The University of Melbourne Student Union has a long and proud history of student activism. We have supported students for generations to make their voices heard in the face of adversity and will continue to do so.

In 1939, the Melbourne University Union^[1] fought to keep the University open in response to the Second World War. Against a host of anti-activism changes challenging the student right to protest, in 1971, four conscientious resisters, Ian Turner, Paul Fox, Michael Hamel Green and Laurie Carmichael Junior, locked themselves away in Union House to launch ‘Radio Resistance’, a pirate radio station. Students created a system of barricades and obstacles to prevent police intervention. This barricade lasted for nearly three days before police broke through.

In the 1990s, University of Melbourne students allegedly provided refuge for East Timorese Refugees to protect them from deportation during the Timor-Leste conflict.

In 2024, the University of Melbourne Student Union supported students throughout the encampment, protests, and disciplinary procedures relating to the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict. This activism was replicated across Australia with various responses from universities.

However, the University of Sydney has recently launched an attack of student activism that threatens the very things student unions seek to protect. In November 2024, Bruce Hodgkinson handed down his external report as commissioned by the Senate of the University of Sydney. This report recommends a sweeping range of anti-student activism reforms, including:

• The prohibition of encampments as a form of protest on any University campus should be maintained as part of the current review of the Campus Access Policy.
• The prohibition against any form of protest within a building on the University campus, and the impeding access to and exit from any building by protest, be maintained following the review of the Campus Access Policy.
• The University prohibits any student from addressing those present in a lecture, seminar, or tutorial prior to the commencement of the lecture, seminar or tutorial on any subject matter. A breach of the prohibition may be considered misconduct.
• The University should hold Organisations responsible if posters identifying them or an event in which they are involved are put up on campus in breach of the Advertising on Campus Policy.
•  That the University develops a range of sanctions including the withholding of funding to an Organisation which can be imposed on an Organisation found to be in breach of University policy.
• Where an Organisation is repeatedly acting in breach of University policy, consideration should be given to precluding its office and position holders (or some of them) from being eligible to hold an office in that or any other Organisation receiving University funding.

Alarmingly, the University of Sydney has accepted in principle all the recommendations within the Hodgkinson report. When implemented, this will prevent essentially any form of student protest or student activism at the University of Sydney. We, as the University of Melbourne Student Union must fight to ensure that this does not occur at our university. We are proud of our history of activism and will fight to protect it. As your President, I am working with the University to ensure that they understand our view on the Hodgkinson report and that we will not accept similar measures at the University of Melbourne. In a time when the Victorian Government is proposing changes to limit protest action across Victoria, such as preventing people from wearing face masks to protect their identity and limiting the use of attachment devices, the right to student protest is under threat, and we must ensure it remains strong for ourselves and for those students of future generations - the right to peaceful protest is a core and indispensable part of the University of Melbourne Student Union and is not something we will allow to be tampered with.