“We are indeed drifting into the arena of the unwell,” says Withnail

Last week’s presentation by the Law Commission about their Issues Paper on Controlling and Regulating Drugs sought to promote rational decisions for drug policy.

Unfortunately for Law Commissioners Dr Warren Young and Val Sim, only seven people attended, six of whom were vocal advocates for drugs.

Dr Young said that the main focus of the issues paper was harm minimisation.

“Tentative thinking is that we’re not going soft: the present system doesn’t achieve anything. It is just recycling people through the system.

“If people are in court on their third drunk driving offense, it is clear they have a problem. Judges will tell you that out of these people, about 20 per cent will get assessed. The rest will get a conviction, a fine or a small term of imprisonment, then they start drink driving again,” said Dr Young.

The Law Commissioners said there were three limbs to the national drug policy: supply control, demand reduction and problem limitation.

“[The current system is] law enforcement, conviction and punishment—in order to have effective crime management we need to have a more flexible system.

Dr Young said rebalancing the three limbs of the strategy is what is needed to ensure positive change.

While Dr Young and Ms Sim were clear to point out this was an interim report to get feedback, the crowd did not seem to understand that these people were just making recommendations—not changing the law.

When the topic of legal selling of drugs came up, one member of the audience was herd to remark “Certified drug dealer. That’d be choice.”

“[Current medicine treats] the symptoms rather than treating the whole being… holistically,” one audience member said.

While focusing on marijuana, the crowd also dipped into Dimethyltryptamine and its ability to stop drug addiction by inducing deep introspection as well as the need to treat problems as a whole.

The paper seeks the public’s feedback on a number of issues surrounding the laws which govern drugs and alcohol.

Submissions can be made through the Law Commissions website.

Penile Portrayal Pleasing

Second-year student Michael Hempletine last week discovered the joy of drawing penises in inappropriate places.

Hempletine, a religious studies major, had until last week never drawn a penis at all.

“It was like an epiphany,” said Hempletine.

“I was just sitting there and the thought came to me: why not draw a giant big cock on the desk of MacLaurin 103.

“Luckily I had a blue and a red pen—so I got some really well rendered vein action going on.” 

When asked, religious studies lecturer Joey Balboa told Salient he hadn’t noticed the act of wanton vandalism happening four rows back.

“I was fucking lecturing. What the fuck do I care if some kid with a phallic preoccupation spews forth his unconscious onto the shitty, shitty desks,” said Balboa.

Sally Menk, a fellow student with Hempletine, said she noticed what he was doing but didn’t take too much attention.

“He was muttering to himself and breathing heavily. I tried to ignore him.

“It was when he started saying ‘Cock-cock-cock-cock. COCK!,’ really fast. At this stage I looked over to see what he was doing.

“I don’t know what kind of penises he’s been looking at but I have never seen one like that. And my mother was a hooker,” said Menk.  

Hempletine was unphased by the criticism and is looking to take his newfound pleasure up a level.

“Maybe I’ll scratch a penis onto the lens of one of the projectors so everyone in the class can wallow in my art.”

EEEEEK

Current Wellington Mayor Kerry Prendegast is to run for a fourth term in office. When approached by Salient for comment she ran away.

Gettin’ crazy with Ese

Former Salient editor Jackson James Wood has gone insane. Students last saw Wood raving in a quiet corner of the Student Union Building harping on about how “that Sobson bitch was ruining [his] magazine”.

Current Salient Editor Sarah Robson was unsympathetic.

“I don’t want to hear his fucking problems.

“Even after he’s gone he still whines like a little bitch,” said Robson.

Police say Wood is of no danger to the public, although you probably shouldn’t stroke his belly hair no matter how much he pleads.

Tree gets stuck up cat

In a shocking cliché inversion, firefighters were called to Kelburn Parade over the weekend when a tree became stuck up Mrs Wallace, a four-year-old tortoiseshell moggy.

Chief Fire Inspector Alex Wizel said it was one of the most gruesome scenes he had ever attended.

“We’re still not sure how it happened. We can only assume some sort of disturbance in the time/space continuum meshed the matrices of Mrs Wallace and this lovely Magnolia. Beautiful flowers, eh?” said Wizel.

Mrs Wallace’s owner Dhama Eggleston (76) was more reticent about the situation, saying only “There are plenty more where she came from.”

“Send out, Salient, the swift satiric point,
To smart the sluggard mind awake,
While Freedom anywhere in bonds is pent
No compromise with falseness make.
Those freed today tomorrow forth must leap
Some further outpost there to take and keep.”

This poem, written in 1938, spelled out Salient’s intent. Seventy-one years later we’re still trying to live up to these lofty ambitions. It isn’t easy to maintain the integrity of the magazine, or to balance the many ideas of what Salient is and what Salient should be.

It is a great honour that I have been able to stand on the shoulders of previous editors. Especially Carl Dawson, Michael Appleton, Sarah Barnett, James Robinson and Tristan Egarr. Thanks for your support, ideas and banter.

To my successor, Sarah Robson, I wish you well. You are an amazing writer, woman and friend. This is a crazy place and I know that you will clamber up my gangling frame and perch yourself firmly up there. Please don’t wear high heels.

Rory, designer/defacto editor, your amazing design skills, eye for detail and need for perfection ensured Salient 2009 was an amazing year. I don’t think I’ve ever been so close to another man before.

Kia ora MJO, kia ora. I threw you into the position of news editor when you just wanted to be a lowly feature writer. You have exceeded my expectations in every way possible and although we never got to drive high-speed to Palmerston together, I’m sure we will share many more epic lolz in the future.

Despite never actually getting any of your features to me by 5pm on Tuesday, Nina, your writing, company and attitude always bought a smile to my face. It has been a pleasure working with you and I look forward to reading about your South American exploits.

Mikey: with an eye for detail that surpasses the evolution of the Accipitridae family, you constantly surprised me with your ability to spot double spacing, missing macrons and my attempts to use foreign languages. It is no doubt without you staying here till 4am most weeks Salient’s grammar and spelling would have been unreadable.

Guy Armstrong is real. He has been a dedicated distributor and writer without whom Salient would have been slightly saner, but less exciting place. I wish you and your career in writing well. Maybe we could play Duke Nukem 3D later?

Advertising pays for the magazine, and Jon has done an amazing job of bringing in new and varied advertisers as well as lubricating the office with Jaffa Cakes and urging us to eat together more. Don’t let The Man get you down Jon, you’ll always have a pal in me.

To the arts crew: Uther and Fiona, you guys took my silly idea of arts editor, ran with it and made it a total success despite little guidance on my behalf. Uth, your acerbic wit and unconnected trains of consciousness bought joy, rage and frustration to me. Fi, your ardent feminism is always delightful and welcome.

Kim, Elle, Ryan and Maggie. Your… ummm… wonderful way with words is always a… ummm… pleasure to read. I hope you all stick with writing next year.

Nic, Shirley, Juliet and the other various columnists—you’re better than blogs. Please don’t ever blog.

Anna Friedlander, Polly, Adam, Conrad, David, Robyn, Sarita, Renee, and all the other people whose columns and cartoons were at the back have the honour to know that yours were the most widely read of all the content in Salient.

Jessy and the rest of MJO’s bevy of news girls (and Elliot, and Sam and Cam) deserve special mention. Your Monday meetings always made the office a happier place.

The latest addition to the Salient team, Josh Cleary, deserves special mention. Please, please please con Sarah into giving you a job next year.

To everyone in the Salient crew and everyone who I have left out: I will miss you all.

People outside of Salient have been integral. Gerard Hoffman: thank you for saving me.

Big thanks goes out to Madeleine Setchell. You have made the operation of Salient so much easier.

Daniel Miles receives the JJ Wood for Mt Albert award for ensuring my humourous side did not get buried under the dull drudgery of everyday editorship. You are an AbsoluteGeni.us and I look forward to working with you soon.

To my fellow editors, especially Matt, Val, Josh and Amy, I thank you for listening, understanding and supporting ASPA and me.

Of course my parents get a mention for not letting my grandmothers see any issue of Salient and therefore my proclivity for using the word “fuck”.

Laura, thanks for being there. Your endless advice and direction were totally invaluable.

We all feel like failing at some point in our lives and all these people haven’t let me fail. This issue is a dedication to the fail. I guess at the end of the day, as long as you keep pushing for success in those around you, you will not fail.

Aroha to you all.
­– JJW

The idea to plant a tree as a way of, in-part, eschewing Salient‘s massive carbon footprint and enhancing the already beautiful grounds of Victoria University, was Advertising and Sponsorship Manager Jon McQueen’s.

Wood was enthusiastic about entrenching some Salient vegetation into the campus that nurtured him.

“Hopefully Vic will nurture this tree like it nurtures so many great minds,” Wood said as he let out his famous belly laugh.

The native Kowhai—approximately 2.5 Salients worth of wood pulp—sits in pride of place, 20 metres up Hunter Drive (right by the maroon and white cars on gate one in this link) and is expected to bloom over the summer, attracting Tui and other nectar-drinking native birds for hungry first years to catch.

“I love that I did my part for nature by turning up and putting a tree in a hole,” said Oliver. “l’ll never have to recycle again.”

A plaque will be put under the tree sometime over the summer break.

JJW: So you’re Salient editor next year, huh?

SAR: Apparently so. All my dreams came true and next year, I finally get to sit on the OTHER side of the office.

JJW: So what you got planned? ‘09 has been pretty frickin’ legendary. You best keep it up.

SAR: It’s some big shoes to fill, JJW. I’m planning on not playing Raptor Safari, that’s for sure.

JJW: Hey… It wasn’t all Raptor Safari. There was the…

Umm…

Na, you got me.

Look, the kids want to know what you’ve got in store. Spill the beans, fool!

SAR: Actually, I need a computer game. What could you recommend for a girl who can only play car games badly?

JJW: Plants vs. Zombies ftw

SAR: Super. I’ll learn how to play that over summer while I plot and scheme for Salient ’10.

JJW: You still haven’t told me what you’re going to do…

Stop avoiding the question you damn journalist.

SAR: Well, the first thing I’m going to do is CLEAN THE OFFICE.

JJW: Content wise, Sarah.

SAR: Ohh that.

Well. More interviews, more chats with people who pretend to know what they’re talking about.

I will get Tolley. I will get Tolley.

We’re going to be asking the hard questions, and the questions that the mainstream media wouldn’t dare ask,

Here’s an example:

JJW: Ohhhhhh. I <3 examples

SAR: Have you ever spewed in your bed?

Classic.

JJW: Not since I was a child…

Ohhhhh…

Right.

Example.

Sheeeeeeeeit.

SAR: For the record, I haven’t spewed in my bed since I was a wee thing

JJW: The Great Tolley Hunt shall continue. My bet is that she’ll, sadly, get first blood. Bitch.

SAR: I’m going to get her.

Mark my words.

JJW: Kia ora Sarah Robson, kia ora.

Hey, hey, hey, hey guess what?

SAR: WHAT?

We won?

JJW: Hells yeah we did. But I reckon that is pretty much an editorial right there. Wasn’t that easy?

SAR: It was pretty painless. Sorry everyone for that being a bit boring.

THERE’S NO DICK JOKE.

JJW: Oh, but what about public transport and Jack Yan. He’s pretty awesome and I’ve never heard him tell a dick joke.

SAR: P.S. Just because I’m a girl doesn’t mean I’ll cut all the dick jokes.

I’ve been hanging out with you boys all year. I use the c word now.

I should wash my mouth out with soap

MJO has entered the conversation

MJO: More like wash your mouth out with Pope, ’cos Salient ’10 is gonna be religious… I mean… uh… fuck this, I quit. The hell with you, the hell with all of you.

The usual food writer gorged herself to death on some delicious treats—don’t worry though, Polly will be back next week—so we conducted a food experiment in the office.

Observation

The people who inhabit the Salient office like food and eat food regularly. Generally when they enjoy the food they’re consuming they let out coos of delight and become malleable to my will.

Hypothesis

That if one takes all the food that Salienteers enjoy and combine it, you will have the most delicious food known to humankind, therefore placating the workers and ensuring editorial dominance.

Method

1) Find out which food products the Salient team enjoy.

MJO: Salmon Teriyaki (one serving)
Mikey: Cassoulet (French White Bean Casserole) (1 bowl)
Sarah: Obama Sushi (4 pieces)
Guy Armstrong: Tropical Fruit Salad (1 bowl)
JJW: Chili Lime cashews (1 cup)
Rory: The trifle that Rachel made on that one Friends episode (the leftovers)
Rosabel: Cheerios (thousands of them) (Rosabel isn’t quite a Salienteer, but close enough that she needs to be dominated).

2) Purchase/make said food products

Salmon Teriyaki: Wagamama.
Cassoulet: Mikey’s fridge.
Obama Sushi: Tania Sawicki Mead once said she’d make some, so probably just hit her up.
Tropical Fruit Salad: Aisle three Chaffers New World.
Chili Lime cashews: Bulk Bins.
Trifle: Central Perk, I hear they make a really good one.
Cheerios: Any given butcher.

3) Take ingredients and place into an industrial blender.

4) Blend.

5) Poor out Salient mix into greased baking trays. Use cupcake holders if desired. Mix should make roughly 24 large… things.

6) Preheat oven to 180°C. Bake until golden brown.

7) Leave to cool in a place uninhabited by vermin or worm-infested first years.

8) Ice with the following recipe:

½ Cup cocoa powder
250 gms Cream cheese
¾ Cup icing sugar
1 Tbsp vanilla extract

Preparation
Bring the cream cheese to room temperature. Beat it well using an electric mixer, until it becomes smooth and soft. Add sifted cocoa, icing sugar and vanilla extract. Mix it well, until it becomes fluffy and light.

9) Make some poor rube eat them.

Result

Upon bringing these delicious treats into the Salient office, a random Londoner exclaims “By Jove. Awful pong, say what.”

Admittedly it did have a pungent aroma but that didn’t seem to deter Mikey and Guy, who started hoving into the muffins.

Sarah projectile vomits everywhere.

MJO and Rory are slightly more coy and break one in half, hesitantly taking small bites. Ambulances were immediately called.

The courier package never made it to Rosabel and Salient was extensively investigated by the SIS’s biological terrorism unit.

Conclusion

Always, always abide by Food Safety Standards and never ever combine two different fish products with Cheerios.

In some ways it worked. Complete control rested in the hands of the editor, who now has to write the entire magazine next week.

Salient Editor Jackson James Wood continues to explore the internets with an investigation into “the kids”.

Nineteen ninety-nine was an epic year. Mark Blumsky’s voluminous eyebrows, framed by his mayoral chain resided over the Wellington City Council, Telecom launched its Jet Stream service where you could get a whopping 600MB of ADSL bandwidth for only $89 a month and, most importantly, it was the last year we spoke of time in multiples of a hundred.

It is indeed a small and insignificant factoid of little relevance, a glitch in how we talk. For the most part people say two thousand and nine, not twenty naught nine. A change, perhaps. A sleeker way of describing time to suit a sleeker generation.

Despite there only being a gap of about six years, most students at Victoria today are the last generation to remember getting the internet.

Perhaps your parents remember where they were when JFK was shot, or perhaps the day the US pulled out of Vietnam. Not so much for many of you.

The one historical moment that many of our generation remember was the first time they heard the EEEEEEEE-OOOOOO-EEEEEE-GHGHGHGHGHGHHGHGHGHG of their 14.4k modem connecting to the world wide web.

The MSN effect

Countless hours were spent on the Pentium II computer on a program called MSN Messenger. Fourth year politics student Kurt Urich ,25, recalls a time when his life was dominated by those three capital letters.

“I’d go home and plonk straight down in front of the CRT and log in,” he says.

“MSN was really the first social experience I had with the internet. We had a computer but it was mainly used for playing Need for Speed or using Encarta for school assignments.”

Urich notes the amazing capacity for information to travel fast, saying “If someone broke up you’d know within minutes, rather than the next day at school.”

The propensity for instant communications has possibly lead to unrealistic demands from us. When we want information, we need it now.

But now the internet generation has sold out. We willingly allow screeds and screeds of our personal information to be harvested by Facebook, Twitter and Google. This has prompted the President of the United States to issue a warning to youth not to put too much of themselves into the blogosphere.

“In the YouTube age whatever you do, it will be pulled up again later somewhere in your life.”

Poignant words from Mr Obama.

Star wars kids

One of the first major examples of just how important this advice has turned into an internet meme—Star Wars Kid.

The recipe for ridicule was simple: take one geeky looking kid with a Star Wars obsession, add a long metal pole and set the video camera to record. Leave the recording somewhere your pals can find it and hey presto. Fourteen and a half million hits later you have an internet sensation.

First year commerce student Harriett Teeple ,18, doesn’t remember life before internet.

“My father worked as a project developer for Telecom on the roll out of ADSL so we had highspeed internet since the time I was about ten.”

“I’ve always been pretty open with what I put on the internet, it’s not like I have much to hide.”

Urich has mixed feelings about sharing information on the internet, “People my age are still fairly weary about what we put online. But at the same time we don’t quite get it.”

Citing the numerous accounts of people getting snapped for improperly calling in sick when their Facebook photos clearly show them consuming large amounts of alcohol and doing the tango on tables.

Teeple acknowledges the potential for damage to her reputation, but says “you just gotta be more savvy.

“At the end of the day we’re the kids who grew up with it and we have a better handle on where it is going and how to use things like Twitter and Facebook. If you’re stupid enough to put revealing information up then you’ll get burnt sooner or later. It is just a natural learning process.”

She has a point. Even though there is a six-year gap between her and Urich, the differences are startling. While Urich sees social networking sites as “somewhat useful and mildly amusing,” Teeple sees them primarily as “fun”.

“I’m really getting into twitter at the moment. You can tweet from anywhere about anything. It’s great for networking because unlike Facebook there isn’t that much personal information and you can still limit who sees what.”

A quick glance at Teeple’s twitter account [@harriT25] reveals she is indeed very open about what she does and who she is.

Tweets from harriT25:

“Making up for a deprived childhood by downloading Aladdin.”

“My perfect guy wears converse, is totally laid back, and doesn`t worry about being cool.”

“The barriers have broken down. This isn’t nineteen ninety-nine. It’s the two thousands, mang,” says Urich, parodying what he calls “the kids”. “The next generation doesn’t need a purpose, they’re selling out—it’s all about the fun.”

University Council members had to duck for cover as protesters threw fruit and eggs at them at a meeting where fees and the student services levy were raised last Monday.

VUWSA President Jasmine Freemantle was hit in the head by an orange, but Chancellor Tim Beaglehole and Vice Chancellor Pat Walsh survived unscathed.

Official VUWSA Protest leader, Education Vice-President Freya Eng said the poultry-produce pillory was not supported by VUWSA, and no executive members threw items.

The group of about 25 protesters, largely made up of Workers’ Party members, marched from the quad to the Hunter Building Council Chambers shortly after 4pm.

Almost 20 students gathered in the quad last Monday afternoon, outraged at the university’s decision to raise fees and combine the Students Services Levy and close to double it.

Workers’ Party activists who no longer attend Victoria University took control of the protest, shouting for students to disrupt the Victoria Council Meeting.

“Education shouldn’t be a privilege, it’s a right!” called a representative of the Workers’ Party.

During a speech by Victoria Broadcasting Club managing co-director Matthew Davis on why fees and the levy should not be raised, Reith, fellow Workers’ Party member and former VUWSA Campaigns Officer Sam Oldham and perennial student Kerry Tankard began yelling and chanting.

As Vice-Chancellor Professor Pat Walsh moved to report on the increase in fees, protestors shouted obscenities at Council members who for the most part received free education.

Chancellor Emeritus Professor Timothy Beaglehole issued a formal warning to protestors, stating any further interruptions would result in their removal.

Beaglehole read a second warning and took a vote to vacate the council chambers as the protesters began to throw eggs and fruit.

The Council was then moved from the Council Chambers to a smaller room in the Kirk Building under a heavy Campus Care presence, where the meeting continued.

It wasn’t always like this. Once upon a time we relied on card catalogues, word of mouth and books.

No doubt you’re currently within 20 metres of a computer. You’re being bombarded by the internet right now as wi-fi passes around you. The idea of the internet evolved from a United States government communications programme. Computers were huge machines that used vacuum tube fuses. As you meander through the history of computers and the internet you find computers, and now the net, are dominating our lives.

There was a time when computers weren’t so intertwined with everyday life. Victoria graduate and Biology teacher Richard Wood remembers the good old days of 1977 when computer programing was part General Maths 101.

“The language was possibly FORTRAN but I can’t remember much about it. I never saw the computer itself but rumor had it that it took up a large area somewhere in the library building.

“We first made a flow chart of the program and had to translate it into digital language and then transfer the program to punch cards. The cards were pre-punched. You used a pencil to remove the little pre-punched rectangles. Your stack of cards was then handed in to a technician who put them in a card reader machine.

“That was the only contact I had with computers in four years at Vic.”

Today you’d be hard pressed to come to university and not deal with a computer. There are couple of hundred computers in the Kelburn library, CyberConnect stalls and wireless access over all campuses.

According to former Victoria mathematics and computer science student Rowan McCaffrey, the dressing up to operating systems like Vista and Mac OSX don’t really make it any easier to use—but it make it easier to learn. “Once you know what you’re doing when you’re typing in commands—if you remember the old Commodore 64s—even a kid could do that,” he says.

But the early nineties were especially heady times for ‘what could be’ in terms of the future of the internet. One story from Salient in 1994 predicts:

“A virtual reality version of the internet; a place where, with the help of VR goggles, bulletin boards look like meeting rooms, other users can be directly talked to and files can be saved just by grabbing them and shoving them in your pocket.”

While we’re not too far off that with programmes like Second Life, McCaffery thinks we don’t need The Matrix-like setting and “can do all that with a few clicks of a mouse.”

Let me Google that for you

The idea of a totally different virtual reality does seem superfluous, but is grounded in reality.

“If you wanted to know something you’d talk to your friends or go to the library. But now you just go look on Google. Basically the answer to everyday questions are on there,” McCaffery says.

This is so true. Say you needed to figure out a complex maths problem. Wolfram Alpha has the answer. As does Google. Need to know how to tie a tie and you don’t have a scrap of paper in your breast pocket telling you how? [page 32] Google it! 227,000,000 hits in 0.20 seconds.

The use of Google has become so widespread that when someone who is sitting at a computer and who asks a stupid question automatically gets sent a www.lmgtfy.com link.

Google has even become a religion!

The Church of Google posits that the human-made search engine is the closest experience we mortals can have to the divine. The church has nine proofs that Google is God. They say Google is

1. Omniscient.
2. Omnipresent.
3. Answers prayers.
4. Potentially immortal.
5. Infinite.
6. All-knowing and remembers all.
7. Omni-benevolent.
8. A more widely regarded source than other deities.
9. Scientifically provable.

Which leads us to the question…

Is it all just one big in-joke/meme?

Much like Salient, the internet is rife with in-jokes and memes which many of you will never pick up on or get or even bother investigating further.

McCaffery says the internet has gotten so big and complex because “its users [are] wanting it for more and more things. Stuff like 4chan, it’s not of use to anyone, but everyone wants to do it.”

But, somewhere between the turgid mess of fart and dick jokes, lolcats and pornography, there actually valuable learning resources.

iTunes U is a great place to start for anyone looking to expand their mind. With lectures from Berkeley, MIT, Yale, Melbourne and Otago, you can lose yourself in the thousands of podcasted lectures.

Just now I downloaded a lecture from Introduction to Biology from MIT and a series of Anthropology lectures from Cambridge. If you can afford the bandwidth it is totally worth it.

The database section on Victoria’s Library site is an amazing resource. You can search through thousands of databases for millions of academic papers. From the Dictionary of Old English Corpus to Sex Smart with JSTOR, in between you’re guaranteed to be able to find what you’re looking for in a matter of minutes.

Newton’s [see page 49 for more about that badass mother fluffer] quote: “Standing on the shoulders of giants” is the appropriated motto of Google Scholar (GS). GS takes the simple format of Google and puts it toward something more than finding funny pictures of geese.

Once again you have thousands upon thousands of academic documents all easily searchable.

Some universities are already harnessing the amazing power of the internet. In partnership with Apple, makers of… oh, like you don’t know what an iPod is, have joined with 210 Australian universities to put lectures, video and audio online to bring you the aforementioned iTunes U.

When asked if tools like iTune U should play a bigger part in tertiary education, Acting Director of Victoria’s University Teaching Development Centre Dr Stephen Marshall whole-heartedly agrees. “There’s no should about it. The use of online resources as the primary medium for finding information and communicating is now inevitable.”

Wood laments that there are problems, but if teachers are online savvy they can use the inherent to great advantage: “Schools now use computerised rolls and markbooks. When the inevitable glitches occur with faults in software or hardware it makes life very difficult and it happens all too frequently. The data projector is replacing the video or DVD player as a way to show video and animations stored on your laptop.

“Teachers in the know use YouTube to find video clips of all the subjects you could wish to use—from Adolf to Zeppelins.”

McCaffrey’s opinion is a bit stronger. “If you’re not just teaching stuff you could learn by going on the internet, then there is no point in [lectures].

“It’s not like anyone can learn just by reading something. You have to be dedicated to it. It’s about adding value.”

And where to from here? Marshall reckons the internet will be even more ubiquitous. “Mobility is the next big thing—continuous connectivity and augmented reality.”

So while “internet isn’t bigger than universe”—a question on Yahoo! Answers—it is the glue by which we all learn and interact.

Marshall is optimistic about the future. Well, perhaps: “My wife hates this vision, she says she’ll only agree to it if I also get the ‘wife attention taser unit’ option with any augmented reality kit.”

Olde skewl computer games

Why you missed out and where you can play ‘em
By Arty Nerdstink and Joshie McAwesome Pants, Nexus.

While not quite academic per se, video games and their development heralded much of the computer graphics technology we now use for everything from the tear drop down Tom Cruise’s cheek to Jar Jar Binks. Here are a couple of games which were totally freaking awesome from a pre-internet time which you can now play on the internet.

Sid Meier’s Pirates: Most of you would have played one of the Civilization games at some point. Sid Meier doesn’t just create games where you can be Ghandi or Genghis Khan. He also made games where you could be a goddamn pirate! As a pirate, you chose where you sail, you chose what jobs to do and you shoes when to fight or flee. No linear storylines in this game, folks. Sure, you can go looking for your sister, your uncle and parents, but you’ll have a lot more fun leading your pirate fleet on raids across the Caribbean, attacking towns and doing little missions for priests and colonists. The game is available on pretty much any old machine, from Amiga to Xbox. You don’t need to have a powerful computer to run it and it has gone through several editions from 1987 to 2004.

The New Zealand Story: This game was notable for being the original Amiga computer game and having exactly sod-all to do with New Zealand. A tricky platformer which featured a Kiwi(?) bearing a distinct resemblance to a dust ball with a beak, The New Zealand Story was a weird little gem of a game. Its ‘plot’ was that a walrus, that natural enemy of New Zealanders, had stolen the Kiwi’s animal mates. So it goes that the kiwi has to fight the walrus with an assortment of utterly bizarre weapons, the most powerful of which looked a lot like a child’s scribble on a wall. Others included a bow and arrow and something that might have been a kind of Kamehameha wave. I don’t know. This quirky game can probably still be found on Amiga emulators, and (bizarrely) was recently re-released for the Nintendo DS.

Sonic CD: This was close to the best Sonic the Hedgehog game ever made. It featured the titular anthropomorph in an adventure where he had to collect Time Stones (instead of the Chaos Emeralds for a change). The gimmick was you could trip signs that said either “past” or “future” in a given level. Travel fast enough after this, and you’d find yourself zipping either back or forward in time. This changed both the level design and aesthetic. Go forward and you’d find yourself in a dystopian future, the Sonic equivalent of Blade Runner, with a shitload of enemies and traps. Go back and you could find a prehistoric world with fewer enemies and a mysterious robot generator hidden in each. Blow this puppy up, go forward in time again, and you’d find yourself in a different “present” or future, featuring fewer traps, enemies, and generally good times. The effect was essentially four times the levels found in a normal game. About the only bad thing about this game was the unforgivable introduction of the hideous Amy Rose character, who will one day be boiled in oil if I have anything to say about it. And I will.

Ahem. Now, to mention the ridiculously great techno soundtrack, which was only available on the Japanese and European (which includes New Zealand) releases. For some reason, Sega, a notoriously arbitrary company, decided Americans weren’t quite ready for techno yet, and wrote shitty, shitty music for the Yank release. But the original music was mint. I haven’t even touched on the boss battles, which were probably the best of any Sonic game (bar Sonic 3 and Knuckles) and which culminated in a fantastic race-off between Sonic and the sinister Metal Sonic. Yeah. I’ve already said too much about this. Where can you play it? Well, unless you’ve got a Sega Mega CD lying about (unlikely) you’ll need to play it on PC CD-ROM on Windows, which sadly features only the crappy American music—it’s still possible to find in shops. Otherwise, your best bet is one of the many Sonic collections available for various consoles or the pirate-y realms of BitTorrent. Do play it.

This isn’t the VUWSA election season we all know and love. Things have been disgustingly quiet—cordial, even. The prickly tentacles of civilised discourse seem to have taken hold and wrapped themselves around the torso of this year’s band of gnarly political bandits.

The universal law of student politics, much like the science described in Back to the Future, says two student politicians cannot exist in the same space without the universe collapsing.

So, Salient went along to this year’s candidates’ forum hoping for Armageddon, but getting something as lame as that film starring Ben Affleck and Bruce Willis about that asteroid.

No, friend, you’re welcome.

What they said:

Victoria University of Wellington Students’ Association Presidential candidate Alan Young revealed that he supports Voluntary Student Membership (VSM) of students’ associations.

Young, the self-proclaimed “people’s voice”, went on to say many of his supporters think VSM is a good idea and consideration should be given to it.

Max Hardy, who is also running for president, said he would fight against VSM but acknowledged that if his views ran contrary to the majority he will go with what the students wanted. Salient was confused as to why he chose not to run on a “Soft Speaking, Hard Hitting” ticket. Your mum would call him a “Such a nice boy” if she met him. Mums love Max.

Fraser Pearce on why he should be council rep: “Cheaper drinks, pimping out the van—YOU!” He then compared himself to Sarah Palin. Remember her from that other election? Oh ho ho, you get cultural references.

James Sleep belied his surname and gave a coherent and well thought-out talk about why he should be Education Officer. “Student voices need to be heard in the appropriate way,” he said. The normal convention of allowing sound to pass through the eardrum and into your cerebellum quite clearly has no grounding with Mr Sleep.

Alan Young offered these thoughts on being Activities Officer: “Guy Williams was the one who got me into politics… I want to continue his legacy.” Williams was on the VUWSA exec for less than two months before the election result was invalidated. Kia ora, never-read news section, kia ora.

Bridie Hood promised she wouldn’t throw produce at anyone and urged the need for “awareness and promotion” at the association. It’s a shame those kinds of promises need to be made.

Fraser Pearce once again got up to tell us why we should vote for him to be Clubs Officer. He said he wanted to give more money to hostels, allowing the opportunity for you to be on the same mixed-touch team as that tousle-haired pale-skinned guy from E-Floor.

Former Women’s Rights officer Caitlin Dunham was greeted with a rousing applause from the audience. Caitlin outlined her achievements in the past two months. Probably the most qualified and passionate person to speak. Girl wants her job back, mmmhmm!

Craig Carey, who is running for Welfare Officer, wanted to be part of making VUWSA “respectable and competent,” which are also the only prerequisites needed to work as an airline hostess.

Zach Dorner believes that by harnessing his powers of cool he can beat no confidence, saying “I rock the block every time.” He also emphasised that he was committed to the long haul, saying “commitment is part of who I am. I’m single as well.” He also claimed no confidence is “crap”. No Confidence could not be reached for comment at the time of print.

Long-time VUWSA execer Seamus Brady listed his achievements and rightly said: “Vote for me to keep the good work going.” Brady, who has been working at VUWSA since 1963, is two van purchases away from retirement.

Sam Mason, Kieran O’Connor, Alice Pan, Conrad Reyners and William Wu did not show up to the forum. They all have names that are fun to say out loud though.

Queer Representative, VP Administration and Publications Committee Representative did not receive nominations. A by-election will be held for these positions early next year.

04:43

Mood: Why am I in the Salient office so fucking late/early? Fuck knows.
Music: The hum of the computers and drip of the panel heater.
Completion level: 10%
Peeve of the moment: no shower. no shoes.

11:38

Mood: Bouncy/constipated
Music: mc chris — Dungeon Master of Ceremonies
Completion level: 50% but stalled
Peeve of the moment: Rainy rain rain

13:13

MJO checking in.

Mood: Contemplative/transcribey.
Music: The docile tones of VUWSA President Jasmine Freemantle talking issues about things.
Completion level: Salient—55%. MJO—20%. Kia ora, news for Africa, kia ora.
Peeve of the moment: BROKEN HEADPHONES.

15:14

MJO again-o was his name-o, but not quite-o.

Mood: Newsensual
Music: Ben Folds’ Acapella. Boxing, evidently, has been good to him.
Completion level: Salient—65%, MJO—50%. Newsiness is the business.
Peeve of the moment: What’s this unwelcome winter all about? F-off, bro. Youse is crampin’ my styles.

18:32

O-wee-oo with MJO.

Mood: Work-addled, but otherwise in the zone.
Music: The hum of six computer fans a-buzzin’.
Completion level: Salient—I have no idea, but it’s looking good on screen. MJO—75%.
Peeve of the moment: None at all—Madeleine Setchell from the Coms Department is all kinds of awesome. :D

20:09

I’m MJOwning this blog.

Mood:Sugar-addled, which as a diabetic isn’t really the best thing to be.
Music: This soothing kinda ambient-machine-blustering music coming from Rory’s mp3 player.
Completion level: We’re making a magazine tonight? BUT IT’S FIGHT NIGHT.
Peeve of the moment: Not being able to drop a powerbomb on someone through a table. YOU HEAR ME, HULK HOGAN? YOU HEAR ME?

22:50

MJ Yo Ho Ho and a bottle of… water… or something, I dunno.

Mood: My wrists are sore. What would Mike the Courier say about this? (“GET YER FUGGIN HAND OFF IT, COBBER! HA HA!”)
Music: The Arcade Fire, courtesy of Rarah Sobson.
Completion Level: 80%—the last 20% takes fo-ev-ah.
Peeve of the moment: All out of Week That Wasn’t ideas. What kind of monster am I?

Young, the self-proclaimed “people’s voice”, went on to say many of his supporters think VSM is a good idea and consideration should be given to it.

Max Hardy, who is also running for president, said he would fight against VSM but acknowledged that if his views ran contrary to the majority he will go with what the students wanted.

Young is running for President, Vice President (Education) and Activities officer. It is convention that if elected to multiple positions the candidate will assume the highest ranking position. A by-election is then held to replace vacant positions.

For full story please check out next week’s edition of Salient. For more information on the candidates please see this week’s Election Guide pull-out in Salient.

Off the cuff: What the candidates said about themselves

Fraser Pearce on why he should be council rep: “Cheaper drinks, pimping out the van—YOU!” He then compared himself to Sarah Palin.

James Sleep gave a coherent and well thought-out talk about why he should be education officer, saying “student voices need to be heard in the appropriate way.”

Alan Young on being activities officer: “Guy Williams was the one who got me into politics… I want to continue his legacy.” Williams was on the VUWSA exec for less than two months before the election result was invalidated.

Bridie Hood promised she wouldn’t throw produce at anyone and urged the need for “awareness and promotion” about the association.

Fraser Pearce once again got up to tell us why we should vote for him to be Clubs Officer. He said he wanted to give more money to hostels.

Former Women’s Rights officer Caitlin Dunham was greeted with a rousing applause from the audience. Caitlin outlined her achievements in the past two months. Probably the most qualified and passionate person to speak thus far.

Craig Carey, who is running for Welfare Officer, wanted to be part of making VUWSA “respectable and competent”.

Zach Dorner believes that by harnessing his powers of cool he can beat no confidence, saying “I rock the block everytime.” He also emphasised that he was committed to the long haul, saying “commitment is part of who I am. I’m single as well.” He also claimed no confidence is “crap”. No Confidence could not be reached for comment at the time of posting.

Long time VUWSA execer Seamus Brady listed his achievements and rightly said: “vote for me to keep the good work going.”

Sam Mason, Kieran O’Connor, Alice Pan, Conrad Reyners and William Wu did not show up to the forum.

Queer Representative, VP Administration and publications committee representative did not recieve nominations. A by-election will be held for these positions early next year.

EDIT: Hardy pointed out that I had misquoted him slightly. This has now been fixed?

VUWSA president Jasmine Freemantle was hit in the head by an orange, but Chancellor Tim Beaglehole and Vice Chancellor Pat Walsh survived unscathed.

Protest leader, VUWSA education vice president Freya Eng said the poultry-produce pillory was not supported by VUWSA, and no executive members threw items.

The group of about 25 protesters, largely made up of Workers’ Party members, marched from the quad to the Hunter Building Council Chambers shortly after 4pm.

Former VUWSA President Joel Cosgrove, and Alistair Reith, both Workers’ Party members who were disenrolled from the university after burning a flag on the Mount Street Bar deck earlier this year, were in the protest group.

The protest, which initially left off from the quad—containing fewer than 25 people, mainly Workers’ Party members—was aimed to dispute the annual fee setting meeting of the university council. Fees were for the nth year in a row set to go up and the council mooted a 93 percent increase for the student services levy.

During a speech by Victoria Broadcasting Club managing co-director Matthew Davis on why fees and the levy should not be raised, Reith, fellow Workers’ Party member and former VUWSA Campaigns Officer Sam Oldham and perennial student Kerry Tankard began yelling and chanting.

Beaglehole read a warning to the protesters, saying they would be asked to leave if they continued to interrupt the meeting, before the protesters began to throw eggs and fruit.

The Council was then moved from the Council Chambers to a smaller room in the Kirk Building under a heavy Campus Care presence, where the meeting continued.

Fees were raised by about five percent, while the student services levy was raised by 93 percent. See our other story here for more information.

It was not known if those involved in the protest would be trespassed or face discipline from the university.

Hey, hey, guess what? Salient is the mother flipping best publication in the world*!

Last week we took out the Fairfax Media New Zealand Award for Best Student Publication at the Aotearoa Student Press Association (ASPA) Awards. It’s the first time since 2004—when I was first year—that Salient has won this prestigious award.

We also picked up five first places and eight other placings out of the 18 categories. For all the juicy details see page 9.

Big thanks to Clive Lind from Fairfax and to Laura McQuillan for organising the shindig (oh, and for just being generally awesome). Big love to every volunteer and staff member who has contributed to Salient this year.

Stop. Back it up. You’ve probably never heard of ASPA. What was I thinking?

The magazine you’re holding is drenched in it. Your hands are covered in ASPA. Don’t worry, it’s not a communicable disease. It’s just a network of student publications—from Craccum in Auckland to Critic in Dunedin.

We share stories, features, ideas, spit and content, as well as providing support and advice to the group as a whole. Each publication is fairly autonomous but we get together twice a year to wallow in our own hard work, awesomeness and superior abilities (when compared to student politicians).

ASPA is an important backbone to all the student mags and one which you should support. The power of ASPA isn’t quite as strong as the power of Grayskull, but, nevertheless, it is strong.

We routinely nab interviews (Anne Tolley, Bob McCoskrie, Bill and Ben) and stories (Tolleycopter, The Roel van Leeuwen scandal) that the mainstream media pass over. Sometimes the mainstream media take notice and run with stories we got first. It’s all very well when they do, but ASPA remains committed to doing what it does best—covering student affairs, for students.

With cuts in tertiary education funding and voluntary student membership of students’ associations on the horizon, we look to ASPA more and more to provide support and pick up on the main issues that run like shining threads through the tapestry of student life. But we can’t do it without your help. How do you help, you ask? Why, by reading, of course! Keep reading (and writing in, and volunteering for us, and so on) and we’ll keep writing. That’s the deal.

And now for something completely different

The New Zealand Republican Movement (NZRM) is spearheading a grass roots movement to get people discussing, thinking and debating about republicanism. This can only be a good thing.

The republican movement has deep roots at Vic—a republican club was formed in 1994 by current NZRM Common Cause liaison, Savage. The movement dominated Salient’s letters pages for the entire year that year. This gem caught my eye:

“Dear Republicans
I like the Royal Family because the Queen mum used to go to all the FA Cup games.
Thanks.
Aston Villa Fan”

This pretty much sums up most of the arguments for monarchism anyway.

I encourage you to head to their meeting in the Common Room of the SUB on Wednesday 1 pm to hear Savage and Lewis Holden talk and argue about why New Zealand should become a republic.

VUWSA by-election shitstorm?

Could be. Interesting things have happened which are only coming to fruition at the time of print. Check out the Salient website on to find out what is going on.

*of student media in New Zealand.

Sources revealed the decision to Salient last week. The report had not been officially released at the time of print.

McCaffrey complained because of irregularities between online and paper ballots, and lax identification procedures with paper votes.

Upon recieving the complaint the election committee released a statement saying the irregularities’ while “not strictly in accordance with the VUWSA constitution” had “minimal” influence on the by-election.

The matter was passed onto an independent panel, comprised of former NZUSA president Joey Randall, former VUWSA Treasurer Graeme Edgeler and Senior Lecturer in Statistics Dr Richard Arnold, who have reportedly found the by-election to be invalid.

If the election is invalid, the decisions of the VUWSA exec over the past two months may not be legitimate.

Former Vice President (Administration) Alexander Neilson—one of the executive members replaced in the by-election—said the panel would have needed a “decent reason” to declare the by-election invalid.

“In almost every election there is something that doesn’t go completely right. In past elections we’ve had a number of exec members who’ve helped the returning officer to ensure compliance. This [error] may have happened because the returning officer was new to VUWSA.

“There is definitely some inexperience on the exec. There’s been a loss of a lot of institutional knowledge from staff and exec members recently.”

Neilson said the panel’s decision put the exec “in a tight position”.

“It puts the voting strength on or below six, [which is] what’s required to make quorum,” he said.

Five new executive members—Max Hardy, Caitlin Dunham, Guy Williams, Zachary Dorner and Luke Cao—were elected in the by-election held from July 27 to 29.

Further updates will be available on the Salient website.

You know that feeling when you’ve been sitting in the sauna for too long? That point where the sweat is trickling down your back, you’re on the verge of fainting, thinking to yourself “now would be a good time to leave”, just as the fat man in the towel sitting across from you gets up but snags his towel on something and you see everything. He snatches at it, but it’s too late. You’ve seen everything. That is the closest approximation I can render.

The meeting kicked off with Deputy Vice Chancellor (Academic) Penny Boumelha presenting the university’s draft equity strategy and draft learning and teaching strategy.

Jasmine, Caitlain and Max (with Nate by default) asked questions of Boumelha to ensure that adequate student input would be sought on the two plans.

The plans themselves set up working groups which will address equity and teaching issues. Putting them down on paper with definite goals and strategies to reach those goals. For more info on these flick the president an email.

It was at this point the exec noticed the friend I had bought along. Haimona sat there quietly during the meeting until asked to leave later when the exec moved into committee.

The exec then discussed last meeting’s minutes. Hilarity ensued over formatting and inaccuracies. Sorry, Nate—they looked good to me.

Having just seen Up I was worried that the accumulated hot air would lift the Student Union Building. It was sweltering. How Freemantle survived wearing about three layers of clothing I will never understand. At this point WVP Seamus Brady opened a window, thus winning 10 points and becoming my personal hero but dashing any hopes of lift off.

AVP Max Hardy, who was wearing a snuggily faux-woolen jumper, was pulled up for referring to a certain VBC staffer as “Princess”. On closer examination of his work report he also claimed under the Miscellaneous heading that replying to trolls on the Salient blog was work. Go figure.

My KPIs just went through the roof.

International Officer Luke Cao was pulled up for not explaining acronyms on his work report and offered other formatting tips by Freemantle. She also reminded Cao that he should not be speaking on behalf of students, unless authorised by her or in his capacity as president of the ISC.

Guy Williams got a stern telling off from Freemantle for cracking a joke. Pity, cos it was pretty funny.

“I’ll be open with you guys. We’re going to have a dance production.” —Masha Kupriyenko

Freemantle grilled Masha over the Dance with Me via Revolution in Colour dance production. This was not the last time the Dance with me via Revolution in Colour dance production would come up.

Guy Williams had put down in his work report that he had written 200 words for Salient which was then not published. Since I didn’t have speaking rights I was only able to nod my head when questioned about the executive’s columns in Salient.

Freemantle announced that VUWSA would be opening a part time office down at Te Aro campus so students down there can access VUWSA’s services. w007. She also mentioned we now have a new IT service. l337.

Mature Students Network and International Students’ council budgets for 2009 were passed after some humming and hoing over the amount of money available for grants, which turns out to be around $12,000.

The exec then discussed Masha’s proposal to grant Debsoc $55.26 for a debate about Roger Douglas’ VSM bill. Freemantle took umbridge at one line on the budget:

Secret Hill Merlot ×2 $12.99 $26

DENIED. No cheap wine to gift to guest speakers who have given up their time to talk to a bunch of students. I will be taking my own cask to the debate.

At this point the exec meeting went into committee and someone closed the window. I meditated through the heat. Some schmack was discussed. The word hypocritical reverberated in my mind a few times. In a last gasp effort the meeting closed and I retired to the cold cold Salient office.

New Zealand has been wandering down a dangerous path of political discourse lately. Between painfully phrased plebiscites, pro-smack acolytes proselytising moral panic, locking prisoners up in shipping crates and nanny state arguments, there is a glimmer of hope. A thin sliver, that somewhere in New Zealand someone cares about deliberative democracy.

The New Zealand Republic Handbook sets out to be exactly what the title leads you to expect. This thin volume sets out a compelling argument for New Zealand to become a republic in a logical and well-written fashion.

The author Lewis Holden is the chair of the New Zealand Republican movement.

Unlike most manifestos distributed by people with political ambitions, this one doesn’t resort to invective rhetoric or slanting of facts. The information contained in The Republic Handbook addresses both sides of the argument, bringing a balance to the reading. To a point this is more of an exercise in ‘know your enemy’ than actually treating Monarchism as a serious threat. By laying the arguments out for all to see you open them up to critique and debate.

This is truly the start of a grass roots movement by the NZ Republican Movement. Putting this information out there in an easily digestible form not only provokes debate, but leads people to the logical conclusion. Worth a read even if you love the Queen.

The New Zealand Republic Handbook
By L J Holden
Self published

Between 1pm and 3pm on Wednesday 23 September Lewis Holden will be on campus in the Atrium of the Student Union Building talking about Republicanism in New Zealand.

VUWSA’s Annual General Meeting is this Wednesday at 1pm in Mount Street Bar. At this meeting a motion to change the Salient charter is being put forward by one of the VUWSA exec members.

The motion is as below:

18. That Salient provides regular coverage of VUWSA affiliated clubs affairs to appear in every issue of the publication. The coverage is to include, though not necessarily limited to, one page per week. The publications editor in conjunction with the clubs officer is, responsible for liaising with clubs to ensure provision of this coverage.

This is totally unnecessary and poorly thought out.

Clubs and their activities already make up an integral part of what Salient prints. Without reporting on their doings, Salient would cease to be the students’ magazine. I can see the need for a motion along these lines if Salient wasn’t doing this already under clause 2 of the Salient Charter. However, anyone who has read through Salient know that we are doing this thoroughly. The person who has put this forward has no working knowledge of how Salient operates and its constraints and has taken no opportunity to get her head around Salient’s operation.

Here is why the motion is unnecessary:

1. We already do it: Salient has a notices page which is extensively used by some clubs. Our news section has consistently featured stories about clubs.
2. There has been no consultation over this proposed motion. The first I heard of the motion was when it was posted on the VUWSA noticeboard. The first time Masha came to talk to me was last week. She says it is just what clubs want. This stems from a motion raised as urgent business at the Clubs Council Committee (CCC) on 13 August. The motion stated that the CCC “support the provision of a page in Salient for clubs per week”. I was not notified of this or asked to speak at that meeting or any meeting since. No club has approached Salient directly to complain about coverage.
   There apparently was one complaint from Amnesty International, but this stopped on the president’s desk and hasn’t reached mine. No doubt gathering dust.
3. The motion is contrary to clause one of the Salient Charter: “The Editor shall determine the form and content of Salient with complete freedom from political interference.”
4. This year Salient has reached out to clubs multiple times via Clubs Coordinator Brent Hayward. We have informed clubs they can use the notices section, and asked them to inform us about what they’re doing, events they’re planning and accolades they think should be mentioned in the news section. The editor simply does not have time to go chasing clubs who are late or muck around in getting content in, and it’s forseen that if clubs don’t get copy in and the one page isn’t filled, it’ll be Salient, not the clubs, clubs officer or clubs coordinator, that takes the rap.
5. Clubs recently launched the Clubs Express zine, a publication devoted to clubs.
6. The space within Salient is limited—there are only x amount of pages, but there are over 100 clubs. The variable activity of clubs means that some will get more coverage than others, and Salient is unable to guarantee that if there were an overflow of content one week that it would all be run—and would therefore be forced to choose which club’s content is published.
7. One of the core functions of the new VUWSA website, due to launch any time soon, is to be a focal point for clubs.

There are alternatives to this constitutional amendment to make sure coverage of clubs activities is at a level Salient can work with, not one imposed on it. These would include inviting the editor to CCC meetings, a working group including the clubs officer, co-ordinator and the editor.

The problem isn’t about a rule in the constitution, it is about communication.

I urge you all to come to the AGM on Wednesday and vote against this motion and encourage your friends to come along and do the same.

There are many ways to write any given statement. Some of them are ugly, some of them are functional, some of them are beautiful. When you are writing—especially if you’re writing for Twitter-addled youth—you should strive for beauty and functionality.

Being the Editor of Salient has opened my eyes to the many different ways of writing. Tens of emails from prospective writers stream into my inbox a week with people saying they love to write and are good at it. Sorry folks, no you’re not.

Many Salienteers have endured heavy horse whippings before their prose was in good enough shape to be published in these hallowed tomes. Most of the ideas stem from George Orwell’s six rules of writing:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

The essay Politics and the English Language is just as pertinent now as when it was written in 1946. Keep these in mind when you’re writing and you can’t go wrong.

Sentences

Sentences should be short. You do not need a sentence which endlessly goes on and on with many sub clauses and parenthetical statements. People who mimic Proust’s prose will induce periods of paralysis.

Metaphors, Similes and Allegories

Can be good if you’re doing them right. Metaphors can be golden. If the flow of your work is unrelenting like a lahar down Mount Ruapehu and your descriptions transcend the mundane, then please by all means use these descriptive devices. Remember: avoid clichés like the plague.

Punctuation

When you dont use punctuation it can be quite hard to to figure out what youre trying to say it can get quite confusing in situations where you are writing about gun slinging pandas the term eats shoots and leaves springs to mind this gets even more confusing i have seen this from some of the best writers is when there are parenthetical statements within subclauses a bit shit really.

Are rhetorical questions worthwhile?

No they are not. While being a powerful emotive tool for public speaking, by asking a rhetorical question you introduce the idea that you may be wrong. Ask multiple rhetorical questions and you run the risk the reader will assume you’re stupid (probably not unfairly).

That

After you’ve finished writing something, use the find tool to locate all instances of ‘that’. More often than not you can get rid of half the ‘that’s.

However

,
If you’re starting a new paragraph that contradicts the previous paragraph you don’t need to say however.

Writing like you’re talking

Please don’t like, do this, man. Unless you’re Guy Armstrong you will not get away with it.

…’s

Ellipses. If you want to sound like a clueless doofball, use ellipses more than once every paragraph.

Grammerz, spellink, txt spk and tense

Once when I was write a piece of writerngs it all was going to go horribley rong. Th pnt is nt a hrd 1 2 gt?

The only exception is when you’re like being ironic. LOL!!! WTF!? Read all previous teh grammerz by Mikey for more info on these topics.

Thesaurus function

This is a killer. Some words have very specific meanings and connotations. Use the wrong one and you end up looking like a male genitalia. (See what I did there?)

Simplicity

People are stupid. When they read, they don’t want to have to think. Keep words simple. Keep sentence structure simple. Exclude jargon and technical terms unless it’s totally necessary.

Fonts

Please do not use Comic Sans, Times New Roman, Wingdings. For more on this please see page 33.

Read it aloud

This will force you to spot the errors you miss when you’re reading it in your head. As the Salient crew will attest, I read everything out loud.

You can throw away all these rules if your audience is yourself, your Live Journal or WordPress blog. If you want to be able to communicate effectively you need to be able to be understood. The above points address the communication problem but the most important thing to remember when you sit down at a computer is that you need to have fun.

Approved reading
Politics and the English Language, George Orwell
Stained Glass Political Platform, Stewart Chaplin
Dilbert and the Way of the Weasel, Scott Adams

Disapproved reading
Anything by Uther Dean
The President’s column
The Biography and complete works of Marcel Proust, edited by J I Tadie

That ‘cunt’ is offensive

By Jean-Michel Olivier, Independent Film Maker

We find our hero sitting bow-legged on the set of his latest cinematic construction, the aptly titled C Word Run. He regards me with a certain je ne sais qua as he contemplates a response.

“Well,” the director begins, “Sit still and I shall tell you a tale…”

In 1996 when I was but a lonely best boy for Robyn G. Ackman’s mind-blowing tribute to banal nationalism The River Runs Red, White, and Blew You to Smithereens, Sandman, I whittled away the hours by reading some of the finest literature of our time. Your readers may not be familiar with the treatises of Norman Sandchild and his seminal work The Fuck, but it changed my conception of what constitutes reality.

I was no longer satisfied with fixing lights; I needed to become my own light. I developed an insatiable need to rise up beyond my better self and produce something complete—an even better self. I became fixated on Chapter 12 of The Fuck, which was entitled The Power of the Word. I photocopied it at least seven-dozen times and plastered it across the walls of my New Yorkian bedsit. In it, Sandchild poses that the word ‘fuck’ has an indelible power. “To replace it with another word like ‘dog’ or ‘barbeque’ would have an immediate and banal re-ac-tion,” he says.

This single sentence was a revelation. It became an obsession. I found it wrapping around my body and sniping my face like a cobra sitting on top of an anaconda during the wet season. It suddenly became clear; the obsession developed meaning. I had to embrace this and give it some kind of form, a claymation samba of a tango, if you will.

I moved out of my bedset and hiked across the western plains to Billings, Montana, where I lived in a cave subsiding on flecks of moss and contaminated cave water for six years. In that time, I began to concoct my ideal image of a word. Linguists around the world have agreed (I assume) that the power of one single word can change the world. It became my destiny to find a word and lead that word down the road of enlightenment and towards a podium facing out upon humanity.

The word… is not a popular word, this I must accept. It is a word that for better or worse has enveloped a set of meanings and conceptions. It is understood to mean something in a literal sense, and another in its hateful virtual embodiment. I am not the architect of this meaning; but I must accept it is true. It is why I have used it with absolute aplomb in C Word Run. You may not find the word offensive, but it is used to construct offensive meaning. Le word ‘cunt’, ergo, mon ami, is offensive.

He folded his arms and leaned back in his chair. A look fell across his face that said ‘checkmate’, and I was left confused. Had this man, this Jean-Michel Olivier, successfully proven once and for all that the word cunt was indeed offensive?

The filmmaker was right. I was offended—best boys are best scene and not heard.

JvJ’s Right of reply:

RIP Jean-Michel Olivier.

Dropping the C-Bomb

Jakon von jakobson, the lowly quantity surveyor.

I use the title ‘c-bomb’ only in a totally ironic manner here. If the c-bomb was in fact ordinance, it would closely resemble a spud gun. Fun to play with but ultimately ineffective way to shock, awe and impress your enemies. You are holding testament to how inoffensive the c-bomb is in your sweaty little hands right now—what self-respecting magazine would publish something offensive?

Rather than writing some boring screen-play-esque novella, it is best to address the issues here. So, in perfect quantity surveyor-type prose, please survey these reasons why the c-bomb is in no way offensive.

Constituent parts

Words are made up of letters. None of which on their own cause offense. Here is a short run-down of the letters involved in the making of the c-bomb.

U: twenty-first letter in the latin alphabet. Used in words such as uvula (twice!), unanimous and is the first letter in the United States of America, the strongest country on Earth and the country in which Dr Dre resides.

T: Twentieth letter in the latin alphabet, the most commonly used consonant in English. A little known fact about the letter T is that one time it was missed out of an important document. This directly led to the charge of the light brigade.

C: Third letter of the latin alphabet, famous for being in words like cereal, Craccum and Caclin.

N: Fourteenth letter in the Latin alphabet, second most commonly used consonant after T. Often overlooked when choosing initials for small children.

Sound

/ˈkʌnt/—kun – t.

It starts off like fun, gun or run. Also sounds like Mike Hunt. It also sounds like bunt, the act of hitting a baseball lightly; runt, the smallest rapper of a litter; dunt, A dull-sounding blow to the back of Olivier’s head; Gunt, a river in Tajikistan, hunt, pursue for food or sport, junt, an unrolled joint made with a mix of tobacco & cannabis just like Dr Dre smokes, lunt; A slow-burning match or torch; munt, fuck shit up; nunt, jewish pastry; punt, kick. None of these words are offensive even though they all sound pretty darn similar to the c-bomb.

Offence

Carl von Clausewitz or Jack Dempsey or perhaps Gandhi said “The best defence is a good offence,” which of course means that if you want to make friends and/or influence people, you have to insult them. That is the obvious conclusion.

Historical usage

Supposedly comes from a street name where prostitutes used to hang out, but if you go back even further it was an actual anatomical term that derived from a word that meant blossoming flower.

Many famous people have used the c-bomb, here are but a few:

Geoffrey Chaucer.
Robbie Burns.
James Joyce.
Jane Fonda.
Dr Dre.
Jean-Michel Olivier, the well known unknown script writer.

When used in art, like the pretentious attempt on the opposite page, it seems to be okay. So why not in every day parlance?

Oh, it already is, you say?

Reclaimation

Many feminist movements like to use the word. Kind of like how African American rappers can say n-word, the gays can say the f-word, dykes can say dyke, people of an orange hair colouration can say ginge and student journalists can say nubs. Many young people and emos have started using the term in such forums as Manners Mall, and not just to describe female genitalia. The c-bomb has been used to describe all manner of things, from the editor of this magazine to a sailor’s cap—it is even a colloquial unit of measurement.

Similar

words
Cock is another four-letter word that starts with C that is deemed only mildly offensive. It’s meaning refers to male genitalia, as does cock, schlong, willy and dick. Vagina, vulva and box are also not offensive

Words have as much power as you give them. Meanings change and it is quite apparent that this particular word is no longer offensive.

J-MO’s Rebuttal:

In an interview with Salient last week Freemantle played coy with the prospect of a second term, saying she was strongly considering her future. She did say that if she didn’t run she would support a “strong and sustainable” successor.

Salient’s guess is that this is current Vice-President (Administration) Max Hardy.

Alan Young has hedged his bets by nominating himself for three positions, including president and vice-president.

Many of the catagories have only one candidate, meaning No Confidence will be a strong option for many VUWSA voters this year.

No nominations for the positions of Vice-President (Administration), Queer Officer and for one of the publications committee reps were recieved. This coupled with No Confidence’s strong presence means some positions will probably be co-opted until VUWSA is able to hold a by-election early next year.

Because nominations closed right on deadline, Salient is unable to provide man­ifestos or interviews until next week’s issue.

We will be updating the Salient website for more details over the next week.

Vuwsa General election nominees 2010

President
Max Hardy
Guy Williams
Alan Young

Vice-President (Education)
Sam Oldham
Alan Young

Vice-President (Welfare)
Seamus Brady
Samuel Mason

Vice-President (Administration)
No Nominations Received

International Officer
Alice Pan

Environmental Officer
Zachary Dorner

Queer Officer
No Nominations Received

Welfare Officer
Craig Carey

Women’s Rights Officer
Caitlin Dunham

Clubs Officer
Fraser Pearce

Campaigns Officer
Bridie Hood

Activities Officer
Alan Young

Education Officer
Kieran O’Connor
James Sleep

University Council Representative
William Wu
Amy Archer
Conrad Reyners
Fraser Pearce

Publications Committee Rep
Seamus Brady
[Two positions available]

Polling opens this Thursday 24 and closes Wednesday 30 September

Salienteers picked up another five first placings:
Robyn Kenealy, first equal for best cartoon.
Rory Harden, best cover.
Sarah Robson, best feature writer.
Nina Fowler, best feature content.
Jessy Edwards, best unpaid news.

We also picked up a number of placings:
Salient/Catch Design 2nd for best website.
Adam Howard, 2nd for best sports writer.
Sarah Robson, 2nd for best education series.
Michael Langdon, 3rd for best column.
Uther Dean, 3rd for best reviewer.
Jackson James Wood, 2nd for best editorial writer.
Rory Harnden, 2nd equal for best design.
Michael Oliver, 2nd for best paid news.

Full results with judges’ comments are below.

Best Website

Third: In Unison.
Second: Salient.
First: Craccum.

Dompost.co.nz web editor Patrick Crewdson said Craccum’s homepage was the most visually appealing of the sites and included bonus features which weren’t in the print edition.

Best Headline

Second equal: In Unison, with “Exploiting Excessive Empathy as a Form of Recession Relief in Three Easy Steps (Or: How I made a fake charity, and used it to buy myself some Chicken McNuggets)”, and Gyro, with “Trousers lowered, awareness raised”.

First: Critic, with “Students spitroasted at CoC fight”.

Listener staff reporter Sarah Barnett said it was a great pun that showed Critic knew its audience, and was relevant to its audience without being forced.

Best Cartoonist

Third equal: Michael Leung of Canta and Valentine Watkins of Craccum.

First equal: Robyn Kenealy of Salient and Maria Brett of Critic.

Cartoonist and illustrator Dylan Horrocks said Robyn Kenealy’s cartoons had distinctive personal drawing with a lot of character, and “all kinds of smarts going on just below the surface”.

Editorial cartoonist Jim Hubbard said Maria Brett’s cartoons were an impressive comic book style, with a good use of angle, movement and perspective.

Best Original Photography

Third: Matt Jenkinson of Canta.

Second: Erin Gaffney of In Unison.

First: Clinton Cardozo of Debate.

The judges said Clinton’s concert photos captured the moment, and they liked his use of black and white photography.

Best Sports Writer

Second equal: Adam Howard of Salient and Ian McDonald of In Unison.

First: Brad Kreft of Critic.

NZPA deputy news editor Greg Tourelle said Brad Kreft’s column on the pain of encountering elderly golfers was easily the best entry in the category: “Delightfully dry, it was well written, with the clever pullback from the cynical ageism just at the right time.”

Best Education Series

Third: Helen De Reus and Ben Thomson of Critic.

Second: Sarah Robson of Salient.

First: Joshua Drummond of Nexus.

A judge said Nexus’ coverage of the van Leeuwen affair was an engaging investigation of issues that lie at the core of what a university is, or ought to be. It showed what student media is capable of, with some tenacious digging.

Best Humour Content

Third: Ryan Boyd of Debate.

Second: Jeremy Bryson of Chaff.

First: Joseph Harper of In Unison.

TV personality Jeremy Wells said Jospeh Harper’s piece on the lameness of charity was particularly clever piece on charity and its lameness, an “original idea, well constructed linguistically and graphically.”

Best Reviewer

Third equal: Uther Dean of Salient and Daniel Copeland of Gyro.

Second: Antony Parnell of Nexus.

First: Joseph Harper of In Unison.

Music reviewer and blogger Simon Sweetman said Joseph’s entries stood out amongst the rest. He writes like a reviewer rather than a blogger, with a good level of opinion and information.

Best Columnist

Third: Michael Langdon of Salient.

First equal: Dr Love of Magneto and Liz Willoughby-Martin of Critic.

Public Address news columnist Russell Brown said Dr Love wasn’t the only column this year to adpot a humorous persona, but it was easily the most successful. It’s a good blend of dry wit and useful information about things the reader might actually want to know.

Scoop co-editor Alastair Thompson said Liz’s column is entertaining, charming and occasionally funny as well as being informative and beautifully crafted—a natural columnist with a consistently good product.

Best Cover

Third: Craccum.

Second: Satellite.

First: Salient.

Metro magazine art director Charlie McKay said Salient’s covers could easily live on his coffee table. Salient used typography in an interesting way and had a current visual style.

Best Editorial Writer

Third: Matthew Harnett and Valentine Watkins of Craccum.

Second: Jackson Wood of Salient.

First: Ryan Boyd of Debate.

Dominion Post editor Bernadette Courtney said “Ryan’s editorials are quirky but hit you between the eyes immediately. They made me sit up and take notice and read on and on. Ryan’s writing is tight, imaginative and funny. He has a bright future.”

Best Feature Writer

Third equal: Anthonie Tonnon of Critic and Rosabel Tan of Craccum.

Second: Stacey Knott of In Unison.

First: Sarah Robson of Salient.

Asia New Zealand foundation media adviser Charles Mabbett said Sarah’s articles were of a very high journalistic standard, well-researched and well-written, and she was the most consistent entrant.

Best News Writer (Unpaid)

Third: Stephen Smith of Debate.

Second: Nicholas Mark of In Unison.

First: Jessy Edwards of Salient.

The judges said Jessy’s story on bums bumming around Victoria University showed confident writing, while her other stories had genuine new value and were well-written.

Best News Writer (Paid)

Third: Aimee Gulliver of Critic.

Second: Michael Oliver of Salient.

First: Stacey Knott of In Unison.

Blogger, freelance writer and former Salient news editor Keith Ng said Stacey was the clear-cut winner, and her ability to engage with her subjects made her stories outstanding.

Best Feature Content

Second equal: Joshua Drummond of Nexus and Matt Russell of Chaff.

First: Nina Fowler of Salient.

Investigative journalist Nicky Hager said Nina’s article on the political crisis in Fiji was “a thoughtful and skillful examination of a subject where the mainstream media have spectacularly failed the public … her work is an excellent example of journalism explaining the news.”

Best Design

Second equal: Magneto and Salient.

First: Chaff.

Former Salient designer Chris Elder said Chaff used its larger format well, an interesting and reader-oriented design and excellent technical execution of newsprint to keep everything legible.

Best Small Publication

Third: In Unison.

Second: Gyro.

First: Magneto.

Journalist and media commentator Denis Welch said Magneto was easily the best small publication, for its bold design and high production standards, its good ideas and great attitude. It had the best sense of humour, including some brilliant satire, and it has begun to deliver on its aim of “becoming the most kick-ass student publication in the land.”

Best Publication

Third: Critic.

The judges said it was a very polished publication with consistent and well-written content.

Second: Craccum.

The judges said it had varied coverage, a consistently high standard of writing and interviewing, and was committed to political issues and university matters.

First: Salient.

The judges said Salient is chock full of good reading from start to finish. It is intelligent, irreverent and packed with attitude and personality without being up itself, with good news and features, and endless content.

15 student mags will be represented tonight with 18 Snowflakes, or ASPAs, being awarded.

Of course, none of this would be possible without the generous sponsorship from Fairfax New Zealand. They’ve been sponsoring this event for three years now and every year it just keeps getting better.

I will be live tweeting from the event, you can follow the tweets here.

Good luck to all nominees and magazines.

Keep checking the Twitter feed for updates.

President

Max Hardy
Guy Williams
Alan Young

Vice-President (Education)

Sam Oldham
Alan Young

Vice-President (Welfare)

Seamus Brady
Samuel Mason

Vice-President (Administration)

No Nominations Received

International Officer

Alice Pan

Environmental Officer

Zachary Dorner

Queer Officer

No Nominations Received

Welfare Officer

Craig Carey

Women’s Rights Officer

Caitlin Dunham

Clubs Officer

Fraser Pearce

Campaigns Officer

Bridie Hood

Activities Officer

Alan Young

Education Officer

Kieran O’Connor
James Sleep

University Council Representative

William Wu
Amy Archer
Conrad Reyners
Fraser Pearce

Publications Committee Rep

Seamus Brady
[Two positions available]

Big surprise that current president Freemantle is not running again. In a interview with Salient earlier in the week Freemantle was playing coy with the prospect of her running for a second term. She did say that if she didn’t run she would anoint a successor. Salient‘s guess is that this is Max Hardy.

Alan Young has hedged his bets by nominating himself for three positions, including president and vice-president.

Many of the catagories have only one candidate, meaning that No Confidence will be a strong option for many VUWSA voters this year.

No nominations for the positions of administration VP, Queer Rep and for one of the publications committee reps as well as No Confidence’s strong presence means that these positions will probably be co-opted until VUWSA are able to hold a by-election early next year.

Sir Roger Douglas’ Voluntary Student Membership (VSM) of students’ association bill was been selected as a members bill late last month.

The bill, entitled Education (Freedom of Association) Amendment Bill, has the stated aim of “uphold[ing] students’ right to freedom of association, by ensuring that no student is compelled to join a students’ association.”

Under the current system every student enrolled at Victoria University has to become a member of Victoria University of Wellington Students’ Association. The only way to opt out is to approach the president of the association and provide sound ideological reasons for not wanting to be a member.

Pro-VSM lobbyists were excited by the promise of the bill. ACT on Campus Vice-President and Victoria University student Peter McCaffrey called upon parliament to honour the Bill of Rights and give New Zealand students “freedom”.

“The local tennis or rugby club can’t compel membership and instead relies on providing a good quality service that people want in order to attract members—student associations should be no different,” McCaffrey said.

ACT on Campus’ sentiments were echoed by Chair of Victoria’s branch of the Young Nats, Christian Lambert.

“Students ought to have the same rights and freedoms as every other New Zealander, we should be able to decide whether or not we join a union,” Lambert said.

Douglas himself frames it as an issue of choice allowing students the freedom to choose rather than forcing them to pay a union fee if they want to study.

“In addition, student associations often support particular political causes, which is inappropriate given that all students are forced to financially contribute. Voluntary student membership will increase the legitimacy of the involvement of such associations with politics,” Douglas said.

New Zealand Union of Students’ Associations (NZUSA) co-president Jordan King said the bill was another idea from Sir Roger Douglas who is grossly out of touch with the student population.

“We find the system is working fine. We don’t think he is the best person to make this decision for students,” King said.

“It looks like he wants to impose his 1980 beliefs on unsuspecting students. He probably doesn’t know what it is like to be on a tight budget. We don’t all get a 90 percent discount on our undertakings.”

The bill is expected to have its first reading in parliament within the next few weeks.

This is not the first time a VSM bill has been put before parliament. In 1997, then-MP Michael Laws managed to pass an amendment allowing VSM under the condition that: a) 10 percent of students signed a petition to force a referendum, and b) a majority of students in the referendum voted for VSM.

19:09

Mood: Flamboyantly ambivalent (it is Gaylient next week)
Music: None. It stopped. Put some more on Rory… oh there it goes. It’s that time. Cue Lonely Island.
Completion level: 60% (quite good for this time of night)
Peeve of the moment: Wu sitting in the corner not serenading me, bitch.

20:03

Mood: Transfixed on subbing—high on red ink
Music: Sex with Bowie
Completion level: 61% (Stalled. Fucking subbing).
Peeve of the moment: Stomach ache from too much coke.

20:24… Now with pictures

Mood: Av
Music: Sex With Bowie
Completion level: 62%
Peeve of the moment: Only minimal amounts of Red Bull left.

Cunts in an office

MJO texts while Rory works his fuckin' arse off.

Nina and Mikey doing work having a cry.

Red Bull: it gives us wings.

20:50

Mood: Flat. Flat white. Red Bull. Vooooon
Music: Dr Dre—The Chronic 2001
Completion level: 69% [Explict images here. Takes a while to load because of large file size]
Peeve of the moment: Not too peeved at anything much right now.

21:31

Mood: We’re fuckin’ chuggaluggin’
Music: Arrested Development… it’s not quite music.
Completion level: 70%
Peeve of the moment: Arrested Development. It is a boon and a curse.

22:07

Mood: Starting to not give a fuck
Music: Arrested Development—Love George Michael
Completion level: 71%
Peeve of the moment: Subbing takes too long

22:42

MJO checking in.

Mood: Wondering if there will ever be a boy born who can out-swim a shark.
Music: Myykillll Bluth.
Completion level: I’ve long since abandoned interest in this magazine. Go Issue 47.
Peeve of the moment: “AWW C’MON.”

There’s an awful lot of love going on here at the moment. JJW is subbing and has a question for Mikey “Milhouse” Langdon. Oh, no, he doesn’t. Well.

23:05

MJO again.

Mood: /|\ check it out, it’s a fucking tent
Music: Guitar tuning in Drop D by R. Harnden, musician, designer.
Completion: 84.34%
Pet Peeve: “Aww… double spacing.” “I can see what you mean by that thing, Mikey.” “My life is a never-ending barrage of misery piled upon misery. When will God take something off the pile and let me lie?!”

(Only two of those quotes were true.)

23:49

JJW back from the wilderness.

Mood: Like I’m on a Robotussin trip.
Music: mc chris—Life’s a bitch and I’m her pimp “My backpack’s got jets / I’m Boba the Fett”
Completion: -483% Mikey ‘Milhouse’ Langdon accidentally deleted EVERYTHING.
Pet Peeve: Ellipses… use them sparingly please, or MJO will wastify yo’ face.

00:22

Mood: It started hailing!
Music: mc chris—mc chris is dead “I need ON* to find the clit”
Completion: 90% The last 10% is the hardest
Pet peeve: I didn’t bring a fucking jacket BLARGH BLACK ZOMBIE VOMIT ALL OVER YOU.
Watch for more updates as the night goes along

02:12

Mood: AMPING
Music:

Completion: 99.5%
Pet Peeve: “Jekyll Jekyll Hide Jekyll Hide Hide Jekyll”

02:37

Mood: 17
Music: NONE. We turned it off
Completion: 100—uploaded
Pet Peeve: Needing to urinate when you’re half way home

Night ALL! Look out for Gaylient on Monday

The bill entitled Education (Freedom of Association) Amendment Bill has the stated aim of “uphold[ing] students’ right to freedom of association, by ensuring that no student is compelled to join a students’ association.”

Under the current system every student enrolled at Victoria University has to become a member of Victoria University of Wellington Students’ Association. The only way to opt out is to approach the president of the association and provide sound ideological reasons for not wanting to be a member.

New Zealand Union of Students’ Associations (NZUSA) co-president Jordan King said, “The bill is another idea from Sir Roger Douglas who hasn’t been a student for a long time.

“It looks like he wants to impose his 1980 beliefs on unsuspecting students. He probably doesn’t know what it is like to be on a tight budget. We don’t all get a 90 percent discount on our undertakings.

“We find the system is working fine. We don’t think he is the best person to make this decision for students,” King said.

Douglas frames it as an issue of choice. “We allow students to choose what university or polytechnic they attend, and what papers to take; it’s time we gave them the freedom to choose whether or not to join their local student association rather than forcing them to pay a union fee if they want to study.

“In addition, student associations often support particular political causes, which is inappropriate given that all students are forced to financially contribute. Voluntary student membership will increase the legitimacy of the involvement of such associations with politics,” he said.

The bill is expected to have its first reading in parliament within three to five weeks.

This is not the first time a VSM bill has been put before parliament. In 1997, then-MP Michael Laws managed to pass an amendment allowing VSM under the condition that: a) 10 percent of students signed a petition to force a referendum, and b) a majority of students in the referendum voted for VSM.

The full bill can be read here [pdf].

I’m not going to bore you all with what the role is about. You can bore yourself by reading this job description. As per appendix 3 of the job description here is this year’s Salient budget, a subset of VUWSA’s. You can find that in one of the tabs.

Basically, if you want to be editor drop me an email with your CV, a covering letter detailing your aims for Salient during 2010 and some samples of written journalistic work.

Just want to talk about it? Give the office a call on 04 463 6766 or drop by.

Applications close 5pm, 11 September.

It’s been fun and it is definitely worth a shot going for it.

Should be down by 2:30. The VUWSA van is getting its WOF and should be back up at Kelburn at about mid-day.

Mean while you can read all the content up here.

Hugs and kisses,

JJW

*********
UPDATE
*********
Ok. So the VUWSA van was stuck down at the shop all day. Great. No one bothered to tell me.

SOOOOoooOooOO I’ve arranged for our star distributor, Guy “I ain’t got no morals” Armstrong, to go beyond the call of duty and help out by lending us his Daihatsu. Should have Salients to all satellite campuses tomorrow morning. Sigh.

There are many conceptions of what justice should be. In my conception justice is—or at least should be—like science. There is a theory. That theory needs to be tested. Our conceptions of justice, like our understanding of science, should be constantly being refined. Constantly improved.

In the search for justice nothing should be taken for granted till you have the evidence to support it. Most of all, those administering justice should admit when it is wrong when new, better evidence comes to light.

Justice is evolution in motion. Over hundreds of years the common law system and humanity’s changing beliefs have led us to this point.

Evolution occasionally leads to dead ends—the slowly dying provocation defence has just been put on the ‘soon to be extinct’ list. Just as anti-homosexual laws were in 1986 and the capital punishment laws in 1961. Short sharp shocks—changes in our beliefs force their extinction.

I find it truly sad that the level of discourse around our justice system has reached new lows. Talk of private prisons, shipping container cells, longer, harsher sentences, crushing cars, more prisons, arming police with tasers, putting offenders back into communities without the support they need, turning our backs on restorative methods that evidence shows actually works.

The Chief Justice cannot even say what most people would consider a few choice words about her valued and expert opinion.

New Zealand has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world and a startling recidivism rate.

Play word association with someone. You say “prison”. They say “easy street”. You facepalm. They rant for half an hour about how easy it is for crims on the inside.

No one wants to talk about miscarriages of justice. Passions understandably run wild with those involved, but all too often those who aren’t involved fail to see a bigger picture behind airing justice issues.

Something is going wrong somewhere. The evidence shows this. We as a country just don’t seem to have the courage to engage in rational debate about the entire system, nudging it in the right direction.

It’s 4:45pm on 5 June this year and I am watching Wendy Petrie’s live cross from outside the Christchurch High Court. This was the most intensely reported-on trial New Zealand has witnessed—live streaming video, reporters camped outside the court for the whole month, daily updates in all major dailies, inches upon inches of editorial columns and megabytes of blog-space have been written about this case.

New Zealand Press Association news editor Kevin Norquay said, “everyone knew he had been tried once before and found guilty. There was no prospect of being able to report that trial without indicating what had happened. It was an unusual situation.”

Coming off the back of a year of media-intensive trials—from Tony Veitch to Clayton Weatherston, Bain to Taito Philip Field—discussion here and abroad has been drawn to how the media addresses high-profile court cases.

Oft we hear the term ‘trial by media’ thrown around. But just how robust is the interplay between New Zealand’s justice system and the media? Has the concept of innocent till proven guilty been eroded by media inference? Does public interest trump privacy?

Public interest

Senior lecturer in Media Studies Dr Douglas Van Belle sees public interest as a way of keeping the judicial system transparent and honest.

“Public interest focuses primarily on making the substance of the case—not necessarily the identity players—the evidence and logic and so forth, publicly available for public scrutiny.

“You can have a fair system, it doesn’t always go fairly for the individuals caught up in it,” he said.

Norquay said for justice to be seen to be done, “somebody who is deemed to have done something against the rules and regulations that society has imposed needs to be tried in public.” This will allow the public to be aware of the ins and outs of the case against them and therefore be better informed.

The Gatekeeper

There are certain rules about what the media can report during a trial, and unless you’re sitting there it is unlikely you’ll ever know. Norquay describes the public’s view of most cases as just the tip of the iceberg. “What the reporter and the newspaper know is the part under the water.”

One of the things you’re asking the news media to do—as a consumer of news—is to sort through a mass of information and give you the details you need to know.

Occasionally media outlets will take a chance when there is suppressed information they believe to be of public interest. The Dominion Post in particular has taken chances on things they believe are in the public interest. This was shown with the publication of police documents about the 2007 Urewara arrests.

In this case The Dominion Post intercepted and then published parts of a 156-page affidavit used to gain warrants for the arrests. The Solicitor-General, Dr David Collins QC, threw down a hefty indictment, saying “the articles were the most serious and inexcusable breaches of an accused’s fair trial rights that this country has ever seen.”

Fairfax, The Dominion Post and then-editor Tim Pankhurst were cleared of the contempt charges on the basis it would be unlikely for jurors to remember details of the stories when in all likelihood their trials wouldn’t take place for two years.

Norquay said, “it was quite a brave and responsible stance for a media organisation to take.”

Crusading journalistic ethos aside there is a plus side to having many different media outlets decide what you should know.

Van Belle said “assuming you have a variety of news media and a variety of perspectives you’re going to get a variety of information from different perspectives. You, as an intelligent consumer, can develop an opinion as a whole.”

As long as they’re operating within the rules, allowing a variety of different reporting styles, angles and edges, it’s actually to the benefit of us, the consumers of news, and to the discourse around any given trial.

Suppressed

Van Belle said, “the one thing you absolutely want to preserve is the process of name suppression. The specific theme of the person involved—unless it is a public official—until the trial system has run its course, and you have a verdict, by suppressing the name you get a chance that, if acquitted, the person can return to at least a reasonably normal life.”
Norquay disagrees, saying “If you have a whole series of court cases where you report a guy from somewhere is alleged to have done something to someone who we can’t tell you who they are. What is the point? There is no deterrent value to anybody not to commit crimes if they know they’re going to get instant name suppression a lottery-type chance of getting off.”

However, there is also a dark side to suppression, as Norquay points out in the Louise Nicholas case. “There wouldn’t have been a journalist in the country that didn’t know that those two guys were in jail and that they had previous convictions for the same thing.”

Because of the rules, not only could the media not report that arguably important fact, but the jury were not allowed to know let alone take it into consideration.

The Law Commission’s issue paper Suppressing Names and Evidence released late last year concludes in the favour of open justice, but provides many discussion points around why suppression should be granted. It also brought into question the cost of penalties for breaking suppression, which are quite low ($500–$1000 fine or three months in prison).

Norquay said many of the breached suppression orders are mistakes, and occasionally a person’s name has already been made public before they’re formally charged and given name suppression. “It is almost impossible to put that particular genie back in the bottle,” he said.

This difficulty is acknowledged by the Law commission: “we heard of cases in which journalists had great difficulty in ascertaining whether there was an order in place in a particular case, and what its terms and duration were.” They go on to suggest a national register of suppression orders or a Courts Information Officer.

TEH INTERET

When asked by Salient, Justice Minister Simon Power said, “the internet has substantially altered the way we communicate as a society. It’s important for the media to report criminal trials responsibly, in a factually accurate manner, and preferably without recourse to what might be considered gossip or unreliable opinion.”

Victoria University of Wellington media law lecturer Steven Price has posted a blog in which he outlines his thoughts on the way to deal with the internet, blogs and social networking sites. He points out most of the risk of prejudicing a trial comes from top Google hits and widely used social networking sites.

He said, “it is now unrealistic to expect jurors not to Google. The debate among judges tends to be: ‘do we warn them not to look at information outside the court, or do we explicitly warn them not to Google?’”

The conclusion Price reaches is that Googling is almost instinctive and it would be counterproductive to make it a criminal offence or sequester the juries so they don’t have internet access.

Price’s solution: “An official should be tasked with sitting down before each trial (and periodically during it) and Googling the defendant’s name. If there’s prejudicial material out there, steps should be quickly taken to have it temporarily taken down.”

Van Belle doesn’t see online news or blogs as a big problem for the judicial system.

“People who go online for information go to trusted sources. Until a blogger establishes a reputation as a trusted source, they’re not going to have an impact in any mainstream kind of way.

“If you’ve got some off-the-wall kind of blogger, only off-the-wall people are going to be reading it anyway.”

On the topic of David Farrar’s Kiwiblog, Van Belle said: “it probably pales in comparison to stuff.co.nz.”

Price reminds us that with free speech comes limits and responsibilities: “If it can be shown that they have published some inaccurate, or suppressed, or prejudicial material, and it has improperly influenced a jury, this may give defence lawyers grounds to argue on appeal for a conviction to be overturned.

“Imagine if Weatherston’s lawyers got his conviction overturned because of prejudicial publicity. It’s that prospect that should make bloggers save their comments until after the trial, as much as any fear of a contempt action against them.”

Norquay points out that how closely a journalist walks the line “depends who is drawing the line. Depends on the journalist. Depends on the organisation. You should be cautious and aware when reporting court cases to not interfere in the process.”

An imperfect thing

Of course the process is the most important issue. Within the framework of a democracy we can’t and should not stop people from having opinions and voicing them. What we should be doing is encouraging opinions based on fact. The easiest way to do that?

Power said it is to provide “factually accurate, neutral and balanced” reporting.

Norquay posits that the Weatherston case served the people of New Zealand well:

“Let him say what he likes and let the public make up their own minds. It is when you put it in an editorial line and say ‘this is what he did, this is what you should think’—that is bad.”

As the justice system shows us every day, humans are flawed. Because of this, media and democratic government are flawed too. “You’re asking it to do too many things at once.” Says Van Belle. “It is never going work precisely right. That same editorialising that you don’t like with a court case is absolutely critical when you’re talking about policymaking in government.”

Power’s promise to remove the partial defence of provocation is one example of how the vital the interplay between the justice system and the media is. Without the focus on Weatherston’s use of the defence it is unlikely enough traction would have been gained to get the law changed in the same timeframe. A big fist pump to the media for this.

So goes the onward crawl of the judicial system of New Zealand.

Van Belle sums up the situation well: “You just gotta live with it—it’s a broken car, but it’ll get you there. You have to accept it is an imperfect thing, but it is the least imperfect thing we’ve got going.”

Sean Connors is rumoured to be gunning for another shot at VUWSA President this year.

The failed 2008/09 candidate was at a party last weekend when he was overheard boasting about his political aspirations by a Salient reporter.

“Thisssh time next year, eyesh gonna be shitting… eyesh mean I’ll be in a lumbar poshitshun somewhere,” he drunkenly slurred to a crowd of first years as he collapsed into a pile of empty Bushman’s Draft quart bottles.

Connors—who includes President Obama, Hitler and Martha Stewart as political role models—was reticent about his boastfulness at the kegger when Salient caught up with him.

“By run for president I mean… Aw fuck it. The cat’s out of the bag now. Long live Conners!” he said, and continued chanting.

This follows startling news that longtime VUWSA member and campus personality Nick O’Kane may not be running for President.

O’Kane said “I have no intention of running at this stage,” despite reports from prominent VUWSA exec members who said he had approached them and declared his interest in becoming Jasmine Freemantle.

Freemantle, when asked if she would be running against the potential candidates, stressed the need for experience on the executive, especially in the position of President.

Connors said that he would be happy to arrange some kind of power sharing arrangement with either O’Kane or Freemantle.

“Let’s face it. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m lonely. I just need a friend. That’s really why I’m running. Will you be my friend?”

Freemantle seemed hesitant at Connors’ offer of a power-sharing arrangement saying, “I don’t understand that question.”

Nominations for the VUWSA General election open this Monday.

In preparation for seeing F1 I did what any self-respecting man—who has a) never owned a car and b) has very little interest in cars—would do: watch Top Gear. There is one great clip where Richard Hammond is let loose with a Formula One car.

For a man who has driven pretty much every car under the sun with skill and finesse, he never quite got the hang of driving the intricate and seemingly temperamental machine.
Hammond’s little experiment gave me a great insight into just how highly evolved these machines are. I say evolved because, as the full title: F1 – The Great Design Race implies, the cars have seemingly come from backyard jalopies to magnificent marvels of modern mechanics. In the 60 years since Formula One’s birth from the womb of the European Grand Prix races the cars—it seems a shame to call them cars—have literally evolved.

It is evolution sped up. You have a specific biosphere: the track, a changing environment: FIA rules, and you have diversity in the multiple teams and drivers. Throw in high stakes competition and you have a great design race. The evolution is tracked around the outside of the main exhibit in three timelines which detail events, FIA rule changes and the great names of Formula One racing.

The cars themselves are pieces of art. Perfectly engineered to go as fast as possible within the strict rules, the pristine body kits with their aerodynamic edges and swish paint jobs are simply more than just mere engineering.

The first cars of the 50s, like the the Babham BT20, with their distinct rolled up, slightly flattened newspaper shape and rear mounted engine stand next to Ferrari’s racing red F2004.

The centre piece of the collection is definitely the McLaren MP4-21. Its grandeur is such that they have segregated it from the other cars and mounted it on a mirrored throne. The silver and red body with the fat grooved tires and mood lighting sent shivers down my spine.

New Zealand’s connection is of course emphasised. The names and ephemera of McLaren, Hume and Amon are in a place of pride. Everything from dented helmets to melted steering wheels are there. Like the ad says, “driving is in our blood”, and our most famous racers are no exception to the dire warning delivered by the ad: Hulme died of a heart attack while going 301 kph on Conrod Straight at Bathurst. McLaren died testing a newly designed model and Amon had many narrow escapes.

Even if you’re not a car buff, F1 is worth a visit this holidays. Formula One is one of the most widely watched sports and this exhibition gives you a great insight into not only the design element but the people, the history and the antics. Best time to go is mid week, the weekend queues have been long and you really need a bit of time to digest all the information on display and to just look at the cars from every angle.

Salient has seven tickets to give away for F1 courtesy of Te Papa. All you have to do is complete the colouring in competition on page 70 and you could be getting the green light. Please have entries in by 5 PM Wednesday 19 August. Vrooom Vroom.

Te Papa
15 July—1 November
$12 Admission

This is an apology.

I apologise to the families affected by Salient’s proposed Lundy500.

We did not anticipate your feelings when we were planning this. It was a mistake on our behalf. We could never imagine the hurt and pain you all must have gone through and go through every time something like this is brought up.

As stated, we were trying to address a wider issue with the justice system—the presentation of deeply flawed evidence and the convictions that this may lead to.

The way in which we did this was tasteless and unthoughtful.

We hope the family can, if not forgive us, then at least understand where we were coming from.

JJW and the Salient team

The usual writer for this column contracted swine flu and I’m not sure what he contracted it to do but it wasn’t a sub-contract to do this column

Type: Sparkling Wine

The swine flu thing got me thinking: is wine good for ill health?

Common sense tells me that downing a whole cask of County in 20 minutes is probably not good for that lingering case of chlamydia.

However, in moderation, apparently wine can have positive health effects. It is rich in antioxidants. Red wine is plentiful in these little beauties.

Scientists are usually sadistic fucks. Cutting animals up. Feeding them blue M&Ms till they explode, but some—like the ones in Brazil in 1996—give rabbits wine. FOR FREE!

The rabbits were feed with cholesteroly food and given red wine. The variables were red wine (with alcohol), Red wine (sans alcohol) and the control was water.

Guess which rabbits had most build up of fatty plaque on their hearts at the end of the experiment?

The ones that drank water.

Rabbits which drank alcoholic red wine were the healthiest. Fuck yeah.

So best thing you can do if you catch the swine flu, or perhaps even before you catch the swine flu, is to sit down with a big bucket of mulled red wine in front of the footy.

Imbibo ergo sum!

1. Petrol
2. Pet troll
3. Pineapple
4. Shampoo
5. Napalm in the morning

Top Five Reasons You’re Pregnant

1. Condoms are for pussies.
2. You can’t get the ECP in Palmy
3. That special night with Ken Orr
4. Let’s see him leave now
5. Apathy

Top Five People Who Displayed Displeasure With Salient Last Week

1. Paul Henry
2. Tasmin Dismantle
3. The university
4. 90% of the population
5. Ally’s mum

Top Five Things That Are Around Us Right Now

1. Footy
2. Footy
3. Footy
4. FOOTY
5. FOOOOOOOOOOOOOTY

Top Five Things Wrong With Previous Top Five

1. Painfully self-referencial
2. No one cares about footy
3. It’s a transperant and lazy space filler
4. Not nearly as funny as it should be
5. Footy

Top Five Things About Your Dad

1. He’s always right
2. He’s always wrong
3. He’s always thong
4. He’s always fucking the mad shit up
5. He’s always good in the sack

Top Five Schmears

1. Albert Schmear
2. PAP
3. Lisa’s Jalepeno and Lime Hummus
4. Schmear Jet
5. Cream Cheese

Top Five Food Substitutes

1. Chocolax—the laxative-flavoured fitness shake
2. Polystyrene
3. Tyra’s once-toned arms
4. Despair
5. Hamburger Lego

Top Five Reasons We Should Pay Politicians to live in their own houses

1. Because they’re worth it
2. We don’t want them to live on the street, do we?
3. To get them out of sight
4. Bill English. We know where you live.
5. It’s a Duncan Garner-based conspiracy to make more news

Top Five Twitter Feeds

1. @stephenfry (obviously)
2. @common_squirrel
3. @goku_karori_28
4. @swinefluremedy_
5. @Nude_UK_Girls

Top Five Ways to Ruin a Film

1. Cast Shia LaBeouf
2. Less dialogue, more pebbles
3. Genital mutilation
4. Not cast Harvey Keitel
5. Have Uther Dean review It

Top Five Ways to Improve Salient

1. Read it
2. Write it
3. More footy
4. Less footy
5. Genital Mutilation

Top Five Ways of Getting Your Shoes to Tie Themselves

1. Glue
2. The Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique
3. Bribery
4. Extortion
5. Emotional blackmail

Top Five Injokes

1. “It’s on the barge!”
2. “There’ll be free beer tomorrow!”
3. “Lack What-a-ka?!”
4. “The monorail to where?!”
5. “Too slippy for some dogs!”

Top Five Things I, Uther Charles Allen Dean, Would Be Doing Rather Than Writing This Top Five

1. Watching the new Torchwood
2. Having a really good wank
3. Tvtropes.org—it’s like crack mixed with heroin mixed with love.
4. Colour coding my focus sheet
5. You

Top Five Reasons to Make Love To a Walrus

1. Their saxophony is better than Bill’s
2. Where are you going to get an aardvark this time of year?
3. Because, counting the Egg Men, it’s a gang bang
4. The reassuring aroma of fish
5. Next best thing to Mark Sainsbury

Speaking to a press conference last Thursday night, Brash said “New Zealanders need to smoke more pure methamphetamine, or ‘P’ to keep up with Aussie productivity levels.

“This may seem like an unconventional response but when I took this position I said there were no limits to what the task force would consider and it would act as ‘a fresh pair of eyes’.”

P, which has been shunned by mainstream drug users, has recently been the subject of many scathing scandals.

Brash said “P was a safer option than many of the other favoured drugs,” motioning towards a graph in his PowerPoint presentation.

“Traditional ‘on the job’ pick-me-ups usually have a negative effect—the sly sip of scotch, the tenacious tinny in the toilet and the palpable pop of a party pill are all depressants.”

Brash then assured the press conference that there was no depression in New Zealand.

“Reb Bull and cocaine have short-term benefits but high street prices which make their use uneconomical,” he said.

Surgeon General Doctor Anita Donaldson said many of the “positive effects” of P had been overlooked.

“Weight loss, increased productivity, reduced need for sleep, increased concentration and focus, are all factors which will help New Zealand workers preform at their best for longer,” she said.

Minister of Economic Development Gerry Brownlee launched what has been dubbed the ‘Kiwi / P me’ campaign.

Unveiling a billboard on the grounds of parliament, Brownlee said “This government came to power on the promise of turning this country around.

“We’ve well and truly flipped this problem right on its arse and turned a black eye to a feather in the cap of New Zealand,” he said.

Health Minister Tony Ryall sung praises about the “slimming” nature of P.

“Not only will we be the most productive nation in the world, but the slimmest. Obesity has been a huge problem here, ya’know,” said Ryall.

Brash took great delight in pointing out that of the budgeted $477,000, the task force only used about $3000 on lunch and a few hits of P.

“Cost-cutting was one of my main emphasises. I even went into a public restroom and took a lightbulb” he beamed.

As the year goes on I become more and more disillusioned with the system of student representation we have here at Victoria.

If you’ve been reading these editorials you’ll know I harp on a lot about that democracy bullshit.

Democracy needs people to care about it. It needs people to be involved. The latest by-election is a perfect example of how disengaged students are with the association, or perhaps how abstractly the executive operates from the students.

Fewer than 600 out of the 20,000 or so students who are members of VUWSA bothered to vote. We don’t know exactly how many people voted because the Returning Officer hasn’t given us that information, but that is a different story best read on page 9.

On Thursday afternoon MJO and I took a stroll around the Union Building and Quad and talked to roughly 50 students. The resounding response when asked if they knew there had been a by-election was “Huh?”

About a quarter of the students we talked to knew there had been an election but were unclear about what it is about and/or if they had voted. Many cited lack of awareness, saying there has been no effort by the candidates or the current executive to raise awareness.

Maybe it is time to rethink how students are represented at this university. All the transparency, openness and accountability doesn’t matter if people don’t give a flying fuck in the first place.

Maybe one thing to do is break the monopoly on representation and allow people to create and join associations which actually cater to their needs and beliefs. Associations where they not only get their money’s worth but they are actually represented and engaged with by associations they’re proud to be members of.

When an association fucks up, you find your needs change or you become embarrassed by the actions of its leaders, you can disassociate yourself from it. Conversely, if you like a certain association then you can join it.

We have a government which is ideologically opposed to compulsory student unionism, supported by a party which has already had a voluntary student membership bill in the ballot. It seems like a wise idea to start talking about ways to strengthen representation now than waiting till it’s too late.

The online voting forms included the option of ‘No Confidence’ in every category, which was believed to be contrary to the VUWSA constitution, which reads: “In the event that there is only one candidate, for any one of these positions, or only five candidate for the executive, you may vote ‘no confidence’ for that position.”

The paper ballots only included No Confidence where only one candidate was standing.

ACT on Campus member and pro-VSM student Peter McCaffrey complained to Returning Officer Mark Maguire about the alleged breach, saying “the constitution as currently written clearly states that the ‘No Confidence’ option is only available when only one candidate is standing for a given position.”

McCaffrey said this was grounds for the election to be invalidated.

In a second email to Maguire, McCaffrey said: “We are in the outrageous situation of having two different ballot papers for the one election”. He again called on Maguire to invalidate the election.

The VUWSA election committee responded, acknowledging the by-election was not “strictly in accordance with the VUWSA constitution”.

The committee said the inclusion of No Confidence had happened on past ballots with minimal impact, and blamed the error on Catch Design, the company which designs and hosts the VUWSA and Salient websites and election voting forms.

President Jasmine Freemantle told Salient she understood Catch “advised No Confidence (should) be included for all positions”.

Catch disputed this, and told Salient they had been given less than a day to get the polling ready, and would normally be given two weeks.

“At approximately 4.30pm Friday 24 July 2009 [three days before the election was due to start] we questioned the use of No Confidence as an option where multiple candidates were standing for election, but were instructed to keep No Confidence in place for all positions,” Catch said.

Both paper and online voting forms were included in the election results, but the number of No Confidence votes cast in the disputed categories was not made public.

Despite numerous attempts to contact Maguire via phone and email, he did not respond to Salient’s request for further information on the No Confidence votes, or other matters.

Election Committee chair Jeremy Greenbrook-Held told Salient he was unable to comment because the election committee had been disbanded.

McCaffrey, in a third email to Maguire, said that not having this information was “an insult to democracy within VUWSA”.

He said the Returning Officer’s job was to carry out elections according to the constitution and count all votes, and these requirements had not been met.

In 2007, former VUWSA Treasurer and lawyer Graeme Edgeler said a basic part of the Returning Officer’s role was to communicate election information to Salient and students.

“Not only should students just have a basic right to know how many people voted in their election, this information is important in assessing whether the vote tally is actually valid,” he said.

Salient banged its head against a desk in the office, weeping and muttering that at 71 years old, it “shouldn’t have to put up with this shit”.

At time of press, Salient was waiting for clarification on whether VUWSA’s treatment of the septuagenarian publication constituted elder abuse.

Official (but incomplete) results

The official results—not including No Confidence counts—as given to Salient at the time of press.

Vice-President (Administration)
1. Max Hardy = 225
2. Monica Dunkley = 153

Women’s Rights Officer
1. Caitlin Dunham = 167
2. Tracy Miles = 155
3. Lucy Deane = 122

Activities Officer
1. Guy Williams = 185
2. Mathew Martin = 141
3. Alexis Luck = 97

Environmental Officer
1. Zachary Dorner = 394
2. No Confidence = 131

International Officer
1. Luke Cao = 387
2. No Confidence = 134

Salient estimates there were 525 valid votes cast.

Past election bungles

In 2003 a switch in email servers meant students who had been previously enrolled did not receive online voting forms.

In May 2006 a candidate for International Officer was left off the electronic ballot. Then President Nick Kelly promised a review of how elections were run in general.

In the 2007 election the Returning Officer Andrea Reeves refused to clarify voter turnout to Salient.

The committee acknowledged the mishaps reported on by Salient here and here were “not strictly in accordance with the VUWSA constitution”, but the results stand.

The Committee claim the error was made by the external entity which hosts the election. Salient could not reach the company responsible at time of posting.

Returning Officer Mark Maguire was unable to be contacted at the time of press.

Watch here and in the print copy of Salient on Monday for updates.

Full statement below:

Statement regarding July 2009 By-election.

The election committee has considered two complaints about the inclusion of No Confidence as an option where multiple candidates were standing for election. This was not strictly in accordance with the VUWSA constitution.

The election committee has noted that this has happened in past by-elections, with minimal impact. Subsequently, the election committee is of the opinion that the influence on this by-election is minimal, and the results stand.

The error was made by an external entity which VUWSA engages to conduct online voting. All paper ballots – which were generated by the returning officer – were correct. The election committee has instructed the returning officer to ensure that this does not happen for future elections.

Jeremy Greenbrook-Held, Amanda Hill, and Karen Price

VUWSA Election Committee

Vice-President (Administration)

1. Max Hardy = 225
2. Monica Dunkley = 153

Women’s Rights Officer

1. Caitlin Dunham = 167
2. Tracy Miles = 155
3. Lucy Deane = 122

Activities Officer

1. Guy Williams = 185
2. Mathew Martin = 141
3. Alexis Luck = 97

Environmental Officer

1. Zachary Dorner = 394
2. No Confidence = 131

International Officer

1. Luke Cao = 387
2. No Confidence = 134

Note that even though No Confidence was an option for all candidates on the online ballot—historically the way most votes are cast—they do not factor into the offical count. Salient is currently investigating reported on irregularities.

There are two different ballot papers being offered to voters in the VUWSA by-election.

The online ballot form allows you to vote No Confidence in every instance.

The paper ballots, which were available in the quad, had No Confidence available for Environmental Officer and International Officer positions.

This has added more fuel to the fire reported on by Salient yesterday that the election was unconstitutional because of No Confidence’s inclusion on the electronic ballot.

The Returning Officer Mark Maguire confirmed to Salient that he had received the first complaint from Peter McCaffery and had passed it on to the election committee.

When asked about there being two separate ballots and whether this was unconstitutional, Maguire said if a complaint was made it too would also be passed onto the election committee and that he guessed “it would come down to the number of votes.”

Freemantle again refused to speak to Salient, saying it was “not her place” to comment.

Chair of the election committee Jeremy Greenbrook-Held refused to comment saying only, “The Election committee is dealing with these issues at the moment.”

Salient banged its head against a desk in the office, weeping and muttering that at 71 years old, it “shouldn’t have to put up with this shit”.

At time of press, Salient was waiting for clarification on whether VUWSA’s treatment of the septuagenarian publication constituted elder abuse.

No Confidence was unable to be contacted at the time of press, although her voicemail expressed the utmost confidence in her imminent victory.

Fans of No Confidence can sign up to her Facebook Fan page here.

Below is a copy of the paper ballot which can be compared to yesterday’s here.

McCaffrey, whose email to the returning officer can be found here, is adamant the rules have been breached and the election should be invalidated.

“Why do we force students to pay millions of dollars to student associations, when they can’t even follow their own constitution and hold legitimate elections?” McCaffrey harped on.

VUWSA President Jasmine Freemantle said “there is a procedure in place as underlined in the VUWSA constitution. Any complaints concerning VUWSA elections are handled by he returning officer and or election committee as is appropriate.” Freemantle felt it inappropriate to comment further on the issue because of this and being unaware of the challenge tll Salient informed her.

Jeremy Greenbrook-Held, former president and member of the VUWSA election committee said: “It has unintentionally happened in the past and wasn’t a problem at the time. It’s a crude interpretation of the constitution.”

The instance which Greenbrook-Held cites was the 2004 election where no one lost to No Confidence.

The last person to lose to No Confidence was, coincidentally, Jasmine Freemantle in 2002 when she ran for 2003 Welfare Vice-President.

Below is a screenshot of how one student voted.

Vice-President (administration)

Monica Dunkley

No manifesto supplied to Salient.

Max Hardy

Manifesto supplied late to Salient.

Hi, I’m Max Hardy and I am currently in my third year of History, Economics and Law.

I see the Vice-President’s (Administration) job as one that ensures the association is accountable and transparent, that VUWSA keeps to budget, and that the association is aware of it’s strategic role and meets it. It is my intention to do just that.

I would like to do this for VUWSA:

● Focus on increasing efficiency so you get more for your money.

● Extend VUWSA’s transparency and accountability structures through things such as policy, the Strategic and Operational Plan and putting executive work reports online.
● Support Clubs and Representative Groups in accessing and increasing funding and assistance. They are an extremely important aspect of Univeristy life.

Essentially, I want to ensure that you get the best value for your money, that you know where your money is going and that the Association is being run prudently and sustainably.

VUWSA has taken drastically needed steps this year in addressing serious weaknesses that have plagued the Association. I want to work with the Executive, the Association Manger and the staff to ensure this kind of positive change continues to strengthen VUWSA.

Vote Max!

Activities Officer

Guy Williams

I was originally planning on running a hilarious comedy style campaign based on the slogan My Lipgloss is Poppin however I now believe student politics is something that needs to be taken seriously. I also believe that as a newcomer to VUWSA I come free of the petty politicking and ridiculous power struggles that have made me not care about the exec for the past three years.

The strength of my campaign is based on a 2 prong attack strategy:

- The establishment of a Victoria comedy club

- The laying of a wreath on Anzac Day

I also promise that I will not waste the earths precious resources with dirty political propaganda such as pamphlets and posters.

Mathew Martin

Hi, my name is Mat Martin and I am running for Activities Officer this by-election.

I am originally from Auckland, and am in second year studying LLB/BA in Politics and Economics. I believe I have the management skills, organisational skills and common sense to do very well in this position. I also have a background in music and the arts, having been in cover bands, concert bands and musicals throughout high school.

There are two things I want to achieve in this role, should you choose to vote for me.

First, I will ensure that my full attention is paid to this portfolio. Looking at other student associations, both in Wellington and across the country, it is obvious that Victoria students are missing out on opportunities to see good live entertainment. Orientation is almost non-existent, good bands come and go without any opportunity to get discounted tickets on campus, and there are plenty of plays, theatre and other such activities which are not sufficiently catered for or advertised around campus. It is my hope that we can improve the range and quality of activities at Vic, through engaging with the wider Wellington community.

Secondly, as a member of the VUWSA Executive, you can be assured that I will not engage in the politics of silliness that have plagued this association in the past. While only playing a minor role, I won’t muck around with silly infighting and childish behaviour, I won’t use your money for extraneous purposes, and I will undertake my role professionally and sensibly.

So, get out there, have a bit of a LOL and a ROFL, and vote Mathew Martin for Activities Officer.

Alexis Luck

No manifesto supplied to Salient.

William Wu

No manifesto supplied to Salient.

Women’s Rights Officer

Caitlin Dunham

Hi, my name is Caitlin Dunham. I am running for the position of Women’s Rights Officer. I am currently in my third year of a Classics and History degree and plan to study honours next year. I am currently secretary of a representative group and active in the Women’s Group. I also co-host the Women’s Show on the VBC Thursday mornings. If elected, I plan to:

* With the incumbent Executive, continue to build on ensuring the accountability of your elected officials, now and in the future;
* Increase awareness of women’s issues on campus and in the wider community;
* Create stronger relationships with off-campus women’s groups (such as Rape Crisis);
* Coordinate a range of fun and inclusive events for the entire Victoria community
* Continue and extend joint projects with Ngai Tauira

If you have any questions, comments or ideas for me, please don’t hesitate to contact me at caity.dunham@gmail.com. I look forward to serving the students of Victoria University of Wellington.

Lucy Deane

I have a long history of women’s rights. In fact, my Dad was a women’s rights activist. My mum would have liked to be but she was too busy with domestic duties to be concerned with trivial tittle-tattle such as politics. Also, my dad wouldn’t let her. Wasn’t her place he said.

What do I stand for? Equality, liberty and FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEDOM! Women are cool. Rights are cool. It follows, therefore, that women’s rights should be pretty cool as well. But what would I know, I’m just hypothesising.

To be honest, I got into this position rather unconventially. My flatmate somehow managed to bypass VUWSA and slip a cheeky wee application in without anyone, let alone me, knowing. Still, however, I’m a huge fan of democracy, student politics and velociraptors – so I’m only following through with this because I’m currently away at MGMT and have no way of removing my name from the ballot.

Take me where you will, democracy!

If you want to see me beat down a handful of feminists with no-effort (or support) on my own unauthorized behalf, then vote for me!

That, my friends, is women’s rights!

Tracey Miles

Hi, my name is Tracey Miles and I am running for Women’s Rights Officer. I am a third year studying Politics, International Relations and Religion and I’m from Nelson. I am currently the secretary for Greens@Vic and am an active member of Greens@Vic, VUW Geology Society, Just Action, GECKO and the VUW Women’s Group.

I applaud how much the rights of women on campus have improved since the creation of the Women’s Group and the WRO, but as with everything, it can also be improved. I will be working towards three main goals this semester as WRO:

1) Raising the awareness of the Women’s club and room, letting women know of the services that the university provides such as child care, tampons in the emergency food packages, and group councilling sessions and creating Women orientated study sessions, events such as movie nights and craft circles and lessons on everday activities such as first aid and car maintenance.

2) Domestic violence and sexual assault is still an issue prevalent in our city. I will use my position as WRO to expand the Thursday’s in Black campaign and the Reclaim the Night event. I will work with the Welfare office and the Wellington City Council to expand the Campus Angels, City Safe people who patrol the streets of Wellington and the buses that travel to and from the campuses. Women should not feel threatended by the prospect of walking from campus late at night.

3) Finally, I will work with the Environment Officer to neutralize Victoria’s carbon emmissions. I will focus on the role of women by holding workshops on these issues. These workshops will include child care, environmentally safe cleaning and skin and hair care products, environmentally sustainable clothing and recyclable menstrual products. I will also endeavour to support women from developing countries by passing a motion and hosting a subsequent AGM that Victoria becomes a fair trade university.

Environmental Officer

Zachary Dorner

Severe weather warning: Hurricane Zack is approaching from the north, and is likely to hit Wellington – particularly around the campuses of Victoria University – between 27 and 29 July. Hurricane force winds will blow you away, driving rain will have you begging for mercy, and a storm surge of up to 2m will flood your mind with purified awesome. Due to global warming hurricane Zack contains more power and energy than any other storm on record. This storm will cause you to support Zack as the new VUWSA Environmental Officer.

Kia ora fellow students. I, Zachary Dorner, would like to be your next Environmental Officer. This would make me your go-to environmental activist on campus. If you have any ideas, things that are making you angry or just want someone who cares to listen to your problems (all environment-related of course, except in certain circumstances) then I’m your man.

Ah yes, the environment. “Meh” some of you might say. “I’m worried about shit, but yeah,” I predict others would probably say. However, what I would say is “save the people”. Yes, not save the planet, but the people. It’s you and I that I’m advocating for as an environmentalist – and that means taking action to look after the planet.

So, think of me as an advocate for the people, for students. That means I want to be your friend. I also want to work hard for you. And I don’t want to engage in unnecessary personal battles on VUWSA (who seem to have some sort of reputation or something apparently?), but rather work for what’s really important.

In conclusion: The environment is important. Watch out for Hurricane Zack – remember I warned you. And make sure you vote Zachary Dorner. I’m here for you, friend.

No Confidence

Vote for me. I look good in black.

International Officer

Luke Cao

Hello, my name is Luke, come from China, and I am running for the international officer. I have been in Victoria University for one year and a half. As an international student, I join the clubs and make many friends from different countries. As the general executive of the international students’ council this year, I know what the international students need, and how their feelings.

I am very happy to work for all international students, I hope everyone can enjoy their life in Uni.

Vote for me, thanks!

No confidence

Vote for me. Cummon. You know you wanna.

Your time is gonna come

In 1937 the age of the airship came crashing down in flames upon Maxfield Field, a stone’s throw from the Lakehurst Naval base. The Hindenburg, a 245-metre Zeppelin carrying 36 passengers and 61 crew was hovering almost 100 metres above its final destination when it violently combusted.

The rigid airships were no stranger to adversity. The complete idea of them is bizarre: a giant frame of light metal suspending envelopes of highly flammable gas atop engines burning diesel. Sounds like a disaster waiting to happen, right?

At the turn of the 20th Century the idea of lighter-than-air flying didn’t sound as silly as what we now think of conventional aeroplanes.

In many ways the impressive rigid airships—or zeppelins—of the 1920s and 1930s were engineering and ecologically sound examples of human technology. Unlike fixed-wing aircraft, which require constant forward motion through the air, zeppelins don’t need to expend massive amounts of fuel and energy to maintain altitude.

When Salient called BOC Gas, a standard price of $854 +GST was given for 8.25m³ of Helium and a price of $124.85 + GST was given for 6.48m³ of Hydrogen.

There are many factors which swing in favour of one of the other of the gases. Helium has traditionally been the logical choice for lighter-than-air craft because it is totally inert. However, there is one major factor which counts against the use of Helium: we’re running out. Wired magazine reported late last year that within 25 years the Earth’s supply of helium, mainly sourced from the United States and Algeria, will be exhausted.

In a resource-scarce world the volatile choice of hydrogen is easy, as it is all around us: H20. The net cost isn’t that much as it can easily be produced.

Monbiot wrote in 2008 that the environmental cost of an airship is 80–90 percent less than that of a standard passenger jet and says, “travelling by airship would be rather like travelling by cruise ship, but at twice the speed and using a fraction of the fuel.”

Dazed and confused

The British had a plan to bring zeppelins to New Zealand, called the Imperial Airship Scheme. In 1924 the idea of aeroplanes being used as passenger transport across vast distances was laughable. Building upon work done by the British Navy, the UK set about building airships and trialing routes, progressively going further with actual flights going as far as India by 1930 and plans to go as far as Australia by 1936. A change of heart in the Cabinet was the death knell for the scheme, which was officially dumped in 1931. So close, yet so far away.

Civil Aviation Authority spokesperson Bill Sommer says that New Zealand has never had any rigid lighter-than-air craft. “I believe that New Zealand may have been visited by a US Navy airship in the late 1930s to early 1940s, but I am not aware of any airships having ever been registered in New Zealand.”

Given that most JetStar customers will arrive at their destinations on the same timeframe if they take a zeppelin or one of their planes, it’s not such a silly idea. A spokesperson for Air New Zealand had other ideas about answering Salient’s questions, saying “Air New Zealand has never operated them, nor do we have any current plans to.” The reply came with a whole lot of media-enviro-spin which, although making positive reading, does not get us any closer to finding out whether we’re going to have zeppelins in New Zealand. This is summarised by Monbiot, who said: “While the price of carbon stays low, companies have no financial incentive to switch to a different form of transport.”

Wellington Airport’s future upgrade to the hideous pumpkin-shaped buildings does not seem to include plans to service zeppelins. However, those with strong ecological consciousness will be pleased to know that the design is environmentally sustainable and will use many energy-saving features, a low velocity thermal plant and using ramps instead of escalators and lifts where possible.

But does this mean Wellington’s skies will be devoid of zeppelins? Maybe some lateral thinking is needed. An obvious docking point is the Majestic Centre. It is the tallest spire in Wellington, and the sight of a 200 metre long dirigible docked almost even with the university’s skyline is an exciting prospect.

Sommer points out that “landing any aircraft at Wellington in moderate to strong winds has been described by some experienced and knowledgeable pilots as ‘character building’.

“I would suggest, and no one would even attempt to takeoff or land an airship in such conditions, and trying to handle such a machine on the ground in other than light wind conditions would be next to impossible.”

Out on the tiles

Obviously the climatological conditions of New Zealand are the biggest barrier to their use. Wellington’s wind in particular would cause problems for zeppelins and there would be few places to dock, service or even store zeppelins.

NIWA’s principal scientist and Group Manager of Meteorology and Remote Sensing Dr Michael Revell is sure that zeppelins are unlikely to work well in New Zealand conditions. “These types of craft require relatively calm conditions (like hot air ballooning) and New Zealand, because of its steep mountains and location in the strong westerly belt, is not generally in calm conditions. Certainly not like continental areas of Europe, Africa or America. This is because unless you have a very powerful propulsion system the craft will tend to move with the wind.”

Dr Revell highlighted another factor that puts the use of zeppelins in New Zealand in doubt. “You need a very big craft to carry a relatively small payload compared to a conventional aircraft, which puts it more at the mercy of the wind.”

Sommer concludes “They are without doubt more environmentally friendly than most if not all modern aircraft, since their engines would be used for control and propulsion, and not providing lift. However, it’s a matter of whether it is practical to use them in our conditions.”

So while New Zealand zeppelin enthusiasts may dream about silvery bulging cigars floating through our pristine vistas, the reality is that our conditions stop this dream from being fulfilled.

65 million years ago Velociraptors gave their lives so you and me could drive petrol-fueled combustion engines and drink coke out of hydrocarbon-based plastic bottles. The story of oil is an interesting one—from prehistoric zooplankton being trapped and heated, direct into your gas tank.

This week’s Salient tries to be slightly ‘greener’ than usual. We’ve only printed 3000 copies of the mag in an effort to get you to reuse and recycle. Every Tuesday when I run around campus redistributing Salient, I get disheartened at the many copies strewn on the seats of the overbridge, scattered around the quad and hidden in library shelves.

Salient’s journey to your hands is a long, and unfortunately carbon intensive one. Somewhere along the line trees have been cut down to make the paper this ink is on. There is a recycled component to the paper but it isn’t too high. The next obvious input into Salient is electricity: lighting and heating the office, running the computers and Guy Armstrong’s hydroponics kit. The packaging and delivery of all the alcohol we consume and the screeds and screeds of paper we print out to proof the copy before it is signed, sealed and delivered to the printers—in Tauranga.

Once it is printed and dried APN print chuck it on a truck and ship it the 525 kilometres from Printcorp Tauranga to the Student Union Building. From there we use the VUWSA van to take it down to Pipitea, Te Aro and up to Karori. We also post it to around 100 destinations in New Zealand and Australia.

Thankfully the ideas cost nothing. Like the zooplankton they get trapped in our heads and through a complicated process involving heat, alcohol and stress they transmogrify into words. From here these words hopefully get changed back into ideas when you read them and the cycle continues. Earth’s ecosystem isn’t quite so clean cut. Hopefully if we keep throwing ideas around we might affect some physical change.

Two years ago when we did a SPAM survey we figured out for every one copy we print, three people read it. This is good compared to something like The Listener or The Dominion Post, but we could be going further. When you finish with this Salient put it back into the basket so someone else can read it. If you do throw it out, make sure you chuck it into one of the many recycling bins around the university.

Next time you throw away a Salient, think of the Raptors.

Sometime in your life you’re going to have to do something you really don’t want to do. So those of us at the Produce Appreciation People—or PAP as we like to be called—are taking one for the team. A lot of people seem to be afraid of getting a schmear test. But we PAPers think that it is a procedure that everyone should go through every couple of years. So we present to you the PAP schmear test.

Medically speaking, our scientific rigour was at best poor. Grading of various schmears were taken on whatever scale struck us as most amusing at the time, resulting in an incomprehensible motley collection of scales, ranging from New Zealand Prime Ministers, cheap wines, to mass murderers. Never let it be said we are not at least interesting.
An intensive screening programme was undertaken to determine what ingredients would make the final cut for the schmear testing. Only produce of the finest quality would be good enough to be tested by the members of PAP. A baker’s dozen of assorted Wholly Bagels bagels was sourced from the Thorndon store, whilst a field trip to Moore Wilson’s resulted in extravagant purchases including caviar, salmon pâté and Craig’s raspberry jam.

Next we needed some erstwhile yet talented testers to sit on the PAP schmear panel and conduct the schmears. We wrangled up some of our fresh-faced new members who were yet to have their first PAP schmear. I mean, who can afford professionals in the current economic climate? Head of the panel, the one wearing a white coat, was Dr Daniel J Miles. Head surgeon Rarah Sobson, anaesthesiologist Jackson James Wood, and a second-year nursing student Arthur Allan Bain rounded out the team.

And so began our story of angst and woe, a voyage into the depths of what is possible with a bagel:

12:07: Sobson begins cutting the bagels. Promptly cuts herself instead. Excellent beginning. First bagel is set to be jalapeño Cheddar with Bentwood Barn Chilli Jam. Wood ranks it David Lange. Miles ranks it Ed Gein. Sobson ranks it $13 wine. Bain ranks it 6/10. Bain was always the most boring of the group.

12:46: First wines are poured into Sobson’s great aunt’s brandy glasses. Wood was drinking the Nautilus 2007 Marlborough Pinot Gris. Miles accumulated some extensive food miles (ha, get it?) in purchasing the La Puerta Cabernet Sauvignon, which came from the foot of the Andes. Or something. Sobson just scabbed some wine. She’s a cheap drunk anyway.

13:29: In a move to the sweeter side of the procedure, the panel opted for a wholemeal bagel with New Zealand Artisan Honey’s Manuka Active 12+ honey. A thick schmear with a dank yellow colour and pungent honey smell, reminiscent of a summer’s day in Ngarawhahia. Ratings were low however, with the schmear bringing in a John Key from Wood, Corban’s White Label from Sobson, Eileen Wuornos from Miles and a solid 2 from Bain.

13:53: Arthur Allan Bain starts to look a bit green around the gills but we press onward with a jalapeño cheddar bagel schmeared with Lisa’s jalapeño & Lime hummus. While initially tentative about the findings, this was the best schmear the PAPers did all day, receiving a David Bain from Miles, a $28 bottle of birthday wine from Sobson, Helen Clark from Wood and 8.25 from Bain.

14:25: The increasingly ill-looking Bain was unimpressed that his fellow PAPers chose this occasion to pull out The Smokehouse smoked salmon pâté on a Poppy bagel. His audible groans brought the mood down as the remainder of the board bravely soldiered on. A delighted Miles awarded it a Ted Bundy, high praise, but this failed to sway the increasingly jaded members of the board who awarded it an Alfred Domett and a Queen Adelaide. Bain’s gurgles of appreciation were interpreted as a 3/10.

15:07: Sobson drinks five glasses of South American wine in record speed to rid the foul taste of salmon from her tastebuds.

15:09: Sobson almost passes out, but instead eats an onion bagel topped with a slice of Kaimai brie. Wood translates as Sobson simultaneously chews and gives the brie a $16 bottle of wine (reduced from $22) rating. Wood gave the brie another David Lange, while Miles hated the stuff so much that not only did he chuck the remnants of the bagel in the rubbish, but he gave it an Antonie Dixon. Bain stuffed his face and gave it a 5.

15:45: In an attempt to rid the taste of mouldy cheese from our mouths we turned back to everyone’s favourite afternoon tea treat: Nutella on plain bagels. The thick brown spread made schmearing hard. Bain muses out loud that he doesn’t feel so bad and that he might be lactose intolerant as he nibbles on the edge of his bagel, giving it a 6. Daniel gives it a Dexter, Sobson a $16 bottle of wine on special for $12 and Wood gives it a Geoffrey Palmer.

18:38: After many more rounds of nutella-ed bagels, and many more rounds of Andes-imported wine, the team returns to the task at hand. Wood reaches into his pocket and removes a tiny vial of caviar, which, as it turns out, he carries round at all times. The things one can afford when on $45k. Everyone takes a wholemeal bagel with cavi-art Seaweed Caviar on it, the trepidation quite clearly written across all but Sobson’s face, her sole exception so dulled by alcohol abuse that a grimace of pain was the best it could manage. Her alcohol-fuelled stupor was soon the envy of the group though as everyone tasted our cheap no-brand caviar and quite obvious retches were heard. A grin spread across Wood’s face though, as he basked in the glory of eating tiny fish eggs worth around ten cents each, prompting him to award a mighty Muldoon. An unimpressed Sobson and Miles gave a Queen Adelaide and Che Guevara respectively. Bain looked up from his floor vantage point, and after a long, loving gaze at Sobson’s thighs, he awarded a 4/10.

19:57: Fish eggs now lie scattered around Sobson’s flat and Sobson suspects that there are fish eggs stuck in her molars. With her judgment impaired by that wine from that far off place, Sobson suggests that they try a Jalapeño Cheddar bagel smothered in Craig’s raspberry jam. Bad idea. Sobson nearly chokes, but gives it a Riverstone (JC bagels are good, raspberry jam is good, just not together). Wood gave it a John Key and Miles gave it a Pol Pot. Bain was getting increasingly frustrated by the whole situation and gave it a 2.8.

21:22: As the bellies of the PAP schmearers slowly expanded, Wood tried to clandestinely remove his pants. This was picked up on by Bain who started shouting “Oh look. Woody’s got a small woody.” It was at this point Wood realised he had forgotten to put on underwear that morning. With this stomach-turning event the panel moved on to that old New Zealand favourite: Marmite. Many professionals will tell you that if your schmear is yeasty you probably shouldn’t go through with it. It proved to be a fail with our taste buds, getting a 4 from Bain—whose increasing whimpers of pain were increasingly annoying—Sydney Holland from Wood, Jack the Ripper from Miles and a Montana on special from Sobson.

21:58: Sesame bagels with Pam’s Smooth with Full Salt Peanut Butter. Hilarity ensued as a peanut butter-mouthed Wood and Miles attempted to give ratings through increasingly gummed up mouths, while an increasingly drunk Sobson cried, interspersed with raucous laughter. Bain interpreted results, declaring Wood to have awarded a “Kiwi Keith”, Miles a “Pol Pot”, and Sobson’s slurs were decided to be a return to the cheap Montana. Bain then tried his, and began choking on a peanut while the rest of the Schmearers giggled under their breath. He eventually gasped out a final verdict of 4/10.

22:35: Miles had a really bad idea. Plain bagel. In wine. Worst idea EVAH. Wood went first. In white wine. It was “pretty bad”. He gave it a Mike Moore. Miles went next and dunked his bit of bagel in red wine. For a long time. He choked a little and couldn’t finish it. It went in the bin. A Judy Garland. Sobson used a smaller bit of bagel and dipped it in some red wine. Soggy. Disgusting. Passion Pop. Bain sculled the glass of wine with the bit of bagel in it. Wood unsuccessfully attempted to perform the Heimlich. He called 111 and screamed “I heimliched the prick!”

03:00: After a quick trip to the hospital to remove the wine-soaked bagel from Bain’s oesophagus we returned back to the PAP schmear test. Refreshed and high off some morphine Miles stole while the night nurse wasn’t looking, we dived back into the schmear. The final official procedure of the evening was a sesame bagel with strawberry ice cream schmeared. The gloopy concoction went down a treat with Sobson marking $16 bottle of wine, Bain 6/10, Wood with Kiwi Keith and Miles with a final Ed Gein.

It would be wise to point out that at this stage the morphine’s pain-killing properties hadn’t quite taken full effect, but had distracted the PAPers sufficiently that any cries of pain and agony would wash over them like so many waves of nonchalance. Bain, however, hadn’t fully thought this through, stupidly taking risks that no true bagel aficionado would ever have seriously considered.

It was only after the eighth bottle of wine and the fifth syringe of morphine that Wood, Miles and Sobson noticed an unusual silence coming from Bain’s corner of the room. They turned to see him shrivelled up in the corner, a pathetic shadow of his former greatness, bits of bagel crumb littered down his delightful knitted cardigan. He had tried to eat a whole bagel. With everything. The lot. Salmon, Nutella, Chilli Jam, Raspberry Jam, Caviar, the lot. The sloshing of the wine slowly dripping down a bagel filter into his gullet was excruciating. Bain had given his life for the test. But he would always be remembered.

S(ch)mears: we’re serious about this

Sometimes there are serious underlying messages among the bad taste puns that appear in the fine publication you are reading. This is one such occasion.

If you’re a girl, if you’re over 20 and if you’ve ever been sexually active, you should probably go and have a cervical smear—if you haven’t gone and had one already.

Why? Well it turns out that having a cervical smear every three years is one of the best ways of preventing the development of cervical cancer.

The National Cervical Screening Programme’s website says that women who have regular smear tests every three years as part of a screening programme reduce their risk of developing cervical cancer by about 90 percent. 

Cervical cancer results from an uncontrolled growth of abnormal cells of the cervix. The main cause of cervical cancer is the very common human papilloma virus (HPV). HPV comes in various forms, however, it is the genital variety (a sexually transmitted infection, surprise surprise) that can lead to abnormal cell changes and the development of cervical cancer.

Most women will have the HPV virus at some stage in their life. It has no symptoms, so the only way of detecting its presence is by having a cervical smear. Most mild cell changes on the surface of the cervix do not progress into cancer, however, if the abnormalities persist over a long period of time, the cells can evetually develop into cancer cells.

So a cervical smear is checking for abnormal changes to the cells on the surface of the cervix. Abnormalities can be treated before they develop into cancer. Huzzah!

And the moral of the story? It’s really important to go and have a regular cervical smear. Pop along to Student Health or Family Planning and make yourself an appointment. It’s not as bad as you think.

A statement from Director Student Services Ruth Moorehouse has confirmed seven cases of swine flu in hostels, with 15 more suspected cases out of the hostel.

Moorehouse stressed that the situation was being careful managed and a supply of Tamiflu has been made available to people with flu like symptoms.

Salient still points out that there are only small, isolated number of people afflicted and possibly affected by swine flu and reminds students to maintain good hygiene, washing your hands regularly etc etc.

Original story

Salient warns students to be wary of reports today of an “outbreak of suspected swine flu” by Indiana Journo, Ryan Bridge.

Bridge’s story, which can be accessed via the Scoop site, was “a bit misleading” according to Victoria University’s communications department.

Salient would like to add further clarifying information to compliment the story. Swine flu has not been confirmed in any of the cases. There were also only three cases in one hostel—hardly “spreading” as reported by Bridge.

There is no confirmation from the hostels or the university about the veracity of swine flu. The students “which are from Helen Lawry [sic] [lol, sick] Hall, are currently seeking medical advice”—meaning they haven’t even been to a doctor and it might just be a case of the regular sniffles. It is also the middle of winter, of course people are going to be going to Student Health with “flu like symptoms”.

The story also claimed that the university’s communications department failed to respond to media inquires. This proved untrue when Salient‘s News Editor Michael Oliver picked up the phone, called the comms dept and solicited comment from a spokesperson.

Once again Salient urges students not to panic till more information comes to light about these very few suspected cases.

JW: What is a smack?

BM: Basically a smack on the bottom with an open hand or on the top of the hand. Basically some application of force that doesn’t involve bruising or welts or injury. A short sharp shock I guess is the way some people would describe it.

JW: How hard is that, in force—newtons perhaps?

BM: Once again, you’re giving it back to parents making the judgment that there is no long-term or short-term damage. But it is enough to stop the kind of behavior that is unacceptable. It can vary because of the age of the child.

JW: The older they are the harder you can smack them?

BM: A little tap, a two fingered tap on the top of a hand of a three year old can be sufficient. Whereas it wouldn’t be for a 7 year old. Once again, parents understand what works and that’s what the research has shown. Generally it is used as a follow up when other forms of correction haven’t worked. It is when there is some defiance and it is follow up action.

JW: The amendment you support says open hand smacking—so you can’t use implements?

BM: It takes away any use of implements. We think that is a win–win middle ground. There was concern around a couple of cases that used implements, so let’s end any doubt and make it clear, it is simply just an open hand smack on the bottom or hand.

JW: The case where a father was prosecuted for pushing his child over, you said this guy was a “great dad”. Is pushing a child over analogous to a smack?

BM: That case was misreported. The reason we can say that is because we were actually in the courtroom at the time of the processing of that. In fact, what he was doing was he had his hand on the back of the child and was trying to get him out on the sports field. The kid was wearing sprigs. There was resistance from the child and he was tripping over.

JW: Three times?

BM:Yeah. The father simply wasn’t throwing him to the ground, or pushing him to the ground as made out. He was trying to get him out on the field.

JW: Three times? He didn’t stop to help him up?

BM:The child was trying to resist getting out on the field. Once again, one of the problems with this case is that the whole charge has been laid on the evidence of one person driving past. When there was no concern shown by other parents who were present at the time. It is their interpretation of what happened. So there has been one witness. There is no veracity to that claim.

JW: Assault: What is the difference between me correcting one of my staff members, my partner or even you? Why is there a difference? Why can I, as a human being, hurt another human being? What makes that okay?

BM:There is a huge difference, and that is in the nature of the relationship. The difference with a child is that there is a parent/child relationship. In the same way I can’t tell you to eat your peas or when to go to bed. Or the same way I can’t put you into time out when I’m sick of your bad attitude. That is because it is an adult/adult relationship. A parent child relationship is very different. A parent is responsible for the actions, behaviour and development of that child and sometimes there is an element of force that is necessary—whether that is removing them to time out, or yanking away that plate of food because of withdrawal of privileges. That is what the original Section 59 took into account and what we’re failing to recognise at the moment.

JW: What if it is one of my employees? I have responsibility for them under law and they’re doing something that puts Salient in jeopardy. What is the difference there, why can’t I smack them?

BM:Because they’re an adult. It is a totally different relationship. At the end of the day you can actually use force. It is called policing. Tasering. Batons. It is called putting them in a prison cell. So force can be used. Once again it is in the context of what is happening. Every Saturday there are hundreds of people assaulted on a rugby field. The reason it isn’t taken to the police is because it is in the context of a game—a very physical game, and it is not an issue. We’re saying that it is in the context of a parent child relationship and it is not abusive then. It is just part of parents raising good kids. It has been done for generations and it hasn’t been a problem.

JW: What exactly is your problem with the legislation as it stands?

BM:The benchmark is so low that it criminalising parents who use a light smack. We’ve put examples of these cases to the Prime Minister. It has simply gone too far and that is why we support an amendment, which doesn’t go back to the original Section 59. We believe that it is a middle ground and a win-win situation in that it more clearly defines what is reasonable. It takes away the use of implements to avoid any doubt. It says there can be no evidence of bruising or welts—that’s an immediate indicator of whether it has gone too far and also says that it can’t be degrading or humiliating. If that father had repeatedly thrown his boy to the ground because he didn’t like the fact he wasn’t going on the rugby field, that would be degrading an humiliating. The problem is that is not what happened.

JW: Can you identify a single case in the last two years where the amended section 59 has been applied injudiciously?

BM:Yes. We have six cases in front of the Prime Minister at the moment that involve a simple open-handed slap on the leg, a couple on the bottom, a smack on the arm, pulling the blankets off a kid who won’t get up in the morning. Throwing a pair of jeans at a child to get them to hurry up in the morning.

We believe the law is being applied wrongly. One of the interesting issues about all this is that people have questioned the referendum question and said, “What is good parental correction?”

If you look at the new Section 59 you’ll actually see that one of the categories for when you can use reasonable force is “good care and parenting”. Okay. Now, they say, how do you define “good parental correction”, and yet within the law that they’ve passed they say you can use reasonable force when it is part of good care and parenting. Well, they need to define that. There is a red herring about the referendum question because they don’t like the answer it is coming to. But at the same time they’re willing to use the same type of wording within the law and say it is working.

JW: What was the thought pattern behind the question?

BM: I can’t answer that question. We came into the process after the referendum had been launched by Larry Baldock and simply supported it because we knew that the majority of parents didn’t like it.

JW: Have you talked to Larry about it?

BM: I haven’t really. I know he went through a process. I’ve looked at the act—I know you have to get it formulated by the Clerk of the House. It was publicly notified for a month. Groups like Plunket and Banardos could’ve objected to the question when it was publicly notified. But they didn’t because they never believed the petition would be successful.

JW: Would you could you smack John Key? / Could you would you then smack me?

BM:Up a tree?

JW: Key’s comments about the question being written by Dr Seuss…


BM:It smacks of desperation to me.

JW: Both John Key and Phil Goff have said they’re not going to vote. Why do you think that is and how do you feel about his comments?

BM: John Key says that he is not going to vote because it is a chance for the people to speak. There may be some validity in that, but I am pretty sure I saw him voting in the recent general election.

The second point is that when Phil Goff and John Key say they’re not going to vote, they simply don’t like the answer they’re coming to. Phil Goff has been asked the referendum question and he said “No”.

JW: There has been a certain amount of misunderstanding about the question, I’m sure you would agree…


BM:What is the misunderstanding?

JW: John Boscawen said he would be voting yes in an interview.

BM: He wasn’t asked the referendum question. He just said “Yes, I don’t support the anti-smacking law”. That was a big beat up by Sue Bradford. He said yes, but he didn’t say yes to the referendum question.

JW: Most of the other candidates who answered the question managed to align their views with the question. Many of them also said yes. When the question was the referendum question.

BM:Good. Melissa Lee made a few faux pas as well. I would encourage you to give John Boscawen a call and put the referendum question to him and see what he says.

JW: Hindsight is great.

If the upcoming review showed that it wasn’t working, then you could have seized upon that and used it to your advantage. Whereas now the review, which comes out at the end of this month will likely show it seems to working. People might have run out of steam by then…

BM:There are two aspects to that question. Firstly, people simply oppose the law. End of story. They just don’t agree with the law even being in existence. That’s the first part. The second part is the review. We’ve already had a couple of reviews. It’s already been established that despite the myth going around, nine people have been prosecuted in the first 15 months. There will be more in the review coming up. Kids are ringing CYFS [Child Youth and Family Services] and saying they’ve had a smack. We’ve got a documented case of an 11-year-old who didn’t like being grounded from going to a friend’s party so rung up CYFS and said “I’ve been smacked”.

CYFS come around to investigate. Remove the child while they do the investigation. It’s not only prosecutions we’re concerned about. It is the persecutions. And it is highly traumatic for these families to go through that type of investigation and suspicion. It is simply because we’ve put the benchmark so low.

JW: What do you think of the idea that parents who smack their children cannot control their own anger?

BM: That is the biggest load of bollocks I’ve ever heard. It makes out as though anyone who uses a smack is completely out of control. There are some rotten parents, I’m the first to admit that, what we want to do is target those rotten parents and but not implicate good parents in the process.

JW: How do you define a rotten parent?

BM: A parent who doesn’t look after their children, don’t send them to school. Don’t send them with food. Don’t feed their kids. The Families Commissioner’s report two weeks ago said neglect is five times more common as a form of abuse than violent or sexual abuse. So we’ve got to get realistic about this. All those reports that’ve come out of CYFS and UNICEF, out of Families Commission, have said kids are at risk when there is drug and alcohol abuse. When there is non-biological adults living in the house—when mum’s got the live-in boyfriend—when there is family breakdown and dysfunction and the poverty and stress associated with that—that’s when families are at risk.

There are plenty of parents who just tell off their kids, who completely lose control, and say things they should never say to their kids. There are also people who put them in time out for periods far longer than what is appropriate.

The argument is a smack is on the continuum to child abuse—physical abuse. Time out is on a continuum to neglect. Withdrawal of privileges is on a continuum to bribery and bullying. A telling off by a parent is on the continuum to verbal and emotional abuse. All of those things are an extreme. All we’ve done is look at the technique rather than the person or the parent that is administering it. It’s a bit like saying that everyone who has a glass of wine is going to become an alcoholic, or everyone who buys a raffle ticket becomes addicted to gambling.

JW: Supporters of the repeal of Section 59 weren’t quite eloquent enough to say that the repeal was about making the law fair to everyone. Anyone can be assaulted.

BM: It was already fair because it said force had to be reasonable and you use the word assault, you immediately bring in a terminology that just doesn’t apply to a parent that is correcting a child with a smack on the bottom.

The reason the law never won any success, people simply don’t see it as assault. The question that groups like Barnardos, Plunket and the government need to be asking themselves is if the country is so desperate to deal with the problem of child abuse—which we have—why have they been unable to sell the anti-smacking law. Simply because it’s been misdirected and it’s tried to equate a good parent, who might use a smack on the bottom to raise a good kid, with a rotten parent like the caregivers of Nia Glassie or the Kahui twins who are abusers. Some people simply don’t accept that equation.

JW: It removed the defence of being able to use discipline to get off…


BM:It basically said that a smack was illegal.

JW: Before the law was passed, parents were using S59 to get away with abusing their children.

BM: No. That is your interpretation. All those cases were going before juries. If the law was allowing that, then you simply get the police to administer the law better, you don’t do away.

Let’s disperse the myth here. This wasn’t about an anti-smacking bill, that’s just the medias fault. When Sue Bradford launched this bill she called it the anti-smacking bill. Groups like Barnados and Plunket and other government groups—they’ve all wanted smacking banned. They just need to be honest about what their intention was. They don’t like smacking. They think it’s assault. They think it is violence and the majority of New Zealanders simply disagree with them.

JW: Do you think children, at some level, if you believe they’ll understand what you’re saying to them as we’re all humans, that if you can explain to them that what they’re doing is wrong and there is a consequence to it, and you don’t have to reinforce that with pain?

BM: That’s why, as the kids get older you’re probably not going to be smacking. As the research shows, the meta analysis is that the most effective time you will probably have to use it, and it’s at its most effective, is between two and six. After that kids can reason. You can explain to a child. But I tell you what, when you see that kid doing an upside down ant impersonation on the floor of the super market that is not a time to sit down and have a reasoned debate. Kids just don’t want to reason. If you’ve dealt with a tired child at about 5:30 at night, and most parents will know what I’m talking about when I talk about the ‘witching hour’—around tea time, late in the day, kids are scratchy. Sometimes reasoning just doesn’t work. This is the reality of parenting.

JW: What if you’re wrong? Family First points out there are a whole lot of social problems in New Zealand—what if you’re wrong and those social problems are a direct result of using physical force against children and it’s a cyclical problem?


BM: If I see evidence of that, then I’ll be the first to accept it. But there is not a single bit of reputable research that smacking done by a non-abusive parent is harmful. Not a single shred of evidence.

JW: Were you smacked as a child?

BM:Yes.

JW: Regularly?

BM:When I deserved it is all I remember.

JW: You don’t have bad feeling about that towards your parents?


BM:No. In fact I even got the strap at primary school.

JW: You didn’t think that when the teacher applied the strap or when your parents applied the wooden spoon they were doing wrong by you?

BM: No. No. That’s just it. I think some people would say I got it and it was highly traumatic. My argument would be it wasn’t the technique that was the problem; it was the way it was applied. I’ve been a social worker in South Auckland for 12 years and I spent far more time dealing with kids who had been told by their parents they were absolute nothings and they were going to amount to nothing and just were useless. The harm the spoken word can do is just as damaging. It goes back to not necessarily the technique, but the way it is used. I think parents are rotten when they leave their kids in the car on time out when they’re up in the casino gambling away all the money.

JW: What is your vision for an ideal New Zealand?

BM: Where families grow up in safe communities. Where kids are in safe environments and strong families. There are a whole lot of areas. It’s like the name, it’s where we start putting our families first in terms of social policy and some of the standards we have in the community.

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Just because this is so awesome, here is Bob’s email disclaimer. I didn’t notice it till my fourth or fifth email.

Democracy, at a low level such as a student association, is an interesting dynamic to watch. Late last trimester, two motions of no confidence in executive members were put forward by students. There have been worse presidents than Jasmine, who is doing a good enough job steering the VUWSA ship away from rocks of peril. Robert, well he seems to be dead weight heavily listing the ship contrary to Jasmine’s directions.

The Special General Meeting this Wednesday is your chance to be involved in the democratic process. As you’ll see on the news stories on page 10 and the back issues of Salient, there have been issues raised about the performance of some of your exec members.

The decision you need to make is a clear one. If you think Jasmine and Bobby aren’t doing their jobs, if you think they aren’t acting in your best interests as students, if you don’t think they represent you, then this is your chance to tell them. Come along and exercise your right of accountability on these people who control the students’ association.

On a national level, democracy is no less dynamic, but the way in which the game is played out is less blatant and dislocated from most people. One of the true ways that citizens can be directly involved in process is the Citizens Initiated Referendum (CIR).

This week’s Salient dwells heavily on the child discipline issue enshrined in the current referendum question. The features on pages 21 and 28 present two sides of the argument.

But why are we even having this argument? It, like the question the pro physical discipline supporters put forward, is stupid. There is no other word.

So stupid that to dignify the question and engage in the discourse seems totally futile. Here is a better idea for what to do with your ballot than to just tick one of the boxes and buy into this sub-par petition. Tick both boxes, scribble on it, Photoshop the form and add in a better question. Then send it back to the electoral commission to be counted as a spoiled ballot. If enough people do this—and I really hope you do—it sends a clearer message than voting ‘Yes’ will ever deliver.

In both cases your money is being wasted. VUWSA by-elections cost money. CIRs cost money. In both cases peoples’ pet projects are being played out for political reasons that benefit no one. Not even the people who’re pushing for it. Yip, democracy sure is a funny old thing to watch.