By Alex Bainbridge
NEWCASTLE — Right wing student politicians are the big winners in the election of delegates to the National Union of Students, winning the first three positions. At least two were won by the ALP's right wing Unity faction.
The top scoring candidate, running under the spurious banner of "independant [sic] students", cooperated very closely with the Unity candidates in the elections held September 17-19. The fourth delegate is from the ALP "left" and the other two positions were won by members of the Non-Aligned Left (NAL) grouping.
While the Unity/"independant" coalition campaign's publicity protested up-front fees and Howard's cuts, none of the candidates played a prominent (if any) role in the recent education campaign activities.
This year's results are a significant shift from last year when all but one of the five delegates were sympathetic to NAL (the fifth being from Unity), and contrast to the outcome of the student association (NUSA) council elections. While most positions were uncontested in the NUSA elections, Unity challenged for president and general secretary and lost decisively.
Most of the NAL and progressive independents ran under banners such as "Students first; party politics never" or "Keep party politics out of student representation". While this reflects a healthy rejection of the ALP's bureaucratic stranglehold over NUS, Resistance activist Karen Fry told Green Left Weekly, "it would have been better to argue for progressive politics than no politics, otherwise it is hard for genuine activists to distinguish between the real progressives and the right wing 'independents' who give lip service to anti-Howard sentiments."
Resistance, which didn't win any positions, was the only ticket to distribute preferences to all the other progressive candidates. Fry explained that this was done to maximise the chances of progressive candidates getting elected and argued in favour of a tight exchange of preferences between progressives in future elections.