SMH: 'Police to hunt for missing [MQ] uni funds' (1 Viewer)

[AsyLum]

Rofl, you guys do realise they DO have secretarys and a complete PR and administration wing right ? I mean very rarely do people in such positions ACTUALLY send stuff like that...?

 

[Kegs]

I saw him use levitation in the meeting so maybe he has telepathic powers. Pwar, you been schooling him?

 

[AsyLum]

Councillor Schwartz!!!! Emperor Newman! I should've known, its the return of the Sith!!!

 

[nikmueller]

The rise and fall of Chairman Ma

June 8, 2007


Students are still coming to terms with the ramifications of several tumultuous weeks at Macquarie University, writes Harriet Alexander.

• ON THE day Victor Ma's five-year domination of student politics at Macquarie University snapped, his humiliation reached perfection in the darkness of the university car park. It had started on the bright morning of May 4 when he woke to read newspaper headlines linking him to a police investigation into hundreds of thousands of dollars that had gone missing from student accounts.
• Later, wearing dark pants and a maroon shirt and tie, he was forced to wait outside a meeting of the university's governing body, on which he sat as a student representative, while it discussed whether to sack him as president of the student union, Students at Macquarie, or SAM.
• "Everyone looked at me like I was a crook," he says. He returned to his office to find the locks had been changed. When he rang the union's chief executive, Anthony Matis, who used to answer to Ma and who Ma had considered a friend, his secretary said he had left for the day. "Emma, don't lie to me," Ma said as he stood outside the window with his mobile phone. "I can see his head."
• Finally, throwing away any last vestiges of pride, he went and waited by Matis's car in a last bid to confront the person he suspected of being behind his downfall. And there in the university car park, the man who once fancied himself as a future Liberal politician was moved on by university security.
• Within weeks Ma had lost every one of his elected positions, two student organisations had been liquidated and 40 years of student politics at Macquarie University had come to a close. "It was like a big bang," Ma says. "If I knew, I would have gone with honour and not been humiliated in this way. Once I started feeling things were getting out of hand, it was already too late."
• Students are still coming to terms with the ramifications of those tumultuous weeks and investigations into the whereabouts of assets seized by Ma in the final weeks of his presidency are continuing. But the immediate and most obvious effect was that, with a few deft moves, the vice-chancellor, Steven Schwartz, had done what students had been campaigning for the university to do since 2003, albeit with unforeseen consequences for student representation on campus.
• Chairman Ma, as he was once known, was not a popular figure among the few students who cared about undergraduate politics at Macquarie. The 35-year-old political science student held almost every elected position open to students - as a representative on the university's governing body, as chairman of the student council and president of the union, which ran commercial activities on campus. For the latter two positions he earned an income of about $50,000 a year.
• But students had long complained about electoral irregularities under Ma. His first successful election, in 2003, was conducted under the supervision of the returning officer Gigi Wong, who a year later was deemed by the courts to have staged improper elections at the University of Sydney.
• Students complained at the time that Wong, a friend of Ma's, had obstructed his opponents from nominating by giving them just two academic days' notice and then being unavailable to give them the relevant forms. Wong responded that her election schedule was the same as the previous year's, dismissing their complaints as "frivolous, vexatious and lacking in substance".
• The following year Ma acted as the returning officer in elections for the postgraduate student council at the University of Sydney, where was Wong elected president for a controversial year, during which she was forced to defend herself through the courts against alleged mismanagement.
• Ma says he would not have associated with Wong had he known that she would engage in such activity, and denies the two engaged in a sweetheart deal to get each other elected. "I wasn't helping her to win because that would get me into a lot of trouble," he says.
• At Macquarie, the university declined to intervene in response to student complaints. Ma had come as a breath of fresh air after a previous council beset with factional infighting and mismanagement. The first thing he received on taking office was a $28,000 bill and a summons to court, a legacy of the previous council. "That was my first wake-up call," he says. "This is no clubs and societies, mate. This is really heavy stuff."
• Now he had the foothold he needed, and with the support of the Chinese Students' Association, he held onto his position for the next four years, joined by more and more of his supporters.
• Cathy Rytmeister, an academic in the university's education faculty, remembers Ma boasting about the number of right-wing students on the council at a governance conference. "He seemed very pleased," she says.
• In 2004 Ma widened his powers on the student council through a new constitution and suspended elections, which he said would be too complicated in a year that the council was being restructured. The university supported the decision.
• Students complained in 2005 that students from a private college had been given voting rights despite not being paying members of the council. Last year they complained they had not been given enough notice to nominate for the union board elections. Ma denies all of it. "When people don't like you, anything you do is negative."
• If students were hurling mud on campus, university politics gave him a prime platform from which to launch a broader political career. Ma did not advertise his membership of the Liberal Party on campus, with Liberal membership regarded as political suicide among the undergraduate population, even one as indifferent to politics as Macquarie, where about a third of students are from overseas. But it was no secret that he was surrounded by Liberal sympathisers, including Kyle Kutasi, the general secretary of the student union, who resigned from the party after being accused of branch stacking for the extreme right faction, and is the son-in-law of the right-wing powerbroker David Clark.
• Ma's 2004 tilt for Ryde council was unsuccessful, but he has been a hard-working party member. He put up posters for John Howard's campaign for Bennelong in 2004, and planned to organise a booth this year. Those plans are now in doubt.
• Last year he spent $2400 of student funds booking a table at a Liberal fund-raising dinner. He has declined to repay the money, saying he had a meal, so it was not a political donation but a networking opportunities. Visitors to Ma's university office often commented on the picture of him and the Prime Minister with their arms around each other. A 61-year-old Labor branch member alleges that at the state election earlier this year she was intimidated by Ma's allies at Eastwood Public School, where she was campaigning for John Watkins. "They followed me around, just little shoving type things, putting their posters in front of the Labor posters so they can't be seen, and when I confronted them about that they followed me around with a hammer and bolt cutters," says the woman, who asked not to be identified. "These were the people Victor Ma had recruited. "They said they needed the hammer to put up posters and the bolt cutters for goodness knows what, but they didn't need to be standing there swinging them around. And then Victor turned up." But she said Ma did not intimidate her. "He's not a thug," she says.
• Meanwhile, students were complaining that services on campus were diminishing, while the directors' salaries were increasing. John Bransgrove, who fought against Ma through the action group 180 Degrees and sat on the university council in 2005, said constant appeals to the administration had failed to persuade it to interfere. "It was like bashing my head against a brick wall," Bransgrove says. "When I got onto council I thought I was going into an environment that was transparent. But if I thought student council was bad, university council was even worse."
• The university repeatedly said it had no right to interfere, he says, but he was sceptical about this when the then vice-chancellor, Di Yerbury, wrote to students about their union votes in 2001. The two-page letter detailed complaints about the membership of the council in the lead-up to the election, and concluded: "I therefore encourage all undergraduate students to acquaint themselves with the issues and to exercise their right to vote on them." The registrar, Brian Spencer, stands by that position, but admits that in retrospect it was clear the student organisations were being mismanaged.
• Then, this year, the university suddenly budged. The abolition of student unionism meant Macquarie, like other universities, was short of money to fund services, and Schwartz, the new vice-chancellor, planned to cut costs by amalgamating the sports association, student council and student union.
• Some clubs in the sports association put up a fight, but the university eventually managed to impose its will by cancelling the membership of life members and honorary life members and denying them the right to vote against the changes.
• But Ma would not agree to take steps towards amalgamation on behalf of the students council and student union, under which he would lose his paid positions and his wife, the union's financial manager, would lose her $75,000 a year salary. "If I had gone up and said, 'Mr Vice Chancellor, here you go, anything you want', I would have been given a medal," says Ma, who is convinced the events that followed were about the university wanting to remove him for standing in the way of its plans. "I didn't want to leave as the student president who handed everything to the uni."
• AROUND that time, whistleblowers told the university about longstanding financial mismanagement in the student organisations and Ma stopped providing financial statements to Spencer, who was the university-appointed board member. "It became clear to me, as well as many of the students, that the range of services traditionally provided by the students council, and claimed to be provided by the students council, were not being provided," Spencer says. "It's clear to me in hindsight … that the money was simply being depleted by the costs of the [students council] which, when we finally got some financial statements, were very highly directed to the executives in stipends."
• Schwartz commissioned an audit into the affairs of the student organisations. Among other questions, the auditors asked Ma why directors of the student union were being awarded pay increases - raising their salaries to $45,000 a year - when revenue was declining. Ma declined to answer them, and says he no longer needs to, but he saw the writing on the wall. It was clear the university intended to sack him.
• He removed union executives as signatories to the organisation's accounts, and transferred more than $200,000 to a lawyer's trust fund. He also stripped the student council offices of assets and moved them into storage. He says he intended to spend they money on a legal fight to stop the university's amalgamation plans. "I [knew] that they were going to toss us all out and I had to think of the consequences … like, we have no resources, we're nobody, absolutely nobody," Ma said at the time. "We will not have access to our secure account. We will not have access to the funds to do anything."
• But it was too late. The university forced him to return the money and assets through the Supreme Court, though the court-appointed liquidator, Trevor Pogroske, says it is not clear whether all records have been returned. Ma resigned from his positions on the student council and university council and later from the Liberal Party. "It was a set-up," he says. "This shouldn't happen to any student politician, from anywhere."
• Meanwhile, opinion is divided on what it means for student representation on campus. At least initially, students will be appointed to the board of the new student organisation by the university, rather than being elected by students. Some believe, like Ma, that the university's actions in removing him were a cynical attempt to take total control of student affairs.
• Rytmeister, who for years encouraged students to get organised when they approached her as a member of the staff union for advice on defeating Ma, is concerned for the future of democratic student representation. "[The student union has] been mismanaged for so long that it now seems justifiable for the university to wipe out student representation altogether," she says.
• About 30 students met at Macquarie last week to discuss the future of student politics at the university - a large meeting by Macquarie standards.
• They worried about how much control they would have of their affairs, but organisers say the meeting was largely positive. "There were a lot of ideas bounced around and everyone seemed optimistic," a student, Tim Hendry, says.
• And nobody talked about Victor Ma.

 

[nikmueller]

crazy long article. made it nationally.

positive-ish ending note.

told you that you should have been at that meeting pwar.

but no. porn time was more important.

 

[glitterfairy]

Rytmeister, who for years encouraged students to get organised when they approached her as a member of the staff union for advice on defeating Ma, is concerned for the future of democratic student representation. "[The student union has] been mismanaged for so long that it now seems justifiable for the university to wipe out student representation altogether," she says.

mm that's the sort of thing I'm afraid of. But yeah. I'm hopeful too... a Ma-less situation has got to have some sort of potential!!!

 

[xeuyrawp]

crazy long article. made it nationally.

positive-ish ending note.

told you that you should have been at that meeting pwar.

but no. porn time was more important.

weh I had so much to do.

 

[AsyLum]

Rytmeister, who for years encouraged students to get organised when they approached her as a member of the staff union for advice on defeating Ma, is concerned for the future of democratic student representation. "[The student union has] been mismanaged for so long that it now seems justifiable for the university to wipe out student representation altogether," she says.

Yep, sounds about right rofl.