Voluntary student unionism

[splintax]

The UWA Student Guild and the National Union of Students are pretty strongly opposed to voluntary student unionism, or VSU: the result of amendments to the Higher Education Support Act 2003 which took effect in 2006.

Essentially, VSU means that Australian universities cannot require their students to be a member of a student guild or pay fees for

Comments

[dannipenguin]

So it's important to understand that UWA was less adversely affected by the introduction of VSU than other universities around Australia, but as a member of NUS, it campaigned on the same message.

The UWA Guild was in a stronger financial position than many other student unions around the country, and had access to a number of profitable revenue streams (i.e. catering). Some unions, who didn't have such flexible revenue, have since gone broke. That said, there have been changes, the Guild is now filled with advertising, events are often sponsored and some programmes have been discontinued (I can't immediately think which ones, but it did happen).

On your opinion that the University should be providing services. The problem here is that the University doesn't really have the funding with which to provide the services. Also, there are services that wouldn't be provided. Part of the point of unions is to provide services a larger body will not.

On fees vs. student poverty. The problem here is that in a consumer-pays system, the price of everything goes up, and it goes up for the people who are worst off. Effectively levying one fee against everyone subsidises the cost of the services for those who need them.

Finally, it's important to realise that VSU vs CSU wasn't about free-choice or consumer-pays or anything else they tell you, it was effectively a move to silence the political lobby groups that existed within student unions. None of whom were fans of the Government.