SRC Elections 2025: Day 1

As the sun sets on the University of Sydney’s Student Representative Council (SRC) elections with Grace Street of Grassroots being provisionally elected as next year's President, UNSW takes its place. The campaigning period for this year's election season officially started at 4 pm yesterday with several tickets announcing their intention to run.

The first ticket to come across my Instagram feed announcing their campaign was Shoutout for SRC. They started off with a reel outlining several of their policies, including native flora gardens on campus, divestment from fossil fuels and weapons companies, and an SRC-led vaccination drive. I don’t know if Shoutout have been outside lately, but if they had, they would know that campus is filled with native flora already in many garden beds around the university. Additionally, UNSW has been a fossil fuel-free university for many years now, as it took out a power purchase agreement to run on 100% renewable energy about 5 years ago. The university has also committed to ending any investment in fossil fuel companies by the end of this year. Shoutout is a little late to the game, however their idea of bringing free pill testing kits to uni is a good one and something I haven’t seen from any other tickets before. 

Now came the mission of trying to find out which faction Shoutout was aligned with, and I wasn’t the only person looking for answers. Conroy Blood, the 2025 Students with Disabilities Officer, who is running with Shoutout this year, was shouted out (see what I did there) on Noise’s community discord server, asking him what faction Shoutout the ticket was best described as. Conroy answered that it's mostly made up of independents with some people from the NSW Greens party and National Labor Students (NLS) who are aligned with Labor’s left-leaning faction. When one of our editors, Ren, pointed out that the person authorising the ticket, Divya Nandyal, is an NLS member, Conroy responded, “It’s complicated.” Conroy himself has had a complicated history with student politics factionalism. Although he is a steadfast Greens member, having been elected to Canterbury-Bankstown Council as a member of the party, last year he instead ran with Left Action Free Palestine, Socialist Alternative’s ticket. His decision this year to join an Labor-led party is a big switch given the dynamic in SRC meetings. NLS hasn’t existed as a faction in the UNSW SRC for many years now, so it will be interesting to see if they can gain some traction this year.

365, an independent ticket, was the second ticket launch I saw today. Their launch was simple but clear, choosing to use a Charli XCX album cover style meme that simply read “365forSRC and it’s the same but we’re here for 2026.” 365 has not announced their ticket lineup yet however, Diya Sengupta, 2025 SRC President, is their authoriser, so we can assume she’s campaigning for the top spot again this year. Instead of sharing policies, 365’s caption went over some of the things a 365-led SRC has brought the student community over the last year, including Clothing Hub, mutual aid campaigns and bringing student media back into the SRC (you can never get rid of us). Their caption ended simply with “We’re about action not just flyers,” a clear dig at the next ticket on my list, Left Action Free Palestine.

Left Action Free Palestine is led by the left-wing group Socialist Alternative. They have been around in several forms for many years and have had a strong presence on the SRC for much of that time. With their ticket launch today came an announcement of who they were putting forward for Office Bearer positions as well. Jamie Tyers is aiming to keep his current role as Education Officer. Avasa Bajracharya, a Councillor this year, is running for Ethnocultural Officer, Louisa Chen, also a Councillor, is running for Environment Officer, and Emma Terry, this year's Environment Officer, is running for the Welfare Officer position. Socialist Alternative are known for their rallies, mostly to do with weapons divestment and a free Palestine, however, many criticise their lack of actionable efforts to help student issues on campus in a meaningful way. Despite this, they held the majority of votes across all seats last year due to their immense people power around SRC election season.

Edge, another independent ticket, has also announced their intention to run again this year with a couple of Instagram posts, one of which outlined their core values and another which insinuated that Edge is the only independent ticket in the running. I’m not so sure 365 will be pleased. Edge’s core beliefs centre around their three ‘I’s’: Independence, Integrity and Involvement. No candidate announcements have been made as of yet.

Notably, we have seen no announcements yet from last year's Together Again, who are run by Unity (Labor’s right-wing leaning faction), Spice Up, organised by members of UNSW’s Liberal Party Club, or Revive, an independent ticket which split off from Together Again last year. I’m mostly interested to see if Luke Cox, one of this year's Together Again Councillors, will be making a reappearance, as I can’t stop running into him at Surry Hills Yo-Chi, but on campaigning day he’s so unusually absent from my life. 

Well that is all I know about the state of play for this year’s SRC election season as of now. There will be much more to follow. Stay tuned.