With the regularity of a tatty Halloween prop brought out each year to scare the children, student politicians and student media can be relied upon to produce articles warning of the dire consequences of ‘voluntary membership’. When reading articles about the impact of voluntary membership of student associations, it’s helpful to remember one thing: compulsory membership is all about money. In particular, it’s about student politicians retaining uncontrolled access to your money.
Think about this. This year vuwsa received over $1.5 million in levies taken from students. This is very unusual income; it’s unlike any income received by other types of incorporated societies. vuwsa has not earned this income. vuwsa has not persuaded people to join the association and pay the fee. vuwsa has not sold its membership to individuals who have purchased membership because they want to access the services that vuwsa offers and believe the fee is good value for money. vuwsa never has to go out to students and ask them to become members.
Instead, students have paid the vuwsa levy because they must before they can receive an education at Victoria University. vuwsa free rides on people who want to receive a tertiary education. If you try to enrol without paying your $131.90 to vuwsa, your application won’t even be processed. Did I mention yet that the levy is set by vuwsa itself, with no legal limit on what it can be?
As you can imagine, this situation is extremely advantageous for vuwsa. The organisation knows it has a captive market. Even if it fails to meet the needs of individual members, wastes money and misrepresents students, vuwsa knows those same students will have to pay $1.5 million to the association if they want to study next year.
This ‘Compulsory Student Membership’ (CSM) creates a huge pool of money, but the lack of any direct relationship between individual members and the association means there are very low levels of active participation in the association. Instead the pool of money ends up being controlled by a very small minority who direct it towards areas that are of interest to them. The fact that vuwsa can do as much advertising for a meeting as they did for the IGM last week, including leafleting, adverts in Salient and offering a free barbecue, and still struggle to attract the required 100 people to a meeting that is going to spend $12 million dollars of student money is a perfect example.
This disconnection between individual members and the association, usually described as “apathy”, caused by compulsory membership has bedeviled vuwsa for years. The attempts to ‘fix’ vuwsa invariably result in some form of restructuring; the current ‘Change Proposal’ being the latest manifestation of this.
The truth is that student politicians have become hooked on the blank cheque provided by compulsory membership and prefer the comfort of a wealthy dysfunctional association to one with less income and a genuine membership-based structure.
Voluntary membership will always be presented as a threat by student politicians and student media who have become accustomed to easy money. But voluntary membership is no mystery; it’s the norm in New Zealand. Sports clubs have voluntary membership; churches have voluntary membership; political parties have voluntary membership; even the Labour Party, the Tertiary Education Union, the Vice Chancellors’ Committee and the New Zealand Union of Students’ Associations have voluntary membership.
Students, like all other citizens, should be able to exercise their right to Freedom of Association, as guaranteed by the New Zealand Bill of Rights, the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and by basic common sense. Should the government pass a law that allows the local tennis club to force everyone in the area to pay them $130 a year in the interests of public health? Or perhaps if ACT on Campus were to claim to ‘represent all thinking students’ we could convince the government to force everyone under 30 to be a member of our organisation?
Without voluntary membership, student associations will continue to have low levels of participation, will continue to provide ‘services’ unwanted by many of the people who pay for them, and will continue to misrepresent the views of many of their members. Arguments against voluntary membership are self-serving pleas designed to give student politicians access to your money without having to prove value.
At least sexually transmitted diseases occur through voluntary interactions between two or more people. Nobody can legally force you to get an STD from them, never mind force you to pay for the privilege.