Referenduh…

Did you vote on the referendum this time around? Judging by the student apathy and poor turnout even with the controversial motions of the previous term, it’s unlikely that you, dear reader, cast your vote and struck an important blow for democracy. We’ll soon find out exactly how many of you did, and which motions around 5% of you passed through. Why exactly do we not seem to care about what goes on in our Union? Is it the stereotypical student apathy that we are always told that we embody? Do we care more about Willow and our Sports and Media societies than the politics that surround us, or do the problems run deeper?

Let’s talk about how the Union promotes its referenda. If any of you can explain to me or anyone else what the Democratic reform will entail, please let me know, because all we have to go on is an 180 word tweet from KalTay and an obtuse thirty page article in the back end of the YUSU website, referring to other obtuse documents which take hours to find and trawl through. For more information, refer to sub-section b2 on motion 5349. Is it ‘democratic’ to urge students to vote on a ‘Democratic Reform’, when not informing the public what the ‘reform’ entails? Ironically, part of the reform will involve getting rid of Referendums, because they are ‘inefficient’ and not enough students vote on them.

Perhaps this is because, rather than students not caring, they are not being informed sufficiently, and how can someone care about someone if they are not informed about what it is? The democratic reform motion highlights this – walk around campus and ask people if they know exactly what it is – hell, walk into YUSU and ask someone there who is being paid to care about it and I doubt anyone apart from Kallum or perhaps Dan Whitmore would be able to shed light on the matter.

In the same way, with the vacuous ‘Ye5’ campaign, it’s doubtful whether people will be voting based on their feelings towards the issue, or on the separate motions. The posters don’t even say what the motions are on them, they just say ‘vote yes to the five motions’, with the exception of the separate Housing YES Campaign. We were urged to vote based on a gut reaction to five completely different motions, some of which weren’t even explained to us, just because our officers told us to.

If we aren’t inspired to care about what we vote for, how is it surprising that we are apathetic? Perhaps it could be the fault of the campaigning behind the motions in the referendum that causes low turnouts, and the fact that the debate was only advertised the day on which it was happening, rather than referendums themselves. If the admins behind the YUSU website and social media cared less about making money and promoting club nights, and more about student engagement, it would be more likely for us to have better turnouts both in person and in terms of voting.

It’s too late now to vote, but referendums are too valuable to lose based on turnout, when this turnout could be improved by YUSU changing the way in which they try to engage students. In future they could actually explain what the issues that they want students to care about are, and when they could tell us the reasons why they want us to vote, rather than just that they want us to. We don’t want empty phrases about ‘changing the Union’, we want specifics. Empty phrases breed apathy, which is exactly the problem YUSU is apparently trying to combat.

It might be cool, or easier, not to care, but these issues do affect us – although despite extensive research I am not exactly sure how. Our YUSU officers should be trying to get us to care rather than taking away the way in which we can express our views.