ASA announces restructuring of executive committee roles

The ASA announced a downsizing restructure of the Executive Committee at a Special General Meeting, which has drawn criticism from some students.

The Executive Committee will downsize from eight roles to six. The current structure consists of the President and Vice-President, two Executive roles and four representative roles.

With these new changes, the President and Vice-President roles will remain; however, they will be supported by four “Officer” roles. These Officer positions will be Engagement, Education, Welfare and Cultural. The Officer positions will streamline the Executive and Representative roles and require each student in an Officer position to work 8 hours per week.

Concerns were raised about the ASA no longer offering roles with low hours, such as the representative positions, which were 3-4 hours per week.

Engineering students expressed that these roles had offered opportunities for students studying degrees with a high number of contact hours to be part of the ASA Executive. 

They explained that they thought the restructure might lead to a lack of representation of students studying demanding degrees on the ASA Executive team.

However, the majority vote approved the restructure and it will be put into effect for next year’s Executive Committee.

Student president Dallin Niuelua explained that when developing the roles the ASA “tried to model it after the Māori framework of Te Whare Tapa Whā. That talks about recognising that the wellbeing of a student is made up of many factors.”

The key reasons for the restructure was to reduce doubling-up of responsibilities between roles and to ensure that students come into the roles knowing exactly how many hours are expected of them.

“We are cutting it down people-wise but we’re upping everyone’s hours to create a small, tight-knit, core group,” Niuelua said.