged to the union.
• The valuation given for Unibooks was disputed.
• The historical legacy of Unibooks belonging to students (who provided the starting funds in 1929) was rendered.
• As was the fact that in eight and a half years (when the funding agreement runs out), the AUU could well need a hand to play in its negotiations with the university.
• Furthermore, many doubted the promise of the entity to remain non-for-profit, citing the bad experiences had with the National Wine Centre (who now has a monopoly on the food and beverage on campus) following the sale of the union’s commercial operations a year and a half ago.

After several hours of rather one-sided debate (only the negative side showed much conviction), the vote was taken. In favour were Andrew Anson (Labor Right), Daniel Bills (Labor Right), John Bowers (Liberal), Ben Foxwell (Labor Right), Sonja Jankovic (Liberal), Jiang ‘Strong’ Jianbin (Independent) & Mark Joyce (Liberal). That’s seven.

All other Board directors (Ash Brook, Paris Dean, Lavinia Emmett-Grey, Yasmin Freschi, Aaron Fromm, Rhiannon Newman, Fletcher O’Leary, Jason Virgo, Jake Wishart and Ye ‘Jackie’ Yang) voted against. That’s ten.

The proposal was lost. Unibooks isn’t going anywhere today.

Posted 16th July

Early last year brought a funding agreement with the university. Set at $1.2 million in the first year, it is to continue for ten years, with a new amount being decided every year in negotiations between the university and the union. Threatened with financial meltdown in late 2007, it was hoped this funding agreement, the details of which are not avaliable to the public, would ensure the long-term viability of the AUU.

These weeks see the end of the first financial year of said agreement. A new budget is being prepared to present to the university, which in all likelyhood will only agree to fund part of it. The disaffiliation of the Sports Association from the union may have an effect on the final amount, as the university may demand a reduction in the cash given to the AUU if it has one less expense. Amid these fears of a fall in revenue, the AUU Board also discovered (at the May meeting) that, due to an accounting error, its projected income for the coming year is in actuality $168,000 less than expected, due to a complex system where the AUU pays the wages of SA employees, with the SA then paying the AUU back (one would assume only the incoming money appeared on the budget).

This comes at a bad time for some Board directors looking to rebuild after the VSU cut-backs, particularly AUU President Lavinia Emmett-Grey. She has long pushed at Board meetings for a Clubs Administration officer, believing this will be very benificial for the effectiveness of the services provided by the CA. Others, while acknowledging that there is a need, are pushing for the outsourcing of these services, which they argue will be cheaper and more effective (both claims are disputed). Also discussed, though I believe at this stage shelved, was honoraria for On Dit editors, who currently work full-time hours on a volunteer basis.

These expansions are now the last thing on the minds of some, intent on coming up with a budget acceptable to the university. Board Director Mark Joyce, in a failed bid to minimize expenditures, made the novel suggestion of scrapping the snacks provided prior to AUU meetings. Given that the AUU is largely believed to be working on a bare minimum, finding things to cut is going to be no easy task.

Chairing the Finance and Development Standing Comittee, which is responsible for producing the budget, is AUU VP Jainbin Jiang. Other sources of revenue for the AUU include it's $20 membership package, which has sold well this year. Financial concerns were a key argument in the decision regarding whether or not to sell Unibooks, which was voted on at the June meeting.

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.

Posted April 8th

The Sports Association has, as of yesterday, disaffiliated itself from the union, after over a hundred years as an affiliate. This has been in the works for a long time, though I'm still suprised to see it finally happen. When I asked SA President Andres Munoz-Lamilla about it, he said that the unwillingness or inability of the union to change its current structure (to give affiliates more say its operations), as well as the better funding provided by the university, were key factors in the decision. More news on this shortly.

Last year, I wrote a very rash email. I was frustrated by the complete lack of coverage of the student elections in an otherwise enjoyable On Dit, and in a fit of aggravation about the complete unaccountability of our student politicians, I said that if no one else wrote a column on student politics this year, I’d damn well do it!

Silly of me, really. Especially considering the amazing amount of change happening in the Board at the moment. As Ellen Ketteridge put it, it’s been ‘a bit crazy!’. The most obvious and important change is the impending funding agreement between the University and the Union Board. The basic agreement is that the University will give the Union $1.2 million in funding per year for the next ten years (2008 included) in exchange for the Union’s commercial operations at the North Terrace campus (the others having been sold earlier). This comes on the tail of unexpectedly poor takings by the commercial operations last year, leaving the Union with very light pockets.

The most upsetting part of this for the Board members was the concept of releasing Unibar into the hands of the University and, further on, the National Wine Centre, who are taking over all the com ops. Technically, the Unibar is actually the ‘Union Bar’, as well as an ‘important icon’ for campus culture. The idea of the Unibar turning into some sort of respectable ivy league style wine bar was too much for some board members, particularly Rhiannon Newman and Lavinia Emmett-Gray.

Futhermore, a bar run by a successful commercial business rather than the student board posed all sorts of problems in terms of student control of the venues. For instance, the provision of foods that fit various dietary requirements (vegetarian, halal, etc) could be at risk, and the prices might be driven up by the greedy monopolistic company that took over (this argument ignores the huge amount of competition and range that the proximity of North Terrace and Rundle Mall food outlets introduces to the matter. To me it seems that some of the problem was also the possibility that a place so full of Board members' good memories (and alcoholically-faded memories) could be changed in any way.

Sam Kirchner and Emilio Roberts were nominated to join the Union President, David Wilkins, in negotiating the agreement. After discussions, the University agreed reluctantly to leave the Unibar in the Board’s hands. However, once University representatives had explained to the Board the risks of keeping the Unibar (painful litigation in the case of a drunken incident or workplace accident) and the costs of making it a safe workplace (many thousands of the dollars that the Board doesn't have), the Board voted to hand the Unibar over after all. So all the food outlets on campus, as well as the function catering company, have been sold on. But the Board’s kept the income from the vending machines. There’s not really any risk in that one.

Confused yet? Can’t blame you for that. The end result is that the Board has $1.2 million to spend each year, plus what they get out of the vending machines, the sponsors and people buying membership. Out of that they have to fund the Affiliates with amounts specified in the agreement as well as take care of their own spending. For the Board, this is a wonderful achievement. Secure funding for the next ten years means that the Directors can get on with other, more useful things than looking for money The University representatives that watch over the Board can now relax in the knowledge that the Board and the Affiliates aren’t about to go broke while they’re not paying attention, or go under to pay off a bar maid who fell through the floor that the Board couldn’t afford to fix.

A second major event that came up early in the new year was somewhat more political. On the 7^th of December, David Wilkins received a letter written by Lavinia Emmett-Gray and signed by 14 of the 18 Board Directors (David’s faction, Pulse, were not approached). The letter politely informed David that the Board wanted him to retire from the bloody presidency now, please. There were a number of reasons that the Directors who signed the letter gave. Firstly, the Union’s budget for this year was read and approved by the University Council a week before the Union’s budget meeting. In itself, this is simply proper following of policy. However, the rest of the Board only received the budget at the budget meeting. They were also ignorant that it was the budget meeting until they got there.
“We were presented with the budget quite late in the piece…hours before we were expected to pass it”, Paris Dean said.
According to the minutes, the Board was presented with the budget during the meeting and were then given half an hour to read it.
“A lot of people were upset about that”, Paris told me.

Rhiannon Newman was somewhat more expressive on the topic. “I’m still not convinced it was a real budget”, she said, “It was presented on a Word document…and it didn’t have last year’s figures and how much we’d spent and things like that.”
“I’ve been on that board before, and we got it a week before and we had a chance to look through it and make changes where we thought were appropriate”

When I asked David about this, he explained “[the budget] is a living document, it’s a guide only”.
“While I’m very very apologetic to the board that it wasn’t presented, it certainly wasn’t me trying to shove a budget through the Board to try and get support for it”.

However, the budget was not the only issue that Board members had with David's presidency since the election. Other issues such as not meeting the expectations of the board in terms of openness and communication; an attempt to introduce email voting to the Board, with all votes privately going to David; and an unwillingness to work with the appointed negotiators on the funding agreement were all raised in the letter.

David has apologised to the Board, but believes that many of these problems were caused by the unique position he has been put in with VSU, the funding agreement and number of AUU staff that have quit in recent months.
“I’ve put my heart and soul into this organisation. It’s absolutely my livelihood, I absolutely enjoy every minute that I’m doing it” David said.
“I think rather than that being seen as an attempt to sack me I’ve looked at that as kind of a bit of a wake up call”.

Recent events, on the other hand, suggest that the Board members meant it to be much stronger than that. In a meeting on January 31^st, the Board voted to ratify all the votes from the inquorate meeting in December, which included the vote to have David suspended. This suggests that most of the rest of the Board is not entirely placated by David’s apologies.

Despite these disagreements, the Board Directors all sound really optimistic about the future of the Board this year. And I can see why. After years of factional stupidity, the Board is finally getting its act together! First and foremost, the election last year delivered a nicely balanced Board, with no more than five people to any factional group. This means that for at least a year it will be impossible for any faction to control the Board outright unless they resort to underhand tactics (which is not unknown for this board, even at this early stage).

The team that’s involved in actually getting stuff done looks like being a good one, too. Obviously I have no idea how O’Week will turn out yet, but everyone involved sounds very up beat and excited about it, and I can’t see Simone McDonnell doing anything but her best to make sure people have a good time – it’s what she thrives on. She’s even looking to revive Prosh this year, which I’m sure will excite everyone who’s wanted to be involved in the event as it was in the good old days before we made it to uni.

It also looks likely that the Board will have some money that they’re free to do what they want with this year. The ‘Loaded’ discount card that was produced last year was a joke, purchased only by Board Directors and the hacks who wanted to become directors this year. Whereas this year’s membership deal looks like it’s a winner. The $20 card that got me $40 off my gym membership bought my interest outright, but the $5 locker discount and the Ambassador Card could be useful, and the 10% discount at unibooks will definitely be handy (even though there would have been a unibooks discount in some way or another, even without the card).

Finally, there’s the less exciting but far more enduring work being done on strategic planning and constitutional change within the Board. The Board executive has already had one meeting to look at where the Board’s going in the future, figuring out what the business is going to focus on and how to set up a foundation to make that happen. The Board’s constitution is also up for an overhaul this year, with Matthew Taylor heading a sub-committee formed to overhaul the current Board constitution, which is currently a bit of an ‘everything to everyone’ document. According to Matthew, a streamlined constitution with rules and regulations forming the body of Board law would be far more effective. An attempt at streamlining the constitution was made in 2006/7 and passed by the Board, but I’ve been told it got lost when it was sent to University Council for them to sign off on it.

Like the Board members, I’m quite optimistic about this year’s Board. They seem to be a very passionate group, and most of them have shown that they can work together and really get somewhere with their projects. There are no CV sluts on this board, just very, very passionate individuals who want to do the best thing for the students at Adelaide. Good luck to them!