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Former OUSA Finance and Services Officer James Meager spoke about his written complaint at last week’s Executive meeting, over three weeks after it was first submitted.
Meager’s complaint raises eleven different concerns. These grievances include the state of the OUSA Constitution and treatment of members on the OUSA Facebook page who have been arbitrarily blocked from commenting. The open letter to the Executive also highlights OUSA’s apparent lack of a plan for the onset of VSM, and indicates that a group of students wish to take a vote of no confidence on “several Executive members” – claiming that the Executive are failing in “basic levels of response to concerns of levy-paying OUSA members,” among other shortfalls.

 
Meager was invited to the Executive meeting by Welfare Officer Shonelle Eastwood and Colleges and Communications Representative Francisco Hernandez. On his mydeology blog, Meager, who turned up with a six-person strong support crew, describes the atmosphere for the meeting as “fairly prickly and hostile.”
 

OUSA President Harriet Geoghegan had not been informed of the group’s intention to speak at the meeting prior to its commencement, nor had Secretary Donna Jones. Geoghegan told Critic “[Meager] really should have followed the usual process. There's no reason why he ought to be treated differently, particularly as we had a huge amount of important business on the agenda but he was insistent he had to put on his show at the beginning.”

 
The group was acknowledged partway through the agenda, once procedural matters had been dealt with. Despite Meager’s claim that “following the agenda bit by bit was just a piss poor excuse not to hear us,” his grievance was heard after the fourth item on the meeting’s agenda.

 
Meager was given speaking rights to read out his self-professed lengthy letter outlining his concerns with the Executive. “I was surprised that he behaved professionally though, as he had told other Executive members he would scream and yell until Campus Watch were called”, said Geoghegan. “Given those comments, I felt it was best to just hear him out at the start, but it is certainly very hard to take him seriously and try to constructively resolve his issues when he is being so difficult.”
 

Having stepped down from chairing the meeting, Geoghegan was entitled to respond to the complaints along with the rest of the Executive. She informed the group that the Executive had not been given enough time to consider their concerns, having been informed of them in full just prior to the meeting.

 
The rest of Meager’s group, which included former Executive members Ashley Murchison, Timothy Grigg, and Margi Macmurdo-Reading, was also given speaking rights at the conclusion of Meager’s speech. Geoghegan cast the sole vote opposing this motion.
 

The Executive formally accepted the complaint from Meager, and promised him a letter of response by the end of last week. Meager describes the Executive’s response to his complaints as “lacklustre”, and although a letter from them “may fail to provide any action or results, we did expect to be shut down completely.”
 

OUSA Finance and Services Officer Dan Stride told Critic that the Executive were submitting contributions on the complaint, which were to be collated by Geoghegan into a formal letter of response to Meager. Stride describes many of Meager’s concerns as “very valid,” and points to the need for “as much transparency as possible within the organisation.”
 

Geoghegan says that some of Meager’s complaints are “genuine issues that we have already been trying to address, but a large amount of them are incorrect and seem like an attempt to perpetuate misconceptions.”