Who Do Student Unions Answer To?

The NUS campaign against One Nation, and the question of who authorised it to speak for a million students

My own political and social engagement is fairly recent. It dates to COVID, about six years ago, when questions about institutional power, consent and public trust that I had never previously had much reason to think about suddenly mattered to me directly. Since then, when a story catches my attention, I have tended to write about it for the sake of my own inquiry, working out what I actually think rather than defending a conclusion I arrived with. This one caught my attention for a specific reason, and it is worth stating plainly before I go further.

On Thursday 13 August 2026, thousands of high school and university students walked out of class under the banner “Students Say No to Hanson,” rallying in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, Canberra, Wollongong and Newcastle. In Adelaide, SA Police estimated around 2,000 high-school and university students took part, with students from at least 46 schools represented.

The high-school leg of the day was called explicitly by a group named the High School Anticapitalists, whose own promotional material states plainly, “we are calling a nationwide high school and university student walkout on August the 13th, three months before the state election,” according to material reported by the right-of-centre outlet One News Australia.

The National Union of Students, Australia’s peak representative body for tertiary students, brought its own national infrastructure to the day, its Education Officer fronting the promotion and its logo appearing on the Sydney poster. The target was a single registered political party, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, a little over three months ahead of Victoria’s 28 November state election, which One Nation has announced it intends to contest statewide, though formal candidate nominations do not close until 9 November.

I want to say plainly what this piece is not about. It is not about whether One Nation’s rhetoric on immigration and multiculturalism is fair game for public criticism. It is. Hanson’s National Press Club address in June, in which she said Australia “cannot be a multicultural society” and “must be monocultural,” was always going to draw a response, and free citizens, students included, are entitled to organise, march and say so loudly.

Nor is it a piece about whether the students marching believe what they say they believe; I take that at face value. And it is not a piece arguing that NUS is constitutionally supposed to stay out of politics, because it plainly is not.

Whatever view one takes of One Nation’s platform, the question this piece asks is narrower: an institution that is entitled to speak politically is not thereby relieved of the obligation to show how a contested political position became one it was authorised to advance in the name of its wider constituency.

What happens when a body claiming to represent students of every political persuasion becomes the organising vehicle for a campaign against one side of a live electoral contest, and who inside that body actually decided it should?

What the walkout actually was

NUS President Felix Hughes told reporters that One Nation’s politics were “not welcome on our campuses or in our communities,” and that the party had “opposed making tertiary education more affordable” and “attacked efforts to reduce student debt.” That is the institution’s own voice, speaking on behalf of an organisation that claims to represent almost one million students through its affiliated campus unions, and it is fair to treat it as such.

The organising was fronted by the NUS Education Officer, elected at the union’s December 2025 national conference. There is no need to speculate about how she understood the office she was seeking. In her own December 2025 campaign article, published in Red Flag, the newspaper of the revolutionary socialist group Socialist Alternative, under the headline “We need a socialist NUS education officer who’ll stand up for Palestine,” she wrote that Socialist Alternative was “campaigning for the education officer position” and that the role “could be used as a national coordination hub for campaigns.”

The campaign she was describing at the time was Palestine solidarity, not the One Nation walkout, and that distinction should stay clear. But the institutional philosophy is relevant: before she won the position, Johnson was openly presenting the Education Officer role not merely as an office of representation, but also as infrastructure capable of coordinating national political campaigns.

The groups listed on the day’s own promotional material, again per that same right-of-centre outlet’s reporting, span a recognisable roster of Socialist Alternative and Socialist Alliance campus branches, several Students for Palestine chapters, and the High School Anticapitalists themselves. Socialist Alternative’s own annual Marxism conference in April had already scheduled a session titled “Meet the high school anti-capitalists,” and according to the organisers’ own report of the conference, the High School Anti-Capitalists ran one of their first collective meetings there.

This is not evidence of secret coordination. It is evidence of openly stated political organisation. The accumulation of evidence does not require alleging that anyone coordinated in secret; it only requires noticing that the organisations themselves describe the relationships, meetings and objectives openly, in their own publications, under their own bylines.

The electoral framing is not something being imposed on the campaign from outside it, either. A June 2026 Red Flag article by a long-time organiser, reflecting on lessons from the 1990s anti-Hanson movement, described the intent of those earlier protests as being not to persuade One Nation members individually but “to demoralise and defeat them as a political force,” and connected that history directly to the coming Victorian poll. High School Anticapitalists’ own material, quoted above, ties this week’s walkout to the same election in the same sentence as the walkout itself. None of that makes the protest illegitimate. It does make it difficult to describe the day as abstract civic commentary rather than an intervention in a specific, live contest.

It is also worth recording, because a fair account should, that the response did not split neatly along a left-right line. Federal Education Minister Jason Clare told reporters “I don’t like One Nation either,” but urged students to keep their protest to weekends and stay in class while school was on. In Adelaide, a counter-protest was advertised on Facebook to support Hanson but, by the day itself, had no visible presence; Hanson’s own response was words rather than a rival rally, telling students they should instead be protesting the cost of living and stagnant wages. None of that settles the argument this piece is making.

It does mean the day cannot honestly be written up as a simple story of students against Hanson, with an equal and opposite rally on one side and government endorsement on the other.

NUS is entitled to be political. That is where the harder question starts.

It would be wrong to pretend NUS is constitutionally apolitical. Its own constitution, clause 3.2(d), lists among the union’s objects “the advancement of student perspectives on political and social issues within the broader community.” NUS itself treats political campaigning as core to its work, not an exception to it.

Clause 3.3 adds a separate constraint: “NUS must not support directly or indirectly any political or religious organisation, except to the extent necessary for furthering any object of NUS.” Campaigning against One Nation is not obviously the same thing as supporting a rival political organisation, so this piece does not allege that clause 3.3 has been breached; that would be a weaker and more easily dismissed argument than the evidence actually supports.

The harder question is not whether NUS may speak politically. It is: who decides when advancing “student perspectives”, plural, becomes asserting the student perspective, singular, in the name of more than a million people who were never directly consulted on that position?

The right to speak is not the same as the right to speak for

Students have every right to oppose Pauline Hanson. The Education Officer has every right to be a socialist. Socialist Alternative has every right to organise politically, in the open, as it plainly does. NUS has a constitutional object that lets it advance student perspectives on political and social questions.

None of that is especially controversial. The harder question begins with two words: speaking for.

When an individual activist speaks, a reader knows whose conviction is being heard.

When Socialist Alternative speaks, a reader knows whose political tradition is speaking.

But when the National Union of Students speaks, institutional authority is added to the message: the authority of a body claiming to represent more than a million students, although those students do not directly elect its national office-bearers or individually determine each political position taken in their name.

Who authorised this? Who do student unions answer to

NUS membership is made up of affiliated student organisations, not individual students; those organisations send delegates to the National Conference, and the union’s own description of that process confirms that delegates “move and vote on policy, determining the policy platform that the NUS will follow the next year,” and separately “elect the next year’s executive”, including the Education Officer, rather than students at large.

That structure is a normal feature of federated representative bodies, and it is not, by itself, illegitimate. But it does raise a straightforward governance question I have not been able to answer from NUS’s publicly available material: who formally authorised “Students Say No to Hanson”? Was it adopted as National Conference policy, approved by the National Executive, or undertaken under the discretionary authority available to national office-bearers?

There may be a perfectly ordinary answer. But for an organisation claiming representative authority over more than a million students, that answer should be easy to find, and I was not able to find it. So, who do student unions answer to?

A pattern older than this one campaign, held more loosely than it might seem

Australian Fabian gradualism has run through the Australian Labor Party and the union movement for a century, and Labor’s own student factions, National Labor Students and Student Unity, have historically supplied much of NUS’s office-bearer class, as I traced in Part Two of this series.

That history helps explain part of the political culture in which a body like NUS developed, but this piece does not need to trace a straight line from Fabianism to this specific campaign, and I do not think the evidence available supports one. The actor driving this particular campaign is not the gradualist Fabian-Labor tradition; it is the more confrontational revolutionary socialist current that currently holds the education portfolio.

Office-bearer positions at NUS are won through a factional environment most ordinary students know very little about, in which Student Unity, National Labor Students, Socialist Alternative and other organised blocs compete for delegate votes. The issue is not that factions exist; organised political groupings are a normal feature of democratic institutions.

The issue is the distance between the factional process through which national authority is won and the enormous constituency on whose behalf that authority is subsequently exercised. It is a smaller, campus-scale version of a pattern I examined at national level in Who Owns the Conversation?: a small number of people occupying positions that give them institutional authority to speak in the name of a much larger constituency does not require a conspiracy to concentrate a voice that was supposed to stay plural.

Imagine the same machinery under different management. If a conservative or nationalist faction won control of the NUS Education portfolio and used the union’s national infrastructure to coordinate a national campaign against the Greens or Labor shortly before an election, would the defence that it was merely “advancing student perspectives on political and social issues” still satisfy the people currently defending this campaign?

The answer does not determine whether the present campaign is lawful. It does reveal whether the principle being relied on is genuinely institutional, or merely convenient while one’s own side holds the office.

Everyone in this story bears the image of God

The Education Officer fronting this campaign is a real person with a stated conviction that she is protecting fellow students from a politics she believes is dangerous. She does not forfeit her dignity by being wrong about the right vehicle for that conviction, if she is wrong. The NUS President speaking on behalf of an organisation that claims over a million students carries a genuine institutional responsibility, and nothing here should be read as an attack on him personally. The many high-school students who walked out, not yet old enough to vote on the question they were marching about, were exercising a civic instinct that is not, in itself, something to be sneered at.

And the One Nation members, volunteers and voters this campaign was built to defeat are not reducible to the worst reading of their politics either: whatever one thinks of the party, younger Australians are themselves politically divided, and recent RedBridge Group/Accent Research polling reported 21 per cent first-preference support for One Nation among voters aged 18–29, against Labor’s 26 per cent. That does not tell us how NUS-affiliated students specifically would vote. It does challenge the assumption that a single anti-One Nation position can simply be described as the political voice of young Australians.

Representation should never become possession. A student who disagrees with the faction currently holding office does not stop being part of the constituency NUS claims to speak for, simply because his view lost the internal contest that put someone else in the chair. Institutions exist to serve the persons entrusted to them; persons do not acquire their political identity from the institutions that claim to represent them.

That is not only a governance principle. It is, as I argued at length in Christ at the Centre, the theological one underneath it: every person carries a dignity no government granted and no government, or union, can legitimately absorb into a collective political identity on their behalf. A piece that asks an institution to hold itself to its own stated standard should extend the same fairness to every person it names.

What I bring to this, and why

I am not a member of One Nation, and there are positions and formulations within the party I would not necessarily adopt myself. But false neutrality would be its own kind of dishonesty, so I should also say plainly that, on substance, more of what One Nation currently proposes sits closer to my own convictions than the socialist and Marxist alternative being organised by those driving this campaign.

That is disclosure, not evidence, and I say it so a reader can weigh what follows knowing where I stand, not to defend One Nation’s platform here, which is not what this piece is about. What holds my attention in this piece is not, in the end, which side is right about immigration or industrial relations. It is the pattern: an institution entitled to speak politically, treating that entitlement as though it also conferred a mandate to speak for a constituency that was never consulted.

I hold a traditional Christian conviction that institutions entrusted with representing everyone owe that trust to everyone, not to whichever faction currently occupies the executive, or holds my own sympathies. That conviction, like my sympathies for One Nation’s policies, is not evidence for anything argued in this piece; it is part of why I went looking.

The same tendency that can bend an institution toward serving itself rather than the people who fund it can just as easily bend a writer toward the evidence he already wanted to find, and a writer who agrees with the party being opposed in this story has more reason than most to watch that tendency in himself, which is why I have tried to quote the constitution rather than characterise it, quote the union’s and the campaign’s own words rather than paraphrase them uncharitably, and record where the response crossed party lines and where the expected counter-protest failed to show up, rather than simply asserting a conclusion.

Where does this leave us? NUS is plainly entitled under its own constitution to engage with political and social questions. That only takes us to the beginning of the harder question. Who decides when one faction’s political conviction becomes the position expressed in the name of more than a million students, what mechanism exists for an affiliated organisation or an ordinary student who disagrees, and would this arrangement still look healthy if the faction holding the machinery were one we profoundly opposed?

Was this campaign authorised through National Conference policy, approved by the National Executive, or carried out under the discretionary authority of a national office-bearer?

What real avenue exists for a member organisation, or an individual student, who believes the union speaking in their name has crossed from representing student interests into advancing one faction’s political project?

And where campaigning on political and social issues increasingly overlaps with an active electoral contest, what practical boundary does clause 3.3 impose between legitimate advocacy under clause 3.2 and institutional support, direct or indirect, for organised political actors?

“It is required that those who have been given a trust must prove faithful.”

— 1 Corinthians 4:2

The trust in question here is not abstract. It is institutional authority, a delegated office, affiliated students’ own resources, and the standing to speak publicly on behalf of a constituency that delegates that authority only indirectly.

Faithfulness to that trust is not a question of whether political activity is permitted. It is a question of whether it has been exercised toward the whole constituency it claims, or only toward the part of it currently holding the pen.

For further reading, the larger argument about institutions, gradualism and who they end up serving continues in Part One and Part Three of the Fabian Socialism series.

Thanks for reading

God Bless

Mark