Every student at Vic is being royally ripped off by VUWSA. I have been apathetic and resigned to my association’s bungling incompetence for years, but while I was writing my Masters thesis I got so desperate to procrastinate that I spent some time reading the 2009 VUWSA budget and this is what I saw:
VUWSA has $1.5 million dollar revenue from our $130 subscriptions after GST and the Ngai Tauira contribution. Out of this, the amount that gets spent on administration + the exec is (stop and make a guess) $1,100,000!
1 million dollars!
This means every year, every student here pays $93 dollars for VUWSA administration and exec expenses, and only $37 of dregs goes to funding the pathetic services that VUWSA provides. I, like almost everyone who has been here for more than one or two, years was resigned to stumping up my $100-plus every year for nothing.
But 1 million dollars being wasted is too much.
Put facetiously: Imagine the exec was efficient and costs were around 20% of revenue ($300,000—an arbitrary figure—but even doubled the following argument holds). That equates to a saving of $800,000. So if the president of the newly efficient association was to be paid a $200,000 salary and buy a 2009 Aston Martin Vantage [!] for another $220,000, students would be better off by $380,000, or roughly $30 per person. No shit.
Whether you are a capitalist, a socialist or (most likely) an apathist, this should be sickening to you. I expect there will be some half-assed letter full of half-truths published by an exec member trying to justify their wastage. They needn’t bother: 71% of a $1.5 million dollar budget being frittered away on operational expenses is unacceptable. The figures in this article are taken from the 2009 VUWSA budget and the data shown overleaf, along with some graphs—there simply isn’t room for argument anymore.
If you are pissed off at finding out that the $130 you stumped up gets wasted, stop reading now. Have a bitch to a friend about VUWSA wasting a million bucks taken from students. Better still, write an angry tirade to Salient entitled 1 million dollars. If you want to be clued up about the details, read on. But have an angry spiel first.
FAQs
Where are the costs coming from?
Short answer: Overstaffing and wastage. VUWSA budgets since 2007 have not had expense codes or comparison between the budgeted and previous actual year, so it is difficult to break down the expenses. However, total salaries paid by the association (not including Salient, which recoups most of its costs through advertising) total to somewhere between $530,000 and $600,000. Computing expenses as part of general administration (i.e. not including the handbook, Salient, student guide, rep groups, women’s group, education, campaigns, or clubs—so essentially, the cost of VUWSA paper pushing) is approximately $100,000. Some questionable (but possibly difficult to reduce) expenses include bad debts ($20,000—who borrowed money from our association?), and $11, 700 for running and maintaining the van. $120,000 (part of the administration budget) goes towards running the Student Union building and cannot be reduced.
What is being done about it?
Short answer: not much, at least at the moment. Jasmine Freemantle has established an auditing committee and has stated that it will have numerical budget targets, but these will not come into effect by 2010. The paucity of VUWSA’s record-keeping means that the true costs involved will be difficult to identify and eliminate.
In VUWSA’s defence, Jasmine says that actual administration costs look larger than they are by the weird budgeting formerly employed by VUWSA (true), and that they also include costs of services that VUWSA provides. She has established a general manager, and realises the need for the separation of directorial and operational management, all of which is an improvement on previous years. However, she seems not to see a problem with clubs admin costs exceeding the amount of money actually distributed to clubs and she does not believe there is an overstaffing problem.
What could be done about it?
Short answer: Plenty, but it will be pushing shit uphill with a rake. This article isn’t going to address the pros and cons of the different approaches much, but its worth noting that 3, 4 and 5 (below) require reform of the VUWSA constitution, which is very difficult due to the vicious cycle of exec incompetence and student apathy that the association has been caught in for years. Chances are that unless drastic action is taken, student politics will ensure that reform momentum is lost and wastage will continue for years.
Possible solutions:
Staff cuts.
Computing and general cost cutting.
Establishment of minimum accounting standards.
Management reform, either based on a small, highly paid and skilled exec or a supervisory exec and a general manager
Voluntary student membership.
Intervention by the university.
My personal opinion: we need a huge helping of 1, 2, 3 and 4, introduced as quickly as possible. Failing that, 6. Failing that, 5.
A quick opinionated note about number 5: The people who publicly advocate this are generally inept right-wing ideologues much like the inept left-wing ideologues that currently waste $90 of your money every year. The last major attempt by these clowns to get on exec involved a $25 rebate and cutting of the few measly services we actually get as students, i.e. still wasting $90 per year, and with no services at all to show for it.
If you are curious, I would encourage you to try to make some sense of VUWSA’s budget, which is available online at their website. I look forward to responses to this article.