fatvegan

I think I'm mostly in favour of VSU. I've tried to listen carefully to anyone I've heard talk about the issue, and I haven't heard any convincing argument for keeping union fees the way they are. The normal argument is that they're the same as taxes, and they are there to provide public goods. I don't think it's a very good parallel at all. The sorts of things the money is spent on are only very tenuously public goods. They spend a lot of everyone's money keeping a very small number in beer and pizza in the societies. From what I've observed there are very few active participants in the societies. The union's supporters will say that this is even more reason to give them money. If there are so few people involved now, then imagine how the societies will look if they have no money. That seems to convince a lot of people, but I don't understand how. It's a hopeless argument. You need a much better reason to invest money in something than in looking at how terribly it's failing.

I suppose it's an attempt to democratise the process of student support. But the democracy is so opaque that I don't think it functions at all. I tried to start a film club last year, but it was so incredibly difficult. The amount of administrative overhead required just to get an empty room to show a film in was insane. I didn't even want any money. Just the use of one of the 100 spare rooms on any given night.

Once you're in though, the money really flows. The food co-op gets free rent and a lot of funding, but on the average day five or six people might come in to buy things. Every now and then a club will get a bucket of money to have a BBQ in the interests of university bonding or something. I like that the co-op gets money because that happens to be my thing. But there's no accountability, despite the initial difficulty. I would rather pay $50 a year to the co-op, and $50 a year for critical services.

Part of the problem is that generally university students are some of society's more capable (so they're less likely to need bailing out of some problem), but they're also ones with cash flow issues (so they struggle to scrape together a spare $250 twice a year). We don't need subsidised food, and subsidised services. Especially since they're not actually subsidised anyway. We just pay for it all in one hit, and some of the lump ends up as sandwich shop profits. The food is no better or cheaper at university than it would be anyway where the eaters had a high elasticity of demand. I can walk up to Randwick (10 minutes away) and get tastier, bigger and cheaper food. And Randwick isn't mostly catering to students - it's catering to workers.

Most importantly, the coffee in most places is very bad. The only place with good (fair-trade!) coffee is the non-union place outside Morven Brown, which has the cheapest coffee on campus.

Of course, the important debate is forgotten. It's not whether or not all union services should be free or not, it's which ones will be free. There's a lot the university already provides, and there is a lot more they should provide. As Ross Gittens has said, those minority of critical services which advocates of the union always use to make the union look indispensable (child care, counselling etc), should be provided by the university and added on to our HECs debt.

Union membership should be voluntary. It shouldn't be a very hard thing to convince people is useful, if it actually is useful. The benefits aren't that hard to describe, unlike convincing people to pay for an army or subsidies for cotton farmers in other states.

My biggest concern is for the ability of student bodies to make themselves heard. The money everyone has to give allows a few vocal students to stand up for the rights of the more apathetic. I suspect a lot of the lobbying money gets spent on things which lefties like but the average student wouldn't. Maybe that's a good thing.

Ultimately I think the only reason the Liberals care about this issue is because it lets them take a swipe at the next generation of activists. But I don't think that means VSU is a bad thing. I hope that student activists don't need a bad policy in order to work effectively.