SRC 2010

[the following has been submitted to the first issue of Tharunka for 2010. I thought it may as well get out a tad earlier]

"'University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small'" - Henry Kissinger

For better or for worse, student politics is often likened to a festering snakepit. It is brutal, harsh, full of various ever-changing alliances and cults-of-personality.

So it’s no surprise that many of you reading this will have no interest whatsoever in being involved in politics at UNSW. You may well wonder what relevance these petty squabbles and power-plays have to your own life. But is that the only attitude? To ignore it and leave it to the student politicians? There are many things at uni which could be improved – are you going to leave it to those few people who ran a week-long campaign to try and fix those problems?

At the very least, it’s good to know who these people are, so if you’ve got a problem you can know who to harangue to try and fix it. Elsewhere in this publication, you may have found Office-Bearer reports from your Student Representative Council. These will, of course, have been written to show the SRC in a very positive light, inspiring confidence in those SRC members. But they won’t tell you very much about them as people. Or even much about them as politicians.

So here I am, one snake amongst many, giving you the gossip on student politics, UNSW-style.

To start with, there’s the Factions. These are mostly (but not always) linked with Australian political parties. They aren’t quite the same as ‘tickets’, which are what run for election (which will be covered in a future column). At UNSW, on the current SRC, we’ve got: National Labor Students (NLS), composed of leftwards-leaning members of the Labor Party. There’s also Socialist Alternative (who you may well have encountered shouting various things around campus by now).

Outside of the current council, we’ve got Student Unity (a misnomer of course, they comprise right-wing Labor members), the Australian Liberal Students Federation (the Young Liberals, more-or-less), as well as a few people calling themselves WHIGS (right-wing ‘independents’).

Most of the current SRC is non-factional (indeed, this has been the case for a few years now), referred to in student-politics-speak as ‘small-i independents’ (to distinguish from the ‘big-Is’, a West Australian faction). Bear that in mind whenever you hear people talking about the ‘Labor-dominated SRC’.

So now, we can move to looking at the people themselves.

First up: Osman Faruqi, SRC President, ‘small-i’. The first non-Labor President since the early 90s (so you can imagine that people in both Labor factions are somewhat taken aback). He’s quite nice, as far as SRC snakes go. Since he’s non-factional, he’s also significantly less likely to pay attention to what the National Union are likely to be saying.

Jelena Samardzic (also known as Helen) is the Education Officer. She has made clear her intentions to become the next President (for NLS). What is less certain is just what she intends to do in her current role. Her immediate predecessor was more interested in filling out his CV than activism – will this tradition be continued?

James Still holds the Welfare role. He’s been very active over summer, printing off a new version of the Cheapskate’s Guide. We will all be watching to see whether his enthusiasm continues throughout the year, or whether he burns out (as did his immediate predecessor).

Ben Noone and Nicola Karcz are sharing the role of Environment Officer. The Enviro role is usually shared by two people. Sometimes they get on and do a lot of fantastic activism together. Sometimes, they do not.

There are a group of positions sometimes referred to as ‘Equity’ roles – they represent special interest groups, typically groups that historically have faced persecution. Jess Mobbs as Women’s Officer, Shuang (Samantha) Guo as International Students Officer, Marita Morgan as Students with Disabilities Officer, Felicity Lee and Anna Khan in Ethno-Cultural, April Long and Peta MacGillivray sharing the Indigenous Students role, and Nick Atkins and Squish Ramsay are the Queer Officers (the last of these I hold in a special place – a student politician snake who keeps snakes!). The Equity Officers are usually devoted to their special area, and do good work in it. If they don’t, they may well find themselves replaced by someone even more passionate.

And then we come to two particular roles. These roles aren’t necessarily problematic, more to do with the individuals holding them. You see, Anh Pham as Postgraduate Students Officer and Rebecca Hynek as COFA Campus Representative are members of Socialist Alternative. And the thing about SAlt is, they often fight for good things. But the methods they use are nasty. Attacking the individual, repeating mantras instead of engaging in debate, ‘with us or against us’ attitude in general.

Pham and Beck may well rise above this usual method of SAlt behaviour, which I hope occurs. But I cannot be confident of this.

If you’re over at COFA, then you get another group of Office-Bearers as well. In this snake’s experience, COFA OBs are inspired and full of fun. They have miniscule budgets, but great ability to make the money work.

So those are your Office-Bearers for 2010. Then we’ve got Councillors, both Undergrad and Postgrad variants thereupon. Councillors usually aren’t that noticeable. The role is notoriously undefined; it’s not quite clear who they represent. They generally fall into three groups.

First off, you’ve got the up-and-comings who didn’t manage to snag a position as office-bearer. Next, you’ve got the old hands, staying on for an extra year. Then you’ve got the randoms, people who got the position simply for being in the right place at the right time.

And why am I doing this? Well, I’m just another snake slithering around this snakepit. I was on Council for two years, first as a Tharunka editor, then an Office-Bearer. Maybe I'm waiting for another chance to get involved. or maybe this snake is sick and tired of the whole shebang, but can’t quite muster up the courage to let go. Time will tell.