The point is, I only first set eyes on Professor Lee Monday last week, from the gallery at a meeting of Council. The first time I saw him where he would have had the opportunity to see me was only yesterday, at another meeting.

It gets better… at Monday’s meeting, I kept falling asleep during a presentation he was giving — yes, falling asleep, and I was sitting where he could constantly see me! You know, it’s not ‘cos it was uninteresting at all, but only because I was bloody tired from not having slept the night before (stayed up setting up a form on the COFA SA website for people collecting our 2006 diaries and stuff).

Being the President of COFA SA has meant I’ve met a few higher-ups in the University bureaucracy who I’ve only previously heard of by reputation. It’s rather daunting actually. It is exciting, finding out if people are as you’ve heard them described, but it’s certainly daunting too — you’ve always got to be careful and mindful that you’re representing COFA SA and COFA students.

I guess I just found it pretty surreal to end up at a farewell for somebody you haven’t met, and have only heard about in passing. COFA is a pretty cosy place and many students and staff certainly know each other.

So I at least stayed around to listen to the speeches, and Adrian seems to be a very nice guy, well liked by many at UNSW. I wonder if he remembered from Monday and would have very much liked it if I in fact wasn’t there? I did end up shaking his hand at the reception and wishing him well, but I didn’t introduce myself. That would just be weird, wouldn’t it? “Hi, nice to meet you… by the way, bye!”

Ah well… what’s the difference between a Pro-Vice-Chancellor and a Deputy Vice-Chancellor anyway?

This means I’m going to be President next year! W00t! Thanks to everyone who voted for me!

However, I’m also disappointed at result in some ways. You might be wondering why. I won an election without having to do a lot of campaigning and without all the stress of having to wait for a result. Why on Earth would I be anything other than ecstatic at the result? Let me explain…

A History of Apathy

For those of you not familiar with student politics at COFA, let me give you a quick run-down: COFA students are notoriously apathetic about student politics, student representation, campus life and maybe even just in general. COFA students don’t get involved in running their student organisation, nor do they like to be involved in protests or campaigns about things that directly affect them, let alone politics, the environment, social ills or any of the other issues facing the world at large.

Last year COFA undertook something called the ‘coursework review’, where all the courses were restructured, with units of credit changing from four to six per course, to fall into line with UNSW standard. Students ended up doing on average four subjects per semester instead of six, with severely reduced contact hours, all while paying higher fees than ever! Despite the best efforts of COFA SA, students generally made very little noise about the issue, with few attending protests or getting involved in the campaign — most just didn’t care.

For as long as I have been involved with COFA SA (one and a half years now), we have only had one single election, despite the fact this is now the second annual full Committee change since I was first on one. The one election we did have was a by-election for a vacant Committee position that we had this year. We had two candidates and if I recall correctly, we ended up receiving a grand total of five votes!

Why Elections are Good

In the present situation, with very few students having an interest in running COFA SA, even though they pay to be members, use the SA’s services and primarily rely on them to represent students’ interests to COFA and UNSW administration, most positions on the Committee (since at least 2003) are filled by a single candidate who nominates and is then elected unopposed. For 2006 Committee positions, this has been the case for all positions other than President and the Sexuality Officers, the latter remaining vacant because there were no nominations.

So while having an election for the position I was running for was daunting and stressful for me personally, it would’ve been great to have a chance to see democracy really at work at COFA for once, with a contested election — especially with the issue of VSU in the air and our critics arguing that student organisations are undemocratic. Too bad neither of us candidates had really gotten into campaigning yet, drawing attention to the election with posters and everything.

Also, with VSU likely to be implemented for 2007, there will be many crucial decisions that will need to be made by this year’s Committee to ensure COFA SA’s survival. I personally would feel more comfortable in my role if I knew I had the explicit approval of COFA students, that I had a mandate to reform COFA SA.

Problems Today

As you may imagine, there are other issues associated with having few students interested in COFA SA.

The biggest problem would probably be the level of commitment of students on the Committee. Some of the students who have sat on the Committee in past years have done so because they saw nobody else wanting that job. They felt compelled to do so out of necessity. As such, such of these students were in fact quite busy and didn’t have time to commit to COFA SA.

Others never really had an interest in the first place, and stopped attending meetings soon after they started. This has made it very hard to just get things done. It’s been very difficult to have Committee meetings regularly this year and simply getting quorum has been a struggle.

Of course, there have been other problems — namely this year’s leadership. I tried my best to ensure COFA SA ran effectively, but there was only so much I could do when I has to work with a President who disagreed with me on so many issues and had such a different style of doing things. This is something else that I’m sure could have been avoided if we had more interested students — surely we would’ve had a higher chance of securing quality candidates then!

So What If You Lose?

Unfortunately, there’s yet another thing which makes it hard to get interested, dedicated students on the COFA SA Committee — our electoral system. At present, if you lose an election (or withdraw from one) you have no way of standing for another position on the Committee, unless one is still vacant after the election.

For example, the other Presidential candidate will not be able to serve on the 2006 Committee unless she wants to be Female Sexuality Officer and she qualifies by identifying as non-heterosexual. However it’s really only by luck that they are vacant. Ideally, all the positions would receive multiple nominations and there would be an election for each position at the same time.

This means that if anybody loses an election, they’re out of the Committee entirely. This is a shame because those running for positions, especially for ones like President and Vice-President that require a lot of commitment, are probably students who are dedicated and genuinely passionate about COFA SA.

This is something that definitely needs to change!

The Future

Anyway, I will leave this topic here for now. Hopefully I have convinced you that I at least have a good grasp of some of the issues faced by COFA SA. While some of these may just be unavoidable for campuses with such a small student population (just over 2000 at COFA), I’ll certainly be working towards a solution during my time as President!

Dr Nelson confirmed to The Age that he did not expect the legislation to even reach the Senate before December, saying the Government’s industrial laws would take priority.

And Dr Nelson said even if the legislation was passed this year, he was considering delaying the introduction of the changes until 2007.

“I’m concerned that the crowded legislative agenda that we have, may make it difficult for universities to actually implement it barely a month after its passage through Parliament,” he said.

I don’t know whether to celebrate or throw my hands up in despair. Forget whether VSU will kill us or not, long before that happens the uncertainty itself is going to get to us!

Opposition education spokeswoman Jenny Macklin said Dr Nelson had been “plainly” unable to get the support of his coalition colleagues in the Senate. “The Education Minister’s delaying tactics have left staff, students and their families at Victorian universities in limbo, not knowing if their jobs and the services they rely on will exist next year,” she said.

Damn right, and it’s obviously not just Victorian universities. At COFA SA, our staff have been left in limbo for the better part of year too. With no idea if their jobs will remain if VSU is implemented but with no idea when we’ll know if VSU will be implemented, you can’t blame any of them for being so incredibly stressed. It’s been impossible for any of us to plan ahead in very meaningful ways and it’s been terrible for morale across the organisation.

If VSU isn’t implemented in time for next year, do we restructure our organisation now anyway and try to save as much money as possible (not knowing what we’re actually planning for)? Do we stick to the status quo for as long as possible? Oh who knows. If the government is trying to screw over student organisations by attrition, I daresay they’re almost succeeding.

Uni student fees plan in disarray

(Before I start, I should make clear that I only speak from my own personal experiences. My views are not necessarily those of COFA SA, and what I say is definitely not official COFA SA anything.)

I’ve found out that life at COFA SA is in many ways quite exciting and there are a lot of things we do that students typically no nothing about. But in many instances, it’s really mundane and a lot less controversial than you might think!

One of the things that many students don’t have a clue about shows up every session on your UNSW fee statement: the “Misc. Activity Fund”. This year, you’ve paid $39 each session towards it (if you’re a full-time student) — but what is it anyway and where does that money go?

So What Is the MSAF?

The Miscellaneous Student Activity Fee (MSAF) is collected to allow capital works that benefit students to take place. That is, it’s used to fund large projects that are permanent in nature — frequently for the construction of student facilities, but also for buying equipment such as computers, photocopiers, etc. As the name implies, it can only be spent on things that will benefit students. It can also only be spent on things that aren’t something the university should be providing anyway. For example, if a facility is needed for academic use (i.e. new lecture theatres), they cannot be paid for using MSAF funds.

MSAF funds are UNSW money. There’s been some confusion over whether it actually belongs to UNSW or to UNSW’s student organisations, maybe because MSAF is collected alongside student organisation membership fees. But my research suggests it’s always been established they’re UNSW funds. However, UNSW is committed to letting student organisations have input in how the funds are spent. This makes sense of course, because as student representatives, we know what extra-curricular facilities and resources students want.

The process we have to go through to use MSAF funds on a project, is that we have to decide what specific things we wish to construct or acquire, and then submit a bid to the Student Facilities Planning Committee (SFPC), which overseas allocations of grants from MSAF funds. So this is where COFA SA comes in.

A COFA SA Project

There is an SFPC meeting tomorrow (Thursday) afternoon at UNSW and COFA SA has three bids that are being tabled. Let me use one of them as an example. We want to refit the Campus Art Store (CAS), a shop we run at COFA that offers discounted art supplies to students. (The other projects include a wheelchair access ramp for Kudos Gallery, and a new postgraduate lounge for COFA.)

We want to make CAS a lot more attractive to COFA students and others alike. CAS faces Oxford St in Paddington and maximising revenue from passer-bys and the public would help us a lot, especially with the threat of funding loss under Voluntary Student Unionism (VSU) next year hanging over our heads.

We also want to finally bring in proper fittings and shelving more suitable for our stock to replace the haphazard, ragtag fittings we’ve accumulated over the years. One of the things we want to add are displays that will showcase students’ works. We want to help our students get more recognition of their work from the public and to help them sell their work.

Believe it or not, we started off with no idea how to go about undertaking this project at all — well nobody at COFA SA is in the shopfitting business, after all! We quickly learnt that we first had to engage a professional designer to draw up plans for the refit before we approached shopfitters. What we did was to get the designer started, and then we applied to MSAF for a retrospective grant to cover to costs of getting the designer in — in fact this is how MSAF works most of the time, for smaller projects. We buy what we need, submit a bid with receipts then ask SFPC to reimburse us from MSAF funds.

What we’ll do with the actual construction itself though, is we’ll make a bid before we undertake any work and get UNSW to pay directly whichever shopfitter we eventually contract. There are two reasons for this: for a start, we just don’t have the money to do this project then get reimbursed. Secondly, we need to submit three separate quotes for SFPC approval before we can get approval.

Back to the designer… now, I won’t name him, but let’s just say to say the first time we saw the drawings, we felt there was definitely room for improvement! So we had to go through the trouble of working out what was wrong them, setting up a consultation with the designer to get improved drawings done. And so we come to a gripe about the MSAF process.

MSAF Deadlines, Stress

SFPC meetings aren’t held frequently — in fact, tomorrow’s meeting will be the very last meeting for the year. (I think the next one is in March!) With VSU still an uncertainty, student organisations are going to want to get as much out of the way this year as we can. SFPC has made it clear in the past that they would take into consideration the looming issue of VSU, but evidently it doesn’t bother them that we will have no access at all to MSAF funds between now and next year should our bids be referred back with concerns, requiring reconsideration next meeting.

Now being typical university bureaucracy, the deadline for submissions was last Monday, ten days prior to the meeting itself. Our designer managed to rush through and produce drawings by last Friday. Even better — I believe the quotes our designer got from us arrived on Monday morning itself. A similar situation happened with one of our other bids too, so we had an absolute mad rush to finish writing them followed by a mad rush down to UNSW to submit them, big roll of drawings and all!

Now We Wait

So we rushed to get the bid in and we didn’t really have much time to consider the quotes carefully. Hell, the committee had no time to look at it at all before we had to submit it. Thankfully, even once approved by SFPC if the committee has objections, we can always pull the plug on the project. But what could we do?

There’s a lot riding on this for COFA SA. All the quotes for the CAS refit cost more than half of COFA SA’s annual budget — over $250 000! There’s no way we could pay for it ourselves, or even start it ourselves. This being the last SFPC for the year, it’ll be our last chance to get this project underway before VSU is implemented, if it will be — and who can be sure what will happen to MSAF after that? Not to mention, if we want to have the actual shopfitting work carried out without taking the shop out of action during session, then the only time we can do it is during the summer holidays. We had to submit it to SFPC this time.

So right now, there’s nothing we can do except play the waiting game. A few of us will be present at the SFPC meeting tomorrow, where we’ll field questions about the bids and placate and concerns they have. They can approve it, reject it, or ask us to fix up the bid in some way and resubmit it.

Oh the stress! Wish us luck!

I hope that leaves you with some idea of how one part of your university fees get spent. Did you know that already? What do you think?

(Update: Hooray! All our bids were approved by SFPC! I forgot to mention though, SFPC’s role is only to make recommendations to Student Affairs Committee (SAC). What this means is that SAC will now have to look at our bids and approve them at the next meeting on 27 Oct 2005, although in the past SAC has invariably followed the recommendations of SFPC.)