OB REPORTS

SRC President

Hey, It’s Anna. I have been serving as your president for nearly a year now, and I am so so proud of all the work the UTSSA has done during this time. From opening the Food Pantry to organising Rad Ed week and supporting collectives in strikes, education, and community events. It’s truly been a great year that’s still going strong.

If you have not yet checked out the BlueBird Pantry, I thoroughly suggest you pop down to level 3A of Building 2 and do so. It’s best to do this from 12 – 3 p.m. on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday so that you catch it when it’s open. The pantry provides students with free essentials like canned foods, hygiene items, rice, and of course, (on the odd occasion) whole watermelons. We thank everyone for their patience with us. This program is still in its infancy, so there have been a few technical issues to overcome; however, it is getting better by the day. It has been awesome to have the volunteer support of students completing the SOUL award. If you want to get involved volunteering at the pantry, please fill out the form below:

https://forms.gle/npDVrbHqnE51Vi3TA

The UTS Students Association will hold Rad Ed week from October 24 – 28. You heard that right — a whole week of collective-run radical educational events, including Life Drawing with the Women’s Collective, workshops on navigating welfare services, and panels on climate change in Western Sydney. Stay tuned on the UTSSA FB page for more information in the coming weeks.

With the UTSSA elections on our doorstep, I encourage you all to actively participate in the democracy of this union and take the time to consider your options and vote. I know as well as you that student politics can seem frustrating and pointless. However, voting for students whose values align with your own and who are campaigning to change your university for the better has a big impact. I hope to see you at the polling booth from October 18 – 20.

Thanks for a great year.

Anna Thieben

Ethnocultural Officer Report Disability Collective

The Ethnocultural Collective have been working tirelessly in efforts to materialise the requests set out by our Safe Space Campaign. In the first semester of the year, discussions with the then Vice-Chancellor, Shirley Alexander, were not fruitful. After an extensive amount of research and justification was presented, Alexander’s response implied that there was no physical room on campus for such a space and that UTS already had a plethora of anti-racism initiatives existent.

As a collective, we find these implications dismissive; the anti-racism initiatives that currently exist (which are mainly marketing campaigns and the odd educational seminar) offer no measurable indication on their impacts on the plight against racism on campus. This is not to say these initiatives and campaigns are not important, but that without material action or resources for BIPOC students on campus, the impact of these initiatives and events will be limited. We have been informed that a physical space on campus will no longer be considered.

As disheartening as this is, we are aware that the Safe Space Campaign has one other demand that the university seemed more willing to support; the introduction of an effective grievance system on campus. This system would allow for students and staff to be able to file complaints about experiences of racism and collate data that would allow us to properly understand racism on campus. It is with frustration, but not defeat, that we have decided as a collective to turn our efforts to seeing the establishment of such a system at UTS. We have been working alongside the Centre of Social Justice and Inclusion to start negotiations as to how to introduce an effective grievance system and surveys to help better the campus’ understanding of this issue.

Other initiatives that the Ethnocultural Collective have been a part of in the past few months include Deep Dive; a series of videos aimed at highlighting experiences of racism amongst young people, discussion with UTS Multicultural Women’s Network regarding collaborative events, and discussions with broader cultural clubs and Activate regarding collaboration. As the year progresses, we’ve had an influx of new members and are excited to continue to work in this space together. The Disabilities Collective has been very active in the past few months, and we are proud of what we have been able to achieve this year so far. We have been in touch with Nikhil, a Disabled student from the University of Western Sydney who is working on a project called Access Maps. This project aims to create a ‘Google Maps of Accessibility’, where people can make submissions about various accessibility features of the world around them, so other users can more easily navigate the often inaccessible world. Nikhil came to one of our recent meetings to discuss this project with the collective, and we plan to work with him in mapping out the accessibility of our campus in the near future. We have also been in touch with a UTS student who works for an organisation that specialises in helping Disabled people get access to and navigate the NDIS. They ran a workshop for our collective that gave information, tips, and tricks on dealing with the NDIS system, which many students found very helpful.

One of our long-term goals this year has been to work on a campaign to address some of the ableism and inaccessibility experienced by students at UTS.

The first part of this campaign involved reaching out to students about their main inaccessibility challenges. We set up an anonymous form so that students can report any problems they face, ranging from physical barriers on campus, difficulties navigating the Accessibility service, and problems dealing with ableist teachers and classmates. If you would like to submit anything for us to consider for our campaign, feel free to fill in our form: https://forms. gle/ M1QowFCVVC9BQiWBA. The Disabilities Collective has also been active in preparing a workshop for Rad Ed Week, which the Students Association has been working hard on running this year. We plan to have a workshop about Radical Disability Justice, where we discuss ways in which it differs from mainstream disability activism. As always, if any students are interested in getting involved with the Disabilities Collective, please email accessibility@ utsstudentsassociation.org and we will get in touch with how to come along to meetings and events!

Cal McKinley and Georgia Pond Disabilities Officer and Convener

Education activism is heating up at UTS! From participating in the recent strikes at USYD to protesting the Australian Financial Review’s Higher Education summit (in which students were met with violence from police), the UTS EAG has been busy. In exciting news, the UTS NTEU unanimously voted to take industrial action on 21 September. This will be a 2-hour stop meeting between 9 a.m – 11 a.m, where striking staff will be rallying outside of UTS tower to demand better working conditions.

As students, it is important we stand in solidarity with our staff, as the conditions they work in dictate our quality of learning (that we are paying $1000s for). We should support all future strikes they take — don’t go to class on the strike day and be at the picket lines to support those rallying! The EAG will continue campaigning with staff to mobilise student support. We are in this together in the fight against management! If you’re interested in getting involved, our socials are:

FB: UTS Education Action Group IG: @uts.ed.action.group

Assistant General Secretary

This month has been both hectic and exciting, with the NTEU unanimously voting to take industrial action on 21 September from 9 – 11 a.m in the form of a stop work meeting. This action has been called in response to the lack of progress made in bargaining efforts between the NTEU and UTS management. UTS has refused to meet demands on fair pay in line with inflation, reasonable workloads with no uncompensated overtime, and more job stability for staff, with UTS having a casualisation rate of 70%.

The terms set within this enterprise bargaining period will be staff pay and work conditions for the next four years. Due to harsh strike laws, workers can only strike and demand better conditions within an enterprise bargaining period. This makes student support so vital. While staff risk their pay and positions to strike, we’ve got to show out. By the time my report is published, the action will have passed, hopefully successfully shutting down the university for a few hours. There will be more strike actions throughout the year leading into 2023. Show your tutors solidarity by not turning up to uni or coming through on the pickets.

Melissa Sukkarieh

Since my last report it’s been incredibly busy with a range of continuous and important initiatives/undertakings that have developed to produce results for our union and students but I’m so proud of the work we continue to do.

Firstly, UTS is drafting a standalone Sexual Violence and Harassment Prevention and Response policy that will be applied university wide, going through all the official channels. Described as:

‘Enabling UTS to learn from its existing approach to inform improvements and changes to the way in which we work to prevent sexual violence and harassment and respond to incidents of sexual violence and harassment.’

Part of the new actions for implementation have taken recommendations directly from our contributions to the SPA, such as having a central point of contact, expanding cultural and linguistic services and creating a new reporting form for sexual harassment/assault as the old one was shockingly insufficient and outdated. It’s ultimately so rewarding to see our efforts and representative voice directly affecting outcomes for UTS students!!

At the time of writing this report, we have staff strikes coming up this week where (as I’m sure every student in this meeting should know) not to come to class Wednesday 9-11am and stand in solidarity with staff and support them in their bargaining agreements for better working conditions. Handing out flyers to students has shown me the level of support that students just generally have for staff as they fight for a better teaching environment, as one of the biggest issues has just been the lack of awareness from students which we have been trying to mitigate with consistent on-the ground building and awareness efforts. We also have the first Ethnocultural conference being hosted after a couple of covid years. It’s being hosted by NUS and UNSW with our very own Ethno collective and council members holding workshops. If you aren’t already, I encourage everyone to attend this week and look forward to bringing a strong UTS contingent. Should be a great couple of days where we discuss how we bring a diverse array of issues experienced by ethnically diverse students to the front of people’s minds, and what the student union movement can do moving forward to continue building towards meaningful change.

Finally, RadEd week organising is continuing, which will hopefully be super successful and filled with a lot of union education, collective events and workshops and our very own funded party at the end.

Short Updates: • The Food Pantry is going great with many volunteers willing to help out and due to its popularity, we’ve created an established system of being able to take 5 items at a time has helped in maintaining stock. • There’s been a lot of logistical organising with

Phillip (RO) as this is our first in person election in a couple of years. This is also why we are amending our elections regulations to include building 2 (which didn’t exist last in person elections) and remove building 5 (which sadly is no longer available). • Finally, I am personally very keen to be paying our International, Postgrad, Disability, Ethno,

Queer and Enviro Officers. This is something we discussed at Handover at the very beginning of the year and even with all our funding negations ups and downs, glad to see we’re made this happen (speaking prematurely aha)!!