I repeat, Sign Up Club should NOT take over the OUSA Student General Meeting that is taking place on Wednesday 21 April at 12pm in Union Hall.
It would be VERY BAD if Sign Up Club sent say a hundred members of their pyramid scheme, and their members voted as a bloc making up over 50% of the students at the meeting and gained the ability to pass whatever motions they wanted. The Sign Up Club should most certainly NOT become aware of their constitutional rights as students at an SGM.
I would hate it if a group of students were to co-opt a meeting that is designed to give groups of students a frankly insane amount of power.
There are 6000 people in the Sign Up Club Facebook group. Many of them (conservatively, 2000) are Otago students. That’s more students than voted in OUSA’s last election.
Sign Up Club can get 100 people to attend a BYO. They can get 300 people to attend a party. I reckon if they try hard enough, and use their effective pyramid scheme recruitment system, they could get 100 people to attend an OUSA SGM.
It would only take 25 people to sign up three friends to the SGM for them to take over and wreak havoc on OUSA for the entire year.
OUSA usually struggle to meet quorum (the required number of students for an official meeting) and end up recruiting innocent people who are just trying to eat their lunch near Union Hall. Quorum is only 0.5% of students, or 100 people. So if you can bring in 100 students who have a purpose, like supporting Sign Up Club motions, you’re going to be successful.
Here are the things that Sign Up Club could do if they managed to get enough students along:
- Vote to host a second Hyde Street Party with no ticket restrictions
- Require that every OUSA meeting opens and closes with a dramatic reading of WAP
- Adopt sexy Garfield as the official OUSA logo Change the title of OUSA President to Head Honcho
- Require OUSA to sell weird natural supplements that give you the shits
- Rename the Aquatic Centre to Skullduggery McGoldfishes Centre for Aquatic Excellence
- Get a communal PO Box for students so we can ship our drugs to safe places
- Vote to rename OUSA “Sign Up Club”
- Use the OUSA van to sign up Milton, Balclutha, and Duntroon
- Pass a motion of no confidence in the entire OUSA Executive, triggering another SGM as a result
- Remove the Exec at the second SGM, triggering an OUSA election
- Get voted in as the new 2021 OUSA Executive by encouraging Sign Up Club members to vote in the election
- Change the election system to FPP and then change it back to STV, the superior voting system, just to flex
- Evict all DebSoc members from OUSA
- Lobby the University to provide three-ply toilet paper in all bathrooms
- Release Starters footage of breathas getting tackled by security
- Bask in Sign Up Club’s newfound power and do interesting things so Critic can report on them