Page last updated 27/12/2025.
Disclaimer: no guarantees of factual accuracy. Some claims are based on best evidence.
Since the start of 2024, the Monash Student Association has been run by the Change ticket. Before that it was run by the Together ticket.
Everybody insists that there are two separate issues when looking at the misogyny article - misogyny on the one hand, and censorship and defamation on the other.
First, read The State of Misogyny in the MSA. A condensed and edited version has been published by the University of Melbourne’s Farrago and the University of Sydney’s Honi Soit.
Grace, interviewer and author of the misogyny article, was a 2024 MSA Women’s Affairs Committee member elected on the Together ticket and the unsuccessful Elevate candidate for MSA Secretary in the 2024 MSA elections. From the start of 2025 she has run Not-So-Shrinking Violet - an Instagram page and a series of pieces in Lot’s Wife, the MSA student magazine, covering women’s issues and feminism. She lives with 2025 Lot’s Wife Editor Mandy and a 2025 Women’s Officer.
Individuals named as interviewees in the misogyny article include another 2025 Lot’s Wife Editor Aishwariya and the 2024-2025 Disabilities & Carers Officer, who was the mover of the MSC 7 motions listed later.
The members of the MSA Executive at the time of the misogyny article’s writing and release, all linked to Change and the Labor Left, include the 2026 National Union of Students President, a 2026 Lot’s Wife Editor (currently Treasurer since July), the 2026 MSA Secretary (currently General Representative) and the 2025-2026 Clubs & Societies President.
In the past, the Lot’s Wife Editors were able to directly consult with the MSA lawyer for advice on potential defamation. The experience of an MSA office bearer who previously submitted to Lot’s Wife was that passages that were potentially defamatory would be identified and could be amended to resubmit in consultation with the Lot’s Wife Editors. Throughout this year, the Lot’s Wife Editors have been able to resolve these cases without MSA Executive intervention. The misogyny article was the first time that the Executive censored Lot’s Wife this year.
Throughout, the Executive corresponded almost exclusively with the Lot’s Wife Editors. Grace corresponded almost exclusively with Mandy, who relayed updates.
At the end of August, Grace emailed the directly elected members of the Executive - the President, Treasurer and Secretary - notifying them that she was planning the misogyny article and inviting comment. Grace received no direct reply to this email and never was officially emailed by any Executive member. In separate correspondence with the President Sasha, Grace indicated that she would welcome advice on avoiding potential defamation to ensure that the article could be published.
Having been made aware of a potentially defamatory upcoming article about the MSA and individuals in the MSA, the Executive demanded that the Lot’s Wife Editors email Grace’s imminent submission to the MSA lawyer and CC the Executive.
There are two versions of what follows. In both, individual Executive members speak with Lot’s Wife Editors, who agree that they will consult with the MSA lawyer. The Lot’s Wife Editors then indicate either that they will not CC the Executive when contacting the lawyer, or that they will CC the Executive as they had done the rest of the year.
Subsequently, with members believing that the Lot’s Wife Editors would otherwise attempt to bypass them, the Executive barred the MSA lawyer from taking correspondence from Lot’s Wife and mandated that the Editors send Grace’s submission directly to the Executive.
In early September, a week after the advertised submission deadline for Lot’s Wife had passed, Grace emailed a first draft to the Editors requesting that it be shared with the Executive to see if an article could be published in some form. The President emailed it to the MSA lawyer who advised simply, one day before the paper was to go to print, that the draft was potentially defamatory and that the Executive would have grounds under the MSA Constitution to direct the Lot’s Wife Editors to not include it. Consequently, the Executive voted to ban the Lot’s Wife Editors from publishing the draft.
Since sending the draft, Grace edited the article to remove content that she thought could be potentially defamatory. After the rejection of the first draft by the Executive, she made no further attempts to submit the article to Lot’s Wife. Instead, it was submitted to other student newspapers at different universities.
In Radwife, the sixth Lot’s Wife issue of 2025, redaction bars take the place of the article. Separately for this edition, Radio Monash recorded Rad Wife - Aish and Georgie Chat Student Media. In the interview Aishwariya (a Lot’s Wife Editor and one of the students interviewed for the misogyny article) and Georgie (Radio Monash President) cover a lot of ground, but among the topics discussed are censorship and misogyny.
A Monash Student Council meeting was scheduled for early October. Two days before, an agenda was circulated to MSC members and subscribers, in which item F was confidential and available only to MSC members to be discussed in camera (with no observers permitted). On the day of the meeting, a final agenda was circulated without any confidential sections. The final agenda was available to only MSC members before the meeting.
Item F in the final agenda, titled Lot’s Wife Article, contained 3 motions:
Preamble:
In late August of 2025, student writer and advocate Grace Binns wrote to the MSA Executive to give notice of her intention to write an article investigating the state of misogyny in the MSA for publication in the final edition of Lot’s Wife for 2025. In the absence of a reply, Grace proceeded to research and write the piece, submitting it prior to the Lot’s Wife deadline, only to be advised that the article was not permitted to go to print. Pursuant to clause 34 (9)(c) of the MSA Constitution, the MSA Executive had directed Lot’s Wife to not publish the piece on account of legal advice that had been received that it could be ‘potentially defamatory’. Grace received no direct communication from the MSA Executive regarding the legal advice or the decision made. She was not advised by the Executive at any stage as to how the piece was potentially defamatory, who it was potentially defaming, or how it could be amended in order to ensure its inclusion in the final edition of Lot’s Wife.
This decision by the MSA Executive represents an alarming infringement on the independence of student media at Monash, a concerning aversion to criticism, and a reluctance to acknowledge and address the impact of systemic misogyny on the experiences of women within the MSA.
Motion #4:
This MSC:
- Condemns the decision of the MSA Executive to suppress the article by Grace Binns in question, particularly without explanation or consultation.
- Affirms the importance of a free, independent, and thriving body of student media at Monash University in highlighting social, political, and personal issues that interest the student body.
Preamble:
Misogyny is a systemic issue that is pervasive in all institutions, and the MSA is no exception. It is gravely important that the MSA not only affirms the lived experiences of women, but actively works to combat an issue that is so deeply entrenched in its culture. As such, to deny the publishing of the article is to deny the experiences of women in the MSA and their encounters with sexism. As Monash’s largest student advocacy body, passive performance is not enough – the MSA should feel both morally and socially obligated to actively work against the perpetuation of misogynist attitudes, in order to ensure all student representatives can enjoy a healthy and dynamic working culture that promotes empathy, growth, and authenticity.
Fundamental to combatting misogyny is the understanding that it does not solely manifest as overt declarations of gendered prejudice, but also through more insidious behaviours such as manipulation and intimidation that perpetuate traditional conceptions of masculinity as a means to dominance. By challenging misogyny, we recognise that true leadership does not necessitate power-hungry bulldozing; by challenging misogyny, we affirm that leadership can instead be guided by kindness, empathy, and understanding; by challenging misogyny, we ensure that the MSA always aspires to be a place where all can feel safe, welcome, and supported.
Motion #5:
This MSC:
- Formally acknowledges that misogyny occurs within the MSA, and recognises the varied and intersectional lived experiences of women and gender diverse people who have had to navigate a misogynistic culture in the MSA, both historically and contemporarily.
- Commits the MSA to upholding and enhancing existing structures for the promotion of gender based equality, and acknowledges the current systemic failings that have enabled the perpetuation of misogyny in the MSA.
Motion #6:
This MSC:
- Commits to undertaking an institutional review of gender based equality in the MSA.
- Asks that this review be undertaken by the sitting and future Women’s OBs, in conjunction with the MSA executive, and appropriate, independent professionals.
- Requests that the review begin with a period of consultation and assessment of current organisational culture prior to the end of 2025, and involve the establishment of a working group to publicly present deliverable actions and suggested reforms by April 2026.
Just before the meeting, Grace posted her (revised) article on Instagram. That it was different from the draft submitted to the Executive was revealed partway through the debate by Executive members who had been reading it during the meeting.
The meeting was attended by a group of students invited by Grace, many of whom spoke during the debate.
The misogyny article motions were the first real item on the agenda. Before they could be debated, MSA Executive Divisional representative Jay moved to skip them. The MSC voted 12 to 11 to address the motions.
During the debate, a number of speakers asked to be directly quoted in the minutes under the MSC standing orders. The standing orders are understood to not mandate that minutes include direct quotations on request.
Read Lot’s Wife’s live coverage of the debate (view thread without an account).
The MSC chair Sasha closed debate on the first motion after 50 minutes, with a few people left on the speaking list. In a move opposed by supporters of the motions, the MSC resolved 12 to 11 to vote on all three motions en bloc, that is in a single vote rather than separately as originally submitted. Debate was not reopened, so the latter two motions were voted on as part of the bloc without being discussed.
The vote was conducted with 23 MSC members and proxies present besides the chair. The first vote by show of hands was declared 11 in favour, 11 against and 2 abstentions, with Sasha casting the tiebreaking vote against. A recount was declared 11 in favour, 11 against and 2 abstentions, with Sasha casting the tiebreaking vote against. Supporters of the motions identified that the total both times was 24, more than the 23 votes that there were supposed to be.
After some argument, a physical division was called. Returning 11 votes in favour, 10 against and 2 abstentions, the 3 motions passed.
I will make a few points about the censorship issue. For background, I am not a student politician but I am acquainted with people on both sides of the MSC vote and debate. Like everybody else, my perspective including the account given above is coloured by my interactions and relationships with the student politicians, including conversations about the misogyny article.
The following are more or less agreed:
(It will probably not surprise that I am sympathetic to Grace’s lateness.)
An article should have been published. It is a failure that the article has not yet been published by Lot’s Wife, on paper or online. There are a number of intersecting reasons that combined for this outcome, possibly including some structural reasons. Nevertheless, the whole episode gives the appearance that the prospects of the article’s publication and subsequent events could have been influenced by the embarrassment that the article could cause. Indeed, some MSA members contend that the article was conceived to embarrass the MSA and specific powerful and well-connected Change student politicians.
In general, it is impossible to go without acknowledging that everybody here - including Grace, the MSA Executive, the Lot’s Wife Editors, and every MSC member - is political in some way. Many of them, by the nature and subject of the misogyny article, may be allies or opponents of alleged perpetrators of incidents described in the article or individuals potentially defamed. By the nature and subject of the misogyny article, it will be difficult to dispel the appearance that these relationships could motivate their actions regardless of how much they did.
Lot’s Wife Editors suggest that the article could have been published, at least online, had the previous arrangements remained in which they would CC the MSA Executive when emailing the MSA lawyer. This would have allowed them the flexibility to directly consult with the lawyer to identify and rectify potentially defamatory parts of the article. As it was, the new arrangement in which the MSA Executive acted as intermediary (after the Executive lost confidence in Lot’s Wife cooperating) made it almost impossible to meet the time constraints for publication in the paper and to know how and where the article was potentially defamatory to fix for online publication.
MSA Executive members claim, including at the MSC meeting, that the door remained open for resubmission of the article which could be published online. Grace and Lot’s Wife Editors did not seem to believe that that was a possibility given the lack of elaboration relayed from the MSA Executive.
A fact of life for journalists operating in this country is that Australian defamation law is notoriously weighted against journalists. Most rely on the resources of their publisher before and after publication.
Grace was well aware that there was a risk of defaming people in writing her article. She was not arrogant enough to believe that it should be handled alone.
None of the students, not even the law students, are lawyers or qualified to advise on defamation. It would not have been appropriate for the MSA Executive or its members to directly give legal advice on defamation or how to avoid it.
It is impossible and unwise to really capture what happens, or appears to happen, in MSC meetings. If you have the time and want to know what happens at MSC without omissions, I encourage you to observe live on campus or virtually rather than just reading Lot’s Wife or my accounts.
The MSA is a notoriously opaque organisation (even to some of its MSC directors) with an unhelpful institutional attitude to student journalism. In one instance, I had a favourable outcome delivered verbally in an unrelated chance meeting half a year after asking, and never received any official or written communication. In some ways, the MSA is more open as a stranger.
However, there have been improvements this year to institutional transparency, notably publicising office bearer honorariums and several MSA regulations.
The MSA Executive (and equivalent committees) specifically is highly inaccessible and secretive. Its proceedings and resolutions are officially confidential. In some cases there are conceivably good reasons for this but given its powers and activities it is a problem for transparency. It is not surprising that outsiders and insiders alike struggle and hesitate to navigate and interpret it, or read the tea leaves so to speak.
The MSA Executive never shares legal advice that it says it receives with relevant parties or the Monash Student Council. It could, and members of the MSA Executive often express a personal willingness to agree to do so, but it never does. So there is nothing unusual about them not sharing the legal advice in this case. There would be a problem if the MSA Executive was misrepresenting legal advice so it should be fine to accept their claims about legal advice at face value.
Lot’s Wife itself, including its Editors and its reporters, is an institution that is highly politicised and enmeshed in the internal politics of the MSA. Its Editors are invariably elected as part of the ticket that wins overall control of the MSA - the student union that Lot’s Wife is meant to hold to account. In particular, since Change won election to the MSA, the Lot’s Wife Editors have come from a faction of the Labor Left. The social, political and constitutional reality is that Lot’s Wife cannot be considered to be independent media in the current situation, regardless of the overt censorship exercised by the MSA Executive this year.
Accepting that Lot’s Wife is currently irredeemably compromised, the Editors over the past two years have made great improvements to its non-creative output, especially in the sphere of local student politics. It is the one student media publication that consistently and seriously covers the Monash Student Council through its live tweeting and articles in its papers, in the absence of any speedy release of official minutes. Under these Editors, many student politicians and activists from various groups and factions have contributed to the paper. At the 2025 National Union of Students National Conference, Lot’s Wife journalists provided among the best and most comprehensive coverage out of student media organisations across the nation. It could even be argued that Lot’s Wife and its student politics coverage have benefited from its factional connections.
The only student journalists at Clayton are in Lot’s Wife and it is difficult to imagine journalists emerging anywhere else on campus in the near future. Grace could be characterised as independent but Lot’s Wife has been arguably her major platform. Lot’s Wife is the only viable platform at Monash.
The point is that Lot’s Wife is not independent and was not before the MSA misogyny article. The question is really about Lot’s Wife as free - and thriving - media.
This inevitably must be driven by the Lot’s Wife Editors. They have and continue to make an admirable effort to do so. But it is essential also that the student politicians including the MSA Executive are actively supportive. In dealing with the misogyny article, the MSA Executive was focused primarily on the censorship of potentially defamatory material which is correctly their principal responsibility. In my opinion they should also be considerate of facilitating and pushing the work of student journalists and Lot’s Wife. They failed to do so in this instance.
Student media is important in principle - for transparency, because students have a right to know about what goes on at their university and in their student union, and in the interests of student safety. Student media is also important to hold institutions to account and to bring about better governance and safety institutions. I believe that from student media, all else flows.