If I need another headache I know where to go....
I got one for you (but the medication for you is easy - just ignore it).
It's Student Union Elections time again at our institution. As usual, the union parties are up to their old dirty tactics that naturally never get clamped down on because the union essentially exists in the "free vacuum" that is the university and hence there is almost no overriding legislation except for standard local, state and national laws (of which none really cover elections or fairness etc. in this sense; the fairness of elections is only legislated for federal, state and local elections).
There have been multiple transgressions by the various union parties and their members over the years - falsifying minutes, physically locking opposing members out of meetings and then marking them as "absent", vote rigging, violations of electoral process integrity (e.g. bribery), effectively barring science-based faculties from ever holding executive positions (you know, that "it's not illegal so you can't do anything about it" stuff)....I seriously don't know how union operations on campus actually still works fairly well (at least on the outer facade), because if these kinds of things were happening at a federal level (barring that there are legal instruments that can be instigated if such problems happened at that level of politics, cf. university unions where there are almost no legal instruments or processes) then surely a civil war would be more warranted.
The classic this year is the allegations that the incumbent party - a far right association who holds pretty much all seats in the union executive - has "disqualified" all other parties from running in this year's elections. Why? According to an oppressed group, the incumbents used their powers to change the timelines of notification to register tickets for the union elections, and also used their powers to change a directive regarding the use of previously used party names. And these changes were only communicated to the wider union
after deadlines had passed. Since the deadlines had passed, no other party could register and hence they cannot stand for the elections.
I know most people here have had anywhere between a gut full to a rat's **** of Australian politics (a.k.a. monkeys humping a coconut at the bottom of the banana tree), but just goes to show that if you thought Australian politics were amongst the worst in the world, then you can sleep tight in the notion that we've bred them young.
Lucky for all of us (and students in general), we are not ruled by the student union or even heavily influenced by them. All our rules and rulings are through the university Senate; frankly that's a dictatorship I'll happily embrace rather than the hypocritical one as fabricated by the student union.
:shock:
