The Green Party says ACT leader David Seymour's proposal for voluntary student fees will finish the job of destroying student associations and the campus experience.
"Students are not customers who pass through a campus and leave. They are the people who make a campus what it is, and they should have real power over how it runs," says Green Party tertiary education spokesperson Francisco Hernandez.
"In 2012, ACT's Voluntary Student Membership Bill ripped out the guts from student associations across the country. The result of the fourteen-year experiment has been clear. Student associations structurally dependent on the institutions they are meant to critique, sanitised campus life and less real advocacy for students."
"Students rely on the food banks, advocacy services and wider campus community that associations run. That is what helps students thrive when they are away from home, and Seymour would take it away."
"Not only that, but the sports and campus clubs scene that so many of our internationally renowned artists, sportspeople and journalists got their start in will also be smashed."
"The real solution to creating independent student associations is to undo voluntary student union membership. The Green Party will work towards a return to default student union membership, and a governance model that puts students and staff at the table where their institutions are run.
"A campus should be where young people learn to organise, argue and lead, not just sit in a lecture theatre. Students have spent fourteen years being told that is too much to ask for. It is not, and the Greens will keep working towards a tertiary system that treats it as the basics," says Hernandez.
