However, according to Federal Youth Minister Kate Ellis, student organisations or unions will not be managing the funds and the services to be funded:

Ms Ellis said university administrations were better placed to manage services like health, childcare, counselling and club funding.

Kate Ellis also says:

what we’re being very clear, from today is that we’re also going to be clear on what the money cannot be spent on, and it cannot be spent on broader political campaigns.

On both these issues – control of services by university managements rather than elected student bodies, and proscription of political campaigns – the government is both wrong and misguided.

On the first point, I am in a position to compare the performance of elected student bodies and unelected university bureaucracies in managing campus services. Since 1991 I have worked in various capacities at Griffith University, and since 2007 have also been employed by the University of Queensland. From 1992 to 2003 I also studied at Griffith. In these capacities I have had the opportunity to access various services and facilities which, at the University of Queensland and the Gold Coast campus of Griffith, are controlled by elected student bodies, but which are controlled by the University management body, Campus Life, at Griffith’s Brisbane campuses. To take just one example: the food served in the UQ and Gold Coast campus refectories is better, cheaper, comes in larger portions and provides a wider range of choices than that provided at Griffith’s Brisbane campuses. The latter is what one could expect from a monopoly provider which is subject neither to market forces nor to democratic processes of accountability.

To take another example. In the recent past the in the inter-campus sports teams at the Gold Coast had their travel and accommodation to an inter-university carnival handled by the Gold Coast Student Guild one year and by Campus Life the next. They have testified via their campus magazine that the former experience was considerably more pleasant and safer than the latter, and that the difference rested in the fact that in one case the relevant decisions were being made by students and by managers accountable to students, whilst in the other it was not.

On the second point, Kate Ellis repeats a favourite trope of right-wing folklore that the major source of waste and misuse of funds in student organisations occurs, and has occurred, in relation to political campaigns and spending. In refuting this claim I name as star witness a former Liberal student activist and current libertarian philosopher Charles Richardson, writing in the CIS publication Policy:

…quarantining political expenditure, even if it was possible, was still unsatisfactory, because waste was greater elsewhere. 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 the Howard Government's 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.

My own considerable experience in student organisations (including being the Treasurer of both an undergraduate and a postgraduate student organisation) leads me to largely concur with Charles Richardson on this score. Most of the funds handled by student unions are spent employing staff and office-bearers, providing services and running commercial operations, and increasingly in recent years have been invested in business ventures of varying degrees of soundness. Not surprisingly, it is in these areas that the most egregious instances of waste, misuse of resources, mismanagement and outright corruption have occurred (e.g. some tens of thousands of dollars worth of beverages going unaccountably missing from the Griffith University SRC in the early 1990s). Further, some of the worst of these episodes have occurred on the watch of self-described “moderate”, “non-political” student union leaderships such as those of Kate Ellis’s Labor Right factional colleagues who destroyed the Melbourne University Student Union.

So what is my alternative? Basically, it is to restore the role of democratic student management of services and funds, but strictly subject to certain institutional safeguards and accountability mechanisms which have been largely missing from the governance structures of student organisations hitherto. These would include:

* choosing governing bodies for student organisations by methods which would preclude “winner-take-all” outcomes (with all the consequent evils of groupthink, clique rule and factional patronage) and include a critical mass of students whose interest in student unions is not of a factional-political or party-political character;

* establishing mechanisms and structures for the resolution of disputes and the enforcement of constitutional compliance which would be as impartial as possible in their composition, independent of the internal political processes of student organisations, and easily accessible by any student and any employee of the student organisation, and with enforcement powers approaching those of a court;

* providing for a critical mass of professional management within student unions who would work for the student union but would legally be employees of the university, and who would handle day-to-day staffing and financial management, subject to the policy direction of the elected governing body but with the legal right to refuse to comply with directives which were unconstitutional or illegal, and to appeal to the aforesaid dispute-settling machinery.

Those are some ideas. The basic principle would be to restore the principle of “student control of student affairs” in a hardnosed way which provides safeguards against the consequences of inexperience and lack of skills in financial and wokplace relations management (problems which are endemic to young student politicians across the spectrum) and against the pursuit of partisan factional agendas unrelated to the purpose of the student organisation (again, this problem can be found accross the spectrum) without arbitrarily stifling the capacity to engage in campaigning and representation. And remember that many more dollars of student service fees have been misspent in half-baked capitalist ventures than in half-baked communist adventures.