MAWSA increases honoraria for exec

MAWSA has successfully passed a motion at their SGM to increase their honoraria to minimum wage, alongside recompensing them for the hours worked below minimum wage since April 1st. 

This new honorarium would see an annual increase of $1,600 for the President, from $40,000 to $41,600. The Vice-President is increasing from $15,000 to $15,600, exec members are increasing from $10,000 to $10,400 each, and Ex-Officio Members are receiving an increase of $80 to $2,080. Nice! In the past, the executive board have been working below minimum wage, due to the weird, twisted nature of honorariums. 

The SGM, held today on Friday 28th of May, saw the exec meet a quorum of over 20 students (giving away free pizza definitely helps) to pass the motion. MAWSA President Tessa Guest was wearing a cool hat, which isn’t relevant to the story, but worth noting nonetheless.

Questions were raised from the student body around the upcoming merger. Tessa wanted to stress that the university were requiring the four executives to merge Service Levy Agreements, which is happening at the end of this semester, but were not requiring that they merge organisations as a whole. “Nothing else has been required of us,” she says. The SLA, which funds MAWSA, is largely operational-focussed agreement, and the Association Executives entered this year with this expectation already set in place. Tessa notes, “going into the second half of the year, we will have one single SLA, the way we divvy up the funding is completely up to us”. 

However, through this conversation around SLA merging, Tessa admits that this opened up a further conversation around a higher-level merge of organisations, which could reap “lot of really awesome benefits.” This merge is what has been released in a press release, but has the potential to not go ahead given student consultation. Tessa admits that possible negatives of this proposal is that with this merge of power and money “creates more risk around who fills those roles and what their motives are.” Well, there’s only one way to find out. 

(BTW- for the next SGM can we please order more Cheesy Garlic pizzas? Preferably with the thin crust, thanks)