NOLS memoir: postmortem caucuses
Postmortem caucuses are the worst. A faction sits in the room and decides what everyone has done wrong. This one was the worst I had ever been to, with a filthy nasty shine to everybody's attitudes and a shared short temper, threatening to close some electrical connection and become mad fist-fighting. Appropriately, our chair were arranged in a circle, putting us geometrically at the greatest distance from each other. We'd lost an election, badly, and in the spirit of losing parties the world over, we were trying figure out who was to blame. Twenty or twenty-five of us gathered and tried to assign responsibility for it--we started at the start, finishing at the end, leaving nothing out and leaving no accusation unaccused. Did I mention that it was my worst caucus I'd ever been to so far? It was my first caucus I had ever been to, too.
Perhaps I should start earlier. In the mid-semester break in 1999 I was invited to go to Adelaide for the NUS Education Conference which was that year held at Uni SA. In a digression--it's quite a nice place to have a conference, if I do say so, and the Coopers' on tap in every pub makes me think well of Adelaide. The freezing Antarctic wind, the repressive middle-class environment and the 23 hours of bus trip I'd spent getting there with my comrades who couldn't afford the flight counterbalanced that. But I digress. I was in Adelaide. In 1999. I was kind of in NOLS but kind of not.
NOLS at Sydney University has these strange rules about 'moving people in'. It's like they were a gentlemen's club of the seventeenth century where someone must be vouched for. If someone questions your politics--I'm serious--the whole process is delayed. Meetings start with the question 'new members?', answered either by 'no' or by somebody having to argue your case for you. I wound up in Adelaide as a participating member of NOLS but not a participating member of the Sydney Uni caucus. I could have a vote in the national body but not in my campus one, because the membership restrictions were less at a higher level and greater at a lower level. Confused? You should be. I was.
Caucus makes the decisions. Labor Club does the recruitment. NOLS is the forum for national battles over preselections, and lonesome young nineteen year old socialists, generally, have absolutely no idea what they've gotten themselves into. I helped get DR and DS elected at the Union Board elections but didn't have much to do with the decisions--I hadn't been vouched for. When midyear conference came around I was NOLS by affiliation and accepted the people whose floor I slept on (ta, by the way) but not in the trusted circle at USYD.
To be quite honest I voted with the Labor Right most of the time, at the plenary sessions of Ed conference. NOLS looked around at me like I was some kind of fucknut and I looked at the rest of them as if they were looking at an invisible cue-card without me. (In a sense they were.) You can imagine what it looked like, reader, one lone hand going up in the middle of the NOLS block, during the votes, with the rest of the faction looking across mournfully at their one lone dickhead. What was it Cool Hand Luke was told? That he had a communication problem?
It was suggested that since I had such a thing going for the Labor Party I run as #1 on the ticket 'Labor Students' in the SRC elections coming up in semester 2. It's the biggest student association in numbers, I think, in Australia--there were 41 Reps at that point. Every faction runs gigantic slates of candidates to slowly but surely flow their preferences. I was quite chuffed at being asked to be at the top of NOLS' name ticket.
Our Presidential candidate was DO, a nice hard working guy but uptight and totally unsuited to personality politics. The main opposition was the National Broad Left's star candidate NV. She was articulate, friendly and could have talked the state of Utah into voting Communist. Let me not waste time by talking through the campaign: we copped an absolute flogging. I think NV won about 70% of the primary vote. At the post election drinks at the pub DO drank himself into a stupor and passed out in the toilet.
Did I mention that we got flogged? The NBL ran a campaign against the Labor Party connections NOLS had. We were held responsible for HECS, the partial sale of Telstra, the political situation in East Timor, the rise of Pauline Hanson, pokies in pubs, the first Gulf War, baby seal clubbing, the murder of Rosa Luxembourg, etc. By polling day I'd almost been convinced myself that I was responsible for Chifley sending the troops in to break the coal strike in 1948. They screamed at us, we got pushed away from voters at the booths, we generally did bloody awfully. Of course dealing with Unity probably didn't help either. I came pretty close to tears a few times and even closer to fist fighting once or twice.
A note for the broadleft. You cannot beat NOLS unless you do this. Every subsequent Sydney Uni election you've campaigned positively and made an effort to stay out of the gutter. Nobody actually cares what good politics you have! Accuse NOLS of having been complicit in, say, the Milosevic regime, and you've got yourselves a campaign.
I polled 23 primary votes. I needed 80 to get elected. Ah well. I turned up to the postmortem caucus and there was nothing anybody could say against me. In fact everyone looked at the new people--especially me, LF, DK, SF and one or two others--as if we had totally lost our minds by wanting to be in the faction that had done so piss-poorly. The fact was that we all knew that we'd enjoyed every minute of it and wouldn't mind coming back for another shot next year, this time to win.
Next instalment: NOLS goes splitsville
Perhaps I should start earlier. In the mid-semester break in 1999 I was invited to go to Adelaide for the NUS Education Conference which was that year held at Uni SA. In a digression--it's quite a nice place to have a conference, if I do say so, and the Coopers' on tap in every pub makes me think well of Adelaide. The freezing Antarctic wind, the repressive middle-class environment and the 23 hours of bus trip I'd spent getting there with my comrades who couldn't afford the flight counterbalanced that. But I digress. I was in Adelaide. In 1999. I was kind of in NOLS but kind of not.
NOLS at Sydney University has these strange rules about 'moving people in'. It's like they were a gentlemen's club of the seventeenth century where someone must be vouched for. If someone questions your politics--I'm serious--the whole process is delayed. Meetings start with the question 'new members?', answered either by 'no' or by somebody having to argue your case for you. I wound up in Adelaide as a participating member of NOLS but not a participating member of the Sydney Uni caucus. I could have a vote in the national body but not in my campus one, because the membership restrictions were less at a higher level and greater at a lower level. Confused? You should be. I was.
Caucus makes the decisions. Labor Club does the recruitment. NOLS is the forum for national battles over preselections, and lonesome young nineteen year old socialists, generally, have absolutely no idea what they've gotten themselves into. I helped get DR and DS elected at the Union Board elections but didn't have much to do with the decisions--I hadn't been vouched for. When midyear conference came around I was NOLS by affiliation and accepted the people whose floor I slept on (ta, by the way) but not in the trusted circle at USYD.
To be quite honest I voted with the Labor Right most of the time, at the plenary sessions of Ed conference. NOLS looked around at me like I was some kind of fucknut and I looked at the rest of them as if they were looking at an invisible cue-card without me. (In a sense they were.) You can imagine what it looked like, reader, one lone hand going up in the middle of the NOLS block, during the votes, with the rest of the faction looking across mournfully at their one lone dickhead. What was it Cool Hand Luke was told? That he had a communication problem?
It was suggested that since I had such a thing going for the Labor Party I run as #1 on the ticket 'Labor Students' in the SRC elections coming up in semester 2. It's the biggest student association in numbers, I think, in Australia--there were 41 Reps at that point. Every faction runs gigantic slates of candidates to slowly but surely flow their preferences. I was quite chuffed at being asked to be at the top of NOLS' name ticket.
Our Presidential candidate was DO, a nice hard working guy but uptight and totally unsuited to personality politics. The main opposition was the National Broad Left's star candidate NV. She was articulate, friendly and could have talked the state of Utah into voting Communist. Let me not waste time by talking through the campaign: we copped an absolute flogging. I think NV won about 70% of the primary vote. At the post election drinks at the pub DO drank himself into a stupor and passed out in the toilet.
Did I mention that we got flogged? The NBL ran a campaign against the Labor Party connections NOLS had. We were held responsible for HECS, the partial sale of Telstra, the political situation in East Timor, the rise of Pauline Hanson, pokies in pubs, the first Gulf War, baby seal clubbing, the murder of Rosa Luxembourg, etc. By polling day I'd almost been convinced myself that I was responsible for Chifley sending the troops in to break the coal strike in 1948. They screamed at us, we got pushed away from voters at the booths, we generally did bloody awfully. Of course dealing with Unity probably didn't help either. I came pretty close to tears a few times and even closer to fist fighting once or twice.
A note for the broadleft. You cannot beat NOLS unless you do this. Every subsequent Sydney Uni election you've campaigned positively and made an effort to stay out of the gutter. Nobody actually cares what good politics you have! Accuse NOLS of having been complicit in, say, the Milosevic regime, and you've got yourselves a campaign.
I polled 23 primary votes. I needed 80 to get elected. Ah well. I turned up to the postmortem caucus and there was nothing anybody could say against me. In fact everyone looked at the new people--especially me, LF, DK, SF and one or two others--as if we had totally lost our minds by wanting to be in the faction that had done so piss-poorly. The fact was that we all knew that we'd enjoyed every minute of it and wouldn't mind coming back for another shot next year, this time to win.
Next instalment: NOLS goes splitsville
posted by Liam at 12/07/2004 01:14:00 PM
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