Lot's Wife Edition 8 2013

EDITORIAL
MATTHEW CAMPBELL
Every so often I sit down and flip through
old editions of Lot’s Wife – from 1964
when it was founded, to last year when my
involvement began with the publication of
some shitty poetry that I found on my blog
from year 10. It was past deadline – which
I thought was pretty serious business – and
I still hadn’t submitted anything to one of
the previous editors, Mell, after promising
I would. Give me a break. And if I find out
you’ve been rummaging through editions
of Lot’s Wife 2012 in some craven attempt
at bringing my name into disrepute by
showing the poems to all your mates,
there’ll be hell to pay.
But perhaps creepier than finding old poems that I wrote is reading
through editions from the past decade or further back and realising
that many of the issues we’ve encountered this year as editors appear to
be on a constant feedback loop. Florence and I may have been the first
Lot’s Wife editors to produce a video as part of a campaign against federal
government attacks on education, but we certainly weren’t the first to
encounter the problem. Similarly, diatribes against student political bodies
and the importance of tearing this magazine away from it all featured
heavily in final editorials over the years. What can we write that hasn’t
been written before? Sometimes there’s no greater existential crisis than
reading through history and realising you’re not special.
The point is I’m filling space. Happy New Year everyone! Now give
me my last pay check.
But seriously, what’s next? What do I do with all this horrendous
free space left in my editorial? Write about Abbott? The protests in Bahrain?
Miley? The human organ harvesting industry in Eastern Europe?
Against my better judgement, I think I’m going to weigh in on this
student government stuff. Unfortunately, if general student sentiment is
anything to go by, by doing so I’m part of the problem, not the solution.
At least that’s what the voter turnout statistics seem to suggest, with only
about 2,500 students on a campus of around 28,000 choosing to vote during
MSA election week.
For a number of reasons, not least because they had the most campaigners
around the traps during election week, the majority incumbent
party of the MSA, Go!, pretty much managed a clean sweep of the
elections this year. As of 2014, Go! will have had control of the MSA for
nine years, but that barely captures the full extent of their influence over
the union throughout the years.
While the ticket has no doubt overseen important changes for students,
their rule hasn’t been without controversy. Some of this has been
written about this year (some would say ad
nauseum), and to illustrate exactly what I
mean when I allude to the historic recurrence
that transpires in student politics
when it comes to shadiness and the abuse
of power, let’s take a look back to Lot’s
Wife in 2007.
In an article published in their fifth
edition, the editors at the time accused
(with a stat dec as proof) MSA Executive
of bribery and corruption in the previous
years’ elections. The then-MSA Executive
saw fit to censor the piece, citing a clause
in the MSA constitution which states
that the executive can refuse to print Lot’s Wife if material is considered
‘potentially defamatory’. The article was not considered defamatory in the
legal sense (as confirmed by independent legal advice) but as it criticised
members of the administration, the editors were forced to “water [the
article] down” before the edition went to print. They were subsequently
told the Executive would be vetting all further editions for the year.
In more recent memory, members of Go! have registered deceptive
‘feeder’ ticket names (2010 and 2012) in elections in an effort to eliminate
competition, and hired a factional associate to oversee the 2010 poll.
I’m not bringing this up to be petty. It would be unfair of me not to
acknowledge that the other major tickets, Switch and Left Hook, don’t
have significant flaws. But this isn’t federal politics. There is no Opposition
to challenge the behaviour of the ruling group. It stands to reason
that the administration, in the context of a student union, will stand up
to more criticism.
A friend of mine made an interesting point with regard to how this
ticket has been able to twist the politics in its favour and weather the ensuing
shit storms relatively unscathed. Students, she said, are in an out of
their degrees in a matter of three or four years, and in that time (roughly
90% of them, if we’re going by this year’s election results) pay no attention
to what goes on in the union. Hardly anyone’s left to give a shit.
In the context of student politics, how people perceive you is paramount,
and I think that negative perception of the union and its major
players contributes to student disengagement. Negative perception can
render a cause or institution a dried up husk of what it could be, no matter
how noble its ideology.
The 1996 Lot’s Wife article that we republished that addresses
student apathy (pages 24-25) is a grim reminder that we all have a role to
play in engaging students – not just Lot’s Wife editors and contributors,
but student politicians and other hangers-on alike.
6 LOT’S WIFE EDITION 8 • 2013