Flex-Week Election Proposal to see Labor-Aligned student reps cross the floor

A proposal by the SRC’s Labor-affiliated faction, ‘Revive’, to move UNSW’s SRC Elections to Flex-Week (Week 6) has been met with backlash on many sides, including Revive’s own.

Motioned in the days after Oscar Iredale, who is also a member of the Labor party, was elected Chair of the Arc Board, ‘that Arc moves SRC elections to flexi-week, to promote higher engagement with student elections’.

The proposal calls elections held when students have classes an ‘unfair choice’, claiming that holding them instead when students are less busy will increase voter turnout.

 “Any candidate who has put much time into talking to students about voting during an election will have heard the common refrain ‘I would, but I’m too busy right now to read the candidates and vote’,” the motion reads. 

But a joint statement on social media, released by Education Officer Cherish Kuehlmann and Indigenous Officer Brydie Zorz, rejects this idea.

“It does not make sense to hold voting during a week when the students we are supposed to be representing won’t have a chance to meaningfully engage with the election process,” Zorz told Noise.

They argue that engagement in student elections will decrease without the visibility of polling-week campaigning on campus; and that voting will be less accessible to students from minority and low socioeconomic backgrounds, who are less likely to live on campus.

“We believe that such a move will strip thousands of students’ access to the regular election process,” they said in the statement. 

This statement has since been promoted by Kuehlmann’s Education Collective, the Environment Collective, and the Students with Disabilities Collective.

This means that Zorz and Students with Disabilities Officers Geoffrey Zhen and Timothy To, who were elected on the Revive ticket that ultimately put forward this motion, will be voting against the party they ran for election with when the SRC gives their verdict on Monday night. The Education and Environment Collectives are safe seats of the Left Action ticket, which is run in large part by Socialist Alternative.

“I can’t in good conscience support this motion, and will not be voting alongside the Revive caucus if they choose to go forward with this motion,” Zorz said. 

“Although I ran on the Revive ticket I don’t in any way consider myself a part of Labor.”

Current General Secretary, former President and leading Young Labor figure Paige Sedgwick, who submitted the motion, dismissed suggestions of retaliation against those who cross the floor. 

“This situation is actually not very much at all like what has happened in Federal parliament and has no bearing on how council members continue to have the freedom to express their personal views,” she told Noise.

Only Arc has the power to set the date of student elections. Should this motion pass, it would still require approval from the Arc Board to come into effect.

Sedgwick indicated that the board was not involved with the drafting of the motion.

Around 4,500 students voted in the last SRC election, or about 5% of the total student population.

The motion continues, ‘Democracies are at their best and healthiest when they reduce barriers to voting and candidacy’.

More to come.