Salient » Elle Hunt

Ready to Die?

Elle Hunt — Sun, 20 May 2012 21:00:18 +0000

While the campaign to legalise voluntary euthanasia has gained traction in recent months, suicide remains a social taboo. Salient chief feature writer Elle Hunt whether individuals should be permitted the freedom to end their lives.

“If you drink this, you will die,” Professor Sean Davison told his 85-year-old mother Patricia, as he handed her a glass of water in which he had mixed a “good dozen” crushed morphine tablets.

Cancer-ravaged Patricia was “longing to die”, wrote Davison in the manuscript that led to his subsequent arrest. He had no other choice than to give her a choice: “What kind of sane person would keep their mother in a bedroom to rot to death?”

Davison’s frank and compassionate defense of his actions in coverage of his high- profile trial quickly established him as the face of voluntary euthanasia in both New Zealand and his adopted nation of South Africa. Though he has since returned to Cape Town after completing five months’ home detention for assisting his mother’s suicide, the debate he sparked is ongoing.

Labour MP Maryan Street is leading the charge for the law to be changed to reflect an individual’s right to die with her End of Life Choice member’s bill, a result of collaboration with the Voluntary Euthanasia Society. Her efforts were validated by a Sunday Star-Times poll earlier this month that found more than 85 per cent of the 1,000-odd respondents were in favour of legalising voluntary euthanasia.

“There is more support out in the community for this than people imagine,” Street told the Nelson Mail.

That Street’s campaign is gaining traction suggests public perceptions of voluntary euthanasia have changed; that human, emotive cases such as Davison’s have gone some way to diminish the stigma of ending the life of a dependent human being for their benefit and at their request. But this societal shift has not extended to the right of an individual to end their own life, prompting the question: how do we decide who has the right to die?

“Research has shown that a substantial majority of people have considered suicide at one time in their lives, and I mean considered it seriously,” wrote psychologist Paul G. Quinnett in Suicide: The Forever Decision.

Though suicide is not considered a criminal matter here as it is in other countries (encouraging or assisting someone to commit suicide, or killing someone in pursuance of a suicide pact, however, falls under the Crimes Act 1961), it is nonetheless a social taboo. That’s not to imply that it is frequent; with 11 deaths occurring on average each week, it is a major public health concern. Around 540 suicides and at least 20,000 attempts occur each year, and even allowing for discrepancies in reporting, New Zealand has one of the highest rates of youth suicide of all 34 countries in the OECD.

Rather, it’s not talked about. The Government has been criticised for its perceived inaction on suicide, with Community Action on Suicide Prevention Education and Research’s (CASPER) calls for a Royal Commission of Inquiry into the matter to be established so far going ignored. “The fact is, there is absolutely no sense of urgency in government about the fact that 558 people are dying a year, 11 a week,” CASPER founder Maria Bradshaw told Fairfax Media in February. “If it was anything else, it would be a national state of emergency.”

Setting aside the question of whether treating suicide as a matter of “national… emergency” would be appropriate or desirable, in truth, New Zealand has had a national suicide prevention strategy in place since 2006. Its seven goals are intended to serve as a framework for suicide prevention efforts over the next decade, and include the promotion of mental health and wellbeing; improving the care of people experiencing mental disorders or who have attempted suicide; and reducing access to means of suicide. According to the Ministry of Health, “its overarching aim is to reduce the rate of suicidal behaviour and its effects on the lives of New Zealanders, while taking into account that suicide affects certain groups more than others.”

But, for certain groups within society, even the existence of a national suicide prevention strategy can be seen as unwelcome interference from the state. The argument goes that in a truly free society, if one has a right to live, one must then also have a right to die, and to do so without obstruction from others. Nietzsche succinctly expressed this viewpoint when he wrote, “There is a certain right by which we may deprive a man of life, but none by which we may deprive him of death.”

Though it is more valid as a philosophical stance than a practicable aspiration, this position is an extension of the traditional liberal or libertarian stance that a person is the rightful owner of his or her body—an argument that has been used to defend both the legalisation of abortion and the abolishment of slavery.

“To hold otherwise—to declare that society must give you permission to kill yourself—is to contradict the right to life at its root,” wrote Thomas A. Bowden of the Ayn Rand Institute for Capitalism magazine. “If you have a duty to go on living, despite your better judgment, then your life does not belong to you, and you exist by permission, not by right.”

American scholar and feminist Carolyn Heilbrun subscribed to the view that suicide was one’s moral right, and acted on this conviction in October 2003, when she was 77. At the time of her death, she was not ill, on medication or depressed; in fact, none of the traditional ‘risk factors’ for suicide were apparent. Therefore, her suicide was understood by her friends and family interviewed by New York magazine to be “an act of will, an idea brought to life. It was something she chose, by herself, for herself.”

“This is a person who was inventive and energetic and gutsy, and that same person at some point decided to stop living,” Judith Resnik, a Yale Law professor, described Heilbrun.

Though there is considerable evidence that Heilburn reached a conscious and deliberate decision, in compos mentis, to end her own life, her death will be incomprehensible to most. Very few psychiatrists will accept that a desire to attempt suicide could be anything but symptomatic of mental illness. For this reason, if a suicide attempt fails and the individual is still believe to pose a risk to his or her self, measures will be put place to prevent them from acting on their impulse.

Those who believe that suicide is a fundamental right will argue that suicide prevention is an example of the state’s coercion of an individual to remain alive against their will, and therefore in violation of the self-ownership that is intrinsic to free society. But this argument highlights the fact that the defense of one’s right to suicide must be kept within a philosophical context.

In reality, suicide prevention is an entirely necessary and moral step. Cases such as Heilbrun’s, where the individual has made a rational decision to take their own life, are by far the minority; depression and alcohol abuse are the two most significant risk factors for suicide, and neither leave someone in a position to make a reasoned judgement about whether it is better to live or die. Moreover, as every one suicide is understood to seriously affect six people, measures such as the New Zealand Government’s own national suicide prevention strategy are of utmost importance.

The right to suicide, then, must be understood to exist as a hypothesis, rather than an aspiration. If it were even possible to diminish the social stigma of suicide, doing so could render less effective measures currently in place to prevent at-risk individuals, such as those suffering from depression or alcohol dependance, from acting on impulse. Nonetheless, moves to legalise another form of elective death—voluntary euthanasia—do raise questions about life, death, and our own freedom as individuals.

What It Means To Be Green

Elle Hunt — Sun, 13 May 2012 21:00:32 +0000

The Green Party enjoyed a spectacular result in last year’s election, and now has more MPs in the House than ever before in its 40-year history. But has its bid to establish itself as a major player in Parliament seen it compromise its role as the more-left-than-Labour voice on social justice? Salient chief feature writer Elle Hunt looks at what impact the party of values’ election success has had on its priorities.

Same-sex marriage. Adoption law reform. Decriminalisation of cannabis. In the past, liberal New Zealanders have been able to look to the Green Party to lead from the front on social justice: issues of equity, tolerance, compassion, fairness and mutual participation. In 1972, the Values Party, as it was then known, contested the general election with its ‘Blueprint for New Zealand’, built around radical new policies that promoted reform of laws around abortion, drugs and homosexuality.

Compare this vision for an ‘Alternative New Zealand’ with the three priorities that the Greens campaigned on, and with great success, in last year’s election: “clean rivers, thriving kids, and jobs that are good for the environment and the economy”, each reinforced by a rigorous financial breakdown. Their focused, targeted, media-savvy approach was met with overwhelming support of the voting public: the Greens won 11 per cent of the vote, equating to a record 14 members of Parliament. The party’s decision to campaign on just three issues was affirmed on election night, but has it come at the cost of its ability to act as an advocate for wider change?

Greens co-leader Metiria Turei, who is also responsible for the party’s social justice portfolios, thinks not. Rather, she says, their streamlined approach was a bid to communicate their profile and priorities more clearly. “In the past, we’ve tended to take a scattergun approach, and that hasn’t worked,” she says. “The election campaign was the first time that we’d narrowed our messages down to just three.

“It was hard work doing that, because there’s more we want to say—but the fact is, people appreciate it if you can be clear in your priorities.”

This new clarity of vision reflects the Green Party’s aim to surpass its status as a minor party and become a major player in Parliament. Turei is quick to refute suggestion that the success of the Greens’ election campaign was a direct result of other parties’ failures. “We’re often described as taking votes from Labour or National, but the truth is, people are making an active choice to vote for the Greens,” she says. “We’re building a constituency based on our own profile, our own values and our own policies, quite separate from Labour and National. Those votes are not protest votes.”

It’s hard to say how Turei could substantiate this claim, as the Greens could not have failed to benefit from Labour’s ineffectual election campaign. Certainly, the party has since taken conspicuous advantage of new Labour leader David Shearer’s failure to gain traction with the public. “On some issues, Labour has been very quiet… meaning there’s been a space for us to be very vocal,” acknowledges Turei.

She says the Green Party has, in effect, led the opposition on matters such as amendments to the Citizens Initiated Referenda Act 1993 and industrial action at the Ports of Auckland. “That’s partly a feature of our own strength, in that we know what it is that we want to do, and partly because having more MPs in Parliament means we have more resources to do that work,” she says. “It’s also partly a result, I will admit, of Labour being in the process of figuring out what to do next.”

Again, Turei seems to be underestimating or minimising the extent to which Labour’s period of transition has benefited the Greens. To a certain extent, their success in opposition does not reflect the strength of their policies as much as it does a shrewd and effectual communications team. The style, substance and frequency of the Greens’ press releases is imitable (conversely, just last week, Labour’s finance spokesperson David Parker headed a statement on disappointing economic growth “Nek minnit”). Turei seems to acknowledge this when she says the Green’s being “more nimble and sharper in our messaging” gives them an advantage over other opposition parties.

Being “nimble”, and holding a flexible position within Parliament, is important to the Greens, maintains Turei. Though the party has a formalised Memorandum of Understanding with the Government, last month National rejected plans to expand that agreement, stating that it “did not have additional resources available for the policy priorities of the Greens”. Though Turei’s co-leader Dr Russel Norman described the outcome as “disappointing” at the time, Turei argues that it adds to their potential for impact: “That aspect of being able to work both with and against National, as we’ve done with Labour in the past, keeps us in a very independent political space.”

The Greens are now interested in as much collaboration, with either National or Labour, as can be achieved without compromising their independence, which again reflects their long-term goal of becoming the third major player in New Zealand politics. “We are critical of both Labour and National where we see fit, because we want to have relationships that are much more equitable,” says Turei. “If we are to start shifting away from a two-party system to three dominant parties, they need to understand that that relationship has changed.”

Budget constraints aside, that the Government and the Greens could not agree on items of common interest with which to extend their MoU does not bode well for the “collaboration at that decision-making level” that Turei argues is necessary for a “progressive, modern parliamentary system”. And as far as matters of inequality go, green jobs, clean rivers, and lifting children out of poverty are hardly polarising. Since the election, it’s possible to argue that the party has kept a low profile on more emotive, divisive issues. At time of writing, the Greens have no members’ bills on adoption law reform, the decriminalisation of cannabis, or same-sex marriage entered into the ballot. This is despite their having more MPs in Parliament (and thus more resources) than ever before, and the party’s history of success with members’ bills.

But Turei denies that, in prioritising its goals, the Greens have compromised their commitment to progressing social justice: “The party continues to work on these issues; [the absence of related members’ bills in the ballot] just means it’s going on in a different way.” For example, she says Green MP Kevin Hague’s work with other parties on adoption law reform is “likely to be more constructive, and potentially more advantageous, in the medium term” than a member’s bill.

She stresses the importance of judicious timing. “You’re continually having to assess whether it’s the right moment to get traction and progress on that issue, because otherwise, you’re just wasting your time and other people’s,” she says. “You have to catch a wave, but you also have to spend the downtime preparing for it, because otherwise you get caught short.

“Often those political windows for change are just moments long, and you have to be ready at the right time with the right response.”

But, arguably, as one of the leftmost voices in Parliament (a descriptor that Turei agrees with, though she points out that there are other, more relevant spectrums than left and right), the Green Party has a responsibility to foster debate on social justice. Legislation does not determine culture, and leading from the front on such issue, convenient “window for change” or no, can go considerable way in influencing and informing attitudes.

In Exploring Social Justice: A New Zealand Perspective, Dr Myron Friesen found that individuals’ understanding of social justice could be expanded through both debate and education of “previous injustices”, proving that discussion of such issues is crucial to a progressive society—whether the moment is advantageous or not. In this way, parliamentary tools such as members’ bills can create a window for change, rather than simply taking advantage of one.

Turei concedes this, noting that Catherine Delahunty’s bill provided the impetus for Minister for Disability Issues and Maori Party co-leader Tariana Turia to establish a Disabilities Commissioner. But Turei points out that issues of social justice are typically “felt very deeply by a lot of people”, and it is unfair to give them “false hope for change”.

“For those individuals, the solutions seem so obvious, and the political inertia is just so frustrating—I think we feel that particularly strongly, because we come from those communities,” she says. “It’s not like we don’t know exactly what it means for people on a daily basis.

“But there’s only so much you can do in any particular political moment, and it’s one of the hazards of the job—that you do disappoint people. There’s not much you can do that that.

“Somebody’s going to be disappointed because you’re not doing something you should be doing.”

In the meantime, the Greens are focused on extending their “political moment” for as long as possible, as the party’s potential for impact in the long-term is dependent on its continuing to build on its constituency. “If we move up towards 15 per cent in the next election, and 20 per cent at the one after that, the face of New Zealand politics has radically changed,” says Turei. “And that’s good, because if you keep doing it the old way, you’re going to keep getting the old stuff.” ▲

Mud Sticks

Elle Hunt — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 21:00:16 +0000

NAME SUPPRESSION IN THE AGE OF CELEBRITY

The All Black accused of assaulting his pregnant wife. The comedian charged with performing an indecent act on his daughter. The high-profile public servant acquitted of punching his teenage son in the head. Their identities have been suppressed, but that doesn’t mean you don’t know who they are.

In part introduced in response to outrage from the public and media over this perceived ‘celebrity treatment’, the recent revisions to the Criminal Procedure Act 2011 are intended to make it harder for defendants to obtain name suppression. But one of the country’s top criminal defence lawyers believes this to be a step in the wrong direction. Salient chief feature writer Elle Hunt asks what’s in a name.

In the small hours of one Thursday in March 2009, down an alley off Courtenay Place, a man who would come to be known as ‘the entertainer’ forced a 16-year-old girl’s head down to his crotch. As the Herald reported at the time, “The victim felt the man’s penis on her cheek and moved her head to stop it entering her mouth… As she ran from the alley, she could hear him laughing.”

Eight months later, the entertainer was discharged without conviction after admitting one charge of committing an indecent act. He was also granted permanent name suppression, as Judge Eddie Paul ruled that identifying him would have a “significantly adverse effect” on his music career. (Though, judging by his media profile three years later, that was already on a downward trajectory.)

“Everybody attacked that case because it was a sex crime, it was a youngish girl, it was down an alley,” says Steven Price, media law specialist and adjunct lecturer at Victoria University’s Faculty of Law. “On balance, I don’t know if name suppression was justified, but when you look at all the factors that the judge took into account, you can see where he was coming from.”

Under changes to the Criminal Procedure Act 2011 that took effect last month, things might have been different for the entertainer. His legal counsel would now have to prove that his name being made public would result in “extreme hardship”, rather than “undue hardship”, which was the test in place at the time.

While what constitutes “extreme hardship” is up to the individual judge to determine, the new law explicitly states that “the fact that a defendant is well known does not, of itself, mean that publication of his or her name will result in extreme hardship”. “There is no reason for a defendant to get name suppression simply because they are famous,” Justice Minister Judith Collins told 3 News.

Price is critical of this simplistic definition, as well as the media’s focus on this provision. “I don’t think any lawyer would have stumped up in the past and said, ‘Your honour, my client, as you’ll be well aware, is very well known, so he should have name suppression’,” he says. “The argument has always been that because they’re well known, the consequences of the publicity if they don’t get name suppression are going to be out of all proportion to the seriousness of the offence.”

In theory, the new requirement of defendants to prove “extreme hardship”, rather than “undue hardship”, will make it harder to obtain name suppression. This, says Wellington-based criminal defence lawyer Mike Antunovic, goes against the presumption of innocence enshrined in our bill of rights.

“It’s an inalienable fact that the state shouldn’t punish any individual until or unless there is a conviction,” he says. “What I’ve seen over the years is that, in many cases, considerable harm is done to the defendant by publication of his name and the allegations he’s facing before trial.”

This harm can extend to loss of employment and damage to personal relationships, as well as considerable stress and embarrassment. “With this new rule, the Crown is effectively saying that it’s okay for a defendant to receive some kind of punishment by way of harm that arises as a result of the publication of his identity,” he says. “And then only when it becomes ‘extreme’ will the state do something about it. That has to be, in my view, fundamentally wrong.”

Antunovic has been calling for significant reform of name suppression law since as early as 2009, when he defended police cadet Mark Tulloch on charges of rape. The case was thrown out of court when the judge ruled that the complainant’s testimony was unreliable, but, by that point, the damage to Tulloch’s reputation had been done.

The woman’s identity, meanwhile, remains secret because the state guarantees automatic and permanent name suppression to victims of specified sexual offending: “They get it by law, even if they’re shown to be liars, and so my view is that the law is wrong.”

Antunovic is in favour of extending the same treatment to defendants “across the board”. “My opinion is that there should be a presumption of fact for automatic name suppression until or unless the person is convicted,” he says. “And there should be a corresponding rule that the police or Crown should have to show good reasons exist for that person to be publicly identified before any conviction is entered.

“The public can wait, can’t they? How on earth can it benefit the public to know that Citizen A has been charged with an offence? The public has a right to know that various offences might have been committed—I’m not saying don’t tell them that—but the public don’t need to know who that person is until they’ve been convicted.”

To a certain extent, the New Zealand Law Society’s submission on the proposed changes to the Act in 2009 echoed Antunovic’s views, in that it called for name suppression to be made more readily available to individuals accused of a crime, and less readily to those convicted. “For the vast majority of the population, there is a perception that there is no smoke without fire—[that] someone charged is probably guilty”, the submission stated, reiterating the need for “greater protection at the pre-trial stage”.

This point is of particular importance given the ease with which an accused individual with name suppression can often be identified through details given in the media. In most cases, the judge orders the suppression of the defendant’s name only, meaning other details, such as their address and occupation, are able to be published.

“The offence is to publish material from which a person can identified… but there’s a little bit of wriggle room there,” says Price. He points out that different media organisations provide different pieces of information, and this is often enough to narrow the accused down to either one person or a small pool of people. “They’re on thin ice a lot of the time, but they kind of get away with it,” he says. “It’s only the really brazen breaches, like Cameron Slater’s, that people go for.”

Slater, who blogs at WhaleOil.co.nz, was convicted on eight counts of breaching name suppression and one count of identifying a sexual abuse victim in 2010. Most notably, he named a high-profile public servant (a client of Antunovic, who condemned Slater as a “renegade”) acquitted of the assault of his teenage son. He remains critical of name suppression law in New Zealand: “My personal policy is to let it all hang out there. I think sunlight is the best disinfectant.”

Slater, who considers himself to have “forced” the changes to the Act (and is “pretty chuffed” about it to boot), nonetheless believes them to be ineffectual, protecting what he dubs the “vested interests of the legal fraternity” at the expense of victims’ wishes. Just last week, he points out, individuals that suffered sexual abuse at the hands of now-70-year- old Dennis Aubrey Newell in Christchurch in the 1970s and 1980s insisted that his identity be made public.

It’s in lawyers’ best interests to campaign for name suppression for their clients, says Slater. “There’s a whole lot of extra hearings along the way, which are more billable hours. They’re just milking the cow.” (On the contrary, Price says criminal defence lawyers tend to caution their clients against seeking name suppression.)

He refutes the suggestion that to circulate the name of an accused individual in the public domain goes against presumption of innocence, arguing that charges cannot be laid without sufficient evidence. “There are many thousands more cases where the defendant didn’t have name suppression— are we saying those people didn’t have fair trials?”

Slater is of the opinion that no-one should be eligible for name suppression except victims of crime. “If we had a blanket suppression on all the details to do with the victim—other than saying a girl or a boy or a man or a woman—and there was no name suppression for those charged, you wouldn’t have that to and fro between courts, and all the delays in the justice system as a result of that.”

Slater notes that in Australia, the threshold for obtaining name suppression is much higher, and so that country’s federal speaker Peter Slipper is having to front up to allegations of fraud and sexual harassment in the media. “Every lurid detail of that case is now being debated in public,” he says. “If that was in New Zealand, all you’d be able to say would be a ‘prominent politician’. Probably not even that.”

Of course, reference to a ‘prominent politician’ would be enough to pique the interest of the media and the public, and that’s often enough to render a suppression order futile. “Once the guessing game gets underway, there’s really no win for the celebrity,” says Price.

But, he points out, there are around half a dozen or so such cases a year. “That leaves two, three, maybe five hundred suppression orders that aren’t about people who are well known. Those work fine, and that’s the meat and potatoes of suppression in New Zealand.”

Price blames much lazy and sensationalist reporting for the public’s skewed perception of name suppression law.

“There’s this narrative line in the media that says name suppression is bad, here’s this evil judge giving name suppression to this evil person, like they do all the time,” he says. “They never put it in context, never point out that name suppression is only given in one per cent of cases—and a lot of them are automatic to protect child victims or sex crime victims, and most of them are only temporary.

“They often leave that stuff out in order to generate their standard outrage about name suppression, which is what has led to these changes.”

Price notes that the new law took effect too recently to predict how successful it will be in practice. But by and large, the revised legislation is an exercise in tinkering with terminology: the ultimate decision whether or not to grant name suppression is left largely up to the discretion of the judge, as it did prior to March. What the changes to the Act have provoked is discussion and coverage of the principles behind name suppression and the law that governs them, as well as the consequences for those that say a name and let it break.

All That Twitters is Not Gold

Elle Hunt — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 21:00:44 +0000

Finding fame in the banal annals of the twittersphere.

Salient chief feature writer Elle Hunt looks to the stars for what not to do in her pursuit of internet fame on Twitter.

My desires to be internet famous and also gainfully employed have often conflicted. My Twitter account, in particular, is something of a liability, with the snark, profanity and in-jokes of my stream of consciousness likely serving as a disincentive to hire me. Or hang out with me.

But last week, the hurt and anger I felt at my omission from the New Zealand Herald ’s list of the country’s top 50 Tweeters (who are, by coincidence, largely Herald staffers) tipped the balance in the favour of fame. After adding “opinions are my own” to my bio as a catch-all caveat, I made my account public.

Within an hour, I’d gained ten new followers (okay, so one was a VUWSA exec member I’d previously blocked. Whatever) and been retweeted by @2degreesmobile. I tweeted about eating a promotional JAZZ Apple, sent to the media, for the media, and @ JAZZAPPLES_NZ responded, hoping that I “enjoyed [my] media JAZZ Apple!”

It was exhilarating.

To hell with what prospective employers might think of the “impudent” tone of my #worktweets, I thought, giddy. My new-found internet fame could lead to no other future than a TV series on HBO about my groovy lifestyle, establishing me as the voice of my generation. Take a picture, ca-chiiiiick.

My confidence in my imminent celebrity was only reinforced when @NICKIMINAJ jumped ship from the site and closed her account (“Like seriously, its [sic] but so much a person can take. Good fucking bye”)—an indirect acknowledgement that as long as I am in the game, she’d never win.

I’m only partly joking. Loath as I am to resort to such 100-level Media Studies clichés as “the rise of Twitter has benefited democracy”, the rise of Twitter has benefited democracy—kind of. Its chief advantage in this regard is that it represents a level playing field: there is, in theory, scope for mere mortals such as you and I to take up some of Minaj’s slack.

But in theory, communism works. In theory. More often than not, Twitter serves to elevate further those who already have a platform. Lady Gaga, the most popular person on Twitter, has more than 23 million followers. Think about that for a moment. Twenty- three million. And this is despite her largely tweeting nonsense (“i had a long day+ im falling sleepies. princess xena of xanaxland has lil secrets in her inbox…I wanna be the first to show u anyway..”).

Gaga seems to appreciate that Twitter enables her to let loose without the supervision of her minders—a rare privilege for a celebrity, even one (or perhaps because) of her stature. Most interviews given by such media personalities are arranged, overseen and to some extent shaped by public relations personnel; manning her Twitter account herself enables her to connect directly with her fans, with some degree of authenticity.

Sometimes too much authenticity. Music producer Jay Electronica live-tweeted the birth of his first child to musician Erykah Badu: “Water broke. I can see the head, it’s covered in hair.”

Many celebrities who tweet, however, seem to fail to realise that this goes both ways—that Twitter makes them accessible to both their fans and their critics. Minaj is the latest to abandon the site in a huff over less-than-positive ‘@’ replies, treading in the footsteps of Chris Brown, Kid Cudi, James Franco, Demi Lovato, Miley Cyrus, Sinead O’Connor and professional train wreck Courtney Love, among others (many of whom have since come crawling back).

The petulance of some positions them as being too thin-skinned to function in the public sphere; others, such as Matt Lucas of Little Britain, are given legitimate provocation. He closed his account after a 16-year-old teenager “thought to live in Northern Ireland” (try as it might, the Daily Mail fails to penetrate the veil of internet anonymity) joked about the suicide of Lucas’ former partner.

Of course, the flip side of this is that it reinforces how some celebrities need minders. As @aplusk, Ashton Kutcher was the first of what can generously be dubbed the ‘A List’ to make his mark on Twitter, but he was recently forced to quit the site red-faced. He’d expressed outrage at Penn State football coach Joe Paterno’s being made redundant (“… #insult #noclass … I find it in poor taste”), without knowing that Paterno’s assistant coach Jerry Sandusky had allegedly raped a number of children.

Kutcher deleted his original tweet and apologised for the misstep, but it was not enough to assuage his outraged followers— especially after, earlier in the year, he’d described September 11 as “the greatest day of the year”. (It’s the start of the football season.)

“A collection of over 8 million followers is not to be taken for granted,” he wrote, omitting the #humblebrag hashtag. “I feel responsible for delivering an informed opinion and not spreading gossip or rumours through my twitter feed.” @aplusk is now in the safe hands of Kutcher’s management.

Twitter is a great platform for holier-than- thou celebrities such as Kutcher who feel that their appearance in mainstream romcoms and a subpar television series gives them credence as commentators. Say what you will about the so- called ‘Twitter uprising’ and its contribution to democracy: the site is at its best when used to distribute meaningless but amusing drivel, and no-one does this better than Amanda Bynes.

The Easy A and She’s The Man star deleted her Twitter at the end of 2010 after announcing her retirement—with the expository hashtag #retired—from “acting” at the tender age of 24. (About a month later, she tweeted, “I’ve unretired”.) But fans of her rambling ‘vlogs’ were overjoyed by her triumphant comeback last year with @MsAmandaBynes_. Her tweets provide a fascinating look into the psyche of someone in the throes of a quarter- life crisis, if not an undiagnosed mental illness:

I’m on my couch and in that movie at the same time. whoa.
2:10 AM Feb 13th via txt

i’m in that movie. it was crazy… I watched it and saw myself in that freaking movie
2:09 AM Feb 13th via txt

I totally just watched Hairspray on ABC. 2:07 AM Feb 13th via txt

In the world of Twitter, this shit is gold— and could well be enough to reinvent Bynes’ ‘acting’ ‘career’.

“If a celebrity’s Twitter is entertaining enough, it can make them relevant again. It’s possibly one of the most powerful tools in the industry today,” wrote Thought Catalog’s Ryan O’Connell of Bynes. “If you’re not starring in any noteworthy movies and your agent is screening your calls, just make Twitter your new job.”

And then O’Connell articulates what I felt at my core when I got tweeted at by an apple company: “If you tweet enough of your insane thoughts, you could very well be back on top again.”

▴▴▴

A Selection of Amanda Bynes’ Best Tweets:

▴ I’ddateaguythathasakidorkidsif we’re in love
▴ I take back that I’m only into dating guys that don’t have kids
▴ I’m into getting married and having kids with my husband
▴ only into dating guys that don’t already have kids
▴ I enjoy reading and writing love quotes
▴ I love tweeting quotes, some I find andsome I write
▴ i always wanted to get married on 11/11/11 but i will be happy whatever day i get married. it doesn’t have to be that day.
▴ i will immediately twit pic my engagement ring and show everybody
▴ i like dating someone i like but i can’t wait to be “off the market” & call my boyfriend my husband.. lots of people are getting engaged….
▴ i only like love when it’s deep
▴ God’s always watching
▴ Magic mushrooms seem exciting
▴ SO quit hating on me because I’m VANILLA and I like CHOCOLATE, ok? Because it just makes you look like a hater thanks so much, bye!!!
▴ FYI if any girls are mad that I like “chocolate” they need to seriously get OVER it. Sorry, you can’t have all the chocolate for yourself
▴ I like black men I’m very attracted to them just fyi
▴ Legitimate newspapers and magazines etc only print the truth and that’s why I read them
▴ I think jeans look good on everyone they are just plain sexy to me

On the Pill

Elle Hunt — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 21:00:52 +0000

The search for a male contraceptive

“What qualifies me to be an expert on women’s reproductive health?” asks a sombre, besuited Leland Palmer in a parody posted on FunnyOrDie.com. “I’m a 59-year-old man.”

The video is a nod to the fact that access to hormonal birth control—a debate that raged in the United States over half a century ago—has always been as much about politics as it has about health. It’s no less contentious an issue in 2012: election year.

In February, the Republican Party attempted to overturn President Obama’s new law, introduced as part of healthcare reforms, that requires most employers or insurers to cover the cost of contraceptives. Republicans argued that this requirement violates the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom by forcing employers to pay for employees’ contraception, even if their faith forbade its use. A narrow majority of Senate Democrats voted against the amendment, arguing that hormonal birth control is prescribed to women for health- related purposes unrelated to preventing pregnancy.

Of greater concern was that the “Blunt amendment”, named for Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, would place control of women’s reproductive health decisions in the hands of their employers. But, as the FunnyOrDie.com parody wryly references, so far in the debate, such decisions have been weighed in on by everyone but women themselves.

Commenting on the debate in the same month, Foster Friess—the single largest donor to Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum’s political action committee—said, without a trace of self- awareness or humour, that “in [his] day”, “gals” held aspirin between their knees in lieu of contraception, “and it wasn’t that costly”. Conservative broadcaster Rush Limbaugh later referred to Freiss’s comment when he called law student Sandra Fluke, who was denied the right to speak on an all- male panel on the religious implications of the issue, a “slut” and a “prostitute” on air.

However, the Republican Party’s bid to encumber women’s access to birth control has gone beyond straightforward name- calling. A couple of weeks ago, former presidential candidate Rick Perry supported the passing of a law in Texas that barred Planned Parenthood from receiving funding under the state’s healthcare programme. This prompted a slew of posts on his official Facebook page (that were promptly removed) along the lines of: “Hey, Rick, when I menstruate there is sometimes coagulated purple gel in my Mooncup. I’m not 100% sure what it is, so I figured I’d ask an expert on women’s health.”

It’s easy to see the source of inspiration for the FunnyOrDie.com video. What the controversy over contraceptives in the United States has highlighted is the inequality and intrinsic difference that exists between what can be crudely generalised as ‘male’ and ‘female’ dialogues within the debate. As male Republican politicians campaign for legislation that will impact on thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of women’s decision-making in regards to their reproductive health, women alone know how it feels like to take charge of their own fertility—and the risks of not doing so.

As Kyle Munkittrick put it in a guest blog for Discover magazine (http:// is.gd/tR2Qtc), “women are constantly bombarded with reminders that they can make babies [and]… that it can happen accidentally. Consider this: no matter what the situation, men are only required to think about safe sex right before or as it’s happening, but never in the interim… a woman is constantly being asked if she’s pregnant, might be pregnant, or is planning on getting pregnant. She… is probably on or considering some form of birth control based on the possibility that she might have sex in the future.

“…The enormous problem here is that while girls are forced to contemplate STDs and pregnancy early, boys are largely unconcerned until they have sex for the first time. In many cases, it will be the girl who asks about a condom or says “I’m on the pill, it’s OK” or something else responsible.”

As a 21-year-old, sexually active (though, in the interests of full disclosure, ‘active’ implies a frequency that I cannot live up to), I can attest to Munkittrick’s argument. I have been expected, just as a matter of course, to have the matter of my fertility under control by taking a hormonal contraceptive every day—most of which pass by without any opportunity for me to risk pregnancy (unless the urban legends about public toilets are true). This requires a certain level of effort on my part: making and attending the appointment at Student Health, picking up the prescription, and taking it as directed. The implicit statement seems to be that—as much as any woman can count on her sexual partner to support her in the case of an accidental pregnancy—women’s fertility is a women’s issue, even though it takes an egg and a sperm to make a fetus.

As Munkittrick points out, despite the debate over it in the political sphere, contraception is a single-sex issue, and this has created a basic inequality in men and women’s attitudes towards sexual health and responsibility. At the moment, the current choices for men looking to take control of their fertility are condoms— already irreplaceable for protection from diseases such as herpes and chlamydia— and vasectomies. (Resulting in about 30 pregnancies per 100 women per year, withdrawal is not a legitimate option. Come on.) The latter is too drastic a step for the majority of men below the age of 40, while condoms have a high rate of failure compared to hormonal contraception.

Conversely, there are 11 female-only contraceptive methods, many of which are readily available at Student Health and Family Planning. The development of a non-barrier birth control for men, typified by the image of a ‘male pill’, would go some way towards addressing this imbalance. “A male pill would dramatically alter some consciousnesses. Both sexes would be having discussions about preventing pregnancy as well as preventing diseases in sex-ed,” argued Munkittrick. “The burden of responsibility would be equalised early on.”

The benefits of male birth control are obvious, but developing and marketing a new contraceptive is difficult. “It’s just around the corner” has become something of a catchphrase in regards to the development of a temporary, reversible contraceptive for men. The key stumbling block seems to be the rate of gamete production in the male reproductive system. Women release one egg a month, and so hormonal contraceptives need only interrupt that single event in order to be effective. Some reports suggest that men produced as many as 1,000 sperm every second, and stemming that flow poses more of a problem.

More of a problem, yes, but not an insurmountable one. Options include hormonal pills and injections inspired by marijuana’s link to impotence, and a similar, but more easily reversible procedure to a vasectomy known as ‘Reversible Inhibition of Sperm Under Guidance’. Most encouragingly, researchers at the University of North Carolina recently concluded (with the help of an $100,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) that dosing the testes with ultrasound is a “promising candidate” in providing men with up to six months of reliable, low-cost, non-hormonal contraception.

However, further study as to whether there would be cumulative damage from repeated doses of ultrasound is necessary before the treatment can be considered a marketable reality. “The last thing we want is a lingering damage to sperm,” commented Dr Allan Pacey, a senior lecturer at the University of Sheffield, to BBC News. One 20-year-old male I spoke to—who was otherwise enthusiastic about the idea—expressed concern at the potential of “lingering damage”, admitting that he would take steps to preserve his sperm before trialling any male-only contraceptive.

Though the development of and widespread access to a male-only contraceptive seems like it would liberate, it would likely only be of benefit to people in long-term, committed relationships, as it would not replace the protection against sexually-transmitted diseases provided by a condom. Moreover, some women are understandably reluctant to trust their sexual partner with matters of fertility that are of such great consequence to them themselves; though no studies have been carried out on the matter, anecdotal evidence points to some reluctance amongst women to have men take care of contraception.

Somewhat ironically, this argument perpetuates the inequality and mistrust that made birth control one of the defining social issues of this primary in the first place. It implies that, though men have the authority to delegate responsibility for preventing against pregnancy and disease to women, they cannot be trusted with the task themselves. Of course, women have much more at stake. “I, for one, would love to let my body take a break after eight years of hormonal birth control and let my partner take a turn,” wrote one female commentator on Munkittrick’s article.

“[But] would I really be willing to trust that the other person is being responsible and taking the pill every day?… At the end of the day, it’s my body that’s going to have a baby growing inside it, and all that entails… It’s going to take an enormous cultural shift before getting pregnant after a one-night stand affects both partners equally.”

Reluctance to adopt male-only birth control will likely discourage pharmaceutical companies from funding its development, which is a shame. The debate isn’t just about safe sex and contraception; it’s also about attitudes to safe sex and contraception. Though

the “enormous cultural shift” necessary to make male contraception an accepted alternative is often spoken of as being a disincentive to progress, its ultimate upshot would be improved responsibility, awareness, and understanding of birth control across the board. To put it bluntly, more equality in matters of fertility would change society’s understanding of sex, reproduction and relationships for the better—as much as it might be a bitter pill to swallow for the Republican Party.

What Makes a Criminal

Elle Hunt — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 20:00:46 +0000

We need to talk about nature vs. nurture

Are monsters born or made? Salient Chief Feature Writer Elle Hunt investigates to what extent parental failure can be used to excuse or explain the crimes of a minor.

Told from the perspective of a woman struggling to move on from her teenage son’s horrific crime, the release of the film adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s award- winning novel We Need To Talk About Kevin has reignited debate over an age-old question: nature versus nurture. Can Eva Katchadourian—successful entrepreneur, reluctant mother, who tried to warm to her first-born but couldn’t help hissing at him through gritted teeth that “Mummy was happy before little Kevin came along”—be held to blame for his subsequent massacre of his schoolmates? Or was the callous, calculating Kevin, as Eva implies, born evil?

“Whether Kevin was innately twisted or was mangled by his mother’s coldness is a question with which the novel struggles, but which it ultimately fails to answer,” wrote Shriver in The Guardian. “That verdict is the reader’s job.”

But it is also the law’s job. We Need To Talk About Kevinasks whether parents can be held responsible for their children’s actions; it does not explore to what extent their failure should be taken into account in the sentencing for their crimes. This question is a thorn in the side of the law, which cannot consider an offender’s being ‘born evil’, just as it cannot ignore mitigating factors that contributed to their offending.

Cruel, cold and contemptuous, Shriver’s Kevin is a character constructed to epitomise evil. But use of the term in a legal context, being subject as it is to historical, cultural and religious pressures, is unhelpful. Professor Simon Baron- Cohen of Cambridge University has instead suggested that evil be interpreted as the “erosion of empathy”, which is “scientifically tractable”: “Psychopaths such as Kevin has zero degrees of

affective empathy (they don’t care about someone else’s feelings) but have excellent cognitive empathy (… able to manipulate others through deception).” Therefore, Baron-Cohen concludes, it would be “uncaring” for civilised society to not “show compassion for the killer, because his actions are the result of his neurology”.

Attributing offending to biological make-up is a controversial opinion that nonetheless has basis in scientific fact. The work of German-British psychologist Hans Eysenck is taken as evidence that most personality traits are caused by properties of the brain, while closer to home, a longitudinal study of 1,037 children born in Dunedin in 1972 and 1973 revealed a protein that, when combined with maltreatment in childhood, is associated with convictions for violence in adulthood. Given these findings, Kevin’s behaviour could be explained by a genetic predisposition towards a lack of empathy, control or moral sense, which seems to largely absolve Eva of responsibility for her son’s crimes.

Such an argument does little to diminish the cries of parental failure from the public and media. “Modern-day mothers get stuck with virtually blanket responsibility for how their kids turn out,” wrote Shriver, an advocate of ‘childless by choice’, in The Guardian. “How we came to conceive of children as passive objects upon which adults act is beyond me.”

In researching Kevin, Shriver came across studies and editorials that placed the blame for school shootings squarely on the parents, several of whom had been sued for negligence by the families of murdered children. “My own reading failed to substantiate that most shooters suffered in any exceptional sense… Nevertheless, countless sociologists have strained to explain the phenomenon in a way that turns the culprits into victims.”

“I’m willing to grant a gradated diminishment of responsibility in relation to an offender’s youth,” Shriver conceded in an online Q&A session with Good Morning America. “But don’t tell me that a 15-year-old who shoots his teacher hasn’t a clue he’s doing something wrong.”

Although there is no explicit reference made to parental failure, abuse or neglect under New Zealand sentencing legislation, the age of the offender is taken into account, as is “any other… mitigating factor” that the court sees fit. “Some of the issues that might reduce the sentence are not really mitigating of culpability, but are really about the personal circumstances of the offender, justifying a more lenient sentence,” says Dr Yvette Tinsley of Victoria’s Faculty of Law. “One of the factors that courts have taken into account is sexual or physical abuse suffered by the offender where there is evidence that the abuse contributed to the offending—though this may not have a big effect on the eventual sentence.”

In the sentencing of 16-year-old Raurangi Marino for the rape of a five-year-old girl—a crime that captured the collective outrage of New Zealand’s people and media—Judge Phillip Cooper took into account Marino’s dysfunctional family background, which involved drugs, alcohol, gang connections, and physical and sexual abuse. Marino’s youth, upbringing, remorse and early guilty plea reduced a starting point of 18 years imprisonment by four-and-a-half years; as his three sentences for rape, grievous bodily harm and burglary can be served concurrently, he will likely be eligible for parole after serving a third of his ten-year sentence. (Marino himself has said that he does not intend to apply for parole until he has served five years.)

Sensible Sentencing Trust director Garth McVicar sees this as putting Marino’s rights ahead of those of his victim. He, like Shriver, believes that offenders’ troubled youth should not be used to explain their wrongdoing. “We don’t believe we can make excuses,” he says, noting that Marino’s consumption of alcohol and marijuana in the hours prior to the rape was frequently referred to in media reports of the case. “Once you move down that line of thought, where do you stop? We’re not supportive of someone’s upbringing [being considered a mitigating factor in sentencing] because, basically, we’d be creating a rod for our own backs.”

That said, McVicar believes parents need to be held accountable for their children’s crimes, noting that “in some European countries, parents are sitting in the cells with their children”. He argues that introducing similar measures in New Zealand could “spark a debate that this country needs to have.” “Ultimately, as the child walks that fine line from being a child to being an adult, parents need to be responsible up to that point.”

Though minors, under New Zealand law, are not considered blameless for their crimes, the parents of underage criminals are rightly or wrongly held up to scrutiny by society and the media. Marino’s mother Lavinia Wall has told journalists that she failed “a good boy, a little naughty”: “I didn’t safeguard my children, and I didn’t apply myself to looking after them”. But other comments she made in the same interview—“They call me a bad mother and [say] I have brought up horrible children”—suggest she felt forced to respond to immense public pressure to take responsibility for her son’s crime.

The law’s complicated and contentious interpretation of nature versus nurture warrants further clarification. If we are are to believe that ‘monsters’ such as Kevin are a product of their upbringing, tackling child poverty (where substance, physical, sexual and emotionally abuse is statistically more likely) should be of utmost priority for the Government. But accounting for scientific findings that an inclination towards crime is a matter of genetics suggests that changes need to be made to New Zealand’s criminal justice system.

The ongoing results of Growing Up In New Zealand, a new longitudinal study of almost 7,000 babies born in the upper North Island between February 2009 and June 2010, are expected to be relevant to this end. In the meantime, Shriver raises a pertinent point—that biology and upbringing combine to create that most unpredictable of motivations, human nature: “Parents are people too, and their emotions are sometimes going to depart from script. Moreover, children are people too, which means that to give them at least partial responsibility for how they turn out, and for whether they murder their classmates, is to take them seriously as fully human.”

Wellington ♥ Students?

Elle Hunt — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 20:00:03 +0000

CHEAP RENT, CHEAP DRINK, CAMARADERIE—DUNEDIN IS RENOWNED AS A STUDENT TOWN. IT’S BEEN A LONG TIME SINCE WE SAW THE CHARRED REMAINS OF A COUCH ON KELBURN PARADE, BUT DOES THAT MAKE WELLINGTON ANY LESS OF A STUDENT-FRIENDLY CITY? SALIENT CHIEF FEATURE WRITER ELLE HUNT LOOKS AT HOW LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND GEOGRAPHY COMBINE TO CREATE CAMPUS CULTURE.

“I transferred to Vic because I didn’t want to drink away my education,” a second-year student, formerly of Otago University, told a Salient staffer in the law school common room last week.

Though it’s doubtful that she intended it as such, in the face of a lacklustre O Week (see page 24) and the rising cost of living here in Wellington, her explanation came across as a glowing assessment of life in Dunedin. Its reputation as a student town is the stuff of legends. It’s hard to imagine the potential loss of the Big Kumara inspiring outrage in Vic’s old boys, but the Cook and ‘Gardies’ are watering holes of such cultural importance that Marc Ellis and other bleak New Zealand celebrities stepped in to prevent their closure. Then there’s the street-wide keg parties, the cheap food and drink, rent for less than $150 (or even, it’s rumoured, $100) a week—it’s almost enough to offset the freezing winters.

“Dunedin is an incredible place to live as a student,” says Julia Hollingsworth, a Wellington local who gained her BA in Philosophy and Politics at Otago. “It’s wonderfully cheap—I think it may be one of the few places where you can reasonably live on $160 a week—and around one-fifth of the people who live there are students, so everyone’s balancing studying and partying.

“Basically, it’s fun, cheap, easy and super-casual.”

Meanwhile, students (including Hollingsworth, who is now studying towards a post-graduate diploma at Massey University) are struggling to make ends meet in Wellington. According to The Economist’s 2011 cost of living survey, New Zealand’s capital city ranks alongside London as the 17th most expensive place to live in in the world. This is most apparent in the rising cost of rent: those of us who paid around $150 per week when we started our degrees are now shelling out up to $190 for rooms of comparable size and insulation.

In fact, recent figures from the Department of Building and Housing put the average rent for a room in Kelburn at $187 per week—more than students can claim in living costs from StudyLink. And though the merits of Dunedin’s student (read: binge-drinking) culture are open to debate, it’s hard to argue with an extra $50-odd per week in pocket. So can Wellington be described as a student-friendly city?

“I suppose you’ve then got to work out what ‘student-friendly’ means,” says Ian McKinnon, who is both Deputy Mayor of Wellington and Chancellor of Victoria University. “Wellington values students. Whether you look at it in social or economic terms, the tertiary institutions and the people that make them up—namely, the students—are valued by and add value for the city.”

As McKinnon acknowledges, students’ contribution to the local economy is significant. Statistics New Zealand’s 2006 census of the Wellington region identified 10.3% of the population as being aged between 18 and 24, a rise of 0.5% from the preceding census in 2001. Given the increasing number of school-leavers pursuing higher education, and the reduced capacity of Canterbury University, it’s safe to assume this upward trend has continued. Moreover, Victoria University employs close to 2,000 people in the Wellington region. So how is the value that students contribute to the city being returned to them?

Well, not in discounted public transport. While buses are free for students and staff of Massey University in Palmerston North, tertiary students in Wellington aren’t eligible for even reduced fares, meaning a return trip to more or less any suburb costs the best part of $10. For most students, this poses just a minor irritation, for, as McKinnon points out, Wellington’s size means it’s possible to “be at the university and then at a coffee bar in the city within five minutes”, even on foot. Moreover, the issue of tertiary discounts will be up for discussion later in the year with the Greater Wellington Regional Council’s upcoming fare structure review.

Changes proposed under the Regional Council’s review of bus services, which is currently underway, are more significant. As part of its bid to optimise services, it is looking to cut the vast majority of routes serving Kelburn Parade, leaving students to leg it up Mount Street to get to class. As 46% of Vic students rely on public transport as their primary mode of commuting, both the University and VUWSA are in the process of making submissions on the review.

Greater Wellington Regional Councillor Daran Ponter is also interested to hear students’ perspectives. He explains that transport planners have worked on the assumption that five minutes’ walk is an acceptable distance to travel to the nearest bus stop—in this case, at the corner of The Terrace and Salamanca Road. “I’m really interested to see how students react to that, because a lot of Victoria University is more than five minutes’ walk from that bus stop,” he says. “If you were going to the music school, for example, I would have thought it would be a bit of a push.”

Public transport is not so much of an issue in Dunedin, where, Hollingsworth says, “living 15 minutes from campus is living far away.” She attributes Dunedin’s status as a student-friendly city to its cheapness and its compactness, neither of which are the achievements of the Dunedin City Council. In fact, according to Hollingsworth, students’ relationship with the University and the DCC is becoming increasingly fraught, with the Council looking to extend an inner-city liquor ban to the “student-ville” suburbs. “Dunedin has a long history of students versus the University, and students versus the DCC, and each side is just as distrustful of the other.”

The appointment of Harlene Hayne to Vice-Chancellor last year, Hollingsworth concedes, suggests of “possible, positive change in the air” in the tense relationship between students and the University. Critic (Otago’s answer to Salient) recently published a photoshoot of OUSA President Logan Edgar horsing around with Hayne—him in a suit, her in a varsity hoodie. Given the professional tone of our interview with him this issue (see page 26), it’s hard to imagine a similar spread showing VUWSA President Bridie Hood chewing the fat with Victoria’s Vice-Chancellor Pat Walsh. (Pat, if you’re reading—we can make it happen. Call us.)

Hayne has been taking a hands-on approach to curbing students’ wild behaviour, taking to the front line of Orientation events last month to help remove alcohol. Dunedin Mayor Dave Cull acknowledges that keeping on top of such a large student body—he estimates that students form about a sixth of the city’s total population—is not without its challenges.

“There’s the odd problem that turns up… the couch burnings, and the somewhat over-exuberant street parties where there’s a bit of disorder and bad behaviour,” he says, referring to the infamous Hyde Street keg parties. “I think that’s a minority, though another sizeable minority are silly enough to stand around and watch.

“But they’re young,” he adds indulgently.

One way in which Cull tries to instill new students with a sense of belonging to Dunedin is by providing them with vouchers for cultural and recreational services within the city. This, he says, is intended “to bring them into the community right from day one, rather than have them hiding in a ghetto not knowing what the rest of the city is doing.

“It’s about giving them a sense of ownership while they’re here. As I said at the civic welcome this year, if you’re going to treat Dunedin like a sailor in a foreign port, then perhaps you want to think about finding somewhere else to live. I want them to feel like Dunedin is their home, and then they can start to think about treating it the way their home.”

That this is even a priority for Cull is indicative of a different mindset down south. Though Wellington Mayor Celia Wade-Brown frequently reiterates the important contribution of students to the city, for most, their engagement with the Wellington City Council begins and ends with her traditional welcome at Civic Square during O Week. Even President Hood concedes that she has little to do with the WCC on a day-to-day basis, as she tends to prioritise issues that affect students on a national level. That said, she says she would be “quite keen to work a lot closer with the City Council” on similar initiatives to Cull’s welcome pack for first-years.

The high concentration of students (“some people have said to me that it’s the youngest demographic suburb in the world”), Cull says, means the DCC has a “duty of care” to oversee their goings-on: “You’ve got literally tens of thousands of young people, many of whom are acting out a bit because parental authority is a long way away.”

The DCC works closely with Otago University, the police, OUSA, youth groups and students themselves to organise events such as the upcoming Hyde Street keg party, which Cull acknowledges has “got out of control” in the past. “There’s been too many people, broken glass,” he says. “The fear is that someone’s going to die.”

More than 7,500 people (out of an invited 14,043) claim to be ‘attending’ the 24 March event on Facebook, and Cull is hopeful that it will be a great success, noting that OUSA has “done a wonderful job” in organising port-a-loos, barbeques, water stations and volunteers. “Ultimately, it’s up to the students, and particularly the residents of Hyde Street, to come up with a model that they can do year after year, where everyone has a great time.”

For better or worse, it’s difficult to picture such an event being held in Wellington. Indeed, last year, now-MAWSA president Ben Thorpe’s attempt to organise a Wellington equivalent to the Hyde Street keg party in Mount Cook was thwarted by the council and police.

Deputy Mayor McKinnon says students in Wellington “haven’t adopted some of the extreme behaviour of those at some of the other universities” because of the city’s “pepperpot” demography. “We all live together,” he says. “It’s not as though students’ only neighbours are other students. I think that acts as a bit of a check. You know what people are like—if they can get away with it, they’ll go a bit further, a bit further, and eventually the sofas get burnt.”

Cull agrees: “The intensity and concentration of students in Dunedin probably leads to issues that wouldn’t be evident in a place where they were scattered over the whole city.”

Another reason, continues McKinnon, is the city’s “vibrancy”. “This city, without any qualification, is the leader in staging events, and they’re all right on our doorstep,” he says. “There’s so much to do in Wellington, students don’t need to sit there in the middle of The Terrace and burn sofas.” (Which brings to mind Hollingsworth’s remark, “Dunedin people are good at creating their own fun.”)

In addition, a number of Victoria University students have set their sights on a career in the public sector, and fears of ruining their chances of employment in future make them think twice about any youthful indiscretions. “People that are going into that sort of career path, whether they’re lawyers, economists or arts graduates, are surrounded by their future career,” says McKinnon. “The public sector’s right here, and their studies are right here, so they’re conscious of that and they don’t want to completely undermine their futures.”

The difference in campus culture at the two universities suggests that Victoria is perceived as a training ground for the real world, and Otago, as an escape from it. “It’s kind of a little bit of everyone here,” says Hood. “Why else would you go to Dunedin, if not to party?” But there are advantages and disadvantages to both. For Vic students, the trade-off for a vibrant arts and entertainment scene, and the chance to pass oneself off as a young professional in the public service sector, is a high cost of living. The upshot of Otago students’ fight for their right to party is their sense of camaraderie with each other, and their relationship, however fraught, with their city council and university. It’s not that Wellington isn’t as much of a student town as Dunedin; rather, it just attracts a different kind of student.

VUWSA and the Greater Wellington Regional Council are holding a forum in SU 218 from noon this Tuesday to discuss the current Wellington Bus Review and the upcoming Wellington Fare Structure Review. Regional Councillors Daran Ponter and Paul Bruce will be in attendance to discuss the changes currently being proposed by the GRWC, which will have a dramatic impact on the bus services two all Victoria University campuses.

Living In The Future? No, The Present Is My Past

Elle Hunt — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 20:00:11 +0000

Yes, that’s a reference to a Kanye West lyric from 2010. In case you needed more proof that we’re regressing.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but also—as the pillbox hats of the 1960s, platform shoes of the 1970s and perms of the 1980s go to show—as dependent on the decade. But what’s the defining aesthetic of the 20^th and 21^st centuries?

According to novelist and critic Kurt Andersen, there isn’t one. In a 3,500-word cover story in Vanity Fair earlier this year (http://is.gd/JTaKvk), Andersen argues that, in recent history, “the appearance of the world (computers, TVs, telephones, and music players aside) has changed hardly at all—less than it did during any 20-year period for at least a century”. The past, he continues, is a “foreign country”, populated with platforms and perms, “but the recent past—the ’00s, the ’90s, even a lot of the ’80s—looks almost identical to the present”.

Andersen’s article, some readers maintain, makes too sweeping an assessment to pick up on the cultural cues of today, but others agree with his assessment that, in an environment of otherwise rapid change, “people are comforted by a world that at least still looks the way it did in the past”. Salient chief feature writer Elle Hunt looks at whether his theory can be applied closer to home.

Follow a certain route around Victoria University, and the decades pass before one’s eyes. Start at the Hunte building on top of Kelburn hill: the first of Vic’s structures, its late nineteenth-century revival, ‘collegiate Gothic’ appearance reflects its 1902 construction date. On the right is Weir House, designed in true ‘English renaissance’ style in 1931; on the left, Easterfield, which the Evening Post said “could well have been imported direct from the United States of America” upon its opening in 1958. Further up the hill is Von Zedlitz, constructed in the late 1970s; Laby in 1984; the Student Union Building extension in 1985; and Murphy in 1986. Each building reflects the aesthetics in favour at the time of its design and construction, and—bar some standardising modernisations—each looks different.

So far, so in favour of writer Kurt Andersen’s argument that, in the past, “just 20 years made all the difference in serious cultural output”. You don’t need to have aced, or even sat ARCH 101 to see that Weir House looks nothing like neither that “handsome pile” Hunter nor Easterfield; you just have to have a pair of eyes. But then there’s the latest round of additions to Vic: 2010’s Alan MacDiarmid building and 2011’s Hunter Lounge. MacDiarmid resembles a bunker from outside and a departure lounge from within; the Hunter Lounge combines polish wooden floors and Scandinavian influences with discounted Castlepoints to serve as the site of the perfect student experience. The spaciousness and linear elements of both are indicative of their being designed and constructed in the present day, but what, in particular, defines their look?

Now venture into the heart of Wellington’s cultural landscape: Cuba Street. You see plaid. You see facial hair. Then there’s the mainstream uniform of jeans and T-shirts—a constant for the past three decades. Martha’s Pantry, The Powder Room, Arthur’s, Emporium, Iko Iko, Havana Bar, Espressoholic and Midnight Espresso are among the Cuba Street destinations that look to the past for their interior inspiration, while photographs on the wall at Fidel’s suggest it’s much the same today as it was when it opened in the 1990s. And it’s not just architecture, interior design and fashion that seems to be stagnating. Pop into the Mighty Mighty on a Friday or Saturday night and hear bands that sound like The Modern Lovers (1970s-1980s), Pixies (1980s-1990s), or The Strokes (2000s-2010s). So what are the big, defining differences between the Wellington of 2012 and that of 2002—or even 1992?

Andersen would argue that there aren’t any; that New Zealand, like the United States, has found itself in a “period of stylistic paralysis”. Moreover, the cultural landscapes of both countries haven’t just stalled: they’ve started looking back. “The future has arrived and it’s all about dreaming of the past,” Andersen writes, pointing to the trend of “reviving and rejiggering” old television series and films instead of generating original content. (That said, glancing at a Reading Cinemas schedule, there’s nothing contemporary about Margaret Thatcher, Marilyn Monroe or a silent, black-and-white film set between 1927 and 1932, Oscar or no.) Even Mad Men, he suggests, is a hit not because of its characters or stories, but because of its “’60s-fetishising” production design and wardrobe.

It’s easy to see Andersen’s point when it’s applied to a hipster rats’ nest such as Wellington, where so much of what is considered ‘cool’ is a relic from past decades. Case in point: the multitude of film cameras toted around the music festival Camp A Low Hum, in spite of their impracticality and expense. Even the reputation of the iPhone as a future-forward technology is called into question by the popularity of Hipstamatic, an app that makes uninteresting photographs look like Polaroids and therefore vaguely ‘arty’. (For the truly inane, there’s Hipstamatic Disposable, where one has to finish a ‘reel’ of 24 shots in order to view them, just as with a traditional film camera.)

This predilection to live what Andersen dubs “make-believe-old-fashioned lives” becomes more bizarre when one takes into account that people are devoting more time, energy and money to matters of appearance than ever before. It’s hard to imagine the phrase ‘personal style statement’ being said with a straight face prior to the 21^st century, but today, 11.7 million people are posting pictures of Chloe Sevingy and Alexander McQueen to their Pinterest ‘mood boards’. Andersen believes this pervasive desire for ‘authenticity’ is a bid to offset rapid change in other parts of society—that is, “the profound non-stop newness we’re experiencing on the tech and geopolitical and economic fronts”. “[T]he more certain things change for real (technology, the global political economy),” writes Andersen, “the more other things (style, culture) stay the same.”

But Andersen’s own “nostalgic cultural gaze” could well be clouding his perspective. As detractors of his article have pointed out, it is more than tinged with sentimentality for the land of the free’s golden years of industry. “It appears to me that Andersen wants to both maintain America’s cultural power as well as its reach,” says Dr Geoff Stahl, a lecturer in cultural and media studies at Victoria University. “The argument is one of a long string of treatises on the waning of America and its culture, a legacy which has always tied itself to consumption.”

As a writer that came of age in the 1970s, it’s not surprising that Andersen laments the decline of the US of A’s innovation-driven empire, but his portrait of its current cultural landscape is painted with broad brush strokes. In a response published on Salon.com, New York Times Book Review contributor Maria Russo argues that Andersen’s “glum” piece puts too much stead in external change and ignores the more subtle and significant developments of the 21^st century. Sure, she reasons, car design “might not be as brash as it was in 1957”, but in an accident, “you’re unlikely to be impaled by your steering wheel, or see your trunk burst into flames”. “In 2011, usefulness and thoughtful details, and what’s under the hood, matter more than radical transformations of style,” retorts Russo.

Though Stahl found much about Andersen’s article “very compelling”, he remarks that it “suffers, in many respects, from two kinds of myopia: one geographic and one historical”: “It imagines an American barely in touch with, and only lightly touched by, the rest of the world,” he explains. “It seems rather shrill to be making claims about the end of cultural innovation from such a narrow sliver of time and space.”

For this reason, Stahl says, it’s difficult to imagine how Andersen’s argument might fit into a New Zealand context, for all the apparent signifiers on Kelburn campus and along Cuba Street. He suggests that, instead, the cultural landscape closer to home is shaped by other, related forces. Stahl, who hails from Canada, has identified the fear of being derivative or unoriginal as a “central anxiety in New Zealand culture”, to which the collective response has been to “rely upon DIY culture—enterepreneurialism in another guise”. “There’s a perception that culture in New Zealand is simply a pale imitation of something from elsewhere… so the kind of anxiety pointed to in Andersen’s article is something that has always existed here,” he says. “This always seems disingenuous to me… because cultural is always mimetic in the first instance.”

This point, that new cultural output is shaped by that which went before it, is glossed over in Andersen’s piece, if not ignored altogether. No-one can deny that the pace of change between 1914 and 1989 was noticeably more frantic, but Andersen appears to be oblivious to the more subtle, structural change the early decades of the 21^st century are setting the stage for. The modern cultural landscape, Stahl argues, emanates “from nodes and sources, real and virtual”, rather than one particular “centre”; its aesthetic is therefore less distinct, but not less valuable. Above all, what Andersen inadequately accounts for that difference and innovation are just as subjective as beauty. Jeans might well have been the sartorial mainstay of the masses for the past three decades, but while the concept remains the same, the cut is completely different.

The Salient Facts

Elle Hunt — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 22:00:22 +0000

Salient’s lifespan does not tend to exceed a week. Following distribution on Monday, it’s flicked through once, then discarded in lecture theatres, crumpled in puddles, used to line litterboxes, fashioned into amusing hats. We joke about it serving as a “ready source of free toilet paper” on our Facebook page but, well—we wouldn’t be surprised.

But as fleetingly as it may exist on a small scale, Salient has been an integral part of life at Vic for more than 70 years. Chief feature writer and former co-editor Elle Hunt looks at the role it has played in Victoria University’s history and campus culture, as well as in launching some illustrious careers.

“‘I’ve been with my man for a few years, and the sex is getting boring,’” complains Wellington deputy mayor and Victoria University chancellor Ian McKinnon. “‘I’ve had him fulfil some of my fantasies, but he never comes up with any of his own, so we just go through the motions.’”

McKinnon pauses and looks up at his audience, comprised of one hundred men in their sixties—an old boys’ club on a scale not often seen today. Among those present are a Supreme Court Justice and a Queen’s Counsel.

“‘Can you suggest some tips and tricks—maybe even some daring positions—to bring out the passion?’”

It is, of course, a rhetorical question. McKinnon is speaking at a reunion of Salient contributors from the 1960s, and to highlight how “liberal” (his descriptor, bless him) the publication has become in the past half-century, he is reading aloud an excerpt from 2011’s “very frank” sex advice column, ‘Constance Cravings’.

“I won’t read Constance’s reply,” concludes McKinnon, “but I quoted it to one of you a short time ago, and he commented that he had obviously attended Vic about five decades too early!”

In her response to that dissatisfied reader, Constance referred in passing to “poop-happy boyfriends”, being “wet like a monsoon”, and a “deep longing… to be bound in rope and ball-gagged”, which just goes to reiterate McKinnon’s point that Salient is a very different (“liberal”) publication to that of his day. Then again, Vic is a very different institution.

Since its foundation in 1938 by A. H. Scotney (better known as Bonk—what happens in O-Week doesn’t always stay in O-Week, one assumes), Salient’s content has evolved to reflect the priorities and views of its changing readership in keeping with its role as an “organ of student opinion”.

If students have felt it or thought it or fought it, Salient has printed it. When “the most important thing” for a woman was to “become a lady”, now-Sir Geoffrey Palmer bemoaned the ease with which “a university girl [could] lose her femininity and her dignity” in a 1963 editorial. (“It reflects the standards of the year,” he said in 2008. “My opinion has changed.”) When, in the late 1960s, students expressed concern at their increasing workload, Salient lobbied for internal assessment to replace end-of-year exams. And when then-VUWSA president Joel Cosgrove donned a shirt that read ‘I [heart] my penis to a 2008 graduation ceremony, Salient’s coverage reflected the derision felt by most of the wider student body.

As well as being (we flatter ourselves) an amusing read, one way in which Salient reflects and fights for students’ interests is by holding the University and the students’ association, VUWSA, to account. It works alongside VUWSA to protect students from the commercial agenda of the University, while also ensuring that VUWSA’s spending and activity is in the best interests of its members.

Although it receives funding from VUWSA, which—as of the introduction of former ACT MP Heather Roy’s Voluntary Student Membership Bill this year—is itself contracted to supply services by the University, Salient retains editorial independence from both. This means it can report on their activities, good (organising an ‘O’-for-awesome O-Week) or bad (spending students’ money on calls to psychic hotlines—see timeline) without encountering a conflict of interest.

Unsurprisingly, these relationships have come under some strain in the past. Under the Salient Charter, the publication is expected to give “reasonable coverage” of the association’s activity and goals throughout the year, and this positions it as both its mouthpiece and its critic—a difficult balance to maintain. Successive news editors have complained of the trivialities and boredom of general meetings in the fortnightly ‘Eye on Exec’ column, and received biting responses from exec members themselves. In recent years, though, Salient and VUWSA have worked together fairly constructively, due in part to the professionalisation of the association and the introduction of an Association Manager in 2009.

The University’s relationship with Salient has largely been positive since 2005, when University Council documents with details of a possible fee increase of five to ten per cent were leaked to then-News Editor Keith Ng. Victoria University’s Vice-Chancellor obtained a court injunction to prevent the distribution of the issue in question, unaware that Ng had extended the story to the Aotearoa Student Press Association newswire. The information was published elsewhere in student media, and the magazine was distributed four days late after the University and Salient settled out of court.

The altercation made national news headlines—not the first time Salient has scooped the mainstream media. Although just 5000 copies of the magazine are distributed each week, its reach often extends beyond Victoria University because its editorial independence, youthful energy and disregard for (or, in more cases, ignorance of) defamation law means—for better or worse—it will often print what other publications won’t. Since the dissolution of the national newswire NZPA in 2011, Fairfax and APN’s domination of New Zealand’s media sphere has become even more difficult to ignore, and though no student media (Salient; Critic in Otago; Craccum in Auckland, plus the publications of smaller education providers) can compete with their scale or resources, an independent voice is increasingly rare.

Salient’s influence can perhaps be better measured in the number of contributors that go on to careers within the mainstream media after ‘getting good at journalism’, to paraphrase 1973-4 editor Roger Steele, on these pages. A survey by 1960 and 1963 editor Ian Grant suggests that just over 40 per cent of editors and staffers of 1960s Salient “continue to be involved with the media”, while the others most likely became lawyers, public servants or academics. A spell at Salient has contributed to the careers of, among others, the late historian Michael King; Queen’s Counsel Hugh Rennie; Metro editor Simon Wilson; National Business Review head Nevil Gibson; former Green MP Sue Kedgley; and 7 Days comedienne Michele A’Court.

But more important than Salient’s launching of an individual’s career, or its holding the University and VUWSA to account, is its contribution to student culture at Vic. Wellington won’t ever be the ‘student town’ that Dunedin is: its suburbs are too sprawling, its demography too diverse, its couches too nonflammable. Sometimes it’s hard to see university as anything other than daycare for 20-sometimes, just as it’s hard to see Salient as anything other than a convenient construction material. The fact remains, both have a distinguished and provocative history, and that Salient exists purely to speak to and of Vic students goes considerable way to unify us. As Roger Steele commented, “the power to put thoughts into words, and put words into the community, is a wonderful thing”—even if those words are, quoth Constance, “Female come is usually clear, sweet/mild tasting and odourless, which is pretty different from urine so that should also help to differentiate the two for you.”

No Debate Over Ultimate Blues Awards

Elle Hunt — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 18:00:35 +0000

Ultimate frisbee and debating were the winners on the night at the Blues Awards this week, proving that even the less virile sports can sock it to the big boys when it counts.

The awards allow University Sport New Zealand and Victoria University to recognise students who excel at the highest level in their chosen sport, while also balancing study and personal commitments.

17 students have been honoured with awards for their efforts in fencing, ultimate frisbee, debating, rowing, surf life-saving and hockey. A further four individuals have been recognised for their efforts in sports administration.

“It’s great to be able to recognise the achievement of many of our top sportspeople like this. 2011 was another strong sporting year for Vic students. From Team Vic’s success at Uni Games and the World University Games to DebSoc continued national and international dominance, we have much to be proud of. Congratulations to all the winners,” says VUWSA President Seamus Brady.

The winners of the overall awards, Sports Administrator of the Year and Sportsperson of the Year, will be announced at the ceremony in the Hunter Chambers on Tuesday night.
“The suspense!” exclaimed Brady.

After the ceremony, it is rumoured that “nibbles” and drinks will be provided, though VUWSA Vice-President (Administration) Daniel Wilson told Salient that this year’s event is “massively scaled back on previous years.”

In the past, the awards have incorporated illustrious guest speakers, three-course meals and even a band, but Wilson, who, together with VUWSA Association Manager Mark Maguire and Clubs & Events Manager Melissa Barnard, helped to organise the awards, said that “there was just no money” for those kinds of bells and whistles this year.

At a meeting of the VUWSA executive last month, Wilson himself requested that VUWSA put a further $5000 towards the Blues Awards, but his application was rejected when he let slip that that amount would cover the cost of hiring Sevens coach Gordon Tietjens to speak at the event.

Sports Administration Awards

Richard Carr—Ultimate Frisbee
Udayan Mukherjee—Debating
Sebastian Templeton—Debating
Daniel Wilson—Debating

Sporting Blues Winners

William Bishop—Fencing
Richard Carr—Ultimate Frisbee
Richard D’Ath—Debating
Asher Emanuel—Debating
Angus Hines—Ultimate Frisbee
James Hunter—Rowing
Jonathan Jackson—Ultimate Frisbee
Holly Jenkins—Debating
Samantha Lee—Surf Life Saving
Udayan Mukherjee—Debating
Tamarah Neal—Ultimate Frisbee
Matthew Richardson—Ultimate Frisbee
Lauchlan Robertson—Ultimate Frisbee
Paul Smith—Debating
Sebastian Templeton—Debating
Alexandra Tully—Hockey
Luke Watts—Rowing