Illuminate candidate for Education Vice-President and first-year journalism student Nicola Gulvin can offer nothing but glowing praise for Illuminate’s performance in managing the Curtin Student Guild.

Gulvin, who previously served as a Guild Councillor and ran for the office of Women’s Officer, said she wanted to help students who were facing academic hardship, and needed a little leg-up.

Illuminate’s most important promise is to stand up to students, according to Gulvin.

“The Guild is there for the students, and that’s what we’re supposed to do,” Gulvin said.

“We have stopped our tuition-free weeks from being taken away.

“We have fought a lot for the rights of our students, we have gone to protests and things like that to help stop higher education cuts.

“We are in a position to stop those things from happening, and we take all of the chances we get to help stop higher education cuts and things like that.”

Gulvin hit back against Left Action’s claims that the Guild under Illuminate was not being politically active enough.

“Honestly I’m not sure where they’re getting this information from. We have been very involved, we just haven’t spent all of our time on that, because we do try to cover all bases,” she said.

When low voter turnout to guild elections threatened the legitimacy of the organisation, Gulvin had this to say:

“If they choose not to vote, and not to have their voice heard, we can’t really do anything about it, but we have to just believe that the students who have voted do show what the majority of students would like.”

Gulvin did not express any concerns about Illuminate’s leader Liam O’Neill being elected guild president unopposed, saying he was the person for the role, and students did have a choice, but just didn’t nominate for the position themselves.

Can students really trust the Illuminate to keep their election promises? In 2015, they promised to fix the Kent Street crossing. Gulvin said the Guild tried to deliver, but that it was ultimately up to the University and the WA State Government.

Which begs the question as to why they’d campaign on the issue given that they did not have all that much control over it.

Gulvin said students can trust the Guild to keep its promises because it always has the best interests of Curtin students at heart.

“We do want to actually influence what happens there, we do want to show students that we are concerned about bigger things than just what we control,” she said.