#BREAKING: New Era for SUPRA with First All-International Student Executive

WORDS BY SANDRA BUOL

There have been whispers for quite some time. While right after the SUPRA elections a few weeks ago, representatives of the four tickets led by Chinese international students (‘Weihong for International’, ‘Team for Continuous Development’, ‘Jarkz’ and ‘Jinghan for Change’) mentioned they would be willing to work with everyone for the needs of postgraduate students, there has been talk that those tickets and ‘Impact’ were putting their forces together.
 
And that’s exactly what happened.
 
Today at 3pm (after a very last-minute public announcement) the Councillors-elect voted for their new Executive.
 
There were two nominations for the role of President: Weihong Liang and Nicholas Avery (Postgrad Action), who self-nominated on the floor. As expected, Avery was not able to get enough votes, despite having more experience when it comes to the workings of SUPRA, and despite giving the stronger and more convincing speech before the vote. Liang won the Presidency with 22 votes, while Avery got 9 votes. Liang says he’s keen to work with everyone on the Council. However, he will have to develop a stronger presence in the next months for his dealings with the university management and other stakeholders in this massive conglomeration that is the University of Sydney – and Councillors of those tickets who lost out on this Executive election, but are very experienced when it comes to the intricacies of meeting protocols and student politics at this uni.
 
The rest of the Executive was elected as followed:
Vice Presidents – Jinghan Feng and Junke Li: 26 votes (no nominations from the floor)
Education Officer – Domi Dana Johnson and Minran Liu: 22 votes (Kim Yoo self-nominated on the floor and got 9 votes)
Secretary – Azhar Saeed and Fangyuan Wang: 25 votes (no nominations from the floor)
Treasurer – Shuai Wang: 26 votes (no nominations from the floor)
Director of Student Publications – Yiqi Wu: 31 votes (no nominations from the floor)
 
Some of the Councillors-elect seem not quite up-to-date on meeting protocols, as they abstained when asked to vote on the simplest motions (if live-tweeting from the event should be allowed / Pulp was allowed to report from the elections). Hopefully they’ll get a crash course soon, otherwise the question will be how representative of all postgraduate students they really are if they can’t follow Council meetings.