Raida Chowdhury

As we welcome Semester 2 with open arms — praying for warmer weather and a fresh start at boosting our GPA — we also fear the state of our Messenger DMs in the coming months. One by one the people around you will begin to fall victim to the plague of matching Facebook display photos, and you may realise that even those closest to you are not above pursuing their dreams of student politics (‘StuPol’) hack-dom. That’s right. It’s ANUSA Election season. And no one can escape its wrath.

The first thing you notice about the National Union of Students’ National Conference is how much it feels like a school camp. Half-asleep students crowd onto coaches that drive them an hour and a half out of the city and into the bush. They pile off the coaches and crowd into 1970s-era buildings to check in, then walk past the shared showers and sad little common rooms to dump their luggage in their dorms.

AUKUS is a security deal between Australia, the UK and the US (hence the name), announced in 2021. It has become synonymous with the “Pillar One” submarine deal, where Australia will be developing a sovereign nuclear-powered submarine capability, including manufacturing eight new nuclear-powered submarines. But first it needs to train a workforce to build these submarines (and captain them too).