Day 3 of NatCon saw a breakthrough in negotiations, with SAlt and the Left bloc getting a deal through by 11am. This deal saw the Left ceding both the Education officer and the Queer officer after having maintained a Socialist Alternative (SAlt) lockout beforehand. SAlt has held both of these positions in 2025, but they have argued that the lockout was a way to cripple the NUS’ ability to be a fighting activist union. 

Shovan Bhattari told Farrago “For us, this conference is a massive political contest about what is the future of our NUS, what are the politics that guide it; or will it be the politics of a fighting activist student union that takes up questions like Palestine, a pro-student, pro-worker radical approach to student unionism. That’s what we’re here to fight for.”

The last two days have involved a lot of factional infighting, and in a refreshing turn of events we turned back to typical NatCon fare: fighting on the conference floor between SAlt, NLS and Unity (who have recently split into Victorian Unity versus everyone else in Unity). 

The first and probably most important motion covered was 11.26, an emergency motion put forth by SAlt to call on the federal government to do what it can to ensure Palestinian people can achieve self-determination. Yasmine Johnson (UTS SAlt), who has now secured the position of Education Officer, spoke about the history book of Australian opposition to the genocide in Gaza and asked “Where is the NUS going to be in that history book?” She said that the urgent nature of the motion was not due to “crazy Trot opinions; hundreds of thousands of people in Australia have marched over the Sydney Harbour Bridge”.

Unity voted the motion down, with SAlt and the Labor left factions voting it up and narrowly passing it. SAlt heckled Unity, “[Do] you guys want to sit here and repeat the statements of the Labor party to say that they recognize a Palestinian state?”

To compensate for having passed zero out of 418 motions over the past two days, the factions decided to get things done quickly by moving everything en blocs, dissolving blocs, taking motions out of blocs and putting them back together. It was resolved that the entire Women’s Chapter would be moved en bloc, which is expected to happen tomorrow. The Ethnocultural Chapter has been reduced to a 28-motion bloc. The afternoon session was spent putting everything together in motions, and one of the first things to happen in the evening session was to dissolve every bloc that had been created in the afternoon session, so that they could be put back together in mega-blocs. 

One of the wins for student media, other than having actual content to report on, was the motion to formally recognise the Student Media Association, which was established in August 2025 at the Student Journalism Conference. To our slight surprise, the motion was voted up by everyone except NSW Labor Students, who spoke against the motion to criticise Honi Soit and describe student publications as “shitrags”. Student media were shamefully banned from speaking about their own motion, so National Labor Students (NLS) delegates Josh Chuah, Alessandro Papaleo (both 2026 Lot’s Wife editors), and NLS observer Mathilda Stewart (2025 Farrago editor) spoke in favour of the motion. 

However, we also suffered a blow to press freedom, as everybody on the conference floor — save for independent Malakai King — voted in a procedural to ban student media from filming. This is a fixture of NatCon, but was made somewhat more urgent for the delegates to deal with after a video filmed by Imogen Sabey and published by Honi Soit went viral on X and Instagram, drawing hundreds of thousands of views. 

The rest of the evening involved a lot of the standard heckling from SAlt and the Labor bloc, with SAlt delivering searing critiques of the Labor factions over the Labor party’s complicity in the genocide in Gaza, and Unity chanting slogans like “HECS is best”, drawing heckles from SAlt about how hundreds of billions are invested into military deals like AUKUS instead of tertiary education. SAlt told NLS to “keep fucking licking boots”.

A surprisingly entertaining part of Day 3 was Anthony Ma, the single Liberal student present at the conference. Liberals are typically absent from NUS conferences. Every time Ma went anywhere near the floor he was met with booing from all corners of the room, including from the Unity people whom he’d been sitting with. He delivered hot takes about how the SAlt lockout was “based”, that “it is time to abolish the NUS”, and when speaking about republicanism he referred to the monarchy as “a symbol of our glorious colonial legacy”. He tried to hold a press conference at 11pm, but sadly for him no media showed up. 

With quorum having been reached by 11:30, the delegates only managed to get through Chapter 2 on student unionism and most of Chapter 4 on education, in one of what will now be a two-day conference. We’ve got 11 chapters to go. Even if entire chapters are moved en bloc, which is looking more & more likely, it’s going to take a miracle for the NUS to get through more than half of their chapters. Hopefully tomorrow they’ll save time by starting with mega-blocs instead of beginning with tiny blocs and redrawing them into large ones. Then again, when has the NUS ever finished things on time?