The new General Manager of the Sydney Uni student union is the father of the editor of Honi Soit, a publication that can bag the union out when needed. Its good they got rid of the last one though. Hiring a yuppie bimbo PR professional was kind of strange... paying someone a salary so we students feel less ripped off when we pay her salary. Its just a union for goodness' sake. A retail organisation that holds a monopoly over the campus of what, 20 000 students, an organisation that holds regular tea parties for students keen the learn what it is like to feel the frustration of the bureaucracy that is ultimately run by paid professionals. I will probably delete this later.

Last year one of the board directors suggested they give all the committee members a special internet password to access the minutes of past meetings online, from the union website. I remembered how transparency had been a popular issue during the board elections, so saw it fit to suggest they make them available to every member of the union. After all, every member pays a lot of money to walk onto campus each year, and what does the word union mean anyway? The old union hands there were once again freaked out by my honesty. Bu xing, bu xing, that will not do! They seemed particularly concerned about the minutes of useless committee meetings being available for all to see, being vulnerable to the inevitable criticism they will receive. If it isa union, how could there be anything wrong with being criticised by the people for whom they are supposed to be working? Give us your three hundred bucks and shut up... we have our resumes to think about!

Then they keep screaming that anyone is welcome at a committee meeting, well knowing that noone is going to bother unless they knew exactly what was going on. If you want to know exactly what is said in a meeting, you need to first contact the special archivist lady who keeps all the minutes locked away in some top secret file somewhere. Transparency my buttocks!

In the introductions in the first meeting I attended, I told them that a lot of people didn't like the union and that we should do things to change that. I didn't mean hire a PR bimbo, I meant there was something terribly wrong with the union and we had to fix it. It didn't go down well, even though the criteria for becoming a voting committee member was having fresh ideas etc. Maybe all they wanted were people who wanted to get the getting-involved experience and have a free sun-dried tomato sandwich with a big glass of o.j. a couple of times each semester, choosing to raise or not raise their hand every time the PR lady or the graphic designer or whoever makes a suggestion. Or perhaps it was my failure to know beforehand that my natural trains of thought were not welcome in the club and in fact all that had been said about new ideas and energy had been the language of a few delusional board members hanging on to a distant dream.

http://digest.idmedia.org.au/2004/1april.htmlhttp://digest.idmedia.org.au/2004/1april.html



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