QUT students defy university to vote for Palestine
Queensland University of Technology students have voted overwhelmingly to demand that the university divest from arms companies and Israel.
More than 600 students attended the student guild’s 15 August special general meeting for Palestine, held at the Gardens Point campus.
QUT brags that its Centre for Robotics collaborates with the US Air Force, Boeing, Thales and Rheinmetall. The latter companies are complicit in the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and profit from it.
The SGM was visibly pro-Palestine: several Palestinian flags were draped on railings, and only two students spoke against cutting ties with weapons companies. Their arguments included, “Don’t you know companies like Boeing do good research, too?”, “Sometimes the US Air Force provides aid in natural disasters” and “All companies do terrible things. Nestlé still uses a lot of slave labour”.
There wasn’t much sympathy for these arguments. Hundreds of students who have been boycotting, protesting, and donating to Palestine over the last year chanted “Free Palestine!” in response.
The motion to cut ties with weapons companies passed with 576 for and 70 against. About 200 students subsequently marched to the Chancellery to deliver the message to millionaire Vice-Chancellor Margaret Sheil.
While proceedings went smoothly on 15 August, the lead-up to the meeting was anything but. QUT is one of, if not the most, undemocratic university campuses in the country. The QUT Guild is ruled by a board of directors, which gives bureaucrats whose interests align with the university significant power to veto decisions made by elected student representatives.
Students and guild-affiliated clubs are banned from putting up posters around the campus. There are severe restrictions on setting up stalls, handing out leaflets and engaging with students on campus.
Harassment increased significantly once Students for Palestine activists collected the required number of signatures to call the meeting. The university hounded students for promoting the meeting, who were told that their leaflets and posters had been banned as “political propaganda”.
On one occasion, students wearing guild t-shirts handing out leaflets for the SGM were told to leave campus by a security supervisor. The volunteers explained that the guild was constitutionally required to inform students about the meeting.
In response, the supervisor said, “Campus is supposed to be apolitical”. The volunteers replied that this violated their right to freedom of speech. The supervisor said that if the volunteers didn’t move, he would call the police and tell them that the students were trespassing.
The university has twice emailed staff, informing them that students were banned from making lecture announcements. The second email was sent days before our mass meeting and accused student activists of being outside agitators.
In a meeting to arrange the SGM, a university administrator warned Students for Palestine members that the university would take chants like “QUT supports genocide” very seriously—implying that the university would consider disciplinary action against students.
University managers even called the police onto the campus twice. The first time was for a careers event that Rheinmetall had been invited to, and the second was for the SGM itself. Guild bureaucrats and university administrators threatened that once the main room and the single overflow room were full, police would remove everyone else from the campus.
QUT calls itself “the university for the real world”. It’s a fitting tagline. As in the real world, anti-genocide campaigners are hounded by the establishment. But we didn’t give in. We defied the authorities—and won.
