Constantly in camera: Why the USU's approach to transparency needs to change

Ellie Stephenson wants more from Board.

I’ve attended every USU Board meeting this year, and there’s one thing I’ve become used to: sitting outside the meeting room or hanging out in a Zoom breakout room while the meetings move in camera. It’s pretty depressing, as a student journalist hoping to keep elected student representatives accountable, to sit and twiddle my thumbs for two hours while the Board makes decisions in secret. Last Friday, the Board held a Special Meeting where the meeting went in camera for around an hour and fifty minutes. Today at 5pm, the Board will have another Special Meeting, which once again I will attend, perhaps futilely as I am told it will basically all be in camera.

Why is this so galling? The Board holding two Special Meetings within a week seems significant. They’re spending those hours talking about something. And yet students have absolutely no way of knowing what’s going on in there. The USU is meant to be a representative organisation, and yet its members have almost no information about its workings and very minimal capacity to engage in its decisions. 

The Board, quite frankly, has got into the habit of going in camera. It’s entrenched, seemingly automatic. I get to hear the Acknowledgement of Country, some bureaucracy, and if I’m lucky, a motion or two,  and then the Board moves seamlessly in camera. It usually happens within the first ten minutes of the meeting. The fact that key decisions like the cessation of operations at Manning Bar have been made in secret and uncovered months later by Honi is absurd.

The explanation for this trend is that the Board needs to move in camera to discuss sensitive financial information. This is true: it would be inappropriate to publicly discuss confidential employment matters and so on. But that doesn’t sufficiently justify the amount of secrecy they actually engage in. The Board needs to spend more time out of camera and it needs to be subject to more scrutiny when it makes decisions in secret. 

I would like to see Board Directors dissenting from moving in camera and making an effort to distinguish between necessarily confidential information and information which students deserve to know. The Board’s current decision-making process avoids critique and is frankly undemocratic. Having spent last week interviewing candidates for the USU Board election, I’m struck by how little they can find out about what they’re getting into. How can the USU cultivate student involvement and democracy if students can’t find out how the organisation is being run?

But most importantly, I believe the Board needs to be more transparent about why they are moving in camera. When the SRC Executive makes decisions in camera, their minutes still record the motions which they pass. This makes sense because it means students can critique whether the decision to move in camera was legitimate and they still get a general idea of what issues the organization is discussing. The USU should adopt this, which would allow them to keep sensitive details private while giving their members and student media the opportunity to scrutinise their actions. 

The USU Board is elected by USU members. Of course, it is reasonable for them to pursue what they see as the interests of the organisation but they should remember they are ultimately  accountable to the Union’s members. This cannot occur when they fail to be transparent.