Check out this post on Rafi Alam's blog. Rafi Alam is a former Councillor of the SRC at USyd. He was in Grassroots on that campus.
"For anyone that knows me, you know that I believe the University of Sydney Union is a joke. It’s a joke because of what it does, what it fails to do, and how it is organised. But you pay around $100 a year to fund it, and it’s the self-declared centre of student life, and you realise it has a $20 million budget, and that it’s the first non-academic thing most students see when they first enter university, and it’s not so funny anymore."