Lets meet the Social Justice group, closely affiliated with SAlt (Socialist Alternative), and looking expand on its current presence in Guild council.
What do you stand for?
Social Justice is the most left-wing ticket. We stand absolutely against inequality, bigotry, war, and genocide. We stand in solidarity with Palestine against the genocidal campaign being waged by Israel with the backing of western governments, including the Australian government.
We think it’s outrageous that the cost of living is spiraling out of control for students and workers while the rich line their pockets with more and more wealth. It’s presented like some natural disaster that barely anything could be done about, but that’s just not true. There are people to blame for it: landlords, price-gouging corporations, and a Labor government that rules for the rich.
We especially think that the UWA Student Guild and the National Union of Students have to do more than tinker around the edges, and go beyond service provision. Our vision for student unionism is that it takes up big-picture issues and puts up a fight over them. Student unions defeated Tony Abbott’s attempt to deregulate uni course fees which would have made degrees cost $100,000. They mobilised early in the campaign for marriage equality and called rallies that outnumbered far right anti-trans bigots.
What have you achieved this year that you’re proud of? What would you do differently?
Every member of our ticket has spent the last two years throwing themselves in to the incredible Palestine solidarity movement. We’ve been organising rallies on- and off-campus and out every day trying to make them as big as possible.
We’re particularly proud of the role our members have played in the regular demonstrations in the Perth CBD, including the biggest demonstration in solidarity with Palestine to ever happen in Perth – at least 20,000 people came out on August 24. We’ve been flat-out promoting them, building student contingents, and speaking at & chairing them.
Which of your policies are central to your platform?
Free Education. Students are being saddled with mountains of debt for the rest of their lives just to get an education. Tertiary education was free fifty years ago, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be now. Standing for free education is the first step in fighting for an education system that is run in the interests of students instead of being run like a business.
Action on cost of living. For us, this means more than just treating the symptoms of the cost of living crisis – it means taking on the root cause of it. So we think there should be cheap $5 meals on campus, parking should be free, unpaid placements should be abolished, and all medical services on campus should be free, including for international students. But we also think the Guild and NUS should set their sights higher. That means, for example, demanding that welfare payments be at minimum doubled, just like JobSeeker was in 2020, so students don’t have to live in poverty while they study.
Free Palestine. The genocide in Gaza is the most urgent moral issue of our time, and the horror only gets worse by the day. Student unions have the potential to do so much more than simply pass watered-down motions behind the closed doors of a council chamber. At minimum, every protest in the Perth CBD should have been promoted on Guild social media, but really it should have been throwing all of its reach, its resources, and its influence in. It is a travesty that the Spark-run UWA Student Guild has abstained from a mass movement for peace and justice and against genocide.
Why should people get out and vote for you?
Vote for Social Justice if you want a left-wing, activist Guild & NUS. Every candidate on our ticket is an experienced and principled activist who has already spent the whole year (and more) throwing themselves into the movement for Palestine.
Does your constant presence of leafletters throughout the year help or hinder your Guild campaigns?
We make no apology for trying to build left-wing activism on campus. Whether it’s meetings on how to oppose the far right, or building opposition to an active genocide done with the support of our government and the complicity of UWA through its research partnerships with weapons companies that arm Israel.
And it’s clear that anyone paying attention to the Palestine solidarity movement that students have been a major part of it, including students from UWA. Just last month, more than 5,000 students around the country showed up for mass meetings to vote overwhelmingly in favour of motions in solidarity with Palestine and against the complicity of our government and universities.
So we think it helps, and there’s a clear appetite for our student organisations to do more.