On Wednesday 26th March, students at the Australian National University’s Student Association (ANUSA) Ordinary General Meeting voted against changing the structure of the Environment Collective. The vote was on converting the collective from a department to a committee, following allegations of a misuse of funds.
At the OGM, 58 per cent voted in favour (173 votes) while 42 per cent voted against (125 votes). ANUSA constitutional amendments require 75 per cent of the vote to pass, so the vote failed.
The ANUSA Environment Officers allegedly misused $6,000 from their Environment Collective budget across 2023 and 2024. This money was allegedly used to fund members of the collective to attend Keep Left and Marxism Conferences.
The Marxism Conference is held annually by Socialist Alternative (SAlt), while the Keep Left Conference is hosted by Solidarity. Both are socialist groups with national branches.
Sam Gorrie, ANUSA General Secretary, told Honi that “We were unable to track down if someone who received this money to go [to the events] was even an ANU student at the time of getting the funding.”
In an independent review published in February 2025 by ‘NFP Success’, a not-for-profit focused consultancy firm, the Environment Collective was estimated to have $10,000 in expenditures for travel and conferences. Campaign and merchandise expenses were estimated at $1,000 and $5,300 respectively.
The Environment Collective reportedly spent $3,447.60 on the Marxism Conference held on the 7-9th April 2023. This was reported by NFP Success as non-SSAF compliant, unaligned with the Environment Collective’s constitutional purpose, and not managing potential conflicts of interest.
The report stated, “Given the Environment Department’s purpose is to focus on environmental activism the high budgeted amount for travel and conferences in 2023 to events which do not have a predominant environmental focus brings in to question the alignment of the Environment
Department spending with the purposes set out in the Environment Department’s
constitution.”
The seven departments of the ANUSA have autonomous spending capacity. Six of these departments serve historically marginalised groups, including BIPOC, Queer, and Women’s.
If the vote had carried, the Environment Collective would be downgraded to the status of committee, and all of their spending would need to be approved by the ANUSA executive.
Gorrie commented, “if 10 ordinary students can come to an Enviro meeting and want to spend thousands of dollars, in our view, it’s not unreasonable that the exec (elected by 2000-3000 students every year) can have oversight — they do with all other spending of the Association — to ensure that it is SSAF and constitutionally compliant.”
The February report mentioned that the influence of SAlt “appear[s] to be quite evident” in the Environment Collective’s campaigns and expenditures: “This could become problematic if
budgeting and spending… become hard to reconcile with their core purpose and difficult to justify with ANUSA and ultimately with ANU.”
Co-convener of No Cuts at ANU, a campaign that aimed to “save the Environment Collective”, Lucy Chapman told Honi “Students showed up to say that they cared about independent activist spaces in our student union — as compared to the students in the ANUSA executive, members of the Labor Party, who were bribing students with free beers in order to vote to cut the funding and the autonomy of the Collective.
“This was not about protecting ANUSA. This was about preventing political activism in ANUSA.”
Will Burfoot, ANUSA President, said to Honi “A structure that allows a small group of Socialist Alternative members power to spend other students’ money, in direct violation of our financial regulations, the departments constitution, and legislated SSAF guidelines is not a good structure. What we proposed would have fixed that, it would have given students confidence that their union will always act in their best interests and use our funds for their betterment.”
He added, “ANUSA continues to be a responsible steward of our SSAF allocation and that will not change. We are working to implement additional financial controls that will safeguard and minimise the potential for future misuse of funds. To this day, Socialist Alternative refuses to take responsibility for their decisions, they would rather lie to students than face up to the fact that it was them who misused thousands of dollars of student money to go to Marxism and Keep Left conferences.”
Sarah Strange, current Environment Officer at ANUSA, published a response to the independent report stating that while she agrees in principle with the recommendations put forth, she does not have the power to implement many of the recommendations. She expressed concern with the reports separation of “permissible ‘environmental’ discussions and impermissible ‘political’ discussions”, highlighting the fact that the report lists a discussion of divestment from fossil fuels and encouragement of disruptive protest as “impermissible”.
