Columns

Last week was historic for student politics at the University of Otago.
The Critic office sits in the Union Building slightly apart (and most definitely aloof) from the OUSA offices that inhabit the same building. Once a year, when elections are on, the place turns into a hive of activity as gossip is passed around and speculation is used as fuel for a thousand status updates.

It’s all very boring and the average student would have no idea what is going on. This year, we’ve been so lucky that we’ve been able to witness the spectacle twice. In addition to election week, OUSA has been kind enough to bring us referendum week!
What brought it on? There has been a general feeling that the Exec is not functioning and needs to be made smaller. There have also been calls (including from me in this column) to make it possible to vote in SGMs online.
The Executive, led by President Harriet Geoghegan, put to the student body a proposal of how they thought these changes should be made, and in a referendum last week it was overwhelmingly endorsed.
Well, overwhelmingly endorsed by the people who voted. All thousand or so of them. (We get all technical in the news pages – see p8).
Despite the fact that it was a year in the works the whole thing has somehow managed to come off looking rushed, dodgy, and ill thought-out.
One reason it has looked rushed is because the Exec was up against a tight deadline. Nominations for next year’s Executive open soon and they wanted to make sure people were voted into the new positions on the new-look Exec.
It looked dodgy because the official OUSA-funded promotions were biased. Students were told to downsize the Exec and supersize their say (move SGMs online). Those aren’t neutral statements, are they? And why weren’t they? I’m sure students at this University are more than capable of making up their own minds, and in this case I think they did, so allowing the whole process to be tainted by questions of dodginess is just stupid.
And I know the deadline has been tight, but I think the process could have had an added air of legitimacy if first students were asked – do we need to change the structure? If yes, here are four options. Pick one. Instead we’ve been left with one proposal, which seems to have a lot loose ends that we’re assured will now be tied up – students have been asked to instil an element of trust and good faith that all the questions will be answered. They’d better not let us down. The evidence says they won’t, but we’ll be watching closely.
There is apparently a raft of other complaints, but Critic has not been privy to these at time of going to print, so we’ll cover how they all go in the next issue.
It is clear that some minority groups are incensed with the outcome and they were preparing to kick up a fight in the immediate aftermath of the results being announced. Harriet has not managed to appease these groups during the referendum process and she will have her work cut out for her to effectively communicate her message once the results are confirmed. She will need to assure people that the new structure is not anti-democratic, and that minority groups such as the Queer community will still be represented, and represented adequately. So far, for whatever reason, she’s done a piss-poor job of convincing them.
Again, bearing in mind that results are provisional, and bearing in mind that at this stage Critic is not fully aware of the nature of the complaints made about the process, the result looks like a clear vote for a change in the way OUSA operates. While 1000-odd people are still a fraction of the student population, it still far exceeds the amount of people that would ever turn up at SGM – and in student politics terms, 1000 is a hellavalot of people.
So, it’s encouraging for the proponents of the changes, and they have a firm mandate to implement them. But it is also healthy for student democracy and shows that students will voice their opinions if they are given an easy forum in which to do so. Fuck wasting your lunch hour at a meeting in the common room listening the International Socialists talk absolute shit.
OUSA has been true to form and ballsed up the PR campaign and the referendum has come off looking like a mess. But students have voted, and the message is clear. They want OUSA to be more efficient. The want OUSA to run more smoothly. They want OUSA to get shit done. Maybe with this brand new streamlined structure of theirs, it will happen, and embarrassing referendums will be a thing of the past.
We’ll see.