“Student Criticism might be bad for our reputation” says company financed by Qatar Airways, Big Four Banks, Police
Students are more than welcome to speak on the issues they’re passionate about, so long as it doesn’t reflect badly on an institution currently being investigated by ICAC.
Recent murmurs mentioning something about ‘the free press’ and ‘journalistic integrity’ have prompted Arc to issue a UNSW-wide statement clarifying their stance on the student paper formerly known as Tharunka, which is soon to be renamed.
“We wish to clarify that every student has the right to say how they feel about UNSW. That is their right,” said Arc’s former Director of Marketing, now serving a role recently rechristened as ‘Director of Smiles and Bubbles’.
“But I’m in a bit of a bind, you see, since if we allow ourselves to be the butt of the joke too much we will be less attractive to our sponsors,” continued the executive of a not-for-profit.
Tharunkan’t understands that this is in reference to their several business partnerships, who have hinted at reluctance to associate with radical concepts such as activism and young people affording to eat.
You see, it is imperative that the spread of independent, unbiased information about our community here at UNSW is managed by the marketing department of a company that exists to make UNSW look good.
Arc has worked tirelessly to aid students through the housing, rental and cost-of-living crises, presenting students with readily available, lifesaving resources such as pop-guides on Instagram and resume templates.
It would be a shame if all that hard work were undone by someone pointing out that CommBank are paying them to condition students into liking them with free jelly beans and a keep cup if you’re lucky, and forgetting that they posted 9-figure profits thanks to the price gouging of renters (i.e. basically all of us) and first home buyers on the basic necessities for survival.
“We can’t have students thinking about that when our banking partners are present,” the Director of Strategic Risks told us.
Similarly, Arc prefers to keep on the down-low that students gave an unfathomable amount of their personal data to the sovereign dictatorship of Qatar in exchange for a slice of pizza.
It also chooses not to delve into that fact when discussing the Queer Collective, its membership or its finances, preferring to disassociate the decrease in funding to UNSW’s largest queer community with the increased revenue it received for advertising the flag carrier of a nation that executes queer people.
It did not comment on the discrepancy between the two.
“Attila needed a photo op at the SCG. Don’t look at us,” Arc said, forgetting that we were in fact looking at Arc Sport and the entire board behind Attila in that photo, underneath half a dozen renditions of Qatar Airways’ logo.
Arc also discourages student journalists from taking a ‘fuck da police’ mentality to its reporting, given that the NSW Police force uses O-Week as a recruitment hotspot. This has been suggested as an explanation of Tharunka’nt’s lack of indigenous authors.
Arc did not comment on the Fuzz’s violent squashing of pro-Palestine protests, BLM protests, ongoing systemic racism and corruption, or the unlawful arrest of one of Arc's few student representatives.
If Arc loses those business partnerships, we might see the cancellation of untold numbers of yacht club memberships.
We can’t have that now, can we?
