 So that leads me to introduce the first keynote by Errol. Errol is currently a PhD student in bioengineering at Swinburne University of Technology. He has been involved with student representation for four years now, representing students on campus and nationally. He has worked and lobbied in collaboration with academics, industry partners from around the world to lobby both state and federal governments. He has also been a founding member of Public University of Australia, a platform that includes every major staff and student advocacy group in the higher education sector. At a more grassroots level, he helped found the Swinburne Leadership Hub, a student-led initiative to develop future entrepreneurs and leaders. Errol's keynote today explores the topic of influence and power, modalities and methods for rallying supporters and crafting change. If you're ready to take it away, Errol, go for it. Can everyone hear me okay? I didn't want to just start off. By the way, we heard absolutely nothing. I'm going to need to share a screen. There we go. Can everyone see that? Has it loaded? Perfect. Cool. So hi everyone. Name is Errol. Thank you for the introduction. And this is like a nice little presentation I put together, specifically to this. And I got to say I was really excited when I was asked to do this because the reason why is because I've had a very, very different approach to student representation because my story is very different from most students. And when you come from a different direction, you tend to do things slightly differently. And as a result, you have something to share, I suppose, that might resonate with other people because you started from a different foundation. So ultimately, the goals and objectives of what I really wanted to do was to show people how I went about building influence from zero. And I mean, really zero. And I'll explain why. Expanding your influence to different groups outside of your typical value system, which is actually really important these days. And also being able to come up with a vision that's relatable and that appeals to supporters so they'll actually want to come along the journey. I think there's a little bit of perception of what advocating and idea is like and the limitations for student representation. A lot of students kind of stick within the student sphere instead of reaching beyond that. In the introduction, I didn't do that and I'll talk about that a little bit more. So I really want to, if possible, shadow your expectations on what is actually possible based on what I've done and I've surprised myself on what people are willing to accept. So it's not just me being surprised. I get surprised still every day. Still a little bit about me as well. I'm actually a PhD student still. In my time, I've been national rep at CAPON. So policy advisor, general secretary and president. Three of those I did in one year. National president only by itself, thank goodness. And more recently, I've been working with the NTEU a lot more. It's kind of my next little frontier. And also a founding member of Public Universities Australia. So these photos of me ranting in parliament, groveling to politicians, me sending a Kim card now retired. And this is Beethoven because I want to say this because I think it's important. I'm actually diagnosed with autism, which means that I am someone that does not necessarily get social cues, which you can imagine is hilarious when you're lobbying because you're basically kind of like a deaf musician. It's tricky. But that's probably also where the uniqueness comes from perhaps. So hence Beethoven, it's a little picture there. So where I started, my credentials on when I met my zero. I was just a PhD student for about two years into my PhD. I never did any student representation. I ran from it. I probably because at that time we had changed a lot of prime ministers. I wasn't sure who we were at at the time. But that's how politically engaged, disengaged I was. So really talking about zero here and just had a handful of friends and PhD students don't have a cohort. So very isolated. So if it is possible to do what I did, how would you do it? And this is probably in the next few minutes. I'll show you exactly how I did it. At least I think I did it. First thing I want to address is that influences has a bit of a snowball effect. Once you have it, it's actually easy to just expand it. Unfortunately, the downside is that when it starts, it starts really slow. And that's the hard part. And that's why I want to really address how you start from zero. You've probably seen relationship compasses before or like political compasses. Sometimes they correlate. Sometimes they don't. But the idea is that you want everyone in the top right hand side. So people with the most influence, people that support you. And you want to pull everyone across the top right. And then you've got people at the bottom left, which usually start off as the bane of your existence, but you're also trying to pull them across. Because if they're not going to support you, at least they'll stay out of your way. That's the goal. So that's the idea. And the dotted lines is basically the fact that when you get started and you pull in a bunch of these people and you pull them to the right side, it's actually easy to start pulling everyone across with you. And it gets a lot easier. It becomes like it almost self becomes what I would call self-perpetuating. It just does it by itself. So my span of being a student rep has gone through a lot of things. Has gone through this period of time, 2018, up to 2022. I kind of break it up into three parts. First, my time on campus representation. So a lot of things will be a lot more face-to-face. And how I had organized things at my university, where it's a lot easier when you're dealing with people face-to-face. Pretty COVID. And then, of course, the COVID pandemic, the challenges that came with that. And then also how to bring people together, which for me has always been remote when dealing with national, for obvious reasons, very expensive to fly around. So I'll go through a little bit of all of that and how I went through influencing people, growing that influence, and getting people to do things that they believe in that I also believe in. So in my early days, as I mentioned, just a PhD student, no advocacy experience. And this was a starting point from zero. Is that my university had made some changes to my PhD program. Well, all of our PhD programs, not just mine, just included me. And they claimed it was a new law. And at my university, we didn't have student representation in that particular area. So I went to student reps and said, hey, what's going on here? This seems really weird. No pushback, no organized advocacy. This is zero, zero, very zero. I don't need to go into negative on zero. But it felt that way. So what do you do in those situations? This is literally like grassroots full on. Well, if you don't have influence, I kind of had to work to my strengths there. I'm a PhD student and well, knowledge and finding knowledge is kind of my thing. So the first thing I did was to look up the legislation and actually prove that my university was being dishonest. When they say knowledge is power, there's truth to this. So being mindful of what you stand against and having the logical facts behind it, helps a lot as a good starting point because it will be very important later on. And then the next thing I did, because I didn't have a student movement behind me already, I didn't have anything else, I did work out that supervisors actually have a lot of influence over their students. Because every student has a supervisor in a PhD. So during this time, there was outrage and there was a bunch of staff members that were not happy with the changes themselves. And there was these meetings with like 100, 200 people in a lecture theater and they were just like, you know, limbasting the dean and whatnot. And I just sat there and just turned to the meetings that weren't even mine from different faculties. And I sat down and just watched and looked around and just waited to see who was the person that was asking and just braiding the dean the most, literally the most, openly. And I just watched them and waited for them to leave when everyone left, approached them, introduced myself, told them my problem, told them I agreed with them and got them on board. It's good to get those people, partly because everyone's upset, but the people that are upset that are in the room might just keep it in the room. The people that are already open to talk about it, they're probably going to be the ones that are going to act because they're already brave enough to speak. So that's what I was doing. I was targeting people or finding allies and people that were already resonating with what I believed in and was willing to speak out because that's what you need is a starting point. Approached them, spoke to them, they were enthusiastic enough to find more professors that cared between all of us and students that I knew as well. We started a staff and a student-collaborated survey, one for staff, for all the supervisors, one for all the students. We put them together and we sent them to the university. So if you don't have influence, you kind of just need to find people that have influence or some kind of influence over the group that you might also be interacting with and just piggyback off that as a starting point. It's kind of like influence on loan because you can imagine if another issue comes up that I care about no one else cares about, it doesn't matter, it doesn't. So it's kind of like on loan there. So that's where I went to address the next problem, which is, well, how do I sustain this? What about the next battle that we have to deal with? And this is where we had a PhD club at my university and it was just built by PhD students and that's where you kind of had a gathering. This is the part where you start organizing. At least when I'm talking about this, I'm talking about campus level. And we organized events and did all sorts of fun stuff. But on top of that, I also worked with the professors and convinced them they need to build a professorial group. The idea is that all the professors at the university come together and they talk about the issues and then they report directly to the vice chancellor. And that's what they had done. And so between our group and the professors, we actually worked together to talk about the issues that we had at the university and the policies. Because one thing you'll learn as a student rep is that if you went up by yourself or with your movement and you spoke to the university, they'll say like, oh yeah, but this and that, no gaslight you and say like, this is the best way, we know it. When you have professors on your hand, it's a bit harder to say that because they're already agreeing with you and they're on your side and it really kind of twists the arm of the university. So that was kind of the plan there to organize all of the groups together under the one banner. And I have to say that I do believe in activism to some extent, but I'm a little bit tricky with it. So I do it in such a way that really is kind of good will but annoying as hell. And I'll give you an example here is that at my university, doing some cost cutting kind of decision making, they decided to get rid of all of the coffee machines, but two and said, oh, they're in these two like staff rooms, which students like PhD students like myself can enter. But yeah, so you have to go to those two staff rooms to get your coffee across the campus, 500 meters or whatever it is through the cold, through the rain, come to these two places to get coffee because we believe in collaboration and people coming together at these can close spaces. So I thought, okay, we'll put that to a test. International Women's Day was coming up and we decided to run an event. I did all the right things. I booked the staff room, one of the staff rooms, which happened to be outside the main administrative staff room of the people who made these decisions. It was like literally 10 meters away. I booked the entire area, gave them a week's heads up, occupied the space like this, made sure it was noisy and all the seats were taken, had everyone have the food. And when the dean walked in, he was confused as hell of trying to just get his coffee. And I asked him to just come along. Yeah, come along. Why don't you just come with us? Like this is the collaboration you spoke about, right? Yeah, join us, International Women's Day, let's go. And he was just like, yeah, I'm just gonna leave now. They were pretty upset about it, but they couldn't do anything about it. And I made my point very clear that the two coffee machines was not okay. They've brought in more coffee machines since. So it's kind of like, I'm doing a good thing, but you can't punish me. So suck it. Another example was the university trying to get students to engage to run a meeting on doing an internship, like a program they had. And like, I don't know, of the entire mailing list that they had, they probably introduced like 20 people, students that could come along to it because they weren't that interested. They couldn't engage. So being the cheeky little bugger that I am, I decided let's organize a barbecue event. And this is how many people turned up. I think the fire safety code was like pushing its limit there on how many people we could have. But we pushed it to limit. And then I invited the dean that was trying to organize these events and said, oh yeah, you can come around. Oh, you can bring your consultant along too. And speak to the students you're welcome to because you wouldn't listen to what I was going to say. So I just had to show her straight up. Like this is the influence that I could have. This is what happens when you work together unless you want to do this on your own. Go ahead. So I just did this and invited her and she was happy. She ate the food, made my point. And funny enough, their consultant came along, was impressed by what they saw and actually decided to form a sponsorship kind of partnership deal to promote their internship through an event that I organized with them away from the university. And the university was not particularly happy about it. They fought it for some reason and to a point that the consultant just said, like, why are you doing this? Like, we want to have this. A boss said, yes. Why are you saying no? They fought me so hard over this. And so we, because I knew the students that did internships. Some of these were my friends. These three panelists here were former PhD students that did an internship. So they were then, we had the consultant speak to them and to share the experience on what the internship was like. We had food and all these students over here came to see what it was all about. And it worked and also annoyed my university, which I'm also very happy about. So that was a bit of fun that I had on a campus level on to basically annoy the university to make my point, to grow that influence, to make the university recognize that we had something to offer. So basically, it's being a little bit chaotic good. The objective is to do good things, but I intentionally did it in a clumsy way, just to hack management, just to make my point with them. But, you know, I had to obviously change my tack a little bit with national influence because you can't just gather people so easily, remotely. And you have to work with more people because you have to be a lot less hands-on, which is a new set of skills that I had to develop, pretty challenging. But I think it's still possible. And I think to me, it was similar again to the first issue of the university changes policies, but in this case, at a national level. Now, 2020 was a horrible year for high education. Most people know that. What I found was the high education sector was very fragmented. They couldn't really have a comprehensive voice, like together between staff, students and everything. And, you know, a bunch of policies went through that people just generally didn't like, but didn't really fight it well either. And I was like policy advisor at the time, and I'm just watching this disaster happen, and I'm going, yeah, this is not okay. And I kind of thought, what could I do similar from what I did in campus level to a national level? Could that apply? And in what way could I kind of make it work? Because obviously it's going to be a little bit different when you're dealing with more people from different states. So when I took over as president last year, I started looking through all of the usual suspects, your usual allies, and actually went up to talk to all of them to really try and work out what they stood for, what they believed in, what their agendas were, and what they were really pushing for. Because there's a lot of overlaps and you basically want to focus on, you know, the things you have in common and the things that you have differences on. And through all that, I came to the understanding that the biggest group that I could mask and the best argument I could make was based on the statement that through 2020, and it needs to stop happening, is that universities were represented to the government only by small minority in the university hierarchies, like basically the vice chancellors. Every time they say, oh, how are universities doing? They talk to the vice chancellors. They don't talk to the students. They don't talk to the staff. They don't talk to anyone else really. But we make up most of the students. We make up most of the university as a staff and students. So we're actually the real voice. And so I brought the message around and said, let's see how many people really like this idea. And turns out, well, yeah, a bunch of people did, in fact, so much so that they were able to come together as public universities Australia. So this is a group of professors. So the professory group that I helped form at Swinburne at my university was now becoming a branch of a national group that now I was working with. It's like literally the same thing, but national now. They were academics of public universities, post-graduates, which was represented by myself, casual staff members, the NTEU came on board, Indigenous reps came on board, even the NUS. If you think about it, getting undergraduates with political views with all professors agreeing on the same thing, not particularly easy, generally speaking, pretty damn hard, but doable. They're in this room right now in this screenshot. And we just came together with a goal to make politicians aware that because of 2020, it became abundantly clear that universities lack governance and they're not accountable for what they do. They fired a bunch of staff, they never really spoke to anyone about it, and that needs to change. And that was the message that we could all resonate with. It was a very simple message, not like how or what to do. It was just a very simple statement on what we would all stand by. And we're constantly working all the time, individually as different groups, but then coming together and sharing resources where necessary, meeting politicians, telling them about it, sharing policies that we believe that universities need to change their constitution to have better governance. This is some articles that came up. So one was by two academics that I work with calling for Royal Commission on Australian Universities. And this was published in Pulse and Irritations with John Minidoo. And if anyone wants to know who that is, that's basically, I dare say, I feel like he's public servant royalty at this point because the stuff that he's done under Whitlum and Fraser as Chief of Staff of the Secretary of their Cabinet and the kind of thing, they've done a lot of great stuff. Like it's a quality publication in a sense. And this year, they decide to have an inquiry on the jobs and skills bill. And this is the Australian government reaching out to our organization, which is about six months old, being like, if you want you to put a submission, they invited us to speak. It's government recognition that you exist. So I like to think it's progress. It's a walk in progress. And it's something that I'm quite passionate about and I've been working on. And because I've gone through a lot, I just want to quickly recap a little bit between my experience on campus and also nationally. The big thing is identifying what the unjust cause is and doing research if necessary. So at my university, that was changing policies that was not in the legislation, like they said. And that got people fired up. So they gave them a reason. And the national one was like it did it itself because of COVID and what had happened with jobs and the quality of education. Talking to everyone that could be affected. So talking to academics is not something that most people would have imagined would be something you would do as a student rep and then mobilizing them as well was a big part of it. And talking to different groups outside your regular circles. Basically, if you talk within your echo chamber, you have no real influence outside of your echo chamber. Sorry, fact. And also creating a very simple message that everyone can easily resonate with. And if the people are very different from you, that's a good thing if they can still resonate with it. That's the idea that a lot of people different from you can resonate with it. And then demonstrating the influence and support by doing things. Now nationally, still working on that. That's a forever thing really. On campus, I think that's mostly there. And then challenging the change with that influence that you have. And the key thing of course is this was never done alone by just me. Maybe the idea started there, but I had to immediately find other people that I could resonate with. And then we did it. It wasn't just me. And then we kind of just went along on the ride. So going to each one of those things a little bit more because I didn't go through a lot, but I needed context to kind of break these things down and to analyze it a little bit closer. I think it is really important to really talk to people with experience, like with different experiences to get different points of views. I did go through reading books sometimes, talking to different organizations. Sometimes those overseas in another country. So I've spoken to academics in Canada as well as UK and the US to get what it was like at universities over there. Reading regulations sometimes is really important as well. But the most important was what I was getting to is that the reason why you need to have a logical framework to your unjust cause that you're fighting against is that you need to build a foundation based on good logic and morals that people can resonate with because otherwise your message makes no sense and it's going to be really hard. So it needs to be clear and resonate with people's logic and morality. The second is being open-minded to talk to anyone. And I mean anyone. And that includes people that you don't necessarily agree with. And trying to actually work out what their values are, what they stand for, they have their motives and what they do, sure. But why do they do it? What are their values, the underlying values? Because that's what you can appeal to. And looking for more where you can actually work with people than finding what separates you from them. And that's a big part of finding potential allies to work with. And sometimes your allies don't have to do, like they don't have to back you 110%. They just need to one, get out of your way or two, give you like a freebie once in a while that you might need. So I give you a really fun example here. It's a bit of a sidetrack. It's not about education that I was working on, but it was just something to happen. And so I kind of, I live in Ellen Touch's electorate. He's the Shadow Minister of Education, right? And so I send them this email and I dare say I sent it off midnight, but it was on election day. And I told them that basically my view is that the Liberal Party, especially Dutton, has said a lot of things about China in a very inflammatory way. Like the real war, mongering, like using the word war in just very agitating way. And it doesn't particularly resonate with people of Asian descent like myself, just in general, just letting him know that that is the case. And it's not that we feel offended by it. It's more the fact that we feel as though you would confront us and shame us as people. It doesn't matter if we didn't do it, but you just feel like you just don't get us. And I kid you not, a day later, I'll play this. I don't know if this will actually work. Can you guys hear this? I can't hear that. I can't hear it yet, no. That's unfortunate. Is there any way to make it? Because I know there is a way to make it play. I think if you stop sharing your screen and then share again, but click on the share with volume, that might work. Ah, okay. Let me just try that. Advanced sharing options, maybe that's it. Oh, wait, no, that's not it. Huh. No, that's advanced sharing options. No, I don't think it's going to be too hard for me to work this out. So I'm just going to go ahead a bit. Sorry. Okay, but okay, I think I'm on the right. What? That's a different slide. Ah, come back. Okay. Basically, he admits that the way they had to approach things was really not great on that front. Still stood by his beliefs, which is fine, but admitted that they lost a lot of votes in areas with people of Asian culture or nation descent in those areas. And like, I don't know. Generally people will say, you spoke to Ellen Tudge. Gross. But the reality is that I perhaps maybe influenced the Liberal Party to be less toxic about this, like still approach it the way like the labor has, but not the way that Dutton did. I don't know. Maybe I did. And that was just a simple email, just communicating with someone. Maybe. And some people will see that as like me trying to, you know, like, why would you help the Liberal Party? So it's not about helping the Liberal Party. It's about pulling everyone across in that compass. And also the fact that, frankly, you want all parties to maybe not sound so war-mongering, period. So to me, you know, as a quick tip, young people, we tend to have our values morph quite quickly because we're kind of learning who we are. But people, as we get older, we tend to have views that kind of cement a little bit. And sometimes it's easier to appeal to their values than to try and change them. They can change over time, but I think appealing to those values is actually really important, at least understanding those values and then being able to appeal to them in a way that they understand. And sometimes you can get a change after that on their values. So understanding someone's different point of view is actually really important, and it's not actually selling out. It's very different. Listening and understanding someone's view different from agreeing, key point. And I think that a lot of people kind of forget that. And I can give you a really interesting example. I spoke to a friend that's doing a PhD in recycling, and he was talking about solar power and wind power. Long story short, he had said to me, the easiest way actually, and studies have been done, to convince conservative people to go with solar and wind is actually to stay, think about it from an independence point of view. You're not independent. You're not dependent on the grid. You're not dependent on someone else. You're self-sufficient. And that apparently people buy into more. So you're still playing on those values. You get them to change to solar and wind. And after that, it's kind of like part of the furniture. It's kind of like it is what it is. And then they might change the view. They might like solar and wind instead of cold. Who knows, right? But so there are different ways of approaching and lobbying to get people on board. Even people that you don't think you probably would be able to. We're dealing with the liberals. Labor, for example, I recently sent an email to Treasury on some issues that I had. And you can see the language that I use over here. I'm talking about disadvantaged groups. This essentially means wage theft. And talking how things are unfair and unequal. And saying, this policy is bad. There's a lot of actually wasted money, which Treasury loves to hear and wants to fix. And I got a response within a day literally saying, like, thank you for sending it through. We'll take a look at it. By the way, and I've blocked this up all of you because I don't want to show that email. Here's our private email on if you want to have a meeting with us and talk to us some more. And this is an advertised on the public website. This is like on the side that you have to ask to get. So like, maybe I've been in Treasury. I don't know, maybe, but, you know, showing that you have value to other groups and you can really expand quite a bit. That's kind of what I've been doing this whole time to work more closely with the new government. So going back to the third point was creating a simple message. Kind of said that a few times, but it is very important to keep it simple. If you have not just a message, but then a way through and then like five other things, it's going to be like, what happened when we tried to become a republic? You try to go through the details and then you have division and then it will just never happen. You kind of need to keep it simple to get people on board first. And so simple is very, very important to bring people together. And again, get people outside of your echo chamber. If they're very, very different from you as a person, that you generally wouldn't like as a friend, but can have as an ally, probably on the right track. And also, of course, at no point do I say that you trade off on your values. And I'm not saying you sell out and be like the teacher's pet by any means. And also demonstrating influence. And the term I kind of like using is being kind of like the nexus of resources for your network of support. Basically, what I deal with is now at a national level, I have people from the NTU, from the branch level, they'll contact me and go, you know, we need to do this. Can you help with that? Do you know anyone that can help with this? And so everyone kind of comes to you for help. And then you can offer them help. And then when they need help, they come back to you. And generally, that's kind of how it works. It's like it's a real big networking thing. And that's where it kind of snowballs. You meet new people there that way. And you just really diversify it to a point that you have a lot of allies. And the big thing is that if you're generous and you show genuine support for your allies, they will come and help you. And you just become like a big player in your center of networks. And that's basically how I've been looking at it and still working on it, I guess. But yeah, for me, there's a lot for making change, at least nationally. For example, I've sort of diversified out a little bit and I've met people that have a publisher that wants to have a book on Australian universities. And so I preserved an authorship position to write a chapter on it. So that's kind of fun. I still have a few bills from the previous government that I want to bury. So that's something that I want to do for making change and work more closely with the NTEU. And I did say this, pardon me, that wonders if there's an appetite for some global influence, working with Canada or in the UK and the US because their academics that feel the same way too. So I'm exploring that, but that's probably like 10 years from now, perhaps. But just to summarize, because I went through a lot really quickly, I think, is that you need to have a logical and meaningful connection with your message to get people on board. You don't have to change people's values and to have change. You just need to understand their values and show how what your message is can still resonate with their values, if possible. Have a diverse group of allies, and I will say this again, very diverse group is better. And be generous with your allies and your support network because if you help them, they will find a way to help you. Even if you don't, it doesn't seem apparent that they'll be able to help you in the future. For example, just yesterday, I was working with the Department of Education. They asked me a bunch of questions about the education framework. We went on a tangent as you do. And in the 30 minutes, we started talking about PhDs. And I went to the pedagogy of education and teaching, and they were like, that's really cool. No one would tell us this. And I was like, look, I'm not present forever. If you want, just contact me. And they were like, can I have your personal email? And I'm like, sure. So I have an in with the Department of Education on a personal level. Just offered it. So it's just being generous, I guess, and working with people. But yeah, does anyone have any questions or I don't know what time it is. Did I go overtime? I didn't time myself. Where's my phone? There it is. I can only see one hand up, but I don't know if it's because it's just the hand that I... Yeah, I'll just go then. You spoke a lot about trying to set up events. I'm just wondering how you would go about setting up those kind of large events in a post-pandemic setting. Like would you approach student services, send out emails, flyers? So I will say that, yes, that is actually... That's the hardest question that no one solved in two years. That one I probably couldn't even give you an answer to, to be honest. Because people want human interaction and it's really not the same. I've seen a few platforms that kind of make it a little bit easier because one thing that everyone has done a lot have tried to do is that they've brought everyone to a Zoom room and everyone... And you can imagine only one person speaks. Now you can break that down a little bit and have like little rooms on the side, I guess. But I've seen a few... I can't think of what website it is, but there are a few where you can literally have more like a virtual kind of world. And you have to look this up, but where you can kind of move around a little bit so that when you're communicating with people, you're not communicating with the entire room and you're not disrupting the entire room and only one person can speak. So they do exist. And I think that as things go on, those kind of platforms will also develop and get better. But yeah, honestly, I have not solved that one at all. I admit. Yeah, that's fine. It's a difficult one. So any other questions? I don't know. I can't see all the names. Yeah. So feel free to unmute your microphones to ask more questions or also pop them in the chat. We can read them out for you. We do actually have a question in the chat. How do you reach out to people as an introvert asks Ahmed? Ah, yeah. So I would say that to some extent being on the spectrum, I'm naturally a bit of an introvert myself. I admit there was one point. I don't recommend this. The alcohol did help at one point. I would not... I'm not saying you should though. I would say that it sort of depends. If you're the one leading it, it can be a bit hard. But I will say that one event that I've looked at working with the Swinburne Leadership Hub to kind of grow this group is that introverts struggle initially with breaking into a conversation, that icebreaker. Now, I feel like the whole like, you know, speed dating thing is a bit pushed and it feels unnatural and people just feel like, ugh. So what you can do instead is you have icebreaking kind of activities that kind of subconsciously gets people to be more involved. So you can have fun little activities like, you know, here's a bunch of sticks. Now you build the highest tower possible and you get people to work together. You could have, depending on your group, you could have like just a massive thousand piece puzzle and you get people to start working together because you're like, oh, you know, I'm looking at this piece, I'm working on that end. People start working together and they start talking. And then because you're doing things and talking to people and doing something, that breaks the ice more naturally and then people want to actually talk and that's how an introvert kind of opens up because once they talk, they're fine. But it's just getting that initial talking that's part of the problem. If you're an individual that's an introvert, I would point out that by definition, an introvert is someone that really needs to recharge by themselves. I don't know if you mean introvert as in like, I generally don't know how to interact with people or you need to recharge a lot more because I need to recharge a lot. I go into a coma state once I deal with an event that's big. I just like go home and I just sleep, but that's me. So you want to clarify what introversion means or did I cover that a little bit? Where's my chat gone? Maybe I should just stop sharing a screen. Yeah, that's easy off. So everyone have any other questions? I actually had a follow-up question on that. So you talked about how, as an introvert, you need to find, it's good to find your ground and find common grounds and kind of get out of that shell a bit more and it takes time. In your personal experience, on average, how long has it taken you to, you said you are a bit of an introvert, how long has it taken you to get comfortable with reaching out more? I think it was through the course of my PhD, my honours and PhD, it was actually slightly before this. I realised I had a knack for finding people that had similar issues or like finding people that way. So I think it was a, it's very weird that an introvert has this, but I had a knack for just like talking to people. So in the lab, I learnt this because I was doing my experience in the lab and people go, what are you doing? And then I tell people what I'm doing, ice breaker. And then you kind of ask what they're doing and they tell you what they're doing as an experiment and you learn a little bit about what they're doing and eventually someone else will say I have this problem and you go, actually I spoke to a guy yesterday and he had that problem. And it kind of just happened that way, you know? That's how I learned how to break the ice with people. Often, yeah, it's just taking curiosity in other people helps. And I think that most people, if you talk to a professor, you just ask what is your research about and then just let them talk for a while. That's like easy. Open to kind of worms. Pretty much, pretty much. And then you have to find the gaffer tape to make them stop. So it's actually quite easy. If you make this less about you and you try to talk about them they'll get the conversation going for you for most of the time. Thank you for that. I've got a follow-up as well. You spoke about kind of student representative roles where there's only one person involved. Is there anything that we as students can do to better improve the lack of proper student representation? So do you mean like at your campus or nationally or? Bit of both. I think that addressing it in a local setting will probably achieve your short-term goals but then again, you need to address it nationally to improve it Australia-wide or worldwide. Well, I dare say that if every single student in the country all rebelled simultaneously you probably would get national movement almost immediately. It's just that it's really hard to do. So I dare say that to some extent I would not short, I would not look down on grassroots movements. I would say that in terms of on campus I feel like it's actually quite simple. It goes back to what I mentioned about trying to find what people believe in and not dismissing their views and values because the second you do that you cause division. Now, I don't want to go into full politics mode here but if you think about it, there are examples out there but no one really explains it. Donald Trump is an example of a politician that has gotten through to a position of power by dividing people. That's not a, I would say personally, that's not a good way of a movement because there's a this and there's a that. So you're always fighting and that causes polarization. You should be working on something that brings people together. And that's where trying to just listen to your fellow students and not being dismissive is really big. Like people will be like, oh, you know, you're a political hack, whatever it might be. That happens all the time. I get called political hack these days. I'm like, yeah, whatever. I used to hate them. I used to be the one that called people political acts. So yeah, I think being less dismissive plays a big part in it and educating people because yeah, I think that a lot of what we do, what we're passionate about sometimes pushes people away because we force them to try and believe in what we believe in. Hi, Errol, not a follow-up question, but just like appreciative of your presentation and all the wealth that you shared with us and also just highlighting that it was really just sort of a good refresher to know that importance of seeking like-minded people is important when you go out and sort of trying to make a change. And I also love the stories that you share about like making noise without banging things kind of things that yes, they took away the coffee machine. So rather than showing activism in a traditional way, you showed it in a way that, you know, this is actually important for a change. We sort of have a similar issue in my institute where they removed a microwave saying it's going to reduce COVID exposures. I don't know how. So what we did was we formed huge lines outside the cafeteria with two microwaves and that's when they saw, okay, that that's no way people are going to deal with. So they ended up putting more microwaves, but yeah, just making noise without making noise. I love that. Thanks for sharing that. Yeah, and I want to also add to that is that I think one thing that happened, which is unfortunate is a lot of international students really struggled to raise their voice because there's a lot of fears that come with visa and whatnot. But these are not things that the university or the authority can really cause trouble. They're not doing anything actually wrong. So I feel like this kind really can work well with international students if they were to group up and do stuff like this to really raise awareness without actually causing trouble but raising real awareness. But yeah. No, I agree. Yeah, 100%. I had a question if that's okay. You mentioned that you were politically disengaged at one point in your life and I was just wondering if you had any advice for people who are also like that who are interested in becoming more informed citizens. So I love that question. Actually, young girl, what would you do? I would say that I'm someone that never really read books up until recently, which is really weird, but I dare say I have about 15 books from past prime ministers and they range from Bob Hawk, Whitlam, I dare say I've even read Howard, Fraser, Turnbull, all of them. And I'm not saying you have to agree with anything that they say, but it's just seeing things from their point of view. Now, you can be cynical and be like, yeah, okay, revisionist history, but I did this for this reason, but they really be only was another reason. But it's interesting to see the different points of views and how someone justifies things. And I feel like overall, you get a bigger picture. And because you read all of these different prime ministers that went against each other at some point, you get this really interesting crosshatch and you're like, oh, okay, I get this for you. And I think it's kind of fun because I found my own point of view and a lot of it. So there are parts where people didn't realize there were certain people at one point, like Bob Hawk was at odds with his own party. Whitlam was at odds with his own party. And we see them as heroes, sure, but there were times where things were got a little sticky, where they didn't necessarily see eye to eye. And it was just kind of interesting to see that. And I took a deep appreciation to it. And I've been called this, I don't know why, but I've been called literally a radical centrist. I don't know if that's an insult or a compliment, but there's like, you can't be a radical centrist or whatever, but I like it, sure. But yeah, that's why I haven't picked a side. Like maybe that's why you've asked that question, but I just enjoy learning about it, but I don't necessarily feel the need that I need to categorize myself into all of these things and all of those things and pick a side per se. I definitely get that. I feel like as much as I try and learn, I feel like the less I understand because there is not that category that fits perfectly here. Sorry, thank you, thank you. Yeah, there's a lot of us like, there's a lot like us, it's just that we're very quiet generally. I mean, I didn't read the manual, it was meant to be quiet and then I just got loud. But, you know, we do exist. It just seems like we don't exist. You see in the votes though. Any other questions for Errol? Errol, that was so fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us. Obviously quite some hilarious stories and some really massive wins, but also just some really good pragmatic approaches. So I think that this itself is an incredible resource actually. Thank you so much. Is there any more questions for Errol? And, you know, because I'm serious to what I'm saying, I'm going to be quite generous about this. If anyone does want to reach out, you are welcome to add me on Facebook and email me. I don't mind honestly. So I'll put the, you can carry on doing your thing. I'm just going to add my details there. And if anyone just wants to talk and stuff, I'm happy to talk to people. At least don't spam my email though with like ads and stuff. Like that's not cool. Don't ruin that generosity of illness. But yeah, you know, feel free to add, find that on Facebook or email me. I'm on LinkedIn as well. I think you can Google my name, you'll find me eventually. But yeah. Any final questions at all? Well, thank you so much for that inspiring session, Errol. The methods that you've spoken about and have actually gone through with yourself in terms of getting everyone together or how to get everyone together to gain that wider support, to craft and change on that kind of a level and actually reach your goal. I think it was really inspiring to hear. Thank you so much and thank you for your generosity. No, thank you for inviting me. I thought it was actually kind of fun. So yeah.