All sugar and no spice
There’s a three-way race brewing for the Honi editorship: Pictures of Spider-Man for Honi, Honey Soy for Honi and Spice for Honi will square off in the September election.
This little mermaid has caught wind of big promises from the Spice for Honi camp: if Spice is elected, the time-honoured comedy spread will be scrapped. That would spell the end for a long lineage of two page sidesplitters—from this year’s Hunny, to Wet’s Garter Press and Scoop’s Cursor before that. Instead, it sounds like Spice is banking on the popularity of a LESS funny paper.
Word is they will make an effort to scatter satirical takes across their editions’ 24 pages. A throwback, perhaps, to the lighter-hearted Honis of yore—when the Chaser boys were at the helm and the pisstakes flowed like the first toilet stop after several schooners of Hermann’s finest. But with no established comedians on their ticket, Spice will have their work cut out for them.
Their electoral rivals, in contrast, promise papers that will be complete jokes.
That said, Pictures of Spider-Man isn’t above electoral manoeuvring and have approached Spice with a preference deal. The terms are rumoured to be as follows: Pictures of Spider-Man will preference Spice above Honey—so long as Spice commits to publishing one picture of Spider-Man per edition if they’re elected.
Heads will roll
The ballot’s been drawn, and 78 tickets will compete for the 33 seats on next year’s Students’ Representative Council. It’s standard practice for each ticket to have several members—up to ten—but only the ‘ticket head’, or the person listed first on the ballot, has a real shot at getting elected. Which means ticket heads are your wannabe stupol royalty for 2019.
This year, there’s a mix of old and new on the ticket head scene. The Reboot grouping, which represents a coalition of Centre Unity (Labor right), NLS (Labor left) and Independents, has discarded its old guard to put fresh blood on the frontline. The only Labor name this little mermaid recognised was Adriana Malavisi, who is running for president.
Grassroots, in contrast, is wheeling out the usual suspects: current SRC President Imogen Grant is heading up one ticket, as is current General Secretary Nina Dillon Britton, who is running on the Groots-aligned Switch branding.
For one big name, there’s even an attempt at double parking: current USU Board Director Maya Eswaran is heading up a Groots ticket, meaning she’ll serve on the Uni’s two main student bodies if she’s elected.
And speaking of the USU, Daniel Lee is bouncing back from his defeat in the semester one Board race. He will contest council on the ticket ‘Baekho for SRC’. Last time Lee graced Honi’s electoral coverage, he said he would not have used USU resources to support the same-sex marriage equality campaign.