Have QUT been shilling out their students to develop strategy for the LNP in Rudd's seat of Griffith? Well gosh, it certainly looks that way.

A Business student at Queensland University of Technology says his uni has been shilling out their students to help develop free strategy for the Liberal National Party, to defeat Kevin Rudd in his seat of Griffith.

At 8.55am yesterday morning, the following post turned up on a political thread over at Something Awful.

“So my assignment this semester at University is to help the LNP candidate for Griffith come up with a campaign to snatch young voters away from Kevin Rudd. It smelled fishy but I figured that our work would not be shared with the client and it was simply a real life example. That is until today where the candidate himself came with full campaign gear to talk about himself and Kevin Rudd’s weaknesses. His Young Liberal helpers also handed out pamphlets … This is clearly the LNP using University Students to help their think tank knockout Kevin Rudd.”

The student, whose Something Awful moniker is Anidav, is studying a Bachelor of Business at Queensland University of Technology, with a major in advertising. As part of the coursework, the students were given an assessment to develop what appeared to be a hypothetical media strategy for Dr. Bill Glasson, a political first-timer who’s challenging Kevin Rudd in Griffith during the Federal Election.

“At first I thought it was an assignment with a coincidental real world example,” Anidav told Junkee this afternoon. “[But] the more the assignment was talked about, the more apparent it became that the LNP was a lot closer to this assignment than students are used to.”

On Tuesday, the students received an email from the course co-ordinator explaining that Dr. Glasson’s campaign manager, Katrina Ronne, would be coming to that Thursday’s lecture. Glasson himself arrived too, and spoke to the class about how the Labour Party was falling short with young people, and how his campaign was hoping to portray Kevin Rudd in the lead up to the next election.

“He was talking up and about his campaign, and his Social Media expert was talking down on Mr. Rudd,” Anidav says. “He talked about his campaign, his party, himself, Kevin Rudd, and after he was done talking he held a quick Q&A session which was dominated by students pitching ideas against Mr. Rudd.”

So, the basic facts: students were being asked by their lecturer to come up with a campaign against Kevin Rudd, and to pitch them to his opposition ahead of the Federal Election. For free. “[The lecturer] stated during the lecture that she was a close friend of the candidate,” Anidav told us, “and after the session with the candidate was over, the campaign manager gifted the lecturer an LNP shirt.”

Adding to the sussness of the whole ordeal, the lecturer told the class that the top assignment would be passed on to Glasson’s campaign “unless the student opted out,” Anidav says. Meanwhile, Young Liberals were handing political pamphlets out around the lecture theatre. The executive Dean of QUT Business School, Prof. Robina Xavier, sent us their official statement, which explained the assessment as normal practice for the course: “The completion of an assignment for third-year advertising students is an exercise in advertising budgeting, not in politics, and will not involve the development of creative content.” But it’s hard to imagine Glasson walked away from the exercise without a few free ideas, at the expense of fee-paying students.

Today, Anidav and his class received an email “clarifying” that students can “opt in” for their assignment to be sent to the LNP. “During the lecture, she said ‘opt out’,” Anidav says. “I believe there is some degree of damage control involved.”

“I feel a little used,” he continues. “It obviously reeks of cheap labour, and the involvement of the LNP is nothing short of desperate.”