Of Jenny Macklin, resolutions, and others

NUS Education Conference 290605 - 010705

The last day of Ed Con started with a bang, with Jenny Macklin (shadow minister for Education) delivering a rather encouraging (can’t really say it was inspiring) speech about the evils of VSU, sinister minister Brendan Nelson, and most of all - but of course - the great and wonderful solidarity of the Labor Party. Labor is behind all you students in your fight against VSU! You should all be congratulated for the enormously successful campaign you have built thus far.

She did make a good point, though, about the importance of building a campaign that cut across many sections of society. Incidentally this has been an increasingly applied strategy in education campaigns in the last half-decade or so. It seems that the cross-community strategy has been yielding much greater gains as compared to the more conventional uni-demographic – or even uni-organisational – model of lobbying.

And quite rightly so, IMHO. Not only does this provide the opportunity for different perspectives (and thus different interests) to be taken into account, it also – more significantly – highlights the fact that the different sectors of the community are stakeholders just as much as politicians are decision-makers – and the latter simply cannot make informed decisions by excluding the former. (Democratically speaking, anyway.)

Sounds wanky musing about all this – but I do reckon that this particular strategy isn’t being tapped enough by student activists, at least to a level that we should really strive to be working at. Possibly because it takes a lot more coordination and effort and some may not be arsed enough to go the distance; perhaps they aren’t getting their act together; perhaps the difficulty in some groups of sustaining motivation and interest is posing a more immediate challenge; perhaps - shock horror - factional in-fighting… I don’t know.

But our strategising finesse, as a movement, can see better days yet.

I shall pen off with the best part of Jenny Macklin’s speech: VSU is quite the misnomer – there is nothing about it that is voluntary.

Indeed.

Update: The Resolutions Session on the last day of Ed Con was a bit of a wank, undiplomatically speaking. There was no order. (Some) motions were badly written. Content of motions were often unfocused, and not always relevant to the campaign at hand. Nevertheless, some good arguments were put up by some of the Broad Left. Which is more than can be said of (some) NOLS (Labor left) kids.

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