Day two of NatCon: quorum? I barely know ‘er!

Another day of NatCon has passed with nothing discussed on the agenda as quorum has still not been reached.

Delegates who remained on the conference floor could not proceed with discussing policy as members of Socialist Alternative (SAlt) and Victorian Unity have pulled quorum for different reasons.

SAlt made their demands known prior to attending the conference, asking for Labor student politicians to stop locking them out from the key executive position of Education Officer and to take a stronger stance on pro-Palestine activism, wanting an emergency motion on the matter pushed to the top of the agenda.

Yasmine Johnson, a member of SAlt at the University of Technology Sydney, spoke to student media about how they were willing to negotiate but that Student Left and Unity both have been unwilling to come to the table.

“We’re prepared to accept a different position but we want to accept a position that will allow us to do Palestine campaigning,” Johnson said to the Student Media Association’s president, Imogen Sabey, who asked about SAlt’s negotiations.

“We’ve put forward a number of different options to them which they’ve refused to accept.”

When the conference’s morning session was cancelled at 11:25am, Johnson attempted to speak to the room about SAlt’s demands. She was met with shameful behaviour from members of Unity who booed and chanted to cut her off. This incident was filmed by Sabey, as well as other members of student media. The video has since been viewed over 150,000 times, despite the NUS’ regular bans on student media filming on the conference floor. The procedural to enact these bans occurs at the start of the conference, so the media have not been under the same draconian restrictions that we typically face. 

“We were drowned out by chanting and by singing which I think is pretty outrageous, in a situation where we’re trying to talk about genocide and they think it’s a joke,” Johnson said to The Tert’s Aleksandar Sekulovski, on the matter of being cut off on the conference room floor.

“We’ve had that all week when we try and talk to the Labor party students about this, some of them make animal noises, they start singing songs.

“They treat this either like a stepping stone on a path to a political career or like the whole thing is just a big joke.”

Following up on the letter released by Victoria Unity on their issues with the NSW branch, Aidan O’Rourke spoke to student media about the division occurring with Unity.

“There is no internal division within national Unity,” O’Rourke told Honi Soit’s Sebastien Tuzilovic.

O’Rourke claimed that Victoria Unity had left on the grounds of not wanting to implement and enforce affirmative action rules within the caucus and that they do not believe the longstanding conventions and values of Unity as a whole should continue.

“There’s been a lot of lies put out in that letter,” O’Rourke said.

“I’m proud to say that I have one hundred percent support within my caucus, that remains, and so National Unity will continue kicking on and kicking on strongly.”

The day continued, lunch and dinner was served and in the end, at 7:20pm, we were informed by the conference organisers that the day’s second attempt at accreditation had not been met. 

The conference has so far cost about $80,000, and nothing of significance has been achieved. The NUS won’t quite risk dissolution, but the intentions with which the factions came here to debate motions and decide policy may be pushed to the wayside because of the endless factional infighting. NatCon 2025 is reportedly the worst conference in decades; we haven’t seen such a long standoff since before most of the people here were born.

Memes in the feature image and above by Mischief Mandem