WUSA Defence
>> lets just say there are 15000 undergrads in the uni.
>> $351 * 15000 = $5,265,000
Only $48 of the $351 goes to WUSA. The breakdown is roughly as follows.
$48 - WUSA is the Undergraduate Student Association.
Or
$56 - WUPA is the Postgraduate Association
Plus
Roughly $200 - UniCentre runs the UniBar, UniMovies, UniShop etc. They also lease out space to food outlets.
Roughly $100 - URAC is sport and rec. Gym, Pool, Sporting fields, Physio etc
Ergo $48 X 11000 roughly is a budget of about $565000. That goes towards amongst other things. About $80K on the tert and staff etc.
If you’re a WUSA member. (Pretty much all undergrads) you can get a copy of the full budget just be asking at the WUSA offices. Ground floor, building 11. There is a further breakdown in the free edition of the tert.
http://wusa.uow.edu.au/tert there is also a couple of articles about VSU and student organisations that you might find interesting. The main article is also on the WUSA website
http://wusa.uow.edu.au/vsu and it talks about what money goes where.
It seems like a whole lot of complaints are actually about UniCentre. I’d say the biggest problem that WUSA has is dealing with UniCentre and Uni and trying to get them to stop messing around with students. Its why WUSA run barbecues for free each week and write articles about how dodgy they are. They actually fired 3 staff members for wearing ‘support you union/VSU bad’ badges. They are hardly a Union or a student organisation, but they still fall under VSU and still get money from fees. (Around $3m – they had a $1.7m profit from students last year alone). The only decent and relatively cheap food at UoW (Apart from tofu and veges by WUSA) seems to be from sejuiced.
If you need questions answered come find me or anyone else at WUSA (Near duckpond).
Cheers
Ben Jones
News, Features and Sports Subeditor for the Tert and WUSA President ‘04