President

LIA PERKINS

Welcome to, or welcome back to, the bureaucratic-corporate nightmare that makes up the University of Sydney. If you’ve managed to enrol in classes, log into your email and access your timetable, you’re off to a great start! The SRC is the representative body for ALL undergraduate students, offering free casework help and a legal service – in case you run into trouble and need independent support. The SRC also firmly sharpens itself as a thorn in University management’s side, offering an alternative to their brand of “student life”. We run a range of activist collectives – currently our focus is on the crisis students are facing in housing. USyd has sold off a huge mass of its affordable housing, and rents in student accommodation and their nearby suburbs is dramatically more than youth allowance or any part time job can cover. We want the University to invest in student accommodation, guaranteeing a place for all students at a price range we can afford. In the reports below you can see a range of campaigns our Office Bearers are running! All of them are fighting for a better world, and a University education that is free, and puts the interests of staff and students before the interests of corporate donors and Vice Chancellors. We seek change in broader society, particularly as the Labor Government continues to open new coal and gas projects, jeopardising our future and making no chang to their broken higher education system. My name is Lia, I’m a 4th year Arts student who will be your SRC President this year. You’re always welcome to shoot me an email: president@src. usyd.edu.au and find my consultation hours on the ‘contact’ section of our website. In future reports I’ll tell you more about what I’ve been up to, for now the focus is WELCOME!

Education

We’ll be talking to students about the fight for quality, free education, the strikes we helped build in 2022, and our new campaign against Thales. Keep an eye out for our Week 1 open meeting on the 23rd at 2PM (New Law Lawns). The EAG’s annual welcome week handbook, Countercourse, is in print! We received a large range of articles, and we’re excited to share the final product with students during Welcome Week (in the SRC totes/ at our stall) and at our meetings. We’re kicking off a campaign against the renewal of the Memorandum of Understanding between Thales and USyd. Thales have provided weapons to major world powers to be used in a variety of conflicts over recent decades. We believe that universities should be about education, not about furthering militarism. Read about our demands in our Honi op-ed or on our socials @thales_off_campus. We’re planning an action for Thursday February 23rd at 1PM (Fisher Library), so make sure to mark it in your diaries! Hope to see you soon!

Wom*n’s

ALEV SARACOGLU IGGY BOYD