Today is a very symbolic day. Not only have we reached the finale of this guild election series, but I write this as we prepare for our final Pelican meeting of the year in the Guild Council Meeting Room, as well as the annual PELICAN PROM (catch you in the Tav tonight). We are busy. I should probably abandon this to go and blow up some balloons and buy more hairspray, but the thought of disappointing my new BFF #CamPayne is too much to bear.
Bullets is a long-standing guild elections tradition that happens in the Tav after polls close. In all honesty, I’m still not sure what it actually entails. It’s a game, and candidates call each other out on their antics during elections, and the person who gets called out the most skols a drink, or a jug, or something. It seems like a reasonably healthy endeavor – a show of good will and sportsmanship. Tellingly, at last night’s Bullets, STAR were a no-show.
Though the idea of actually attending fills me with existential dread, I got the skinny on what went down at Bullets from our official Pelican insider (Cameron Payne). Launch campaign manager won on 36 bullets, mostly for not submitting required forms before the election, and leaving Launch missing a couple of OB candidates. Apparently Pelican got some bullets too! Word from the inside is that it was for our ‘unbiased coverage of the election’, but I’m not sure that’s the whole story. Things we might have gotten bullets for last night:
- Failure to realise that Launch was never an acronym
- Writing the election coverage only after at least one beverage
- Multiple rotations of Carly Rae Jepsen’s new album in the office
Last night a couple of very hard working guild staff stayed in their office well into the night to bring us the news that Maddie Mulholland would be the 103rd UWA Student Guild President. As expected, the office bearer positions were a STAR clean sweep. And it was a landslide – Maddie won with a whopping 2170 out of 3514 votes, and margins across the board were similar. For comparison, last year 2015 president Lizzy O’Shea won with 2055 out of 3849 votes – and that was pretty exceptional. What is really amazing is that Launch’s presidential candidate Rhys Tucker came through with 737 votes. Last year, Liberty’s presidential candidate Millie Dacre came second to O’Shea with 1129 votes. The difference between how many students came out to vote this year versus last year is almost exactly the difference between Dacre and Tucker’s votes. Call me Antony Green.
We’ll finish by offering our sincere thanks to everyone who came back to read this column every day – thank you for jumping on this ridiculous train with us. We’ll see you at the Tav in a couple of hours for Pelican Prom (regardless of your political affiliation, and yes, tickets are on the door); we’ll be the girls with the gins.
Words by Lucy Ballantyne