I ran as an ‘independant’ and still did all of my publishing at a different MP’s office to the ‘official’ party sanctioned ticket. In addition to my own material I even printed up a ticket designed to look like an ‘official’ ticket of the senior party but with the preferences reversed.

Good times.

However now that those days are long behind me I agree that student political activity is a waste of taxpayer funds. Someone should stamp it out!

Political activities, even broadly interpreted, accounted for only a small fraction of student union expenditure, and they had at least the semblance of a rationale for collective provision: student representation, it could be argued, was a public good that could not be funded on a user-pays basis. The service activities—catering, sporting clubs, even dental services—were (and are) much more extravagant and much harder to justify in that fashion… The second argument [against voluntary student unionism legislation] came from more moderate critics; they queried why the legislation should go beyond political activities. According to these critics, who showed a sort of benevolent paternalism towards student organisations, the service activities of unions were unobjectionable and should be protected. This argument ignored, due to either ignorance or deceit, the history of unsuccessful attempts to quarantine political expenditure. It also ignored the fact that waste, as always, was more conspicuous on the services side of student unions.

To which I would add that even greater potential for extravagance and corruption was eventually found in the various business ventures which Labor Right and Liberal student union managements were seduced by from the 1990s onwards, which is basically what brought down the old Melbourne University Student Union.

But yeah, also with the do-gooders.

I would dispute however the article’s assertion of being student focused and being politically aligned as being mutually exclusive, the disgraceful rorting that went on by Unity in MUSU and Griffith and by the Libs at UNE aside, the great majority of people involved in student politics are there for the right reasons and genuinely care about the welfare of students and the quality of the education they receive.

A fair point. Whilst I didn’t intend to suggest that being politically aligned and being student-focused were mutually exclusive, I probably shoud have worded the relevant sentence more circumspectly to preclude such an interpretation. The main point I was trying to make is that access to electorate office printing resources gave those groups with such access an unfair and unjustifiable advantage over those who lacked such access and lacked other forms of major institutional backing.

What I think can also be said with reasonable confidence is:

(a) That political alignment and the associated political convictions can shape how activists conceive of “the welfare of students and the quality of the education they receive”.

(b) That situations can arise when an elected student representative’s obligations to students and their external party or factional commitments can come into conflict, for instance when conflicting calls are made on their time (which I’ve known to happen) or when mutual hostility between factions or parties external to the student union causes people to be unwilling to cooperate on student-related issues on which no real disagreement exists (which I’ve also seen happen).

A couple of years later, with the coalition broken down I’ll admit I abused the copier of an independent MP, but at the time it seemed necessary to combat the fact that our opponents had access to many times as many tax-payer funded publications. These days most Labor and Liberal students I meet don’t even seem to think there is anything wrong with it, which I find even more disturbing than the “well yes its not bad, but the other side do it so we need to” attitude I developed by the end.

On the other hand, I had one conversation with a campus Green who was so ethical about things she said she would refuse access to the party’s own photocopier if it was offered, let alone those of the MPs. I thought that was taking things to extremes.

Adrian – “Well, Paul, I was briefly associated with a local (trying to be a) Green Campus Club and, I can tell ya, they don’t even get advice. So you’re clean.” I knew a “Green Campus Club” that got their printing done at the office of a local rep of one of the major parties, but that was pre federal greens.