By Peter Johnston and Carl Gosper
WOLLONGONG — On October 15-17, elections for the Student Representative Council were held at Wollongong University. Left tickets received strong support, reflecting the level of student opposition to the Liberals' attacks on education.
The Resistance ticket, which polled around 10%, had Nikki Ulasowski elected to a general representative position. All executive positions, two of the NUS delegates, and some general representative positions were won by Viva, the ticket based on students in the Non-Aligned Left. Viva's "dummy" tickets also won two NUS delegates. The United Students (US) ticket, largely ALP members, picked up one NUS delegate and two general representative positions. The Beer for Thought ticket had one general representative elected.
There was a substantial increase in voter turnout for these elections.This is attributable, in part, to the politicising of the election campaign by Resistance, which ran on a platform including opposition to education cuts, sexism, homophobia and racism, and which campaigned for democracy, accountability and student activism.
While Viva also campaigned on a left, activist platform, its campaign was unfortunately tarnished by several "oversights" in preference arrangements. Resistance and Viva had agreed to exchange preferences, however Viva's two "dummy" tickets either did not preference Resistance for executive positions, or placed Resistance's NUS delegate candidates in the wrong order.
It was encouraging to see the Viva ticket mobilise so many new "activists" to help them get elected. It should also be noted, however, that not one of the 30 or so Viva election "activists" did a single thing to help build a rally against the Liberals' attacks on education in the week after the election. Instead, this rally was largely built by Resistance members.
The US ticket, which was led by ALP members, was too ashamed of Labor's record of attacks on students (the ALP introduced HECS and some up-front fees for tertiary students) to admit it was a Labor Party ticket.
During the election campaign, the US ticket attempted to have Resistance disqualified and Green Left Weekly censored over an article in GLW which associated the US and Viva tickets with political groups. Fortunately, the Viva ticket supported Resistance on this question.