By Jasmine Cook
With the ANUSA elections held this week, it’s that time of year when you can’t open your Instagram story without being flooded by campaign slogans from your favourite second-year law students campaigning to be general representatives.
But there’s at least one ticket you shouldn’t vote for in this year’s election: Labubu for ANUSA, which promises to provide “Matcha in da bubblers”, Dubai chocolate in the BKSS, and to resolve ANU’s financial problems by “Fracking Kambri”.
This is not the first time a joke party has run for ANUSA.
Take, for example, ‘Shark Cage Diving’, a ticket which ran in 2016, whose main campaign was to convince students of Great White Sharks and Salt Water crocodiles living in Lake Burley Griffin. Or a group called NUS (Taylors Version), of which a former candidate, Stella Serrao-Smith, is currently running for vice president with Rage.
The existence of joke parties can, in fact, show some much more serious reflections felt by the student body. Consider, for example, Make ‘ANU great again’ which ran on a ticket in 2016. At face value, their campaign was entirely satirical, from members posing in signature red baseball caps, and adapting Trump’s talking points with ANU-specific terminology, to building a ‘wall’ to keep Fenner Hall out of campus. They even criticised Woroni for ‘Liberal media bias’.
However, some of their commentary, although openly flippant, reveals deeper observations about the perceived inequitable distribution of scholarships at ANU. “It’s not enough just to get the Tuckwells. You have to take out their families,” one of their slogans stated. Nearly 10 years later, a similar commentary was recently proposed by Labubu for ANUSA, offering a solution to “our most notorious scholarship [which] is still not means tested” by providing Tuckwell scholarships to all (sponsored by Dubai).
Although both policies include joke references, the concern for unequal scholarship distribution reflects a serious recommendation made in the 2024 Low-SES Student Report, written in response to student activism, by revising similar scholarship models to consider “only need-based” criteria.
The ‘Jedi Council for ANUSA’, which ran in 2022, opposed former Vice–Chancellor Brian Schmidt’s remuneration, which was “higher than the Prime Minister’s salary” in a context of course cuts and staff layoffs. This somewhat serious intention was balanced by their campaign goal of “restoring balance to the force” while committing to wear Jedi robes in meetings.
These joke campaigns don’t fit the typical format of formal, party-affiliated nominations for ANUSA 2025 many students have become accustomed to. In fact, historically, these joke parties have been mostly unsuccessful in gaining ANUSA seats – perhaps because their very absurdity reflects some students’ disinterest in the microcosm that makes up student politics.
But they shouldn’t be dismissed either. Even these mostly anonymous, mostly unserious tickets seem to reflect the concerns on students’ minds – university reforms, course cuts, the job market, campus protests, and the absurd challenge of attempting to balance them all in the ANUSA election
NOTE:
Labubu 4 ANUSA does not appear on the formal nominations for ANUSA 2025 and can not be voted for in this year’s election. Any suggestions for fracking Kambri can be posed to next year’s ANUSA executive.
Labubu provided the following comment to Observer, “Labubu thinks the people love matcha pilates in Dubai 😍 .”
Graphics by Laudine Cao
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