Fraud, partisan election officials, opposition candidates bullied and harassed – such scenes are being witnessed at the leafy riverside campus of the University of Queensland.
Students campaigning against the young Liberal National Party ticket FRESH have been using the elections to publicise and build protests against university funding cuts.
Calling themselves “Fuck FRESH,” these anti-LNP activists have been constantly hampered in their efforts to build an anti-cuts campaign by abhorrent standover tactics. A ludicrous farce of democratic process reached its peak halfway through the voting week, when the election was ruled invalid by an independent legal authority as a result of FRESH’s fraudulent behaviour. Prior to this decision, the supposedly “independent” returning officer had smashed up the anti-cuts stall, stolen rally leaflets and physically attacked a woman campaigner. He then abused a passing student who came to her aid. When confronted by a UQ student who witnessed the assault, the reply of the university’s director of student affairs was that the returning officer may have assaulted the campaigner, “but he was provoked”.
This shows which side the university administration is on. The admin loves FRESH control of our union because the LNP shares the “profits first” attitude to education and uses union resources to attack the left on campus rather than challenge the government’s education cuts. This frees the uni managers to get on with cutting courses and staff.
FRESH is already notorious for having stolen the previous year’s elections through a particularly arrogant fix, secretly opening nominations and then closing them before anyone could register an opposition ticket. Staff members report that FRESH also told international students that their visas would be revoked and they would be deported if they did not vote FRESH, because “voting is compulsory in Australia”.
FRESH’s appalling record of undemocratic and corrupt behaviour was reconfirmed with this year’s spectacle of the student union elections being recalled, after it was determined that FRESH had appointed the returning officer in a fraudulent manner.
It is crystal clear to left wing students at UQ that these over-entitled Liberals need to be challenged. A democratic union that takes a stand against all assaults on students’ rights has to be rebuilt from the ground up. Such a union would seek to encourage student participation in defence of their rights, whether that is against the Labor government’s $2.3 billion cuts to higher education, for a survivable rate of youth allowance or against the discrimination international students face in fees and employment.
The recalling of the elections gives the Fuck FRESH campaign an opportunity to build on the momentum it has behind it already. Let’s make the next round of elections a far more organised and determined fight back against the FRESH Liberals that will really put on the agenda a student union that sees fighting for students’ rights as its paramount goal.
[To join Fuck FRESH, contact Duncan on 0417 035 252 or at duncan_hart09@hotmail.com]
