Jack Fairey
GaG is the joke party in this years Guild Elections, running a suite of policies ranging from funny to fantastical, and it doesn’t seem to be particularly concerned with the menial drudgery of complying with the rules that constrain elections. Rules around elections may seem tedious – it may seem the very thing GaG stands to oppose in search of a less serious student politics; but really, its as much about containing the elections from interfering with the rest of student life as it is finger-wagging.
Take the very basics – sending representatives to the Candidate information session, to make sure they’re properly informed on the proprietaries of campaigning. Cursorily, it might seem pointless for a joke party to attend these sessions. If they don’t intend to campaign at all, it might well be, and the booth ban they’ve recieved on Monday might be of little impact.
However if they intend to, these things exist to balance the election campaign with student experience; the lunch hour blackout where campaigning has to stop, the ban on campaigning at colleges, and the restrictions on campaign areas that keeps the walkway outside Reid walkable during election week.
Beyond that, the harshest election rule is the full blackout, the one that stops any official campaigning or mention of the groups prior to the two business weeks leading up to the election. It’s strictly enforced, sometimes even onto Pelican, and it prevents students from hearing about elections intermittently for months up to the week of polling.
In a manner even more contradictory of their core themes, instead of launching their own account, they subtly infiltrated a growing trend of UWA-themed Social media accounts with the express intent of turning hatemail_uwa into a campaign account with the accumulated following (Nearly 1k presently) – their responses are contradictory in initially choosing to deny an affiliation, then claiming it was created to ‘understand what students hate so they can fix it’ which might function as a deflection if their policies were more realistic, or realistic at all.
This culminated in a series of posts that made political statements, hinting at future political engagement, and then breaking the blackout blatantly by beginning campaigning days early.
Some rules are meant to be undermined, but if one of your central values is a less serious student politics? Maybe not these ones.
Punishments are of little consequence to a party of little ambition, but its a hypocritical to challenge authority in this way; students relative peace in their carefully limited interactions with Guild politics are not the first front in the war on seriousness.