Union Reform Committee has announced that it wishes to expand the policy status Standing Orders, to allow for a greater range of policy types.
At the moment, policy status can either be positive or negative, and effectively only three values can be used (1 for Council, 2 for UGM, 3 for Referendum). We would like to expand this range further, as this will make it easier for people to make policies do exactly what they want.
Under the proposals, policies can be given a strength between -10 and 10, in the direction that the meeting decides, proportional to the number of people at UGM passing the policy. For example, a policy passed unanimously would have a strength of +10, whereas one passed by 75 to 25 would have a strength of +5, and one that was rejected by 75 to 25, a strength of -5.
Policies passed by Council will be on a -5 to +5 range, and policies passed by referendum on a -20 to +20 range.
The committee claims that this will make it far easier to set priorities for campaigns, as the strongest policies can be worked on first. People will also be able to specify, either at policy renewal time or when it is first passed, that it have a lower strength than normal.
This will also make it easier to tell when Council should be able to over-rule UGM on a policy matter, and how many of the reps will need to agree for it to be done.
Questions have been asked about a possible increase in confusion over policy as a result of these plans, but the committee point out that a lot of the work would be handled behind the scenes by Steering, who have already been asked to look through the archives to determine what the current strength of each policy status under this new system would be.
The committee points out that the only visible effect would be
that rather than Steering ruling a motion out of order, they
can now rule it in order but state that it will only take effect
if it achieves an 84% majority, or whatever
. Some people
have reportedly asked whether the strength should be based on
meeting turnout, rather than majority of passing, and Union Reform
Committee will be producing an amendment based on this, but some
members of the committee would be happier with a system that
was based on both turnout and majority
.
While many people worry that policy is being unnecessarily
overcomplicated as a result of these changes, others feel that
they do not go far enough. A group of students is alleged to be
working on imaginary policy status
, which would have no
effect on its own, but when combined with another imaginary policy
status could produce either a positive or negative policy status
depending on the signs of the two imaginary policy statuses.
No rumours have yet surfaced on how one would go about passing a motion to create an imaginary policy status, but one DSU officer, speaking under condition of anonymity, has pointed out that So few people actually read the policy file that if two people imagine that a policy exists, it might as well do - this could just formalise this.