Politics

Student Politics Reached New And Impressive Lows At Sydney Uni Last Night

Fire alarms, power outages and incels, oh my.

by Sam Langford  2 November 2018
Sydney Uni's annual reps elect meeting got pretty dramatic last night.

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What do fire alarms, power outages and chants about incels all have in common? Oh, just the fact that they all featured at Sydney Uni last night, during a heated election meeting held by student politicians.

By “heated election meeting”, we mean the infamous “Reps Elect” (or #repselect, if you’re following it on Twitter). It’s the night when student politicians come together to divvy up positions on the Students Representative Council, which sounds like it should be boring but typically ends in disaster.

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A Terrifying And Embarrassing Snapshot Of Student Politics In 2017

Last year there was a lot of shouting, whistleblowing and disruptive piano playing, while in 2015 the night made headlines after someone tampered with a fuse box and the police were called. This year, in addition to the token shouting and disruption, the fire alarm went off, there was a power outage, and the meeting ultimately had to be cancelled and rescheduled due to flooding. Which means that yes, we’ll be treated to all this drama again in a couple of weeks. Oh, joy.

It’s also worth noting that all of last night’s drama went down just a few metres away from the room where The Chaser’s annual charity lecture was taking place. That event was also briefly evacuated due to the fire alarm, and then suffered a power outage which may or may not have been caused by the student politicians.

Anyway, here’s your annual update on what Australia’s aspiring future politicians are up to (unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for people to progress from the USyd SRC to grown-up politics — Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull, for instance, both got their start in USyd student politics). Meet your future leaders.

Fire Alarms, Power Outages And Incels, Oh My!

Last night’s meeting kicked off at 6.30pm to chants of “racists, sexists, anti-queer, liberals are not welcome here!”. The chanting really set the tone of the meeting — for the next two and a bit hours until the fire alarm forced an evacuation, students attempted to give speeches that were subsequently drowned out by other students yelling things like “1-2-3, fuck the ALP”, “incels off campus”, “scab!”, “give back the $12k”, “shut up” and, memorably, “who are you?”.

If you’d like a taste of the atmosphere this sort of constant yelling creates, here’s a video of someone trying to venture an opinion about the virtues of Western civilisation:

And if you think that’s loud, just wait. Here’s the reaction when in the middle of one speech, the lights suddenly turned off. Given the history of people tampering with fuse boxes at these meetings, students assumed the same had happened and sat screaming in darkness for a few minutes before some bright spark realised that actually, someone had just turned off the light at the light switch.

Time To Evacuate The Joint

After around two hours of this kind of behaviour, someone (perhaps just the universe) had had enough: the fire alarm went off, the sprinkler system kicked in, and the meeting had to be evacuated.

To add further drama, there was something wrong with the sprinkler system, which began to absolutely gush with water, quickly beginning to flood the room. The fire brigade later had to use a water vacuum to dry the place out.

But wait, there’s more — to top it all off, the flooding room was adjacent to a room where a university museum was storing artefacts, leading to a mad scramble to save said artefacts before water damage kicked in. Sydney Uni confirmed today that “fortunately – due to the intervention of the Museums team who worked until midnight – there was no damage to the collection”, though school visits today have been disrupted while the museum is dehumidified as a precaution.

It’s not clear at this stage whether the fire alarm was deliberately triggered. The University is currently investigating using CCTV footage, and told Junkee that “if evidence of willful property damage is found the matter will be escalated to University management for consideration”.

It goes without saying that given the flooded room, the meeting was called off shortly after the fire alarm. Reps Elect will, unfortunately, return later in the month.

Actions Have Consequences, Surprisingly

Unfortunately for everyone involved, there was another event taking place at the University of Sydney last night. Just metres away from the Reps Elect meeting, the Chaser Lecture — an annual black-tie event put on for charity — was taking place.

Or trying very hard to take place, at least. The entire event was evacuated when the fire alarm and sprinkler system went off, and when everyone finally made it back inside, misfortune struck again when the power went out during the keynote speech by comedian Adeola Fayehun. She ended up giving the speech by the light of hundreds of phone torches, held up by the frustrated attendees.

It’s not clear at this stage what caused the power outage, or whether it had anything to do with student politics. I guess we’ll find out once the University’s done reviewing the CCTV footage.

Feature image via Honi Soit on Twitter