Sir,
I write in regard to your recent online article, “Students See Pink As Common Thread Ties Up ANUSA Elections”, in which your “journalist” Cam Wilson (who, as far as I can make out, has some alleged editorial connection nowadays to this once-respected journal) mistakenly asserts that the 2010 elections for the ANU Students’ Association “did not have any major competing tickets”. By this, I assume he means to say that the ticket which eventually won almost all positions (Leah Ginnivan and Brody Warren’s mould-coloured “Engage” ticket) had no electoral rivals. This is incorrect. Engage squared off against two other tickets: Hack! and Left Action. As convenor and Presidential candidate on the Hack! ticket, I would like to reject emphatically the completely unhistorical notion that we were not a “major competing ticket”.
The last of the great idealistic ANUSA tickets, Hack! ran on a values-based platform of devious factional chiselling, meretricious sloganeering and electoral fraud. Since our sad defeat, I have watched tickets come and I have watched them go, each pretending to be slightly more independent than the last. What does this even mean? Independent from what? This year, three tickets tried to claim the label for themselves. Rob Oakeshott is an “independent”, and everyone knows that he is just Juliar’s lackey in the takeover of our once great nation Australia by fluoridating World Government types, and anyway, judging by his current polling, Mr Oakeshott would lose the next election to the corpse of Idi Amin, so what’s the point of your precious independence, anyway? I myself never hid the fact that I was connected to (in no particular order) the the International Spartacist Tendency, the Scottish Independence Party, the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, and the Australian Young Liberals. And why be ashamed of it? It is precisely this mélange of political networking, sexually-charged conferencing and shameless dishonesty that makes the National Union of Students such an effective and functional organisation.
An apology would be appreciated, and probably ignored.
Yours acrimoniously,
Thomas Westland
Presidential Candidate and Convenor, Hack! 2010
Woroni editor, 2011-2
Yackandandah Primary School Grade 1 Encouragement Award, 1996
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