SRC PRESIDENT’S REPORT

President’s Report SRC SRC

Campus is political.

What gets taught, how it gets taught, who’s allowed on campus and why it all happens is shaped by ideas about how the world should look. Do we get democratic say over how our campus and classes are organised? Or do corporate imperatives decide who is invited to our university and where funding for teaching gets directed.

Outside of education issues, no student lives in a bubble. Few can ignore that we are living through a cost of living crisis, global pandemic and accelerating climate change. So students have tended to play an important part in movements relating to issues both on and off campus – from free education campaigns to anti-war movements, women’s liberation to struggles over land rights.

Our universities reflect the dominant politics of today – they’re run like profit-driven corporations instead of working for the common good.

Part of this neoliberal turn on campus, and in society more generally, required smashing our student unions because they had the potential to organise fightback. This was done in collaboration between uni bosses and their goons (known as Vice Chancellors and uni management) and the government. Today, one of the politicians responsible for defunding student unions actually helps run our university council! (Google Amanda Vanstone – Education Minister under the hated John Howard)

While defunding our unions was important for undermining them, another aspect was the battle for the soul of our student unions. This required a subtle but highly political argument waged about what kind of student union students need.

Should our student unions be left-wing, activist bodies, or should they be “apolitical” service providers?

Should they provide resources and an organising space for students to defend their interests, or should they train the next generation of careerists in bureaucratic politics, run career sessions and give occasional free lunches?

While the latter may seem “apolitical”, I would argue it is a right-wing perspective that seeks to undermine the power of the only institution students have to fight for their rights.

The politics of those who run our union matters. Those who control union resources can either deepen progressive struggles, or stifle them. Right-wing student unions at Adelaide have defended staff and course cuts – progressives this year organised campaigns to fight back. Right-wingers have defended the presence of fossil fuel and military companies on campus – socialists have supported the fight to divest and kick dirty industries off campus.

Right wingers in the union have even used their positions to lobby SA politicians against abortion decriminalisation. Over the uni break, I was proud to work as SRC President with the Defend Abortion Action Group to call and chair Adelaide’s brilliant, 5000-strong solidarity with Roe v. Wade rallies.

Unions should be radical, organising forums, daring to fight for a better vision of society, and inspiring students to get involved in that struggle too.

Despite highly censorious and anti-democratic attacks from Oscar Ong, Progress and the Young Liberals, myself and progressives in the SRC have fought all year in an attempt to rebuild old traditions of militancy, decency and radicalism in our student union.

Your experience of campus, like the rest of the world, is the result of political choices and perspectives. For progressives that means it’s important that we fight student apathy, know what side we’re on, and get involved with fights to challenge the neoliberal status quo on campus, in our unions, and the wider world.

Ana Obradovic

SRC President