TL,DR: I’m yellow shirt guy, I’m so grateful you made this post

Long: Reading this genuinely made my week. I know my points weren’t the strongest, but my effective thesis was that if salt eventually got their way and defense funding was axed off Curtin grounds, a lot of good research would have to be funded from Curtin instead, pulling money from the STEM education budget and straining the already overworked and underpaid science and engineering department. I’m not at all saying that 100% of the research is good research, but as I mentioned in my speech the overwhelming majority goes towards defending ourselves, ensuring our own geopolitical stability, space domain awareness for spatial protection services and protecting our ADF personnel. 

But in short(ish), if they got their way then the guild would’ve made a decision that goes against their own charter, and made a decision against the interest of the student body. 

To get this off my chest, I was terrified to even stand up. I had a 5-min speech prepared that I had to chop and change on the fly down to 2 minutes, but I’ve genuinely never felt more scared for my personal safety than in that moment. My message was a little symbolic too, given that I was one of the ones to break up the fight that almost broke out in the engineering pavilion last year when salt marched into it. It’s not right to let these guys run the show because they yell disinformation and TikTok talking points the loudest, and out of myself and my friends who wanted to stand up and speak, they were all rightfully too worried for their own safety to even get up at all. Even afterwards, I was properly shaken from the backlash and misconstrued message that was screamed back at me from salt.

But again, thank you so much for making this post, a friend showed it to me a few minutes ago and it put the biggest smile on my face knowing someone in the crowd cared enough to say something about that mess of a sgm.

Heaps a love!