University student unions will become mandatory once again under a Federal Government plan to bail out the campus organisations students don’t want to join.

The Australian

Uni students are well-known for their pranks, and this latest—two years of failing to lavish money on union-run O-Week jumping castles, lacrosse equipment and anti-war campaigns—is no exception.

The University takes this matter very seriously. Vice-Chancellors and student politicians have launched a two-year investigation into the few bad eggs on campus who have ruined campus life for everyone else. The investigation has narrowed to focus on around 900,000 known troublemakers.

Under Labor’s new plan, students who are suspected of not wanting to join a compulsory student union can be fined $250.

How the system works

The lifeline from Grown-up Labor to Young Labor would see the Federal Government hand out as much as $250 million a year to student unions and then recoup the money through the interest-free student loan system. The plan is innovative in that where the old compulsory unions hit students, the new system hits students and taxpayers.

Labor has made clear that the compulsory union plan is fully-funded, whether you like it or not.

In a bid to reassure students that the money would be in safe hands, National Union of Students president Angus McFarland told The Australian that “We now have a clear timeframe for moving forward out of the dark ages of VSU.”

For those not familiar with the history of the so-called Dark Ages, they were a period between 2006 and next year during which university campuses were no longer under the control of the Roman emperor and experienced demographic decline and frequent warfare.

Writing in the prestigious peer-reviewed protest chant VSU has got to go, hey hey, ho ho, Professor McFarland rejected contemporary academic criticisms of the term “Dark Age” and concluded “What else, then, is all higher education reform, but the praise of Rome?”

Labor’s plan breaks an election promise and would simply increase the cost of going to uni for students and expand the higher education budget without improving the quality of the sector. If these idiots can’t run a Federal Government, who knows what sort of damage they’ll do if they control a cashed-up student union?