Taz Hudson and Jason Pover
The first ANUSA ticket for this year’s elections has been announced on Facebook this evening, with Eden Lim as President and Hannah Minns as Vice President. The ticket is currently nameless and only has Executive candidates.
Minns, the Vice Presidential candidate, is currently the Griffin Hall President. She will be running alongside Lachy Day, who is vying for General Secretary and this year is a General Representative. The ticket’s candidate for Treasurer is Dashveen Jose. Matthew Mottola, the current Queer* Officer and Clubs Council Affiliations Officer, is running for Social Officer. Tanika Sibal, currently the Deputy Ethnocultural Officer, is the ticket’s pick for Education Officer. Lewis Pope, who recently resigned as Clubs Council Chair, will be managing the campaign.
Eden Lim is currently the General Secretary of ANUSA, a role that commands significant influence over the running of elections. The GenSec usually has the power to interpret the Electoral Regulations, with the Returning Officer only stepping in for disputes. However, Lim told Observer that this is not how things will run this year. “Once I made my decision I let the rest of the Exec know so that the election process could be delegated between them, Probity and the Returning Officer,” she said. She says she has “offered to take on other responsibilities…in the interests of fairness”.
No campaign policies have been announced, although Lim last year ran on a platform of making SRCs shorter and holding them on different nights of the week, as well as a full governance review. All members of the ticket emphasised a desire to reduce “shoulder tapping” for ANUSA positions, and encouraged people to apply as Gen Reps. In his launch post, Mottola said, “There is a strong sentiment among the student body that running in an election is about who you know. Our team wants to change that and help bring in new faces, new ideas, and new energy to the Association.” This seems similar to rhetoric from last year’s “Shake Up!” ticket, which Day ran on.
The Shake Up! ticket was announced on July 2nd last year, which was considered unusually early for an election campaign, although this announcement comes a full nine days earlier. Echoing Shake Up! from last year, the candidates state they are not trying to begin an early campaign, but are simply looking for expressions of interest for general representatives. In a comment to Observer, Lim stated that “students can be rest assured that there’s going to be no policies, logos, ticket names etc. etc. until Semester 2”.
Minns posted the announcement and call-out to the Facebook page ANU Schmidtposting in addition to her own timeline. ANU Schmidtposting allows only one advertising post per ticket, but the page organisers told Observer that “tickets will be allowed a post to callout for EOIs, separate from their 1 advertisement limit”.
Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated Tanika Sibal ran on Shake Up!
Eliza Croft contributed to this article.
