A few years ago, a post on the website then-known as Twitter went viral as a reaction to bad opinionated posts. It read “I’m not falling for that hot take that’s clearly someone with a fetish for getting yelled at, I refuse to participate in that kind of perversion”.

In a similar way, there is something intensely voyeuristic about attending Natcon: the National Union of Students’ (NUS) annual National Conference. 

The conference is the annual general meeting of the union, where delegates elected from affiliated universities debate the union’s policy book for the next year and elect its new national executive and office bearers.

Pretty much everyone who attends agrees that the week-long meeting, often called “stupol schoolies” or “hack Christmas”, is chaotic, toxic, rancorous and just bad.

Yet, every year, basically everyone comes back. Ready to yell at each other once again.

Unfortunately, we at Woroni have found ourselves participating in this exercise of sick perversion again, and again and again. 

As I write this, myself, our new News Editor Sophie Hilton, and new Editor-in-Chief Claudia Hunt are on our way to Federation University in Ballarat. 

This article aims to explain what Natcon is and what you can expect will happen there.

“Hacks”, factions, tickets: a who’s who

The NUS is the peak undergraduate student union body in Australia. It is to students what the ACTU is to Australian trade unions: a body where unions can collaborate on issues of joint concern.

The delegates that each union sends to Natcon, many of whom call themselves “hacks”, are elected each year by students as part of their student union elections.

Most unions send roughly the same number of delegates, but the number of votes each delegate can cast differs based on the number of students at the university that they represent. 

For example, ANUSA — which represents the ANU’s 17,000 students — is sending six delegates who can cast six votes each. UMSU, by contrast, which represents the University of Melbourne’s 50,000 students, is sending seven delegates who will have 16 votes each.

Virtually all of these delegates are members of a political faction. The NUS is dominated by its factions. So dominated that, when we went to fill out our registration for our student media tickets, a required field asked for what NUS factions we are members of. (We said “none”, for the record).

Four political factions typically dominate affairs in the NUS. You can think of these like political parties in a parliament. These are:

• Student Unity, a group consisting of members of the Labor party’s right factions.
• National Labor Students (NLS), the Labor party’s left faction.
• Socialist Alternative (SAlt), the socialist organisation known for their stalls on university campuses and outspoken activism which split from the International Socialists (now Solidarity) in 1995.
• Grassroots Independents (“Grindies”), the name given to an alliance between a left-wing faction from the University of Sydney called Grassroots and various left-wing independents from ANU and other universities mostly in WA. 
• The Australian Liberal Students Federation, the student wing of the Liberal party who usually proxy (or give) their votes to Student Unity 

In August, ANU students elected:

• Will Burfoot (change–Student Unity, ANUSA President)
• Skye Predavec (SERVE–Independent, former ANUSA Welfare Officer)
• Ell Lapin (Free Parking–SAlt, ANUSA General Representative)
• Rosie Paton (change–NLS, ANUSA Education Officer)
• Sam Gorrie (change–NLS, ANUSA General Secretary)
• Yerin Park (Left Action–SAlt, former ANUSA General Representative)

Unity, NLS and SAlt all enforce strict voting instructions, called a “bind”, on their delegates. These instructions are determined, usually by a vote of faction members, before the conference. This means all debates and elections in the NUS are effectively pre-determined.

As these factions all overlap with actually existing political parties, “ratting” (voting against the faction’s instructions) can have serious consequences for a delegate well beyond the NUS context.

Sources suggested to Woroni that Student Unity was on the verge of splitting up this year and that NLS appears to have split up on state lines: the WA and Queensland Labor Left students branches are said to be sitting separately from the larger branch covering the rest of the country this year.

Sources differed on whether the WA and QLD NLS delegates would sit on their own or with the independents.

The group of independents that ran ANUSA for most of the 2010s until this year, and which ran in the 2024 ANUSA election as “Serve!”, sat with the Grindies until they left the group in 2021.

The NUS in 2024: Are students still “on the menu”?

Going into Natcon this year, the NUS’ Labor-dominated executive would point to what they see as huge wins for Australia’s undergraduate students.

The Universities Accord, a suite of policies agreed to by the Labor federal government, universities, and the NUS earlier this year, would tend to vindicate the student Labor strategy of representing students within existing mechanisms.

As many a Young Labor member has no doubt chanted at ANUSA meetings this year: “if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu!”

The Accord report recommended a number of policies: some of which, like a minimum amount of SSAF allocated to student-led organisations and an independent ombudsman to review universities’ handling of SASH claims, are long time policies of NUS leadership and have passed parliament.

Other recommendations in the report, such as replacing the Morrison government’s “Job Ready Graduates” course fee changes, have not been adopted by the government.

The Labor party also, outside of the Accord process, surprised many with an announcement of a policy for the upcoming 2025 federal election that they would wipe 20% of outstanding HELP student loan balances. 

This announcement came on top of a retroactive change to HELP indexation, spurred on by higher than expected inflation, which has also passed parliament.

The Labor factions’ strategy is usually presented by the more left-wing factions, particularly SAlt, as overly bureaucratic and a distraction from building an activist movement for students.

SAlt’s argument has become particularly pertinent with the recent crackdown on political protest on many campuses in the face of pro-Palestinian activism. 

ANU sought to evict the Gaza Solidarity Encampment from Kambri, but backed down after the announcement triggered a much larger picket. The encampment later agreed to move to a space near the AD Hope building before disbanding. The university later issued a draft advertising policy prohibiting virtually all posters on campus.

Other concerning responses were seen around the country, such as at the University of Sydney which plucked out a 123 year old law about goats on “inclosed lands” to evict their students’ encampment. It followed this with a new Campus Access Policy requiring permission for virtually any public event – including any demonstration – on campus. 

They followed this up last month with a review recommending even more extreme limitations on speech including a “civility rule” requiring any speaker on campus – including lecturers – to “identify the context” of potentially contentious phrases.

The Labor factions have spoken out against these policies but, given the primacy Young Labor rhetoric has placed on “real” issues for “real” students (to use the USyd NLS tickets’ rhetoric) other than political protest, you would be forgiven for thinking otherwise.

Stupol in 2024: Big gains for SAlt at NUS and Labor factions at SRCs

Accurate numbers are difficult for outsiders to calculate, but based on an accreditation report leaked to us and whispers from sources at the conference, Woroni estimates that the factional breakdown for the 2024 National Conference will look something like this:

• Student Unity: around 51% (including a Unity splinter faction at UNSW, ALSF and various independents which have proxied to Unity)
• Socialist Alternative: 25-28%
• Labor Left (including NLS, Queensland Left, and WA Left): 10-15% 
• Grassroots and various independents: around 10% to 13%

Two points can be made of this.

The first is the near-doubling of SAlt’s voting delegation to Natcon. SAlt typically has closer to 15% of delegates. This might be seen as vindicating recent arguments by SAlt activists that their on-campus actions – mostly organising opposition to Israel’s attacks on Palestine – have increased student engagement with student politics.

SAlt (among others) were a leading force in the push to organise special general meetings to pass motions at student unions across Australia demanding universities divest endowments from companies said to be supporting Israel in the war in Palestine and end partnerships with those companies and Israeli universities.

The other is the apparent decline of the Grindies and NLS, which are normally closer in size to SAlt. NLS is usually the second largest group at Natcon. 

The ANUSA election in August saw its biggest ever turnout, almost double the previous record (20 219). A joint ticket between Unity and NLS – change – won all of the executive positions, won half the NUS delegates, and was only a couple of seats short of a majority. 

Later elections at ANUSA’s autonomous departments saw Young Labor members, who took to calling themselves ULS (United Labor Students) in light of their victory, win the offices of Women’s Officer, Queer* Officer and Disability Officer which, depending how one counts, would give ULS a majority on the ANUSA SRC.

Unity also made large inroads at RMIT’s RUSU, the University of Melbourne’s UMSU, Deakin University’s DUSA and Western Sydney University’s union (WSU). At WSU, Unity won all but one NUS delegate and most of the executive positions. 

At the University of Sydney’s SRC election, the NLS-led ticket Impact won the presidency for the first time in nine years, though they did not displace Grassroots or Socialist Alternative from the SRC, both of whom managed to retain their strong presence on the council.

NUS’ NX Top Model – wanna be on tOB?

Natcon also serves as the annual general meeting to elect the NUS’ office bearers for the year. Most of these office bearers (OBs) will sit on the NUS National Executive (NX).

The election of the two most important offices – President and General Secretary – has been effectively predetermined for almost as long as this year’s first-year cohort will have been alive through the Labor factions’ “sweetheart deal”. 

The “sweetheart deal” means that a person nominated by NLS is given the role of President, becoming the chairperson and spokesperson for the union, and Student Unity nominates the general secretary position, the organisational head of the union.

Other positions are usually also negotiated between the factions with Unity getting most of the functional positions and NLS, SAlt and the Grindies being allocated the various activist positions.

On the one hand, the arrangement means that the smaller factions get positions where they otherwise would not, meaning the NX is somewhat politically diverse. On the other hand, this diversity is rather tokenistic and is generally reflective of Unity’s dominance anyway. They usually get all of the state branch presidents and most of the eleven general executive members.

Two different sources told Woroni that Student Unity will almost certainly nominate former UTS Student Association president Aidan O’Rourke for the general secretary role. O’Rourke was the president of the NSW branch of the Union for 2023, has worked for various trade unions, and is currently a political staffer. 

Woroni understands that NLS will nominate ANU student Ashlyn Horton for NUS president. 

Historically, SAlt has been given one each of the two Queer and Ethnocultural officers. 

Although SAlt is now in a much stronger position to negotiate a larger presence on the executive, because the Labor factions still have a majority between them it is likely the longstanding deal will hold.

Disclosure: Joseph Mann is a member of the Australian Labor Party. He is not a member of Student Unity or National Labor Students. Mann is set to appear in a social advertisement for the ALP’s student debt policy.