I’m not talking about the quality of tertiary education in New Zealand or the national skilled trades shortage. Both issues are important but neither will help you, the current or returning student, get the most out of your education at Victoria. Right here, right now, the single most important thing you need to think about is how you’re using university to get where you want to go.

Take me por ejemplo. I was sweet 18, peachy-keen, and I had some real strong ideas about university. I thought university should follow on straight after high school with a gap year option for the particularly daring, and be completed in the recommended three years. After graduation, my options would include a) pursue further study or b) get a real job and pursue a career.

There is nothing wrong with this model, but it doesn’t work for everyone. Common problems include burn-out, drop-out and low grades due to general fatigue and academic disillusionment. Graduates may feel confused, listless and frustrated with an apparent complete lack of ‘real job’ options. Solutions include taking some time off to travel or doggedly trying to penetrate your industry of choice while working whatever doggone job you can find. The best solution is, of course, prevention, and prevention means we need to dump the ridiculous ‘get your undergrad quick’ model pushed onto students by well-meaning peers and parents.

Without further ado, here are a few home truths about university education:

Lesson #1: If you’re creative and motivated, then you may be better off outside the university system.

Find your enemy. When you know what you’re against, you have taken the first step towards discovering what you’re for. —Salman Rushdie

Milo Haigh, 23, started her undergraduate degree straight out of high school after winning a partial scholarship to fund her studies. Her decision was perfectly logical. “It didn’t make sense to waste all that money, I’d already proven myself at an academic level, and it was also about my school and parents and trying to move away. I just felt like I had to.”

After a fruitful first year and less enjoyable second year, Haigh dropped out of her third year to broaden her experience working in theatre.

“I learned a lot at school but not necessarily what I thought I was going to or what I wanted to,” she says. “My courses were really good and put a holistic perspective on what I was interested in, which was great, but at the same time, one of my frustrations was that I couldn’t apply it in the way I wanted. It wouldn’t have worked with the course and it wouldn’t have worked with the lecturers.

“I started working in theatre, which wasn’t encouraged but was a natural sort of free fall from working on university productions. Eventually, my performance work started to take over because I was learning more from people in the industry than I was from school.”

For Haigh, two years of university gave her just enough knowledge, experience, self-awareness and contacts to start doing what she wanted to do.

“University gave me a direction. It made me rebellious, made me a bit kind of self-righteous about my own education. I thought, I can do this myself in a way that’s more tailored to me and my needs, with the knowledge that I had from school and from knowing that school wasn’t the right thing for me. I had to go to know that it wasn’t right.”

She doesn’t believe her uncompleted degree poses a barrier for further education, possibly at art school, or employment in the theatre industry. On the contrary, after two years of industry experience, Haigh knows exactly what she needs to do and has a good idea of how to get there.

Lesson #2: The real value of your degree may be as a back-up plan.

Rodger Fox is New Zealand’s foremost jazz trombonist, big band leader, jazz educator, arranger and producer, and a teacher at the New Zealand School of Music. He gained his musical knowledge and experience “on the road”, in large part because no tertiary options for jazz were available in 1970s New Zealand.

Fox appreciates that the modern music business is a different beast. “When I was the age of the kids coming to the school, there was a lot of work for touring bands. There’s less work now. Musicians need to be a bit more skilled, with a wide base of experience, and coming to university makes that process a bit quicker.”

Fox remains an advocate of “life experience and being on the road,” but points out that a degree can come in handy if full-time performance work doesn’t work out.

“What I try to encourage is for young students to get their BMus, their honours, maybe look at also doing the teaching degree qualification and then they’ve got everything covered. It means they can walk into any high school and get a job, then be free to go on the road thinking ‘I’ve got this in the bank, when I don’t want to do this anymore I can come back and actually get a job’.

“A qualification doesn’t mean anything when it comes to performing. You don’t need a qualification to play well but you do need a qualification if you want to be in the business of music, and that means if you want to write, arrange, compose or teach. You need all of those skills if you want to get work in a teaching role.”

Lesson #3: Fucking with the traditional full-time, two-major, three-year degree model leads to interesting things.

Kristen Paterson, 28, and Matthew Davis, 23, are two of the core founders of Victoria student radio station VBC 88.3. Both took an alternative approach to university study and believe their decisions have set them up well for the future.

Davis began studying in 2006 by “picking up various bits and pieces that interested me”. He completed his degree in English literature over four-and-a-half years rather than the recommended three. “A lot of people cram in as many papers as they can into one trimester, to get in and out of there quickly, whereas I was doing the minimum needed to qualify for full-time study, basically to get living costs because we weren’t earning while running the station.”

He wishes that more university students would act on their creative and entrepreneurial dreams while still at uni. “People have great ideas but then when you go ‘sweet, go ahead and do that’, they’re like ‘oh, nah, I’ve got to finish off my degree and then I want to basically get a job’. What’s the rush? University isn’t going anywhere.”

Paterson studied English and Media Studies part-time for two years, then dropped out in 2006 to start work on the station, which launched at the start of 2007.

“There were all these papers I had to do that bored the hell out of me and they conflicted with papers that I was really interested in doing. I became very disillusioned with the whole thing. I wanted to just go straight into actually doing something, not just writing and theorising about it.”

She argues that her work with the VBC is worth far more than a completed degree.

“The reason you graduate and feel like you’ve got nothing, is that universities have this weird attitude of ‘let’s get rid of the practical stuff because we want to be high-brow,’ yet most jobs aren’t high-brow things.

“If you want to be a journalist, then you need to know how to write a bloody article. If you want to work in radio, you need to know how to work all the bells and whistles down at the station. Why do you actually need the three years of theory? If it’s just critical thinking that employers are looking for, you can get that out of first and second year and not need to go straight to third year.”

While Paterson respects the value of a university education, she points out that extra-curricular activities like internships, apprenticeships and self-starter initiatives like the VBC are much more impressive to prospective employers.

Lesson #4: University is not for everyone.

Education is not going to get in the way of my career. —G. K. Chesterton

David Cohen, veteran New Zealand author and journalist, is an expert on higher education and academic affairs. Over the course of his career, he has visited an estimated 60 or 70 universities around the world. Cohen’s decision not to enter into tertiary study may seem somewhat ironic, given his area of specialty interest, but is a simple sign of the times.

“The massification of higher education is something that’s really only occurred over the last 15 or so years in New Zealand. It’s now pretty normal for almost any young person to contemplate and pursue an undergraduate degree at the very least, but when I came of age, completing an undergraduate degree was like maybe doing a master’s degree today. We had far less of an academic culture, which I happen to think is a good thing.”

His conscious decision not to enrol at university was driven by three factors. First, “university wasn’t the big enchilada it is now”. Second, Cohen’s background was “fairly rough and tumble, so academic concerns figured even less.” Third, and most important, a career in journalism didn’t require a large academic component. “It was considered, correctly, a craft which largely consisted of knowing how to write, establish rapport with people, body language and so forth, and how to hold your alcohol.

“That’s the way journalism was. Sometime in the ‘90s, everyone without a degree got shunted out of the entry-level positions, which were then all filled with middle-class kids, often with theoretical degrees and little else in the way of varied life experiences. Look, theoretical and media studies are great if you want to pursue that as an academic discipline—but they’re completely irrelevant to reporting.”

Cohen holds a rather monkish stance on university education. “My view of university is simply: I’m an elitist. Most jurisdictions should have as few a number of universities as possible. They should be charged with inspiring the minds of the elite for the sake of pure knowledge.”

“Why does every young person fit the university life supposedly like hamburger on bun? It doesn’t follow. Some young people make excellent chefs or retailers or journalists. You don’t need four or five years of college to work that out.”

The advice and anecdotes in this article are not intended for everyone. For many students, completing their degree may be a primary goal, in and of itself, just to prove they can. This is a satisfying and worthy pursuit and I wish you all the best.

For others, for students who are frustrated with their studies, for self-motivated students who have no idea why they’re at Victoria, here are the assorted words of wisdom that I wish I’d known earlier.

Take the time to work out where you want to go and what you need to get there. Have fun and test your abilities in the ‘real world’ before you leave uni. Chop up your degree. Take a year or a trimester off, study part-time. If you’re an arts student, take a few design, architecture, science or music papers, and vice versa. Yes, you can do that if you want. If you ask lecturers nicely, they will let you sit in on courses at honours and even masters level. Yes, you can do that too. Meet people and chase opportunities. Don’t be afraid or ashamed of not finishing your degree if you find something better.

Basically, fuck with your university education as much as you want. Make it your own. After all, you’re the one paying.

Cash crop

Are you a socially and ethically conscious consumer? Congratulations! Catch a ‘green’ cab home, kick off your eco-sneakers, and ask your partner to switch on that renewable energy-powered stove and cook you a couple of organic, free-range eggs.

We’ve never had so many ‘green’ goods and services available. Kath Dewar, marketing consultant, is in no doubt as to why.

“Businesses are looking at the research and seeing what it shows them,” she told bFM’s ‘Sustainable’ Simon in an interview last Tuesday. “Nearly a third of New Zealanders fall into what Moxie Design describe as ‘solution seekers’.”

“These are people who, when they’re making buying decisions, are looking for something that either has better social outcomes, better environmental outcomes, or a little bit of both, so that they don’t get a healthy dollop of guilt with their purchase. They buy things knowing they’ve been made with care for the impact they have around them. That, in New Zealand, is 32 percent of the population with an estimated $2 billion or so to spend every year.”

Globally, the market and consumer base for sustainable products and services is worth US$550 billion per year and counting. With such a lucrative market at stake, many advertisers are willing to mislead consumers in order to nail a sale.

Dewar defines the term greenwashing as “environmental claims that mislead, destruct or exaggerate”. In the UK and US, she says, false ‘green’ claims have “fostered a high degree of skepticism” among consumers, leading to cynicism towards all environmental and social claims and creating “quite a block to progress”.

The seven sins of spin

In January 2009, researchers were sent into major retailers in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia to collect data on every product making an environmental claim.

The results, published by TerraChoice in April, were staggering. In the US and Canada, over 2200 products making close to 5000 ‘green’ claims were recorded. Of these, over 98% were found guilty of at least some degree of greenwashing.

The TerraChoice study broke down the concept of greenwashing into seven sins:

#1 Sin of the Hidden Trade-Off: e.g. ‘Energy-efficient’ technology made with dangerous materials.

#2 Sin of No Proof: e.g. ‘Certified organic’ beauty products with no verifiable certification.

#3 Sin of Vagueness: e.g. ’100% natural’ products that contain naturally-occurring poisons like arsenic and formaldehyde.

#4 Sin of Irrelevance: e.g. Products ‘proudly CFC-free’, when CFCs were banned two decades ago.

#5 Sin of Fibbing: e.g. Products falsely claiming to be certified by a recognised environmental standard like Fair Trade.

#6 Sin of Lesser of Two Evils: e.g. Organic cigarettes or ‘environmentally friendly’ pesticides.

#7 Sin of Worshiping False Labels: Fake labels, when a product gives the impression of third-party endorsement when no such endorsement exists.

Kath Dewar is quick to come up with some local examples. “One example is OnGas, which is part of the Vector Energy Group. They have a big section on their website saying that burning gas is environmentally friendly. Yes, it has a lower carbon footprint than burning oil directly, but to try and claim it as good for the environment is a stretch too far.”

Dewar says the OnGas site leaves them wide open to complaints, not just to the Advertising Standards Authority but to the Commerce Commission, “who have just taken a fantastic strong line on environmental information seeking to mislead the public.”

She cites McDonald’s as another example. “They’ve gone for Rainforest Alliance certification of their coffee supplies, which is all well and good on the surface, but then you look at what most coffee and chocolate suppliers do when they’re looking for certification, they go for the best form of consumer guarantee of good practice that they can, which is Fair Trade.”

The Rainforest Alliance programme, “while they do some good stuff”, does not provide guaranteed income for growers. “They had a massive opportunity to be the good guys and deliberately chose not to, so those full-page advertisements last year about how wonderful they were, it’s kind of like ‘yeah right’.”

The Cadbury palm oil scandal is another recent example. “What totally stunned me was that when they were already getting into trouble in the media, they ran a full-page range of ads in the Herald business pages about how much New Zealand milk they used in their chocolate. They completely missed the point.”

Keeping ‘em clean: use your certs

Victoria University environmental studies lecturer Dr Sean Weaver believes strong third-party endorsement is the key to beating greenwash.

“It’s a wee bit like when you go and buy your eggs in the supermarket. Quality assurance standards are what sorts the battery eggs from the free range organics and everything in between.

“Those third-party labels aren’t always there,” he explains. “One egg company used to call themselves ‘free range’ eggs because Free Range was the name of the company, and that was a real greenwash.

“If you have strong third-party quality assurance standards, if there’s a third-party label like Biogro and you trust Biogro, then you can be confident that there’s not a greenwash there.”

Certification standards can also help drive competition for a slice of the ‘green’ market. Weaver uses Green Cabs and Combined Taxis as an example.

“The taxi situation is interesting because you had Green Cabs start with a whole fleet of hybrid cars and they’re all painted green, then very soon after that Combined Taxis became carbon-neutral. Of the two, the one that has the higher quality assurance is Combined Taxis because they’ve entered into the CarbonZero programme, a very high-quality carbon trading company run by Landcare Research, whereas Greencabs don’t have any third-party certification.

“That said, Green Cabs were very valuable for the industry because, irrespective of whether they’ve got third-party certification, without them Combined might not have done anything. Combined didn’t want to start a brand-new fleet of hybrids. They wanted to do something with their existing fleet. So, to do it in a way that would earn them market-share or regain market share, they had to choose a high-quality standard.

“If I was Greencabs or I was giving them any advice, I would have gone with the third-party certification from the beginning and then there’d be no debate.”

Weaver believes third-party organisations have an important role to play in the monitoring of green marketing. “There are those who claim to be green when they’re not, and that’s a job for NGOs as watchdogs.

“If those watchdogs expose the bullshit, then the companies that get exposed in that way get punished in the marketplace. If watchdogs don’t do the due diligence on these claims, then anyone can make a claim and the consumer won’t know the difference.”

Dirty dairying?

Greenpeace senior campaigner Simon Boxer agrees that NGOs have a responsibility to act as greenwash watchdogs.

“One of our roles is to look behind what is said publicly, and all the fine-tuning of messaging that comes out of a lot of corporations. If you look into it you can find out the real facts and figures, but it takes a lot of work.”

In late August, a Sunday Star Times exclusive linked Fonterra’s importation of palm kernel animal feed to the destruction of Indonesian rain forests. Boxer believes the palm kernel controversy is a serious example of greenwash in action.

“The industry claims that palm kernel products are sustainable but with a bit of research you find out that very little of what’s being supplied is sustained by any measure, and even then the sustainability measures are very weak.

“There’s talk about palm kernel expeller (PKE) as a waste product but that’s just not true,” he says. “If you talk to people in the palm industry, they don’t consider it as a waste product, yet ministers stand up in parliament and spout off the rubbish that they’ve been advised by the dairy industry.”

Boxer is cautious about applying the term greenwash to the entire dairy industry, but suggests that New Zealand dairy’s ‘clean, green’ and efficient image may no longer be accurate.

“It’s a hard one because it’s such a diverse industry,” he admits. “One problem is that Fonterra won’t reveal any real information. They announced the carbon footprint for their products, then, when we got a copy of the report under the Official Information Act, they blanked out all the data so there was no way to independently verify it.

“That said, we know their footprint has risen dramatically over the last five years. On the world stage, we’re getting close to the intensive dairying seen in Europe and the US.”

Reverse spin

Evan Smeath, Hukerunui dairy farmer and former Ballance Farm Environment Award winner, is concerned that some commentators are implying ‘dirty dairying’ is rampant in New Zealand.

“That actually annoys me immensely because their criticism might only be based on one person’s actions, whereas everybody else is really trying their best.”

He says farmers like the Crafar family, who were recently fined $90,000 for environmental offences and accused of allowing over 100 bobby calves to starve to death, “do not belong in our dairy industry at all, they’ve got to shape up or ship out.”

In terms of the palm kernel scandal, Smeath believes Greenpeace’s tactics have developed into harmful media spin of a different kind.

“Greenpeace are trying to get media attention, to get backing on their side, but they’re going overboard,” he says. “If they want to do make a difference, why don’t they put something in about the people who are actually doing a good job? You never hear Greenpeace applauding something; it’s always pulling someone down.”

Smeath says that, while most farmers are genuinely concerned about the environment, the approach currently used by Greenpeace is not effective.

“Too much criticism gets people’s backs up and makes them think ‘stuff you, we’ll do it when we’re ready’. If Greenpeace actually worked with people and said, ‘this is a good idea’, they’d get more credibility and we’d get more change happening.”

Dr Mike Scarsbrook, DairyNZ sustainability development team leader, points out that dairy farmers are as susceptible to ‘green’ spin as any other consumer group.

“In our dealings with farmers we find they are generally very wary of snake-oil merchants trying to take advantage of the imperative to adopt sustainable farming technologies.

“DairyNZ’s role is to show them where they need to invest their time and resources to lower their footprint, and to test new practices and technologies to give them confidence to adopt them on their own farms.”

Smeath agrees. “One of the biggest things is educating and being able to understand a lot of the information that’s out there, and to believe it. With the economic situation the way it is, farmers won’t spend on sustainable practices and technology unless they’re sure it’ll work. We want it to be tried and true by reputable organisations to make sure it’s the way to go.”

He and around 30 other Northland farmers have formed their own watchdog group, the Northland Dairy Action Team, to monitor and facilitate environmental initiatives in the area.

How deep the wash?

A fundamentalist environmentalist observer could argue that a deeper kind of greenwash exists in New Zealand. For example, Combined Taxis may be bona fide carbon neutral but a taxi company can never be considered truly environmentally friendly. Are we cheating our way to a clear conscience? Will hedonistic over-indulgent capitalism never be overthrown? Wouldn’t cycling be better?

Victoria University environmental studies lecturer Dr Sean Weaver disagrees. “If we want people to be cycling more, we should promote cycling but we shouldn’t kick the ass of anyone who puts a voluntary measure in place.”

He points out that our society is not going to stop consuming anytime soon. “It’s taken centuries to get to where we are now and that’s not going to be changed overnight. We can promote the best behaviour as much as we can, carpooling, people getting on their bikes, that sort of thing, but the vast majority of people are not going to do that.”

“Here’s a thought. Say 95 percent of people aren’t going to get on their bikes, but what if they were prepared to change a little bit, and that change was aggregated? One step each for four million people is four million steps. The small steps in the other direction have added up to climate change, so one of the big parts in our toolbox is to help the vast majority to take steps in the other direction.

“Once they’ve done taken the first step, the second step is a little easier, and the third step even easier, so what may look like a token gesture may actually help to shift their sense of self-identity, in which case the next thing they do is more significant.”

Like farmer Ewan Smeath, Weaver is aware of the risks associated with excessive criticism. “Nobody wants to have guilt landed on them. They’ll say ‘Piss off, I’m not playing your game and I don’t like you guys, you’re freaks and I don’t think you should be voted into parliament.’ It’s easy to criticise but if we want to be effective, I would argue very strongly that we’re better off using encouragement whenever possible.”

As the tide of ‘green’ spreads slowly through our consumer options, Weaver offers some final advice to the would-be environmentalist.

“We need to vote with our feet as consumers, which means looking at labels, looking where things come from. If it’s got palm oil in it, then it’s probably come from a rainforest in Indonesia that’s killed orangutans and destroyed rainforests.

“Be a discerning consumer, but also look for quality and only buy things that you really need to buy. If you’re depressed and need some retail therapy, then lie down and do a laughing meditation or something.”

NF: Why were you drawn to working in this particular area [as a sex therapist specialising in male issues]?

PW: I’ve always had an interest and there seems to be a bit of a lack of men working with men in this particular area. I’ve always been interested in myself as a man and in my own relationships.

Sex as an area is such a wide umbrella because I see people for all sorts of issues, from sexual function through to cross-dressing through to desire differences in relationships. There’s a whole wide range so it’s always interesting.

NF: What will your lecture at uni focus on?

PW: The lecture is in two parts. First, it’s about addressing some of the myths around about men and sex. I think we all grow up with a lot of myths and a lot of misinformation about how we are supposed to be and how young men are supposed to be with sex and in their approaches to sex. I go through about ten of the common myths that I come across in my work.

For example ‘all touching is sexual and should lead to sex’. That’s what I’ve seen and what I’ve heard, talking to couples and talking to men, is that there’s a myth that says ‘if we’re hugging and touching and kissing et cetera, then it’s all on for sex. Our conditioning says any kind of physical contact is all about sex, whereas it doesn’t necessarily need to mean that.

One of the things I work on is encouraging men to develop their sensuality. I mean, sex is valid, but so is developing sensuality. Some of the men I see here, they think that ‘she’s giving me a hug or a kiss, so now we’ll be jumping into bed and having intercourse’. And then some women and partners think ‘no, I feel pressured straight away because he wants to take things further and all I want is to be close to him’. I get that a lot where there are desire differences within a couple, when one partner is less interested in sex.

NF: Usually a woman?

PW: Usually but not always. For about 20% of the couples I see, a male is the low-desire partner so that kind of blows some of the standard thinking. ‘Men are always interested in and always ready for sex’, that’s another one of the myths we look at. The guys I see with low desire, they think ‘as a man, I’m meant to be really keen on this, why am I not necessarily feeling that?’ And that can be just the way he is as an individual. It’s about finding out what is important to you rather than thinking, as a man, this is how I should be behaving.

Here’s another myth: ‘sex is based on a hard penis and what’s done with it’. Most guys, at some stage of their life, will have some sort of erection difficulty. They freak out and think ‘this is the most important thing, I’ve got to get it up so that intercourse can happen’. Whereas most women, in terms of orgasm and pleasure in sex, most women will say that they won’t have orgasms through intercourse, yet guys are led to believe that that’s the most important thing for their partner.

We need to question these myths and ask ‘is this what I want, is this what my partner wants?’ Part of my talk is about discussing the impact misinformation has on us, and some of the ingredients towards creating better sex and better relationships. I’ll be talking about some of the things I’ve seen in my work that make a difference.

NF: In terms of exercises and things?

PW: No, not so much! Although I do sometimes give people exercises… [laughs] No, more like having a relationship that’s based on friendship, where there’s respect and affection, where there’s communication so people can negotiate together what they might do sexually and non-sexually. So being able to talk. We talk about ‘oral sex’, but to me oral sex is about talking.

For guys, knowing a bit about their own bodies, knowing what they like and being able to ask for what they want, knowing what their partner wants and she or he being able to ask for what they want. Having accurate information about infections, condoms, pregnancy and prevention. Focusing on pleasure instead of performance, moving away from the idea of intercourse being a ‘top of the mountain’ idea when really the journey should be about pleasure.

NF: That sounds like good life philosophy. ‘It’s not the destination, it’s the journey…’

PW: Right. [laughs] I also talk about images of women. Pornography is so accessible so, for many of the young men I see, I get them to really question the messages that they’re getting about the way women are, or the way women are supposed to be.

Most women don’t fit that perfect body type, most women aren’t sitting there just dying for sex. It’s that whole thing about ‘this is all that she wants…’

NF: ‘And therefore if I can’t give it to her…’ then that leads to performance issues?

PW: Yeah, definitely. Some of the guys I see say ‘oh, I’m worried my penis isn’t big enough’ and, of course, they’ve been looking at pornography where there are these men with these big, huge penises… It’s about getting guys to question what they’re looking at and what messages they’re getting.

NF: What’s the goal of all this? What do you see as good sex?

PW: That can be different for each person and each couple. Some people think good sex is having sex three times a day, others three times a week, others once every six months. I’m a great believer in losing the idea of the maths of sex, that there’s not some standard for us to live up to.

NF: What advice do you have for students who aren’t in long-term relationships and are still experimenting?

PW: Experimenting is a key thing we do when we’re young. Nothing is going to change that but I do think that we need to minimise risk. So, being clued up about STIs and pregnancy, those are the bottom lines that need to be in place. We need to experiment, that’s the way we find out what we do and don’t like, but I believe in doing that in a way that minimises some of the risks.

NF: Emotional risks as well.

PW: That’s right. To go into those situations with our eyes open, knowing about risks and knowing that once we start breaking down some of those barriers of having sex with other people, we open ourselves up to being hurt and rejected. And again, that’s all good learning even if it doesn’t feel like it at the time. Do you know what I mean? It’s a painful thing that we go through as young people. Do you see that around you?

NF: I think people kind of stumble around and that it can take a long time to work out.

PW: Yes, and there’s no quick way around that. There’s no book that tells you how to get where you want to be in terms of a good relationship. We just have to learn it ourselves.

NF: I think that’s quite a good point to end on.

Today, barriers of entry to the modern nation-state are paper thin. Immigration is an industry and passports are gold. Visas, work permits, residency and citizenship applications must be duly filled in, paid for and processed. Governments have the right to set quotas, target desirable groups of migrants and reject those they don’t like.

I leave the country in two months. Many of my friends are doing the same. We’re young, educated, alert, and we were born with a ticket to ride. New Zealand has a working holiday scheme with 15 European Union countries, seven countries across the Americas, and several through Asia. The ability to teach English opens up the borders of most of the rest.

There is no necessity behind our movements. I have no disadvantaged background, no war-gutted or corrupted country to leave in search of a better life. Once my overseas experiences are done, I’ll return home and settle, pay back my student loan and aim for my slice of the rapidly re-inflating New Zealand property bubble.

For a growing number of would-be New Zealand citizens, migration is a much more serious game. I have many friends who entered on student or working holiday visas and now want to make a permanent home here. The reasons vary. One friend fell in lust with, yes, our verdant scenery and clean environment. I have listened to others rave about our low levels of crime and corruption, and relative ease of employment. Several of my friends and a few of my taxi drivers felt as though they had no opportunities in the country of their birth.

PASSPORTS ARE GOLD

From 25 July 2002 to 31 July 2009, the Department of Labour prosecuted 216 individuals for immigration-related fraud. Two hundred of these led to convictions, in relation to 1,125 offences.

Some particularly juicy examples have been produced in recent months. In August, former Labour MP Taito Phillip Field was awarded ‘first NZ politician convicted for bribery and corruption charges as an MP’ after accepting free labour from Thai tradesmen in exchange for immigration assistance.

Gerard Otimi, the leader of a South Auckland scam, was convicted after he allegedly offered to adopt thousands of Pacific Islanders into his hapu and sold false immigration certification at $500 a pop.

In an alleged scam in Ashburton, recruitment agencies offered farm placements to immigrant workers then confiscated their passports and a percentage of their pay on an ongoing basis. Similar allegations have been made by a Filipino nurse, and allegations of human trafficking have been laid on behalf of at least two Ukrainian sex workers in Auckland.

If the media is to be believed, immigration fraud is on the rise and the recession is to blame. As jobs dry up, pressure is placed on bosses to fire migrant workers first and residency approvals close off. The government has said that the current annual residency target of about 45,000 will not change, yet 3376 people were approved residency in July compared with 4442 in July last year.

SHAM SHAGGING

Residency can be granted to foreigners if they prove they have been in a stable and genuine relationship with a New Zealand citizen for at least 12 months.

Married, civil union and de facto relationships are all eligible, though the latter is more difficult to prove.

According to Department of Labour spokesperson Rowan Saker, a total of 82 allegations of ‘false marriages’ were received between 1 November 2008 and 30 June 2009. Fifteen allegations are still being investigated, and of the remaining cases, no prosecutions were undertaken. ‘False marriage’ is not a specific offence under the Immigration Act 1987, but falls under section 142 of the Immigration Act—‘false or misleading information’.

There are scams and then there are scams. While some ‘fake marriages’ are set up as exploitative mass scams, I know several people who have agreed to a sham relationship for more altruistic reasons.

I asked Sarah*, 26, a New Zealand-born ‘sham wife’, to explain how her particular arrangement came about.

“Basically, through a friend of a friend,” she says, “I didn’t know the person at all. He wanted to stay in the country but wasn’t able to, and I was asked if I’d be willing to do something to help. They were just casting about for someone and I basically thought, why not?”

She was inspired by the experiences of others. “I’ve had other friends who’ve been studying here in similar situations. These are people in work, people who are contributing to the community. They want to stay for further study or for work but don’t get their visas granted, so have had to find another way in.”

Sarah prefers not to reveal the exact amount of money exchanges as part of the deal, but says it was “probably in the same sort of realm” as the payment for a visa application. She and John*, a student and part-time worker, are not living together, despite official statements to the contrary. As far as proof of the relationship goes, “I don’t handle the evidence side of things, that’s up to him.”

“The way I justify it to myself is that people working for the right kind of employer are able to get their employer to sponsor them. In this case, I’m a sort of personal sponsor. I’m vouching for that person in a personal rather than professional capacity.”

She doesn’t know why John’s visa was declined. “Something to do with where he’s from, the amount of money, and how long he was able to stay here on a student visa.”

Sarah believes the current immigration system is inconsistent. “The situation seems kind of dumb,” she says. “We’re not overpopulated yet, and I can see why we’d want to prevent that from happening, but there just seems to be little common sense or consistency in the way the service selects who gets to stay and who is denied.

“Money shouldn’t be the only measure. To move halfway across the world, you’ve got to be an overachiever to start off with, and I think if someone’s motivated enough for this, then they’ve obviously got lots of energy and drive and should be allowed to stay. Everyone in New Zealand came here as someone who wanted a better life, or is the descendent of someone who did. It just seems logical, really.”

SCI-FI MORALITY ROMP

Illegality should not be encouraged, but what if the rules are wrong? In 2002, Helen Clark formally apologised for the institutionally racist Chinese poll tax, an integral part of immigration policy in the late nineteenth century. Current immigration policy may one day be subjected to similar scrutiny.

In terms of service provision, the Government has admitted that Immigration NZ has major problems. In a 4 June press release, Immigration Minister Jonathon Coleman acknowledged that the “mess left by the last government is even worse than anyone thought”.

“Basically it’s a picture of a siloed organisation where people don’t talk to each other, the management practices are poor, and there’s a lack of standardisation in the way things are done across the service.”

As this article goes to press, parliament has remained under urgency to debate new immigration policy. Potential areas of concern are the degree of control given to immigration officers to decide on individual cases and the existence of review panels to which a migrant or refugee can appeal if they have concerns about a decision.

In a wider sense, the morality of the entire immigration system deserves a challenge. I’m no philosophy student, but two recent sci-fifilms raise some worrying questions.

In BBC production Code 46 (2003), starring Tim Robbins, intercity and international travel is restricted to the healthy, wealthy elite. The central government-cum-insurance agency only dishes out travel permits, or ‘papelles’, in exceptional circumstances.

In Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer (2008), impoverished Mexicans are implanted with telerobotic ‘nodes’ so they can work 12-hour shifts controlling robot workers inside foreign cities. Developed nations are able to enjoy all the benefits of a cheap migrant workforce without the nuisances of health care and education provision.

Neither film requires much of an imaginative leap. Global immigration policies already heavily favour the healthy, wealthy elite and the use of cheap foreign labour in offshore facilities is widespread. Migrante Aotearoa, a Filipino workers’ group, has recently raised concerns about the ‘disposal’ of migrant workers during the recession. Like the node workers in Sleep Dealers, workers were enticed to New Zealand while their labour was needed then dropped as soon as they became a potential burden.

Unless we are willing to accept fundamental inequality, it may be time to reconsider the way we view our immigration system. Unless change occurs quickly, altruistic acts of immigration fraud may be the only way forward. Kia ora Sarah, kia ora.

“A lot of people who are trans experience body dysmorphia,” says Max, from across a table in one of Wellington’s finest bagel establishments. “I don’t personally feel that. Perhaps that has a lot to do with both my politics and the fact that I have been able to access transitional therapies easily.”

“For me, being trans is an identity, not an illness. I definitely see myself as genderqueer as opposed to a traditional transsexual. That said, I’m having surgery to remove my breasts.”

Max Prendergast, 23, is a genderqueer Maori Honours student, has a killer set of glasses frames, and loves his body. He began his transition this year, with the help of a doctor at Student Health.

“I just rocked up there, super nervous,” he remembers. “It was probably the first time I’d said ‘I’m trans’ to a person in authority. It’s not so bad saying it to friends or family, but a medical practitioner has power over you. So to have the courage to sit there and say it, that took me a while.”

Max is glad he did. “My GP was amazing, really friendly and amazing. She admitted to me that she’d never seen a trans student before and had no idea what to do, but in a way that was kind of great because we got to do it together.”

As part of his transition, Max has taken out a $16,000 loan to pay for his ‘top chop’, has outed himself to his employer, friends and family, and now faces the physical and emotional turmoil of what is essentially a second bout of puberty.

He says he has it easy. “I haven’t got any problems accessing trans therapy. I started hormones within two months of asking, and I’m having my chop surgery in another two months.”

Max has no illusions about the reasons for his easy transition. “I’m white. I come from a good family. I’m on my second degree, and I’m articulate. I’ve got a good job so I can manage my debt repayments.”

And the less fortunate, those who lack the resources to transition to their chosen gender?

“If you’re experiencing hardcore gender dysphoria,” explains Max, “if you’re really upset and depressed and you can’t access hormone treatment or surgery, that’s like every time you leave the house you do it without clothes, without shoes. That’s what it feels like when we deny trans people the therapies that they need to transition.”

An Invisible Minority

In 2006, the Human Rights Commission launched the Transgender Inquiry, the world’s first inquiry by a national human rights institution into the discrimination experienced by transgender people.

This was an ambitious assignment on several levels. Not only was there no template for the commission to follow, but the trans community in New Zealand is incredibly diverse. Around 200 people made submissions over the 18 months of the Inquiry: farmers, business-people, tradespeople, academics, artists, sex workers, health professionals, economists, managers, parents and grand-parents.

The people who made submissions referred to themselves as transgender, Male-to-Female (MtF) and Female-to-Male (FtM) transsexuals, cross-dressers, intersex, androgynous, genderqueer, takatāpui, fa’afafine, fakaleiti, whakawahine and others.

A trans student at Victoria, who asked to remain anonymous, pointed out that the sexuality of trans people is equally varied. “You can look at it like a graph with two separate axes, gender and sexual orientation,” she said. “You can be anywhere on that graph, anywhere you want. You can be as straight as they come, or completely genderless and asexual.”

Culture could be considered the third axis on the graph. Elizabeth Kerekere and Peri Te Wao help run the Tiwhanawhana Trust, and are acutely aware of the additional decisions faced by takatāpui, a reclaimed term used to describe gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans and other genderqueer Māori.

“One of the reasons we set up Tiwha-nawhana,” explains Kerekere, “is the issue of takatāpui always having to choose between being Māori and following some quite strict roles in terms of male and female roles, particularly in performance and protocols. If you want to be queer and your gender is fluid, how do you express your sexual and gender identity inside the Maori community?

“We try to get out and about so queer youth know there are takatāpui out there living their lives, and that we’re available to help out.”

Te Wao knows that he and other takatāpui advocates are the minority. “It’s a small community and hard to gauge, because we don’t have that box that we can tick and identify as. Not all of the trans community would want to tick that box, even if they could.”

Kerekere agrees. “I find with younger people that, more and more, they’re not wanting to identify as trans. They’re more likely to call themselves genderqueer. They’re not wanting to transition from the physical body they’ve got now but want to be able to present as the opposite sex without having to change it, to be a bit more fluid about it. It’s quite difficult for older people to handle that.”

Identifying Abuse

After two years of research, the findings of the Transgender Inquiry were published as a 100-page report entitled ‘To Be Who I Am/ Kia noho au ki toku ano ao’. The report identified four areas for urgent attention: increased participation of trans people in decisions that affect them; stronger legal protections against discrimination; improved access to health services; and simplified processes for change of sex on a birth certificate, passport and other documents.

Many of the stories shared in the Inquiry report are harrowing. Trans youth reported being harassed by teachers and students and being afraid to ask for health or social support. Many trans people find it close to impossible to gain and keep employment, even when they possess all the appropriate skills, qualifications and experience.

“One restaurant fired me because a customer complained I could give them AIDS by touching their plate (my HIV status is negative),” wrote one trans woman. “They didn’t fire the out gay maitre d’, however.”

“I have been punched in broad daylight on a busy street with no one coming to my aid,” said another. “I have been called names and put up with staring and people talking about me behind my back, often within my hearing.”

Access to health services and barriers to changing sex and gender information on legal documents is often effectively one and the same. Until recently, the only way to ensure a sex change on a birth certificate was to have had full gender reassignment surgery. Not all trans people want to have surgery and, for those that do, the financial and medical barriers can be huge.

Trans men felt particularly hard done by. “We can’t get [‘lower’ surgery] done in New Zealand,” wrote one, “most of us don’t have the $50-$100K needed to do it overseas, it can involve as many as five risky operations with a variable outcome, and many of us will never choose to have it.”

Thankfully, the barriers to a sex change on a birth certificate have been relaxed. In a major victory for the Transgender Inquiry team and trans advocates, a June 2008 Family Court decision set a new precedent for interpretation of section 28 of the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Act 1995. Each application will now be judged subjectively. The degree of permanent physical change required now depends on the circumstances of each applicant.

Getting to the point of any permanent physical change is difficult. In somewhat of a vicious cycle, without documentation that matches their chosen gender, trans people are forced to out themselves each time they apply for a job or enrol in a tertiary course. Without an appropriate level of income, paying up to $300 per hour for a psych assessment may be an insurmountable barrier. Without a psych assessment, access to hormone therapy is difficult, and a positive Family Court ruling to get new documentation is unlikely.

Trans On Campus

The Inquiry report identified discrimination in tertiary education as an area of concern. At least three trans people struggled to gain entry to tertiary courses due to staff concerns that they “wouldn’t fit in” or would not cope with study while transitioning. Others complained about their inability to change their gender details on student records. After constant harassment, one trans student took bed-wetting medication so he wouldn’t need to use the toilets at his polytechnic.

Post-graduate student Max has not personally experienced problems as a trans person at Victoria. “As a whole, my experience has been quite positive. It depends on who you are and how confident you feel.”

He doesn’t feel the need for a separate representative group for trans students. “I really don’t think you can lump trans people together and provide one service for all. I think what we need to do is break down barriers across the board so that trans people can access services that they want to.”

Max admits that the curiosity of the general public can become a burden. “My body has become public property now that I’m transitioning. People think it’s okay to come and ask me really personal questions.

“I can see why people have that morbid curiosity, I did before I transitioned, but people expect you to answer their questions all the time. You’re an ambassador, like it or not… I struggle with that quite a lot.”

Another trans student at Victoria, who preferred not be identified, liked the relative anonymity of campus life. “The university is a brilliant place to be because most people just don’t care, so you can get on with being yourself.”

Lifting The Burden

The Assume Nothing project is an ongoing body of work about gender diversity founded by Auckland-based artist Rebecca Swan in 1995, published as a book in 2004, developed into a feature documentary by Kirsty MacDonald in 2008, and currently in the middle of a two-year exhibition tour of New Zealand galleries.

Assume Nothing aims to reveal the “extraordinary and often very ordinary worlds” of the New Zealand trans community. One of the most famous images from the project features activist and educator Mani Bruce Mitchell, born with both male and female genital tissue, the words ‘I am not a monster’ scrawled across her chest.

“I’m drawn to [gender diversity as a subject] because gender androgyny or fluidity is almost a spiritual thing for me,” explains Swan, over the phone from Auckland. “I feel our souls are androgynous, so when somebody embodies both male and female elements, there is something quite magical about it for me. There are other reasons, political and everything else, but that’s what sustains it for me.”

The Human Rights Commission offers three workshops in tandem with the exhibition, run by Transgender Inquiry project manager Jack Byrne as panel discussions with a focus on trans diversity, trans youth and trans creativity.

Free copies of the Inquiry are available for people to take and read at home or at the workplace.

Swan has embraced her partnership with the Commission. “One of the intents [of the exhibition] was to create social change around gender diversity and this felt like the most appropriate way to harness it.”

“I read the comments books every time we go to a gallery,” she says. “The people who’ve been photographed and filmed are very open with the intimate details of their lives and, because of that, people really respond.”

Swan is awed by the generosity and perseverance of the trans and genderqueer participants in the exhibition. “They’ve got a strong motive to make a difference, and telling their stories or being photographed is a great way to do that.

“I’ve been blown away by how generous and giving they are of themselves. Mani [Bruce Mitchell] comes to every show, every venue. She’ll do anything to get other people talking about gender issues, and she’ll be there on the front line because she has a strong motive for change.”

The stories shared by the Assume Nothing exhibition help to break stereo-types and lift the burden of ‘morbid curiosity’ often experienced by trans people who just want to get on with their lives. Swan, aware that not everyone is happy to be ‘outed’ in every city, checks with participants every time a show goes up.

A Work In Progress

“We’ve seen huge leaps and bounds in the last 20 years,” says Joanne Clarke, president of national support group Agender and host of radio show TransSister Radio. “People have started to stand up and be counted, and people can see that we’re a diverse community with a lot of talent.

“There are so many people out there who you wouldn’t even know are trans,” she points out. “We’re everywhere but it’s still very hidden, a very hidden journey.

There’s a lot of guilt and shame. People have got to realise that you’re born like this, you can’t help it.”

She feels that the Inquiry set an important benchmark for trans rights. “[The Inquiry] tried to be as thorough as possible in the consultation process and a lot of our community felt as though they had been heard for the first time.”

Clarke also appreciates the ongoing nature of the Transgender Inquiry project.

“Three of us [from Christchurch] went up for a national hui last March up in Wellington, and people came from all over the country,” she says. “I’ve interviewed Joy [Liddicoat, Commissioner], Rosslyn [Noonan, Chief Commissioner] and Jack [Byrne, Project Manager] on TranSister Radio, and we talked about how things were going and what’s happening, how to keep moving forward on the Inquiry recommendations. It’s a document that hasn’t just been produced and left.”

The discrimination and human rights abuses identified by the Transgender Inquiry will take a long time to address. The Human Rights Commission does not have the authority to simply step in and pass their recommendations into law, and the long-term impact of the Inquiry remains to be seen. For now, at least the discrimination faced by trans and genderqueer people in Aotearoa is finally, and firmly, out of the closet.

Justice Minister Simon Power has asked the Law Commission to consider the introduction of a European-style inquisitorial justice system for sexual offending and child abuse cases. The Law Foundation, one step ahead, has already announced an $85 000 parallel study. Salient feature writer Nina Fowler asked three Victoria academics to explain the difference between the inquisitorial and adversarial justice systems, and why change is being considered.

Both systems of justice go back hundreds of years, says senior lecturer Grant Morris.

“The inquisitorial system was associated with the approach used by the Catholic Church, not always with positive results, while the adversarial system developed from the dispute resolution process used at local moot courts in England.

“In the early modern period, continental Europe moved towards a civil law system and the inquisitorial approach. England kept a common law system and the adversarial approach. There’s nothing to say that civil law has to use an inquisitorial system and common law has to have an adversarial system, but that’s the way history has panned out.”

The adversarial justice system was passed on from England to New Zealand, Australia and the US. In contemporary criminal courts, legal advocates present their cases to an impartial third party, usually a jury. The presiding judge acts as referee and sets the sentence.

In the inquisitorial system, currently used in South Africa and many European countries, the presiding judge controls the investigation. She or he supervises the collection of evidence and questions witnesses. Unlike the adversarial system, the defendant does not have a right to silence. Lawyers have a more limited role and a jury is not used. Instead, the verdict and sentence are voted on by a group of professional magistrates.

The relative merits of both systems are hotly contested. Opponents of the inquisitorial system argue that the state may be biased against the defendant, and that trial by a jury of one’s peers is a fundamental right. Supporters argue that the inquisitorial system is quicker and less expensive, and that a jury can not always be relied on to reach a just verdict.

New Zealand has a notoriously low rate of conviction for sexual offences. Nearly a quarter of the population experience sexual violence at some point in their lives, yet under 10% of sexual offences are reported to police, and an even smaller percentage make it to the courtroom.

A discussion paper published by the Ministry of Justice in mid-2008 acknowledged that the adversarial justice system was not doing sexual abuse victims any favours. Victims told researchers and social workers that they were intimidated by the criminal justice system, and felt as though their behaviour was examined during the trial process rather than the actions of the accused.

The Ministry concluded that social assumptions made by the jury affected conviction rates. Jury members had preconceived ideas about how ‘real’ victims should behave before, during and after an alleged sexual assault. As the Ministry put it, a “vicious cycle” has been created: concerns about fairness stop victims and witnesses from coming forward, and low rates of reporting and conviction breed new concerns about fairness.

Child abuse trials are not doing that well either. Similar concerns have been raised about the fairness of exposing a vulnerable victim to cross-examination in front of a jury, while the accused is allowed the right to silence.

Speed and efficiency are an even more pressing concern. Last Friday, the head of the Wellington police district apologised for ‘unacceptable’ delays in processing over a hundred child abuse cases in the Wairarapa.

In mid June, Justice Minister Simon Power announced that the Law Commission would consider an inquisitorial justice system as an alternative to trial by jury in sexual and child abuse cases.

Just prior to Power’s announcement, the Law Foundation announced that Victorian academics Elisabeth McDonald and Yvette Tinsley, along with Jeremy Finn from Canterbury, would be funded to lead a 21-month study into the various inquisitorial models which might work in NZ. The group hope that recommendations based on their research will be used by the Law Commission and Cabinet to change trial process.

McDonald and Tinsley were not able to give their opinions on the relative merits of the inquisitorial and adversarial approaches, though McDonald predicted that “some versions of inquisitorial process may be easier on the complainant.” Tinsley said she believed the tools and assistance made available to jurors were the key to good jury-decision making, rather than the “‘innate (lack of) ability of jurors.”

Senior lecturer Grant Morris is more open about his preferences. While he thinks some aspects of the inquisitorial system that could work well, Morris opposes “whole-scale” changes for sex and child abuse cases.

“I’m happy to be down on record as someone who wants the jury system to remain,” he said. “Having the judge as the neutral arbitrator, being able to have your advocate take a much active role in gathering facts and presenting your case… I do have faith in the jury system, being judged by your peers, and especially in matters of fact.

“There’s nothing to suggest that judges, although they are trained professionals in matters of law, are necessarily the best people to make judgements in matter of fact. For example, whether someone accused of murder is innocent or guilty of the crime—that’s a matters of fact. Then there’s that whole argument of whether the judiciary is representative of the population.

“[Another] thing the adversarial system does pretty well is protect the rights of the defendant to due process and a fair trial, no matter how unlikeable the defendant is.”

Morris is more concerned about the effect of jury dodgers than the integrity of individual jurors in sexual abuse cases.

“My main worry is that the representative nature of the jury is undermined by the fact that so many people, and particularly certain groups, manage to get out of jury service. It’s too easy, even though efforts have been made to tighten it up, and that raises questions about the effectiveness of the jury system.”

He concedes that a more inquisitorial approach could increase the speed and cost of trials.

“With the Bain trial, you can see the huge cost of the research involved on both sides. If more control is given to the judge, if we apply management theory, there might be efficiencies in the [inquisitorial approach].”

South Africa’s move to a more inquisitorial approach resulted in increased conviction rates for sexual assault. Similar changes have been introduced in Victoria, Australia. Are the NZ Law Foundation and Law Commission enquiries likely to turf up similar recommendations?

Researcher Yvette Tinsley thinks “whole-scale” changes to sex and child abuse trials are unlikely, as a move to a purely inquisitorial system would “undoubtedly be expensive and time-consuming”. She emphasises that a complete move is not the only option available.

“Over recent years, there has been a willingness for countries using both systems to utilise good initiatives—i.e. an adversarially based process could utilise initiatives from an inquisitorial system and vice versa. So, it is not necessarily all or nothing.”

Grant Morris points out that some New Zealand courts already contain aspects of the inquisitorial system.

“The Waitangi Tribunal is easily the best example. Tribunal members, as historical researchers, take an active role in gathering information. The court is supposed to be neutral and objective, and advocates bring evidence, but the court is also able to direct further research.”

Even within regular courts, he adds, judges occasionally take a more investigatory approach. “[Judges] do have some ability to comment and ask questions, it’s not as though they sit back the whole time and just listen.”

He agrees with Tinsley that a hybrid between the adversarial and inquisitorial approaches may be the best option for reform.

“There’s always room for impro­vement, but we’ve got to look at the positives that we have, and not just throw aspects away.”

Cut to 31 July 2009, Westpac Stadium. The Wellington Lions faced off against the Highlanders for the Ranfurly Shield. A cursory bag check was made to see if Salient was packing knife, gun or hip-flask, security guards prowled and a medical station was clearly marked. None of these precautions were needed. The under-capacity crowd had enough trouble mustering a decent cheer, let alone a skirmish in the stands.

A comparison between post-coup Honduras and wintry Wellington is extreme, but the behaviour of the fans in the stands follows a wider trend. Central and South America, most of Europe and the UK have serious problems with sports riots; Australia and New Zealand do not.

Riots around the world

Legendary German football coach Sepp Herberger once said “after the game is before the game”. Although his comment was directed at players, he may as well have been addressing a certain group of supporters known as ‘hooligans’. The term refers to gangs of obsessive fans who come to games as much for the post-match scrap as the match itself.

Hooliganism was first associated with violent, trouble-making football fans in 1960s England. At first, hooligan violence was fairly spontaneous. By the 1970s, gangs of hooligans had organised into ‘firms’. Footy riots got serious, a trend which has spread around the world.

As a general rule, major footy-mad countries have more serious hooliganism issues than smaller ones. Argentina declared football violence as a national crisis in 2002, after realising an average four murders occured at matches per year. In 2007, Italy suspended all matches after a policeman was hit in the face with an explosive during a riot. Even relative small-fry like Bangladesh, Ghana, Poland, Sweden, Turkey and Wales have their regular share of tear gas, stabbings, death threats, murders, injuries and arrests.

The Sunday Times interviewed a gang of Polish football hooligans ahead of the 2006 World Cup in Germany.

Lukasz Pawlik, a 26-year-old Cracovia fan, described his hatred of rival club Wisla Krakow.

“To say I hate [the Wisla fans] is not enough,” he said, while pulling on a balaclava and reaching for a knife shaped like a miniature axe. “This equipment is now a part of how I fight and it will taste the blood of a Wisla dog tonight.”

A second Polish hooligan, who allegedly carried a knife with a five inch blade and a rubber hosepipe filled with sand, told Times journalist Bob Graham to “tell the English fans we are coming to Germany to hunt them down.

“We will come for them silently and quickly,” he warned. “We hate the Germans and we will fight with them. We admire the English because of their reputation. That’s why we will fight with them. We want to take their reputation as the best fighters.”

The worst riot at the 2006 World Cup turned out to be between English and German fans, the day before the England vs. Ecuador game in Stuttgart. Over 400 English hooligans were taken into protective custody. Police estimate each rioter consumed or threw about 17 litres of beer.

Back in Aotearoa, our one and only claim to sports-riot fame is the 1981 Springbok Tour. Over 150 000 people took part in 200 demonstrations over 56 days, leading to 1500 arrests and numerous injuries. Two pitches were invaded, two matches cancelled, and All Black prop Gary Knight was hit by a flour bomb dropped from a hired Cessna. Quite a good effort, but the extraordinary circumstances of the tour are unlikely to happen again..

Recipe for riot

In June 2005, National Geographic reporter Brian Handwerk asked several leading sports psychologists and researchers to explain why sports riots occur. What he got was a three-step recipe for riot, an insight into the mind of a fanatical sports fan. Salient took a look at how well NZ rugby crowds fit the mold.

Step number one: the fan becomes passionate and identifies personally with the success of the team. Check. Just take a listen to sports talkback, or talk to the battered women who, according to the NZ Herald, experience an increase in domestic violence when the All Blacks get a loss.

Step number two: major sporting events create an ‘anything goes’ environment. Check. The Lions vs Highlanders match at Westpac had face paint, excessive colour coordination, promo boys in boiler suits, promo girls in tiny shorts (in winter), Tui in plastic bottles, a man in a lion suit, bizarre bursts of music and swarms of children. For further proof, refer to the Rugby Sevens. Anything goes.

Step number three: strong group identity makes supporters want to fit in, whether by wearing the right colours or by throwing a bottle. Check. Westpac may have been under capacity, but All Blacks matches draw tens of thousands and bring out the lurking national pride in all of us.

If personal identification with the team, an ‘anything goes’ environment, and the support of a group are all it takes, then every major sporting event in NZ has the potential to become a full-scale bloody riot. In practice, NZ rugby crowds are nearly always well behaved.

Depends on your footy

Association football (aka soccer) is a gentleman’s game played by hooligans, and rugby is a hooligan’s game played by gentlemen, or so the saying goes. Perhaps the chances of a footy riot depend on what type of footy you call footy.

Sports blogger Dave Warner has a theory that physical violence on the pitch prevents physical violence off the pitch.

“Those rugby gentlemen simply take out their frustrations on other players – something that can’t be done in soccer, a game which can often be about frustration,” he writes. “Some teams may try and try to score a goal and come up short, leaving fans so frustrated that they feel the need to vent on something or someone around them.”

Rugby News editor Dave Campbell disagrees. He thinks the culture of rugby in NZ helps prevent hooliganism rather than the nature of the game itself.

“In my experience, rugby is a game which creates a good breed of person. If you’re born into rugby and you play through school, then for clubs, in that environment you become quite well versed in the etiquette.”

“People come together for the love of the game. They don’t get sucked in by the race issues or provincial affiliations [which make people fight]. There’s a degree of respect for the game itself, so you can sit in the crowd with whoever.”

Westpac Stadium marketing manager Steve Thompson suggests that group dynamics also play a part.

“Football competitions overseas attract large groups of males of a certain age that congregate in gang-like situations, like the ultras in Milan,” he says.

“[In NZ], crowds are a bit older, and young people go with their parents so there’s a lot more social control built into the situation.”

Thompson does not think a tradition of hooliganism or sports riots would occur in NZ, even if the fan demographic was similar. “Rugby just doesn’t incite the same intense identity passions as you get with crowds overseas, where people live and die with the performance of the team.”

“It might be our Scottish heritage,” Thompson jokes. “We’re a bit more reserved. We hate losing, but we’re not going to burn down the stand.”

Rise of the boofheads?

The June 2009 test between the All Blacks and France nearly smeared NZ’s hooligan-free record. The alleged attack on French centre Mathieu Bastareaud in Wellington turned out to be a false alarm, but the bottle throwing after the All Blacks’ 22–27 loss to France in Dunedin was not.

“At the end of the game, the French did a victory circuit,” says eyewitness Jamie MacKay. “The whole crowd gave them a standing ovation, until they got to the Terrace and bottles started flying. We’re talking plastic bottles, but some were full so still quite serious missiles. Half of the French team buggered off, but the rest carried on.”

MacKay, a long-standing rugby supporter and the host of Newstalk ZB’s Farming Show, is worried that footy hooliganism is creeping into the rugby crowd.

“You always get a few dickheads in a sports audience but I’ve never seen it to that degree. Hundreds of people were throwing stuff, judging by the amount of missiles thrown out there. Something else I was disappointed with,” he adds, “was the way the crowd viciously booed the French goalkicker.”

“We’re starting to see that sort of thing get more intense in recent years, and it’s a reflection on changes in NZ society. We’re possibly moving towards the British soccer ‘yobbo’ element, though I hope I’m wrong.”

Dunedin Police Inspector Alistair Dickie reassured Salient that the 35 arrests made after the Dunedin test were not a sign of rampant hooliganism.

“It’s not unusual to have a range of people arrested for a range of offences on a Saturday night. Indulgence and alcohol, just a normal Saturday night after a game.”

He admits that “sometimes, after a loss, there is a trend for people to become a bit bitter, to get a wee bit punchy and aggressive.”

‘It doesn’t occur every time, but [we can] see an increase in offences, especially in terms of assaults. On match nights, we usually put extra staff on to monitor behaviour around the city. That can account for the extra arrests, because we’ve got more staff around to see what’s going on.

“On this occasion, the arrests were basically the norm.”

Blessing in disguise

Looks like NZ is fairly set in our quiet, relatively non-hooligan ways. Radio Network rugby commentator Nigel Yalden points out that the culture of association football hooliganism in the UK has taken generations to develop. “It’s life or death for those guys, they’re born into it. If you’re born into a family that supports Manchester, you’ll die as a fan of Manchester. It’s almost a degree of brainwashing,” he says.

Event organisers may wish they could brainwash a few more supporters into buying a ticket, but Yalden believes that our lack of obsession with the national footy is a blessing in disguise.

“I don’t think think [NZ rugby fans] are as passionate as we sometimes claim to be and that’s sometimes a good thing, when you look at the violence overseas.” For wannabe hooligans it seems their only option is the Phoenix.

FINA have belatedly banned full‑body polyurethane swimsuits, the innovation blamed for Michael Phelps’ shock loss to unknown German Paul Biedermann. Banning dodgy technology used by able‑bodied athletes is relatively straight forward; banning athletes who use technology to help them adapt to a disability is more complex.

In January 2008, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) banned Oscar Pistorius, a double‑amputee sprinter from South Africa, from competing in the Beijing Olympics. IAAF were worried that Pistorius’ prosthetic legs, j‑shaped carbon blades known as ‘Cheetahs’, would give him an unfair advantage over competitors using their natural legs.

The IAAF ban was eventually overturned, but the controversy about Pistorius’ landmark case lingers. Supporters argued that the science behind the IAAF ruling was negligible and, if anything, Pistorius had managed to overcome quite a serious disadvantage. Opponents insisted that the Cheetah prosthetics qualified as ‘techo‑doping’ and affected the ‘purity of sport’.

NZ archer Neroli Fairhill, the first wheelchair athlete to compete at an Olympics, came up against similar accusations. After winning gold at the 1982 Commonwealth Games, her rivals at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics suggested that Fairhill’s wheelchair gave her extra support while shooting. “I don’t know,” she allegedly answered, “I’ve never shot standing up.”

Wanaka golden boy, 21‑year‑old Adam Hall, took out all three slalom ski events at last week’s NZ Adaptive Snow Sports Festival. He is the world number two for slalom, was named the 2009 Snow Sports New Zealand Athlete of the Year, and is gunning for gold at the 2010 Paralympics. Hall prefers to be known as an adaptive, rather than disabled, athlete.

“Everyone is ‘disabled’ in one way or another. If you pick someone from the general public and throw them out on the snow, they’re not going to do that well compared to me; [in that situation] they’d be disabled. It’s more about how well you adapt.”

For Hall, adaption means tying the tips of his skis together and using outrigger ski poles to compensate for his spina bifida. He trains alongside able‑bodied athletes at Cardrona and has clocked up some “pretty similar” slalom times to members of the NZ Development Squad.

“I can get a licence to race in able‑bodied competitions if I want, but I think reaching world-class level as a disabled athlete is my focus right now. I guess that if I could get my times up far enough, it’d be pretty cool to be world-class at both levels.”

Not many athletes make it to world-class level, and an even smaller number of disabled athletes make it to world-class able‑bodied level. Those that do, like Oscar Pistorius and Neroli Fairhill, will probably have relied on some form of technology to help get them there. Accusations of ‘techno‑doping’ may run rampant, but the difference between Pistorius’ prosthetics and Biedermann’s swimsuit should be obvious. The former required a lifetime of training; the latter, a changing room. As Hall points out, it’s all a question of adaption.

The world is facing arguably the greatest crisis in human history. No, not the recession, not the boy racer pandemic… climate change. Remember climate change?

Slow kid in the schoolyard

NASA scientist Jim Hansen believes humanity has ten years to either bring global carbon emissions under control or face the possibility of apocalypse. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries are currently approaching the third round of climate change negotiations at Bonn, aimed at replacing the Kyoto Protocol and establishing national emissions reduction targets by 2020. National targets must be set and international negotiations completed before governments can put domestic policies in place and avert aforementioned apocalypse.

Unfortunately, little ‘green’ New Zealand is shaping up as the slow kid in the schoolyard. At the first round of negotiations in late March and early April, all developed countries except for Japan, Iceland, Russia, Switzerland, Belarus, Ukraine and New Zealand set an emissions reduction target for 2020. At the second round, Japan stepped forward to set an admittedly weak target of 8% of 1990 levels by 2020. After a moment of silence, the NZ delegation was asked to explain why they hadn’t yet set a target.

Long-standing environmental activist and current Greenpeace political advisor Geoff Keey was in Bonn to hear the response of Climate Change Ambassador Adrian Macey.
“He said NZ would bring a target to the next meeting but they were still waiting on some forestry data, and they were going to run a public consultation process and this was the reason for the delay.

“At this point, because [the NZ target] was so overdue and the way it was announced, the person sitting next to me turned to me and said ‘is NZ trying to take the piss out of the negotiations?’”

Blame it on the recession

Back home, climate change seems to have slipped from both the front page and the National agenda. Since winning the 2008 election, the National Government appears to have taken more steps backwards than forwards in terms of climate change policy.

On 16 December 2008, Energy and Resources Minister Gerry Brownlee scrapped Labour’s ban on traditional (and inefficient) incandescent lightbulbs.

On 16 November 2008, National halted implementation of the newly passed Emisssions Trading Scheme pending a full review of climate change policy.

On 22 December 2008, National made good on pre-election promises to repeal the ten-year ban on new thermal power stations. Genesis Energy is now planning a gas-fired power station northwest of Auckland.

In February 2009, National announced plans to ‘streamline’ the Resource Management Act. This will fast track sustainable energy projects but also makes it easier for all other developments to get resource consent.

Public transport services funding has been cut by 23% and infrastructure funding by 89%. Funding for the state highway network, however, will receive an extra billion over the next three years.

In fact, the one solidly positive environmental policy that National has announced—the $323m national home insulation scheme—was negotiated as part of a memorandum of understanding with the Greens.

Keey thinks National’s inaction or backward action on climate change is an attempt to set them apart from Labour.

“There’s a lot of positioning around what the government is doing with regard to climate change. That phase out of incandescent lightbulbs made tremendous sense but they pulled it, mostly just to be seen to be different to the previous government.”

Keey believes National’s refusal at Bonn to set an emissions target by 2020 is driven by the same psychology.

“The new government didn’t want to be seen to be implementing the previous government’s climate change strategy. To be honest, there isn’t a huge amount of difference at the international level between the current and previous governments on climate change policy. It’s at the domestic level where there’s a lot of difference. What they want is to have a break between governments so it seems like a fresh start.”

Open mic nights with the Hon. Nick Smith

Last week, the first of the promised public consultation meetings was chaired by Environment Minister Nick Smith in Wellington. As the Government has not set even a preliminary emissions target, all the public meetings will be able to gauge is whether the public want a ‘strong’ or ‘weak’ target.

Keey attended the Wellington meeting. He says most people at the meeting supported a 40% reduction in emissions from 1990 level by 2020.

“There were 350-400 people at the Wellington meeting and pretty much 80% wanted that target.”

Phil Barker, co-leader of Victoria University environmental group Gecko, confirmed Keey’s observations.

“[Nick Smith] is hearing strongly in those meetings that people want a 40% reduction in emissions. His response was, and I quote, “You can go for 40% if you only care about the environment like the Green Party’. That triggered groans across the audience because that’s not even the framework for the debate.”

“Smith was saying, ‘I can hear what target you’re asking for, it’s 40%, it’s clear, but you need to tell us where that’s going to come from, where we’re gonna make the reductions’. Gareth [Hughes, Green Party candidate] was able to respond by saying ‘you’ve got Treasury, you’ve got the Department of Internal Affairs, you’re the government’. The metaphor is like having the CIA at your feet then asking where the details are.”

Admittedly, National is in an extremely difficult position. Crying ‘recession’ may not be an adequate excuse for inaction or backwards action on climate change, but rising unemployment and national debt hardly help the situation.

Geoff Keey thinks the public consultations process may be an attempt to bridge the gap between international expectations and certain domestic lobby groups.

“At the Wellington meeting, people were asked to stand up if they supported an emissions target of 10% or stronger, then to sit if they didn’t support 20% or more, and so on up to 40%. Two of the business representatives there, one from the Major Electricity Users Group and one from the Greenhouse Policy Coalition, weren’t even prepared to stand for the 10% target. Whereas internationally, New Zealand are being pushed to set at a target of at least 25%. There’s a large gap there, so the government need a whopping amount of public support to even get to 25% and survive the backlash they’re going to get from business.”

Battleground Bonn

National is expected to set an emissions reduction target before the August meetings in Bonn. Failing to set a target could have serious consequences. According to Keey, the international community is starting to link climate change and trade negotiations together.

“New Zealand is getting a bit of a hard word put on it, particularly in Europe. Other leaders are making it clear that when New Zealand goes knocking on doors for trade access then, quid pro quo, what you do in one area influences how you get treated elsewhere.

“New Zealand has basically got to bang down doors to sell what we produce, to markets where consumers have plenty of other options and where governments are a bit reluctant at times to let our products in. We can’t afford to tell the rest of the world to piss off [at the Bonn negotiations]. It’s that simple. If we do that, then we’re likely to create an economic impact that’ll make the current recession look like nothing.”

“All the taxi companies will have to do it sooner or later”, he said. “Whole lot cheaper for us to do it now. Plus we’ll get to build up a reputation because we did it first.”

A growing number of groups and individuals on campus believe that Victoria University should do the same. Both Gecko, one of the largest student clubs at Victoria, and the University’s Environmental Committee are committed to working towards a carbon neutral campus.

Why go carbon neutral?

Phil Barker, Gecko co-leader, believes Victoria has an ethical and social responsibility to commit to carbon neutrality.

‘As a public organisation, university is meant to be the critical conscious of society and step forward on leading issues [like carbon neutrality]. Perhaps in the current economic climate, there’s a pressure towards far more short-term thinking, but in terms of social issues and the environmental impact of running such a large organisation, the university needs to demonstrate long-term thinking.”

Former Gecko leader and VUWSA Environmental Officer Tushara Kodikara used his Environmental Studies masters thesis to explore the potential for carbon neutrality at Victoria. In an article published in the 12 May 2008 issue of Salient, Kodikara argued that becoming New Zealand’s first carbon neutral university also makes commercial sense.

“[Carbon neutrality may create] marketing and branding opportunities, opportunities through voluntary activities with the avoidance of any future government regulation, leadership benefits and environmental benefits. These benefits could save the university considerable amounts of money.”

How big is Victoria’s footprint?

Going carbon neutral usually has three steps: assessing carbon footprint, reducing emissions as far as possible, then offsetting the emissions that remain.

The first step in the process has already been completed by the university. The estimate for Victoria’s total carbon footprint for 2008 is approximately 16,151.228 tonnes.

Victoria’s carbon footprint can be split into three main areas, or ‘scopes’. The first ‘scope’ is the direct emissions produced by business operations, for example, the fuel used in Victoria University’s boilers.

The second ‘scope’ is the indirect emissions produced as a result of business operations, like the offsite generation of the electricity used at Victoria.

The third ‘scope’ is the indirect emissions which are not necessarily produced as a result of business operations, but are still connected to the organisation. For example, commuter travel to and from Victoria.

According to Kodikara, the major problem with implementing carbon neutrality at Victoria is that most of our emissions come from ‘scope three’ and are not easily reduced.

“The university’s biggest carbon emissions are through travel, particularly academics who go overseas for conferences and there’s no way you can reduce that. If you try to tell academics ‘sorry, you can’t go to that conference, maybe do a video conference instead’, they’re probably going to refuse.

‘A lot of people think that carbon neutrality is all about reduced emissions, which is a big component, but you just can’t reduce the emissions from big things like travel.”

Carbon neutrality at Vivian st.

Last June, Victoria University’s Faculty of Architecture and Design became the first certified carbon neutral architecture or design school in the world. It was hoped that the faculty could be used as a pilot study for the rest of the university, with a report due to be presented to the Vice-Chancellor at the end of this year.

The faculty’s initial year of certification was made possible by Meridian Energy, who donated 201 tonnes of carbon credits to help offset emissions. In addition, the faculty purchased another 135 tonnes of credits and set up an emissions reduction plan. 

Unfortunately, the faculty’s carbon neutral status has now expired and, despite international attention and positive student feedback, senior management have decided not to re-apply for certification. 

Faculty of Architecture and Design Dean and Deputy Pro Vice Chancellor Gordon Holden says the decision not to re-apply was difficult.

“We deeply regret that we cannot proceed on the path that we had entered. However, the cost to renew CarboNZero status is beyond what can be supported in the current environment of reduced government funding and rising costs for the university.”

The estimated cost of re-certifying the Faculty for the next 18 months is approximately $28,000, made up of $12,000 for measurement, auditing and registration by Landcare Research and an estimated $16,000 for carbon credits. Faced with National Government cuts to higher education funding and no free Meridian credits, Holden was unable to justify re-certification.

“It’s a very tough time and, as committed as we are, we can’t afford the certification.”

Despite this setback, the faculty continue to work on reducing their emissions. Since the Emissions Reduction Plan was introduced in June 2008, waste at the Vivian Street campus is down 16.3% and energy use has reduced by 4.7%. A digital conference studio was installed a few months ago to help reduce emissions from air travel.

Holden says the faculty will “continue to watch the situation carefully” and hopes to reclaim their carbon neutral status “sometime in the future”.

Prospects for the future

The Victoria Environment Committee was founded in November 2006 and is made up of an academic representative from each campus, two student reps (Gecko and VUWSA) and Finance and Facilities Management reps. While most day-to-day work environmental management at the university is carried out by Facilities Management, the Committee responsible for the university’s long-term environmental strategy.

Andrew Wilkes, chair of the Environment Committee, says that carbon neutrality for the entire university is not feasible.

“Fundamentally, we want to be—and are—working towards reducing our carbon emissions [but] to reduce all of our emissions to nothing will take ages, and require technological advances and massive culture change in society. That might never happen, and I have no idea how much it would cost.”
The only way for the entire university to get carbon neutral status is to purchase carbon credits created through reforestation or renewable energy projects. Using an average carbon price of $25/tonne and excluding electricity and commuter travel, buying carbon credits to offset emissions would cost the university about $200,000 each year plus an extra $10,000–$20,000 for the carboNZero auditing and verification process.

This cost is not one that the university are willing to pay. Wilkes says that the university has decided against purchasing carbon offsets due to the “current financial pressures facing the university”. He says that purchasing carbon offsets remains an option for the university but “not in the near future”.

Wilkes emphasizes that, while official carbon neutral certification is off the cards, the university is making steady emissions reduction progress.

“If a sound business case can be made for an initiative, then we [the Environment Committee] can get it implemented without much fuss… it is fair to say tha the Senior Management Team are supportive of our work.”

Environmental highlights over the last three years include a 40% reduction in standard office paper consumption following the introduction of default double-sided printing, the introduction of recycling facilities to all campuses, and the inclusion of sustainable design principles in all future construction projects. Energy efficiency initiatives have been launched across the university and are estimated to have already saved the university $139,000 per year. These projects mainly involved improvements to the efficiency of heating, ventilation and the university air-conditioning plant, along with some lighting upgrades.

One of the next Environmental Committee projects will be to work on promoting environmental leadership among Victoria staff. Gecko leader Phil Barker hopes that video conferencing will become more popular as the environmental awareness of staff is raised.

“Academic researchers need access to the international community of academics. Traditionally and commonly that means attending conferences, that’s a need of their role, but there are alternative systems that can help get more efficient results out of that.

“Victoria actually holds a world leading video conferencing suite in the basement of the library. Gecko used the suite to hold a simultaneous video conference between five NZ universities and the Berkeley campus in San Francisco. It really is a world class facility, the quality of communication is like being right there in the room with the other person.”

Environmental club Gecko and the Environmental Studies department are working to increase environmental awareness within the student body. As part of ENVI 114, students are asked to investigate ways to improve sustainability on campus. Gecko, with membership currently at over 400 students, has put several of these projects in place and also run annual environmental weeks and climate action festivals.

While Barker applauds the university’s progress over the last five years, he believes students need to continue calling for carbon neutrality on campus.

“[The university] are taking steps in that direction, in large part through the voices of students and as a result of student activism. We’re the ones that are going to be living into the future and our children will inherit it, so the management at University need to hear that voice and that advocacy.”

The Wellington Sexual Abuse Network (WSAN), a.k.a. the joined forces of Wellington Rape Crisis, Wellington Sexual Abuse HELP and WellStop vote ‘Yes’ have a plan to prevent sexual violence among young people.

WSAN, with support from the Ministry of Justice, will pilot a revolutionary six-week Sex & Ethics programme at Victoria University over the next 18 months. Project co‑ordinator Sandra Dickson talked to Salient about sex, pleasure and why the traditional approach to rape prevention doesn’t work.

Before we get into the rest of the interview, how does the Wellington Sexual Abuse Network define rape?

In terms of the law, rape means penis, vagina, unwanted. But most people don’t use the word rape like that. Most of the time when we talk about rape in our lives, we talk about sex that one person doesn’t want to be happening. That could be anal rape, it could be unwanted sex between two men, it could be feeling forced to do things you don’t want to do. In our usual lives, that’s the way we define rape.

And what’s the background to the programme?

We wanted to find prevention approaches that worked. We know that sexual violence has not decreased in our twenty or thirty years of looking at the problem. So the first thing the WSAN did was take a look at what was happening around the world. Basically, there’s a bit of a revolution going on. We’ve got sexual violence prevention starting to change, starting to look at what sexual pleasure is. The idea is, if you’re having great sex with your partner or partners, you won’t get sexual violence in that relationship.

Just to move back to the more traditional approach to rape prevention, why do you think that doesn’t work? Specifically, why does ‘just ask women to say no’ not work?

There’s a whole range of reasons. We’re assuming that rape is something women should be stopping men doing, rather than all of us stopping anyone doing. Also, the thing about the new approach is that it can be applied to any relationship—straight or queer.

How did the original programme in Australia get developed?

In Australia, Moira [Carmody, Associate Professor at the University of Western Sydney] and Karen [Willis, head of NSW Rape Crisis] interviewed loads of young people and asked them what they’d been taught about sex. Basically, young people said ‘we know loads about plumbing, how to put on a condom’, some young people said ‘we know we’re supposed to wait until we get married’… different messages, but nothing like ‘how do you hook up with someone you meet at the club and work out what you’ve both agreed to?’ Most of that is done without talking, non-verbal, so if we’re doing non-verbal [communication] to let each other know we’re attracted, how do we know that what we’ve both agreed to is the same thing? What if one of you wants to go home and cuddle, and the other wants to go home and have intercourse? What if one of you wants to go home and take off all your clothes and kiss, and the other has decided on a bondage scene? How do we check that out?

So, basically the programme was founded in Australia and gradually it gained popularity?

We’re actually in the really early stages. The programme has been developed and piloted in Australia over the last three years. We’re the first other country to offer it, and Wellington is the only place in NZ where the programme is available to young people.

And once Moira has trained the educators, they’ll run the programme from Evolve [youth service on Eva Street], Vibe [youth service in Lower Hutt], Massey and Victoria?
Two courses will be offered at Victoria and both run over six weeks for two hours a week. We run it over six weeks to give people a chance to think about it…

Apply it…

[laughs] Yeah, no doubt apply it! And it gives people enough time to think about what they’re actually learning. Part of the course involves looking at how we’ve behaved in the past, what we wish we’d done differently—and I think most people have sex stories like that, eh!—and how we might want to do it next time.

And what’s the response from the trials that have been done in Australia?

It’s really interesting. We saw three really big shifts. People have talked about having a much better idea of what they want to do sexually. You start the programme, you might have a pretty good idea some of the time. Six months later, you’ve got a really good idea about what you are and aren’t prepared to do, what you think is good sex and bad sex. You’ve developed that whole way of checking with yourself.

The second big finding was that people reported feeling much more confident that they knew what their partner wanted. We’re not just talking about long-term relationships here, we’re also talking about one-night stands… so basically, young people were having better sex, which is pretty cool.

The third piece of research showed that six months down the line, most people felt much more confident about jumping in to prevent sexual abuse from happening. Maybe ringing a cab and getting that young woman home, ‘cos she’s too pissed to do anything that night, or popping over and saying ‘mate, what’s going on here, what’re you doing?’ Even something as simple as, you know, ‘do you want to be an asshole, what’re you doing?’ The students in Australia talked about that really enthusiastically, they said ‘I know how to do that now, I know how to do that with my friends, this is how we did it last week’… What that does is stop sexual violence happening, and stop people knowing about it but not knowing how to stop it. That’s a huge change.

So that’s a prevention of both types of rape then—unwanted sex when you know the person, and unwanted sex when you don’t know them well, or you don’t know them at all.

Absolutely.

Something else I wanted to ask, you said right at the start of the interview, you said the legal definition of rape is a penis in a vagina when it’s not meant to be there. Are you pushing for legislative change? Are you hoping programmes like this will help shift stereotypes?

I think we’ve got real problems with our laws in NZ. At the moment when people report rape, they’re really, really, really unlikely to get a conviction. We have all these stereotypes about that being because people who report rape aren’t telling the truth, but actually research suggests that police only get to hear about 12% of the rapes in NZ.

Right.

Most people who are raped are women, so we’re talking about most women not reporting when they’re raped. The second thing is that our justice system at the moment has appalling successful prosecution rates. International research shows us that’s not usually because the complaint is false, it’s usually because there are problems with how rape is prosecuted, with the collection of evidence.

One of the things that we have in NZ, in order to prove that someone has raped you, you have to prove that you didn’t consent to what happened. In a lot of other countries, it’s the other way around. In order to prove that you haven’t raped someone, you have to prove that you actually cared what they wanted. You have to prove that you made sure you knew they had consented.

And that’s happening overseas?

It’s true in the UK now, relatively recently, and it’s true in some parts of Australia. So actually, we’re behind Australia when it comes to rape law.

So rape prevention seems to involve both education and legislation… where does the Sex & Ethics programme fit in?

If the course works well, then hopefully we’ll see these ideas being used in schools. Instead of ‘girls, you just say no, and boys, you just listen to the girls’, we’ll actually get some ideas about how you negotiate good sex, because at the end of the day, who doesn’t want to have good sex?

Students interested in the six-week Sex & Ethics pilot programme have four options:
Massey and Victoria University queer students:
Wednesday 5.30–7.30pm, six weeks from July 15 (includes dinner) at Vic Student Union Building
Contact: Sandra Dickson on 04 473 5358 or email wsanprevention@xtra.co.nz
Weir House residents:
Thursday 7.15pm–9.15pm, six weeks from July 16 (includes dinner) at Weir House
Contact: Rachel Rerekura-Tamaiva on 04 463 3989 or 027 563 3989
Evolve Youth Service
(5 Eva Street, off Dixon, Central Wellington)
Six weeks from Tuesday July 28 (includes dinner) at Evolve
Contact: Josh on 04 801 9150 or email evolve@evolveyouth.org.nz
Vibe Youth Service
(Lower Hutt)
Six weeks from Tuesday August 4 (includes dinner) at Vibe
Contact: Fati or Eddie on 04 566 0525

The fee disparity exists in COMP/SWEN 301 Software Engineering Principles. Students enrolled in a Computer Science major are charged fees of $610.50, while Software and Network Engineering majors in the same class are charged $726.00.

Third-year Engineering student Jared Armstrong believes the extra surcharge is unfair.

“For all intents and purposes are the exact same course, but we’re charged 20 percent more than the people sitting next to us,” he said.

The Bachelor of Engineering degree at Victoria is a relatively new addition to the curriculum, taking four years as opposed to the three years required for a Bachelor of Science majoring in Computer Science.

Head of the School of Engineering and Computer Science, Professor John Hine, believed the added status of an engineering degree outweighs the extra cost to students.

“As the engineering papers are accredited, students gain more credibility in the national and international job market,” he said.

While students currently completing the course would not be eligible for a refund, co-taught courses have undergone review and will continue as separated disciplines from 2010, according to Hine.

Amendments to 100- and 200-level papers will take at least another year to filter though to 300- and 400-level.
A group of unsatisfied Engineering students have contacted the Tertiary Education Commission and are currently waiting on a response.

The Death of Religion

“God not dead but religion dying” shouted the pre-Easter headlines, “New Zealanders are becoming less religious, survey shows”. The cause of the furore? A Massey University study which found 40 percent of New Zealanders have no religious affiliation, compared to 29 percent 17 years ago. Just over a third of New Zealanders identify as religious.

Significant statistics, yet the papers neglected to mention the full scope of the survey or, understandably, explore the murky depths of what being ‘religious’ actually means. Professor Philip Gendall, the researcher in charge of the survey, sent Salient a little more detail.

The results of the Massey survey, actually part of an international study conducted every seven years, are complex. Participants were quizzed on God, the Bible, the role of religion in society, morality, and a range of other beliefs. Despite most of the population admitting to some kind of faith, only 35 percent identified as ‘religious’ and 40 percent said they never attended a ‘religious service’.

Head researcher Professor Philip Gendall doesn’t think the survey was necessary to deduce the state of affiliated religion in NZ. “Just by looking at the numbers of people going to church, by measuring people’s behaviour, it seems affiliated religion is playing a lesser role in society. Once upon a time, everyone went to church on Sundays. We would never have been able to have Sunday shopping.”

He emphasises that a decline in affiliated religion does not necessarily mean religion is dying. “Societies change and religion is part of that. People are becoming disaffiliated from traditional organised religion and in that sense the country is becoming less religious, although it does depend on how you measure religiosity.”

Religiosity and Graduation Ritual

How exactly do we measure religiosity? The most typical criteria might include belief, practice, tradition and ritual, but the definition could also be extended to include ways of moving the body like yoga, traditional songs, irrationality, or forms of community building based on absurdities—like organised sport. If we cut the definition too short, we risk missing that which is utterly strange and perplexing in our most commonplace behaviours and superstitions.

Last week’s graduation ceremonies are a case in point. We would have looked utterly nonsensical to a Martian ethnographer, yet to us, the graduation-believers, everything made sense. Consider how the ceremony opened. After we paraded through the central business district in our black gowns, we assembled on stage and sang the New Zealand anthem. With perhaps a thousand people, we stood up, took off our hats (square velvet with tassel set carefully to the right) cleared our throats, and with others, in unison, belched out:

“God of Nations at Thy feet,
In the bonds of love we meet,
Hear our voices, we entreat,
God defend our free land.”

What did these words mean to us? Were we thinking about a “bonded” embrace? Where we speaking up so Zeus would “hear our voices”, put world-making on hold, and come down to defend us from the intruders (who?). Rather curious thought, when one thinks about it. We generally don’t… probably because, while participation is an option, the graduation ceremony is more than the sum of the participants.

Imagine what would happen if a participant actually challenged the university’s continuation of the practice, if a lecturer (graduands are too transient) were to approach the Vice Chancellor and his group of champagne-supping Deans, and ask whether we shouldn’t eliminate these silly references from the graduation, on pain of irrationality? Indeed, the dissenting participant would argue, why not eliminate these stupid gowns, all that marching and music, and the dread repetition of handing out degrees? Why not eliminate the ceremony all together? The Vice Chancellor would probably react with “get more sun and have a holiday”, while a more vicious response would be incurred from eager parents and graduands if the lecturer in question made their views public.

The Suspension of Disbelief

Everyday superstitions can be as irrational as everyday rituals. Marc Wilson, a senior lecturer at the Victoria University School of Psychology, has been doing his own research into the beliefs of the New Zealand population. In 2008, Wilson collected extensive data from more than 6000 New Zealanders. Turns out 24 percent of New Zealanders believe world governments have covered up the existence of UFOs, 50 percent of us believe ESP exists, and 44 percent believe astrology can be used to predict the future.

Wilson’s inclusion of ideas about urban legends raises similar questions about the willingness of New Zealanders to believe in what a rational mind would consider falsehoods—for example, that evil people put razorblades in Halloween apples or that swimming after a meal causes heart-attacks and drowning (43 percent of us!). Every one of us carries certain irrational, unfounded beliefs, simply because we’ve been told something is true by someone else.

The results of the Victoria and Massey University studies indicate that most New Zealanders express some form of paranormal belief, even if only a small percentage of the population profess to being ‘religious’. There is enough demand for horoscopes to warrant daily updating in The Dominion Post. We tell each other our dreams, without identifying why we believe they give us deep insight into the world. Scratching a little deeper, we find that our evidence for belief often rests on the flimsiest grounds.

The same principles apply to what we value most of all: our attitudes to the environment, to the intentions of government, to our admiration for heroes, to our beloved sports teams (according to Wilson’s study, 40 percent of New Zealanders believe that the All Blacks were deliberately poisoned before the ’95 World Cup final). Are we really in touch with our reasons for taking one job over another, for selecting a particular brand of wine, or deciding to spend the rest of our lives with someone?

Researchers who begin looking into these questions find that they can easily manipulate and predict our judgments, irrespective of our reasons. Indeed, researchers find that we are experts at inventing reasons and then believing whole-heartedly in these self-inflicted prevarications. It seems unlikely that these tendencies will be swept away by the steady winds of scientific progress; they will not decline as church numbers do.

Situational factors can affect people’s commitment to their belief. Wilson found that by suggesting to participants that being a little more (or less) inclined to paranormal belief correlates with intelligence, he could get people to express markedly different answers to his questions. Worrying about dying had a similar effect. After reading 40 questions about different ways of dying, participants not only identified as more ‘religious’, but reported greater levels of paranormal belief.

Students, Apologetics and Universal Truth

For Melanie, a 21-year-old Victoria student, her relationship with God is “everything”. She accepts that other members of the community may not share her belief, but isn’t worried that her faith might be seen as irrational.

“How do you know anything is true? This society assumes that if you can’t see it, it’s not real. That’s not really good enough for me. I’ve experienced God and I’ve spoken to others who have, and to me that’s more important. I believe God is a universal truth, and I think that’s different to being a widely held belief. In New Zealand, you might say a widely held belief is not to believe in God, but that doesn’t make it true.”

‘B’, a 23-year-old former student, said Salient‘s questions about her particular faith made her feel “slightly silly”.

“There are so many different understandings of religion, and no reason why my particular random understanding of spirituality should be of any interest! Also some things that my religion leads me to do are also done by those who have no religion. For example, I try to be green to care for God’s creation—buy a moon cup for Jesus! But being green is not limited to Christians.

“I have travelled, lived in Buddhist countries, gone through a I-want-to-convert-to-Islam period. I think many people from all over the world, and many traditions have desired to reach enlightenment, commune with God, whatever. I don’t want to say, this is God, that is not, here is true faith, there it isn’t… I find life in Christianity and I am committed to that, but I don’t want that commitment to stop me from recognising and respecting the taonga of others.”

The historical discipline of Apologism is built around the concept of truth and how it relates to religious belief. Trevor Mandar, described as one of New Zealand’s foremost Christian Apologists, runs seminars to help Christians give a clear reason for their faith. He says an understanding of truth is an essential foundation of belief.

“There are a variety of ways for people to think about truth, but only one is undeniable. Truth is what the facts are, truth corresponds to reality. No matter what you believe, this is something people from all religions can agree with… People tend to define truth by their experience and beliefs. Once you recognise that this is not an objective definition of truth, it’s a good place to start for inter-faith discussion.”

Mandar says self-professed atheists fail to acknowledge their own set of subjective beliefs. “Atheists deny an ultimate standard of right and wrong, yet an individual may still follow the belief of their community or peers even if there is no logic in it.”

A Fraught Question of Morality

The concepts of religion and morality are often perceived to go hand-in-hand, whatever way you think the correlation pendulum swings. The most extreme of fundamental Christians may view non-believers as immoral, some non-believers may find the religious community around them intolerant and prejudiced. Images of religious fanatics crashing airplanes or preachers railing against homosexuality may lead us to conclude that religious beliefs cause great moral harm.

Perception and reaction aside, what does the data really tell us about the relationship between religion and morality? Many surveys reveal prejudices, but behavioural data paints an different picture. Going back to the 1970s, researchers have considered how religion and morality interrelate. Though it may surprise us when we think of the Taliban or those pinched-faced preachers, social psychologists have found little support for the proposition that religion matters much to moral behaviour. Action-based correlations actually tend to be positive—Christians, it turns out, give more to charity; fundamentalists cheat less on average, and their social groups last longer.

Being a religious ‘believer’ may affect prejudicial behaviour. Circumstances matter, and groups bound by strong feelings of solidarity often organise development to prop up the group feeling at the expense of scapegoats. If context matters, then rituals should be considered moral technologies: strong melodies, rousing speeches, images of fallen soldiers or lost jobs. Such equipped appears artfully concocted to inflame prejudice and in-group feeling.

Yet, before we come to any confident conclusions about ‘religious belief’ and ‘prejudice’, we need to remember what we are really measuring, and whether this measurement entitles us to the pleasure of generalisation. The dynamics of circumstance and commitment are complex, and inferring to large conclusions comes too easily to almost all of us. Restraint is rare. Yet without intellectual restraint, we are every bit as irrational as those villains with the suicide vests or the cherry-faced sermoniser on the television.

It is almost certain that those lucky enough to be reading Salient, including the authors of this article, have caused vastly more harm than the common or garden-variety suicide bomber. If we were to trace the implications of our ‘innocent’ habits, like buying lunch rather than making our own and giving the difference to charity, could we still throw a stone at that scowling preacher or that hungry clueless fanatic in a beard? Evil, as Arendt put it, is ‘banal’, and we may participate in crimes dramatically inconsistent with the moral pictures we carry for ourselves. And what of our moral technologies? Think of how carefully we have organised our circumstances to keep avoidable disease, starvation, injustice, torture, and death far out of view.

On the other side, consider those old religions whose numbers are flagging; how easily we forget the vast matrix of charities stretching around the globe populated with hard-working ‘believers’—all those shoulders set to the wheel, for Jesus, or Mohammed, or Krishna, or Yahweh. How does the good they are doing weigh into up against the monstrous remarks uttered by religious bigots, or the patriarchy of enforced sheet wearing, or by preferential hiring? We simply don’t know. We can’t weigh everything up. That question is rather too large, though asking smaller questions might help us to make better progress…

The Future of ‘Spirituality’?

Leaving morality to the side, if our religions are indeed slowly fading, is this good for anyone? Many of our fellow unbelievers may rejoice at the thought of empty churches. Yet do we really want a world in which we gradually grow more alike each other in our secular beliefs and practices? In such a world, when would our lust for the steady march of progress end—would we feel a similar delight when astrology was stricken from the daily paper, when our anthems were updated to reflected modern sensibilities, when our children began deriding McCahon’s art, when ANZAC day fades into oblivion? Would the sun really shine brighter on such a world, or would it lose something?

While some traditional religions appear to be shedding numbers and other ‘spiritualisms’ appear to be growing, genuine progress begins with honesty. We simply do not know the relationship between these facts and our larger moral and intellectual circumstances. Indeed, almost nothing is known about the causes and effects of religion. It would be irrational to think otherwise.

If that sounds like you, then you probably feel like shit. The relatively good news is that you’re not alone. An Otago University clinical study estimated 20 percent of the general population in New Zealand suffers from depression during any given year. Patch that statistic onto Victoria University of Wellington, and that’s a total of 4 000 students who will suffer some kind of depressive episode this year.

Government has tried to tackle the issue of youth depression, but so far the initiatives have not necessarily been successful in engaging with youth. Students, one of the groups most likely to be affected by depression, cannot always get adequate help and treatment for depression in the public mental health system. Despite efforts by Victoria University student support services to pick up the slack, males in particular are still reluctant to seek help.

Cause and Effect

Depression has no single cause. Family history can play a part, although a strong genetic influence has not been proven. A depressive episode can be triggered by a specific event, ongoing stress, certain medications and recreational drugs, or lifestyle factors. Some people report feeling depressed for no reason at all.

While the expression of depression is equally varied, a few broad trends have been observed. Women are more likely to become tearful or despondent, and men are more prone to aggression and heavy drinking. According to the Ministry of Health, an irritable rather than stereotypically ‘sad’ mood change is particularly common for men from Maori and Pacific ethnic groups.

Dr Garry Brown, Medical Director of Victoria University Student Health Services, says cultural factors can influence the way people with depression seek help. “I don’t profess to be an expert, but I know sometimes Pacific Island communities find it harder to address issues of mental health because of cultural barriers, and I think that’s true at Victoria to a certain extent. We also see international students, some Korean and Japanese students, who have a background where mental health problems are highly stigmatised. We repeatedly see instances where families send their children away to university as far away as possible to lower the shame to their family and they end up in all sorts of far flung places, including Wellington. It’s very traumatic for them, and it’s very difficult for everyone to deal with.”

Gerard Hoffman, Head of the Counselling Service at Victoria, has also observed differences in the way students use mental health services.

“Pacific students are more likely to seek help through one of the Pacific services available on campus, not that there’s a lot of them, but the Manaaki Pihipihinga mentoring programme has a Pacific Support Coordinator who deals with a lot of pretty unwell students who would otherwise never get to us. We work pretty closely together, but Pacific students generally don’t just rock on up to see us. Maori use our services directly, to some degree, but we employ a Maori Services Counsellor specifically to break down that barrier. Again, that’ll suit some students and not others.”

Hoffman picks gender barriers as a bigger issue than cultural factors. “We see two-thirds women and one-third men in counselling, year after year, and while there are more women than men at university these days, it’s not by much. It’s the stereotype of the great Kiwi bloke. We drink and get agro rather than tearful, until it gets really bad.”

For all students, overcoming the social stigma associated with depression is the first step towards treatment and recovery. As Dr Brown points out, “the more you can normalise the truth about depression, the less perceived barriers people will have.”

What’s the Government doing about it?

A 1996 inquiry into mental health services recommended that the government fund a public education campaign to reduce discrimination associated with mental illness. A campaign was needed, the inquiry concluded, to improve the status and well-being of people who have experienced, or are suffering from, mental illness.

In 1997, the Ministry of Health launched a five-year $12.6 million public health project to tackle mental health issues at national and community levels. The ‘Like Minds, Like Mine’ public education programme was launched in 2001 and a second programme, the National Depression Initiative (NDI) was introduced in October 2006. Like Minds receives $1 million of government funding each year, and the NDI has an annual advertising budget of about $1.5 million.

According to Candace Bagnall, a Ministry of Health senior analyst in Mental Health Promotion, ‘Like Minds, Like Mine’ is acknowledged internationally as a leading education programme. The primary societal outcome of the programme is to ensure New Zealand is a nation that “values and includes all people with experience of mental illness.” For individuals who have experienced mental illness, the programme seeks to ensure they “have the same opportunities as everyone else to participate in society and the everyday life of their communities and whanau.”

The NDI, famously fronted by John Kirwan, is one of the most visible depression awareness campaigns. The campaign’s vision is to create a society with an effective response to depression. Understanding more about depression, says the NDI’s website, will help those experiencing depression “find a way through”. The NDI includes a series of television advertisements, the promotion of a freephone depression helpline and website, and a youth-oriented interactive website dubbed the ‘Lowdown’.

The Ministry of Health response to mental health is built around advertising campaigns and media work, but have ‘Like Minds’ and NDI been successful? Bagnall says “Both campaigns have demonstrated significant success in meeting their objectives.” Along with all other health services, both campaigns are being audited in the government’s ‘line by line review’. The future of the campaigns “will depend on the outcome of this review,” Bagnall says. She adds that the results of this review have not yet been finalised, and that “it would be premature to consider potential campaigns since the review of existing campaigns is still underway.”

Last year, the NDI received an award for advertising effectiveness in the social marketing and public service category for the Lowdown website. The website also grabbed international attention when it was presented at a US conference on mental health. However, international attention and advertising awards do not necessarily mean that the NDI—and particularly its youth component—are effective public health campaigns.

Lowdown on the Lowdown

“Living in the shadow of fear” is how Roberta Woodgate has described young peoples’ experiences of living and dealing with depression. Earlier this year the Ministry of Health commissioned a literature review of how to communicate effectively with young people about depression. This included a review of the Lowdown website. The review cited the work of Woodgate, who elaborated on the ‘shadow of fear’ metaphor. “The shadow of fear is associated not only with fear of a return of the ‘bad’ feelings related to their depression, but also fear of not getting help, not surviving the ‘bad’ feelings, and fear of having to do all the ‘hard work’ in overcoming the ‘bad’ feelings.”

Destigmatising depression and reinforcing a sense of normalcy, the review says, should be the main focus of the youth component of the NDI. “This would reinforce to young people the sense that they are mentally well, acceptable and included, even though they are going through a rough patch, and that this will pass,” the review says. “Implicit in this is an emphasis on recovery, support and hope.”

Furthermore, the review recommends that communications to young people emphasise that depression is not a fixed state. “Talking about ‘feeling depressed’ or ‘down’, or ‘experiencing depression’ suggests a more temporal experience that is within their agency, than does ‘having depression’.”

While it is important to alert young people to the symptoms of depression, the review questions whether “alerting youth to risk factors would activate them to avoid these factors, or depress them further.” It was recommended that knowledge of risk factors must be accompanied by practical solutions about where to get help, how to open up and talk to people and what can be done to avoid the risk factors of depression. “Without the skills or resources to avoid these factors, perhaps the knowledge on its own would be dismaying.”

Lowdown seeks to address the complex issues surrounding youth depression, but is it really achieving its worthy goals? The review cites a 2003 study which concluded there were no mental health campaigns aimed at youth, and the existing campaigns were not reaching out to youth audiences. The study also questioned the effectiveness of the internet in reaching out to youth audiences: “They do not particularly see the internet as a source of help or support; rather they see it primarily as a socialising tool.” Communication technologies were recognised as useful in providing constant access to peer support, but television was still the most effective means of reaching at-risk youth. Effectively, Lowdown can only be as useful as the audience it is able to attract.

So how big is Lowdown’s audience? The latest NDI figures show that the website received 95,000 unique visits in the last year, but the number of return visits was not reported. Return visits have been identified as an area of concern by the Ministry of Health review, which recommends that youth should be actively encouraged to revisit the site. It also suggests that youth need to feel that visiting the site is “completely acceptable”.

The NDI’s latest figures also show that 3000 support sessions have been provided by counsellors via text and email, with a total of 90,000 texts and 5000 emails being sent and received by the Lowdown team. It is significant to note that about three quarters of service users have been diagnosed as suffering from depression. However, the Ministry of Health review suggests that contact with site users could be improved, particularly by ensuring users are re-contacted over an extended period of time.

Overall, the Ministry of Health review concludes that Lowdown is already implementing measures consistent with the most recent academic recommendations. Nevertheless, several areas of the service need to be addressed. The site must take into account the importance of individual autonomy while making it easier for people to get information on helping out friends and family in need. It should affirm that seeking help is not only normal, but astute. It should explain what the experience of a counselling session is like. The website also needs a search function to make information easier to find.

Most significantly, the review found that simply having a well-tailored website is not enough to serve its audience. Traditional advertising campaigns and engagement with schools are still vital in promoting the service. Lowdown is already advertised on youth-friendly websites, but the review found that successful social marketing campaigns—which are most likely to be effective to youth—are non-existent.

What’s Vic got to offer?

Victoria University’s Student Health and Counselling Services are dealing with students seeking help for depression on a day-to-day basis. Dr Brown says that Student Health takes a cross-service approach to depression.

“They can come in the health door or the counselling door and get a reasonably consistent approach to the way their problems are picked up and managed,” he says.

“If people have more severe problems then we have a series of programmes which … are more particular and careful and [we] put more resources into helping them.”

A stepped care approach is taken to dealing with mental health issues. “Essentially [it] says you provide a level of service in accordance to the severity of the issue,” Hoffman explains. This approach is now fairly well-defined around the world, and the Ministry of Health have put out direct guidelines to GPs and mental health professionals for dealing with issues like depression, he says.

“There’s a role for self-help strategies for people who are suffering from periods of mild depression, things like exercise, activation approaches—just to get moving and get going,” Hoffman says.

Self-help approaches like staying in contact with social supports, talking to family and friends, and keeping involved in activities and pastimes are some important ways that people can deal with depression. “That’s going to work for a lot of people,” Hoffman says.

However, some people will need more help to overcome depression. “The next level beyond that is to engage in a focused course and talk things through, on a relatively short term.”

Health professionals will consider prescribing antidepressants to people with more moderate symptoms of depression. Hoffman says that the general view is to not put young people on antidepressants too quickly. “Antidepressants can be pretty effective but so can a lot of these other approaches,” he says.

“If students have got longstanding depression or things aren’t shifting within a few weeks or a month, then we could consider a referral to a doctor and start questioning whether antidepressants might be useful. Even then, we still encourage people to keep using us [the Counselling Service] so they get a joint approach.”

Vic is one of only two universities in New Zealand—the other being Otago—to employ a psychiatrist. Dr John Gregson works two days a week in his University-funded position. While two days of work may not seem like enough, he says “Victoria is pretty proactive in employing a psychiatrist.”

When people have much more serious symptoms, or are not responding to antidepressants or therapy, the Counselling Service will consider referral to the psychartrist, Hoffman says. “They have to be pretty unwell for us to do that.”

Dr Gregson’s position does not act as a replacement for services offered by the Capital and Coast District Health Board (DHB). “There are naturally a lot of students here with quite complex problems who’ve got great strengths to keep on going through it all,” he says. Many of these students don’t meet the requirements for mental health treatment under the DHB. “They’re some of the people who come to us.”

Victoria’s Medical Director, Dr Gary Brown, says the mental health services funded by the DHB deal with only the three percent of the population who have the most severe mental health problems. “If you accept as more or less truth the study that found 20 percent of the general population are suffering, then that’s 17 percent of the population who are not going to get help when they need it from hospital services,” he says.

“The strength of the university is that we have immediate access to healthcare services, a free counselling service and John [Gregson]’s service, which strengthens the ability of both services to deal with those people.” Access to services is a problem across the health sector, Dr Brown says. “Like lots of things in health, it’s probably fair to say that the ability to access appropriate services depends on education and income.

“Supposing you have severe depression, you’ll be seen by the DHB mental health service. If you’ve got mild to moderate depression, you won’t make the criteria. “There is some recognition there is that gap which needs to be met. The reality for a lot of people is that their best chance of getting that [help] might be to pay for it privately with a private clinical psychologist.”

We’re pretty lucky here at Vic to have easy access to top quality services to help deal with depression. Student Health and Conselling services take depression seriously, Hoffman says. “Depression is the most common health issue that we as a people face. It’s so closely linked to negative outcomes in people’s lives, including suicide. It’s the biggest risk factor for suicide, and the vast majority of people who attempt suicide or actually succeed are depressed.”

“Our population at Victoria is a really high risk population, if you look at the age range of the students that come to Vic. That’s one of the reasons we take it so seriously.”

Further info:
www.depression.org.nz
www.thelowdown.co.nz

Contact:
Student Health (Kelburn)
4 Wai-te-ata Road (behind the library)
(04) 463 5308
www.victoria.ac.nz/st_services/health/

Counselling Service (Kelburn)
2 Wai-te-ata Road (next to Student Health)
(04) 463 5310
www.victoria.ac.nz/st_services/counselling/

Check the website for opening hours and office locations for other campuses.

Gordon and Ratu Sukuna’s efforts had some unforeseen consequences. While 85% of the total land area of the Fijian islands remained native land, Indo-Fijians quickly became dominant within the Fijian economy. By the time independence rolled around in 1970, indigenous Fijians were seriously worried about Indo-Fijian political dominance, and voting under the new Constitution was split down ethnic lines to prevent the Indo-Fijian majority from getting too much power.

In 1987, an Indo-Fijian majority coalition was elected into government for the first time. Spurred by indigenous Fijian anxiety, Lieutenant Colonel Sitiveni Rabuka staged two successive military coups, revoked the Constitution and declared Fiji a Republic. A new Constitution was passed in 1990 to guarantee an indigenous Fijian Prime Minister and parliamentary majority.

After five years of military rule, Rabuka was elected as Prime Minister. He formed a Constitutional Review Commission with the help of New Zealand Governor-General Sir Paul Reeves, and passed a new Constitution in 1997.

In 1999, Mahendra Chaudhry defeated wrongsRabuka and became the first elected Indo-Fijian Prime Minister. He lasted just one year before a civilian coup led by George Speight took him hostage and abolished the Constitution.

Enter Commodore Frank Bainimarama. As commander of the Fijian military, Bainimarama negotiated Chaudhry’s release and then arrested Speight and his followers on charges of treason. Bainimarama assumed executive power and appointed Laisenia Qarase, the leader of the Soqosoqo Duavata ni Lewenivanua (SDL) Party, as interim Prime Minister. The Fijian High Court restored the Constitution, Qarase became the elected Prime Minister, and the island nation enjoyed a few years of relative political calm.

Bainimarama’s 2006 coup d’état against the Qarase government was not unexpected. Qarase had provoked Bainimarama by passing affirmative action legislation to extend indigenous Fijian property rights and, worst of all, a Reconciliation and Unity Bill offering amnesty to the rebels who had hunted Bainimarama during the coup in 2000. After a series of ultimatums, the military took over Government House on 5 December. President Ratu Josefa Iloilo was forced to dissolve Parliament and Bainimarama was appointed interim Prime Minister.

2009 Constitutional Crisis

Qarase, with support from the Great Council of Chiefs and Methodist Church, eventually applied for a legal ruling on the 2006 coup d’etat. In 9 April 2009, the Fijian Court of Appeal ruled Commodore Frank Bainimarama’s 2006 coup d’etat illegal and his interim government ‘invalid’.

Bainimarama’s response was immediate. On 10 April, President Ratu Josefa Iloilo sacked the judiciary, overturned the 1997 Constitution, declared himself head of state and said elections would not be held until 2014. He then reappointed Bainimarama as Prime Minister, who in turn reappointed all Cabinet ministers to their previous positions.

The interim government then placed Fiji under a 30-day Public Emergency Regulation (PER), allowing the police to “control the movement of people” and to stop any broadcast or publication deemed to “cause disorder, promote disaffection or public alarm or undermine the government or state of Fiji”. The PER has recently been extended for another five weeks.

No Wow Now

The history of Fiji reads colonisation, constitution #1, coup, coup, constitution #2, constitution #3, coup, coup and now, predictably, constitutional crisis. The current situation is the latest symptom in an endemic outbreak of political instability.

Victoria University Masters student Keiran Barbalich recently completed his masters thesis on Fijian politics. He says Bainimarama’s government was never legitimate and it was only a matter of time before a constitutional crisis occurred.

“The 2006 coup happened and the president was so incapacitated that they made him legitimise the coup. Now I don’t care what kind of lawyer you are, it’s pretty obvious the coup was not legal. Eventually the judiciary was going to go ‘we’ll rule against the government’ and all the Bainimarama government did then was reassert itself.

“All the hysteria from the New Zealand media completely misses the point. The point is that the judiciary ruled against Bainimarama and said he didn’t legally exist. If you’re a dictator with that much power, what’re you going to do? Of course you’re going to overthrow them, and of course the judiciary was going to rule against him. What’s most surprising is that it took the judiciary the best part of two and a half years to do it.”

Pacific Bad Boy

Recent developments have swept the mainstream media into a righteous frenzy, much to the frustration of alternative commentators. Professor Crosbie Walsh AKA ‘CrozWalsh’, a former senior academic at the University of the South Pacific, expressed his disgust at TV ONE ‘gutter journalism’ in a blog post on 27 April.

“It started with the sensational News Headlines: ‘Talk of Uprising in Fiji’—surely of extreme importance but unmentioned in the story! When the item started journalist Lisa Owen, freshly arrived from New Zealand, interviewed a Fijian female silhouette who spoke tearfully of the President’s ‘treason’…

“This commentary was filmed against a backdrop of crowded buses, a squatter settlement, and a street beggar contrasted with Commodore Bainimarama, resplendent in his white naval uniform. No text was needed; the film told all. “How could any decent New Zealander do anything other than condemn the evil Bainimarama and what he’s doing to Fiji!”

The international solution to the Fiji constitutional crisis goes something like ‘box those bad boys into a corner until they make good’. Australia and New Zealand have called for an immediate return to democracy and, after Bainimarama failed to hold elections by May, the Pacific Forum suspended Fiji’s membership based on the regime’s “total disregard for basic human rights, democracy and freedom.”

Say what? Defining democracy is a slippery task. As Victoria University senior Politics lecturer Xavier Marquez points out, “if a certain country does not have the exact same set of institutions as New Zealand, it doesn’t necessarily mean the country is undemocratic.

“The question is whether the previous regime was any better, especially if you take into account the intentions of the current ruler.”

Ask Aiyaz

Salient was unable to secure an interview with Commodore Bainimarama, as he is currently visiting an undisclosed location in Indonesia. Luckily, Attorney-General Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum called up Newstalk ZB talkback host Leighton Smith last Monday to answer just the question we wanted to ask:

Leighton Smimith: “What is the intent of the Bainimarama regime?”

Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum: “Under the 1997 Constitution we had an electoral system where people were categorised along ethnic lines. A citizen of Fiji had two votes, one for their specific ethnic group and one for the open seats. You can’t run a modern nation state based on ethnicity or communal voting. You end up with parties and politicians who are only geared towards serving specific ethnic groups, and even within the communal voting you end up with distortion.

“We want to have good and strong institutions of democracy and accountability, not just by way of lip service. Democracy is not only achieved through having elections. Let’s get the system right.”

Leighton Smith: “Now I’ll ask you a question that you might find offensive… could it be that Fiji is simply not sophisticated enough for the pure sort of democracy you’re pursuing?”

Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum: “If you talk to a hundred different people, they’ll give you a hundred different definitions of democracy. Our version of democracy is that everybody in Fiji is treated equally as a common citizenry irrespective of your ethnic or religious background, and that we have a system whereby the ordinary men and women of this country can access information, justice, and basic amenities like water, roads, electricity, education, and heath facilities… where you are able to express your views through people who represent you in a system that is fair and equitable.”

While dodging Smith’s racist insinuations, Sayed-Khaiyum let rip with one of the most flawless definitions of democracy ever to waltz out the mouth of a Pacific politician. Not only that, but the People’s Charter For Change, Peace and Progress (2008) seems to be a solid plan for how the regime is going to get there.

Barbalich agrees. “The Charter reads very well, it is a very nice document. If it was drafted by an elected government then the West would be praising it, but it’s not. Everyone has conceded, even Qarase agrees that what Bainimarama wants to do to the electoral system is correct. The question is how they’re going to do it.”

The People’s Charter: Constitution #4?

Electoral reform is a key part of the People’s Charter. According to Pacific Studies programme director and senior lecturer Teresia Teaiwa, Fiji’s complex alternative voting system and ethnically-based electorate system has contributed to Fiji’s ‘coup culture’.

“It tended to create landslide victories for ethnically-based parties, so in 1999 you got the landslide victory for Chaudhry’s Labour Party and in 2001, Qarase’s SDL Party got the landslide victory. Both parties were supposed to orchestrate ‘governments of national unity’ by inviting minority or opposition parties to share power… but that provision in the constitution was much too idealistic.”

Teaiwa thinks electoral reform may not be enough to realise Bainimarama and Saiyed-Khaiyum’s dream of a common Fijian citizenship.

“It can be achieved structurally, as in reform of the electoral system… which will take one to two years. It is being achieved now, culturally in the promotion of multiculturalism through popular media and art forms, but whether it will be achieved in the hearts of Fiji’s staunch communalists, we can’t know.”

Donasiano Ruru left Fiji three years ago to pursue his Development Studies PhD in Wellington. He says consultation with the Fijian people is essential before a new constitution can be adopted.

“A constitution is a dynamic legal document and it needs to be reviewed through dialogue. It’s not about voting. It’s about educational awareness before integrating the People’s Charter into the new constitution. The people need to understand it so at the end they can claim ownership.”

Ruru says the leadership role played by the Great Council of Chiefs and Methodist Church also needs to be taken into account.

“Frank’s coup is different from the other coups because he does not have the support of the Great Council of Chiefs and the Methodist Church. Rabuka got the support of the chiefs for his coup in 1987, whereas Frank completely disregarded them and even destabilised the Great Council.

“We have to get the chiefs and the Church in dialogue. It’s not something you impose; you have to bring them on side. It’s only when these people become part of the review that we can be assured of political stability. Right now is a dangerous situation because they just don’t seem to be working together.”

Human Rights and Media Fights

An Amnesty International press release on 20 February says the human rights situation in Fiji is “deteriorating by the day”. Pacific Researcher Apolosi Bose says the public emergency regulations are creating a culture of “extreme fear and intimidation.”

“There has been a major chilling effect on a once-robust NGO and human rights defender community. In the absence of a free press to hold the military to account for their actions and a judiciary to provide a balance of power, the work of these human rights organisations is crucial. But they are being crippled by repression. With no one to stand up on behalf of the abused and the vulnerable, there is a real risk of further grave human rights abuses occurring against civilians.”

The Age reported a “spate of attacks” on the homes and cars of pro-democracy Fijians on 7 April, and a group of soldiers convicted of killing teenager Sakiusa Rabaka in 2007 have just been released on “compulsory surveillance orders” but, outside of Fiji, it is simply not clear how much “further grave human rights abuse” has occurred since the April crisis.

Teresia Teaiwa argues that the media need to take some responsibility for censorship. “To be honest, I think there is as much a problem with sensationalist and profit-driven media irresponsibility and structural economic problems within the media industry as with government encroachments on the freedom of the media.

“I’m all for media freedom, but I ob- ject to rabid media baiting of governments, whatever political stripe they may be.”

Island Nation Isolation

Assuming Bainimarama and Saiyed-Khaiyum are genuine in their desire for ‘true’ democracy, it will still be another five years before a new Constitution and electoral system are put in place. Given the additional pressure placed on Bainimarama by Fiji’s growing poverty rate and escalating ‘brain drain’ migration of skilled workers, it may be only a matter of time before his good intentions go sour and the human rights situation gets really nasty.

The antagonistic attitudes of New Zealand, Australia and the Pacific Forum have shut down all traditional avenues of international support. As pointed out by ‘CrozWalsh’, “in displays quite uncharacteristic of good diplomacy, we have bailed ourselves and Bainimarama into a corner, leaving neither a way to escape with dignity intact.”

The international community needs to get smart, get humble and be more sensitive to Fiji’s current political needs. Until then, the people of Fiji will have to continue navigating these dangerous times alone.

Hi, Tania. Just to start off, what’s the most important message you’d like to get out to women?

That we absolutely must change how we view eating and our bodies. Eating is something that is becoming more and more distressing for women. I see women who restrict and deprive themselves, who feel like they’re wrong in their bodies and that they’ll never be able to look right, feel right or eat right.

You can heal your relationship with food and your body if you’re prepared to embrace a different way of looking at it. I teach women to listen to their bodies. Dieting damages the little skills we had as children, our instinctive way of behaving around food. We unlearn them, but you can get back to where you once were and are meant to be.

Why do you think eating has become messed up?

Body image is part of the problem. The narrowly defined image we’ve been exposed to for the last 50 years is not a natural shape for most women. This is causing problems at a younger and younger age. Around the age of six or seven, little girls start picking up on media imagery, they notice Mummy dieting, they’re playing with Barbie dolls; they’re looking to the outside world to try to understand who they are and what they’ll be as women. We now get these children dieting because they feel fat and ugly.

And those patterns continue.

Right. We’ve also developed a cultural obsession with eating behavior. The media has made people fearful of certain food groups. People are wiping out whole food groups because they’ve decided “this’ll make me fat”, and that’s extremely dangerous. Those food groups have physiological and biological functions within the body and there are really nasty consequences if you decide to cut them out.

The most simplistic and obvious is fat: “if I eat fat, I will become fat”. That message is incredibly simplistic and incredibly distorted. Fat is an integral part of being satisfied. If you don’t have enough fat in your diet, you’ll be perpetually hungry, perpetually unsatisfied and much more prone to binging. The punitive self-talk that sets in as a result can really spin someone out.

It’s unsustainable behavior.

It’s unsustainable and has unrecognised consequences on health. Women get real health issues, especially around sleep, yet they don’t realise it’s actually because they’ve eliminated fat or carbohydrates. If you don’t eat enough carbohydrates, you don’t sleep or relax well and you can fall into quite a deep depression.

I see people making decisions with the intent to be healthier or slimmer and not realising the wider implications for their health and psyche. Dieting not only creates erratic weight gain and enormous distress, but actually knocks your eating behaviour out of whack.

Once women realise they’ve become distressed because of their eating behaviour, how do you try to help them?

I start by giving women basic nutritional information so they can start the process of nourishing themselves better. I never do quantities. I just say “this is what protein does in your body; I want you to eat some decent protein for breakfast and notice what it does to your day.” Once people understand why they need to eat something, they’re happy to do it. We usually work on one or two things a week.

So you get the women in your classes to understand nutrition. What next?

The first aspect is nutrition, the science of eating. The second is the dynamics of eating, the art of eating. That’s the simple idea of giving yourself permission to eat something. If you take away permission, you’ll become fixated and end up binging. Once you have permission to eat or try anything, you are much more able to listen to your body.

I teach women to be aware of the feedback your body gives you when you eat something. Women are so frightened of their bodies they can’t do that anymore. They’re stuck in their minds, going round and round with “what should I be eating, how many calories”… real eating should be so simple but it has become so complicated.

Because we’ve developed an adversarial relationship with our bodies.

Absolutely.

What about comfort eating?

Most people don’t recognise that there are biochemical reasons why we eat to comfort ourselves or alleviate stress. Some foods will calm you down if you’re over-adrenalised and some foods will stimulate you.. People label it “binge” when all they’re doing is calming themselves down.

Students do it all the time. You’ll be in the middle of an essay, get stressed and think “I need a chocolate bar!”

A lot of people medicate with food but they label it in a much more punitive way, and they don’t realise that some foods calm you down in a much more stable and direct way than chocolate. Once you teach people what those foods are, they’re away. Food is actually a very powerful medicine. When you know a little about food, you can make your life a whole lot better.

So how can students enroll in BodySense?

It’s a six-week course and each weekly session lasts two hours. Essentially, I cram as much as I can into those six weeks. There are four BodySense courses a year and students can book in with the Counselling Service. At the moment, classes are held on Mondays and Wednesdays.

Higher Education Drop-outs

New Zealand has the third-highest tertiary drop-out rate in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Last year at Victoria University, one sixth of full-time students left without completing a tertiary qualification. Could the psychological burden of working while studying be to blame?

I asked several recent drop-outs for their reasons. Dusty, 22, dropped out of her second year of Theatre and Film Studies because she was unhappy with her courses. “I felt generally maligned by the institution.” She says working while studying was not a major problem. “There should be more support, and student loans suck, but it just shows the sheer determination of students. The supposedly apathetic Generation Y is actually working really hard.”

Former Media Studies student Sophie left university because she “just didn’t have time to study.” She was working mornings at a news agency, nights at a local bar, and found herself booked out with meetings for another creative project during the day. While Sophie technically dropped out due to work commitments, most of her extra-curricular activities were related to her future career path. “I wasn’t doing it to live.”

At first, 20-year-old Ben seemed like the perfect poster boy for my ‘Students Shouldn’t Be Workers’ campaign. He successfully completed the first year of his marketing degree, then dropped out in the middle of last trimester. “I was working three jobs at once. Nights working in hospitality then renovations and office painting during the day.”

Why was Ben working so much? “I had a whole lot of debt to clear. StudyLink overpaid me $42 every week for two years without my knowledge and then wanted me to pay it back in six weeks.” He was able to extend the repayment deadline “until the end of summer” but found himself contractually obliged to finish his job contracts during term time, forcing him to abandon study.

Even so, Ben says he doesn’t usually mind working while studying. “It can be a pain in the ass, mainly because sometimes I had to miss class to cover people. If the rosters work around me, it’s fine.”

Director of Student Services Ruth Moorhouse delivered the final blow to my fledgling theory. “Research shows that finance on its own does not have a significant impact on the exit or retention of our full-time students. Most students drop out of study because they have changed their mind about whether or what they want to study.”

The Stress of Work

I decided to take a step back and check out the stats. StudyLink will lend domestic students $160.24 a week for living costs and dole out an equivalent student allowance to a select few. Most Victoria University students will need an income of at least $250 a week to cover rent and basic expenses. If the gap between these two figures is plugged by part-time work, a student on minimum wage will need to work about 10-15 hours a week.

This seems like a pretty light burden, until you throw in the study workload recommended by the university. According to Deborah Willis, Pro Vice-Chancellor of Humanities and Social Sciences, an average full-time student at Victoria should be doing 60 points per trimester, no matter what degree they are enrolled in, and no matter what level courses they are enrolled in. This is equivalent to roughly 40 hours per week, which is “consistent with workload expectations across all New Zealand universities”.

Consistent, sure, but a 40-hour study workload may not be realistic if students are also working part-time. I asked students around campus how they felt about working while studying.

Politics student Henry, 21, works fifteen hours a week in retail and says he likes his current job. “If it was any other job, I’d be complaining about it though, and I’m pretty jealous of people who don’t have to work”.

Hospitality worker and media student Sarah, 20, is less enthusiastic. “I work because I have to. The government doesn’t provide enough support for me to survive without working.” She says study weeks can be stressful. “The problem is that if you need more time for study, you’ve got those work pressures on your time. You need work to live, so your grades may drop.”

Tim, 21, flips burgers for a living. “It’s perfect while I study because it works around my timetable. It’s the kind of job you can turn up to and just do it, it’s not really a brain task. Late hours were the only problem. Sometimes I’d work until 5am on Saturday and Sunday mornings, then work Sunday nights, then head up for 9am class on Monday morning. I got it changed though, because the management wanted to keep me on.” None of the students I spoke to relished spending their time off campus holed up in kitchens and behind counters, but all seemed to be managing to balance study and work commitments. Perhaps struggling students are not the ones who are visible on campus. I took my search to the student support professionals.

Student Services staff say part-time jobs can contribute to the existing problems of struggling students. Student Learning Support Manager Jan Stewart says working while studying has become the norm. “It’s not an overt problem, although it can bring out the inability of some students to manage their time.”

Counselling Head of Service Gerard Hoffman says while most students can cope with 10-15 hours of work a week, the wrong students try to work too much. “Students who are already vulnerable due to stress and poor mental health, who have less family support and less personal coping skills, for them working long hours is a disaster. They’re the ones we see who come to grief, and they’re the ones for whom not working is not an option.”

He points out that the draft report from the 2007 First Year Student Survey shows only 20% of students disagree or strongly disagree with the statement “I am managing to balance study with other things in my life such as work, family” and only 34% agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “worrying about money has made it difficult for me to concentrate on study”.

Maria Goncalves-Rorke, manager of the Financial Support and Advice Service, was the only Student Services staff member who dealt with students struggling as a direct result of work issues. “Many students can’t afford their flats without 10-15 hours of work a week. People come to us for help when their shifts are cut down, or if they’re sick for a few weeks and don’t qualify for sick leave.”

According to Student Support Services, the struggling student worker struggles because of existing stress, poor time management, or if they are unable to continue working. Inflexible rosters may add to the stress of exams and assignment deadlines, but working while studying is not a problem for most.

The Great Fight for Student Worker Rights

Time to bring out the big guns: the New Zealand University Student’s Association (NZUSA) and Unite, mandated to represent university students and low-paid workers respectively. NZUSA are currently campaigning for a universal student allowance, while Unite’s main focus is on raising the minimum wage.

NZUSA Co-President Jordan King studied sociology at Victoria. While studying, he worked around 20 hours a week as a cleaner and call centre operator to supplement his student loan living cost payments. King says he found working while studying a “distraction” and gives his full support to the VUWSA ‘Students as Workers’ week.

“Working takes students off campus and campus culture suffers as a result. If you look through the NZUSA archives, students in the 1970s and early 1980s engaged in far more activities compared to now.

“Students are working more because we’ve had massive fee increases and increases in living costs since the ‘90s, yet the student allowance and amount you can borrow have hardly increased over the last decade. This pushes students into the workforce. The labour market can absorb this in good times, but now students are at the bottom of the heap.”

King is particularly concerned with Student Job Search reports that hospitality and retail jobs advertised with the service are down 20% since last year, while student demand for work has increased by around 17% (refer to Salient Vol. 72 Issue 1 p. 30 for more details).

“With a more active pool of student workers, there will be flow-on effects in terms of student rights in the workplace, wages and conditions. We have concerns about unscrupulous employers. While NZUSA do not deal with infringements on workers’ rights directly, we are happy to provide students with advice on which union to join.”

Unite are a community union who represent fast food industry workers, hotel cleaners, call centre operators and other low wage workers, and have a high proportion of student members. As Wellington organiser Matt Jones put it, “we represent the underrepresented”.

Jones agrees that the current situation for student and low-paid workers is tough. “Over the last 20-30 years the cost of living has gone through the roof, and the average wage earned has not increased in relation to that. We’re campaigning to lift the minimum wage to $15. Once we get that, we’ll work towards lifting it to 75% of the average weekly income. Right now, that should be around $20.”

While Unite don’t have a specific policy regarding students as workers, Jones says he also backs a universal student allowance. “I think student fees should be dropped and all student debt abolished. We believe in free education for all.”

In addition to the tightening job market, Jones identifies the recently introduced Employment Relations Amendment Act as a potential danger zone for student workers.
“Unite are the only union to say to workers across the country, if you’re fired due to the 90-day ‘hire and fire’ bill then we’ll be there to picket pretty quick.”

A Bit of Perspective

International student Andrea, 22, works 20-25 hours a week to pay for her rent, basic expenses, and photography material costs. “It’s not impossible to live, but it’s hard to save. It’s hard to be creative if you don’t have time, and I’m limited in what I can do. I feel like I’m not giving 100% in anything.” Andrea thinks domestic students have it easy. “My boyfriend gets money from the government, he doesn’t have to work and he has plenty of time to do well at uni. He doesn’t have to worry about his rent, and his family are here to help.” I’m inclined to agree. The suffering New Zealand student worker is elusive, maybe even mythical. Students are not dropping out due to financial pressure. Students are only suffering psychologically as a result of part-time work when it exacerbates existing problems. The danger of student workers being exploited by employers is a more serious issue, but NZUSA and Unite have got the collective student back fairly well covered. Domestic students in 2009 have got it pretty damn cherry… …except for that looming elephant of student debt in the corner.

Jackie O

WWJD? This acronym spells out my new-found guiding principle in life. Nope, I haven’t found God. I’ve found Jackie. Jackie O. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. What would Jackie do? Wouldn’t you like to know. Wouldn’t I like to know. Like Jesus, she watches over us. She watches over me. Or so I like to think.

In my quest to prove that Michelle O will never reach the dizzying heights of First Lady fame a la Jackie O (not hard), I decided to conduct some thorough research. I turned to Wikipedia, where I discovered a number of interesting fun facts. These fun facts read like Jackie’s CV for the position of First Lady.

Jackie was French. She spoke fluent French. Well actually, Jackie’s dad totally exaggerated the French heritage in the family. But with a last name like Bouvier, you’d never know. Pouvez-vous parler en francais? Jackie liked riding horses. She liked ballet. Her parents divoriced in 1940. She went to posh schools. She was named “Debutante of the Year” in 1947. What a princess. What an inspiration. Hands down the best qualified First Lady ever.

JFK and Jackie mingled in the same social circles. They met at a party in 1952. I like to think that back in the old days people didn’t drunkenly meet at parties, pash in the hallway and then go home to have hot sex. They waited until marriage, or something. JFK proposed in June 1953 (how forward) and Jackie was walking up the aisle in September 1953 (keen). Suspicious much?

I asked myself—actually Wikipedia—WWJD if she was marrying a young, hot-shot wannabe Senator? Well, she’d wear a hot dress of course. She’d turn it into the social event of the season. The wedding of the year. It was love. It was a fairytale. With an unhappy ending. Dun dun dun!

So between those two young kids getting married and JFK getting shot in 1963, a few kinda important things happened. JFK became President. Jackie became a style icon. She rocked the sleeveless A-line dresses. The hats. The gloves. The bob. An idol to frumpy housewives across the United States. She was awe-inspiring. If America was ever to have a royal family, it was the Kennedys, with Jackie at the helm. How else did JFK get so popular? Barack was already one of the cool kids. He didn’t even need Michelle.

Jackie’s finest hour is also an endearing American tragedy. JFK was assasinated. Jackie was there. WWJD? Jackie screamed. Jackie wouldn’t let go. Jackie got her pink Chanel suit covered in her husband’s blood. Jackie decided that she would not take the blood-soaked pink Chanel suit off. Jackie stood beside LBJ as he was being sworn into office on Airforce One, still wearing the pink Chanel suit. What a woman. What an inspiration. What a pink Chanel suit. I don’t know if pink is Michelle’s colour.

Jackie was alone, a single mother with two kids. So WWJD? Find herself a multi-bajillionaire shipping tycoon to marry, of course. Lucky for her, the Greek guy named Aristotle (bonus points for cool name) died seven years after they got hitched and she managed to score $26 million from the Onassis estate. Guaranteed lifetime financial security. Jackie, you’re my idol.

There’s no fun in asking what Michelle would do. You could probably rock up to the White House, knock on the door, and she’d appear, ready to provide advice on your every dilemma. You may have disturbed her from tending her vegetable garden and teaching obese kids how to eat properly, but she’d probably invite you in for some quality Obama family time anyway. You might babysit Malia and Sasha and watch a DVD. Normal, mundane family things. Jackie, on the other hand, was untouchable. Kind of like God. Technically, she is untouchable. She’s dead. We don’t know what Jackie would actually do. But we can pretend to know what Jackie would do. That’s most of the fun. I mean, we don’t really know what Jesus would do, do we?

I decided to conduct some survey research to emphatically prove once and for all that Jackie O is way better than Michelle O. I went out with a couple of male friends for a drink. I figured booze would help with the formulation of some stunning arguments. We decided to apply the WWJD mantra to a number of possible real-life situations. This was the clincher.

Male friend number one asked, “WWJD if she was faced with a bear wielding a shark?”

Male friend number two replied, “She’d disarm the bear with her charm, wistfully cooing ‘Be a dear, bear, and place the shark in a secure location’.”

She’d have done this whilst wearing an amazing outfit, complete with a hat and gloves. Can you see Michelle fending off a bear wielding a shark in such a polite and graceful manner? Well, no. Probably not.

Rebuttal:

Jackie O is so cool that Jay-Z has rapped about her. The Spice Girls have lip-synched about her. There is an experimental rock band in the States called Jackie-O Motherfucker. How can Michelle possibly match the legacy left by Jackie? Those are some sky-high stilleto heels to fill. Fowler, you’ve got a point. Michelle’s an amazing lady, no doubt about it. I’d ask her over for tea and biscuits anyday. Jackie’s frivilous spending, renovations, big sunglasses and rose gardens only add to her mystique. It reminds us of better economic times. WWJD to combat the GFC? Cigarettes and martinis all round! What a woman.

By Sarah Robson

Michelle

Michelle Robinson Obama and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis are two fine First Ladies: young, educated, intelligent and stylish, with agendas of their own. We should applaud them both. That said, Michelle comes out way on top in any battle head to head. She’s been in office less than three months and already proves herself far more socially minded and outspoken than Jackie ever was.

First, look at the barriers Michelle overcame to get to the White House in the first place. No gentle waltz from debutante ball via society dinner parlour for Mrs. Obama, no sirree. She grew up in the Chicago South Side, in a one-bedroom brick bungalow. Her father was a pump worker, her mother a secretary who stayed home to raise the kids. Compare that to the childhood of Jacqueline Lee “Debutante of the Year” Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, gallivanting around the family estate on thoroughbred ponies and slaughtering foxes.

After pushing past racial divides at high school, Michelle battled it out for acceptance at Princeton University. In an interview with Newsweek on 25 February 2008, buddy Angela Acree talked about how white classmates would ignore them outside of the classroom and the segregation of social life on campus. Michelle was equally aware of socioeconomic segregation, writing her final thesis on “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community” and teaching local kids how to read in her spare time.

Michelle graduated with merit and was accepted to Harvard Law School. She campaigned for minority representation on campus, and helped other black undergraduates get recruited. She’s the third First Lady to have a master’s degree, after Hilary Rodham Clinton and Laura Bush.

After Harvard, Michelle got work at a Chicago law firm and met Barack when he was assigned to her as a hot young intern. Corporate law didn’t satisfy her social ideals, so she switched over to the public service and started up the Chicago chapter of non-profit youth leadership organisation Public Allies. Before bailing to go on campaign, Michelle worked on a program placing University of Chicago doctors in poor neighbourhoods.

Compare all that to Jackie’s one claim to pre-Kennedy fame: a brief cameo as “Inquiring Camera Girl” for the Washington Times-Herald. What’s that, Robson? Things were different for women back then? At least Jackie never needed to deal with racist taunts from the mainstream media. Even in the relatively enlightened ‘00s, Fox News couldn’t help themselves from referring to Michelle as Obama’s “baby mama” or referring to her and Barack’s victory knuckles as a “terrorist fist jab”. She’s been called “trashy” on the Talk Radio Network, called a “bitch” and compared to James Brown on the Town Hall opinion site. A New York Magazine blog captioned a photo of Obama saluting a marine with “looks like Obama might just be blocking the sun’s glare as he checks out Michelle’s booty”.

Actually, being a high-profile black woman in the modern USA is probably just as hard as being a high-profile white woman in the 1960s. Betty Freidan’s The Feminine Mystique was doing the rounds, the National Organisation for Women started up in 1966, and middle-class women were becoming radical. Jackie could have joined their ranks if she’d wanted to. Instead, she actually reinforced feminine stereotypes.

Take Jackie O’s only major project as First Lady—renovating the White House. She infamously forked out $12 000 in donated funds for the dining room wallpaper panels. Why not give the dosh to charity, eh? The President’s home may have needed a bit of sprucing up, but Jackie went way OTT. Antique furniture, fine art and impeccable rose gardens may impress foreign delegates, but they do nothing to keep a president in touch with his people.

Michelle, in comparison, is all about keeping it real. She’s making her mark on the White House with a massive kitchen garden project, helped by her daughters and local kids from Bancroft Elementary School. Not just a few token tomato plants, the Obama garden is a botanical extravaganza. The first crop rotation includes lettuces, peas, spinach, broccoli, fennel, radishes, onions, shallots, mint, chard, carrots, kale, and assorted perennial herbs. She’s a garden goddess, Maggie Barry with a Harvard Masters and designer gumboots. Even better, the produce from the garden gets cooked up by the White House chef and sent to a Washington homeless shelter. Her background suggests this will be the first of many affirmative social initiatives as First Lady.

Plus, it’s not just about Michelle’s actions. Even if she morphs into a total Stepford wife, she’s still the dark-skinned wife of the first African-American US President and a powerful role model for black women everywhere. Actually, she’s a powerful role model for everyone.

Michelle Robinson Obama proves you don’t need to be rich and white to have a glittering academic career, you don’t need a white woman on your arm to become president, and you don’t need to spend your time as First Lady hosting dinner parties and sniffing roses.

Rebuttal

WWJD? Jackie would order in a dozen crates of Dom Pérignon as the world economy burns, invite Mugabe round for a quiet $250,000 soiree or three, and arrange a billion-dollar bailout for the world’s leading fashion houses Maybe you can’t make ‘fun’ out of Michelle Obama, but you can rearrange her name to make words like ‘meal’ and ‘beach’. Wholesome goodness is far better for the constitution, so aguante Michelle! Long live the quiet, prudent and conscientious revolution!

By Nina Fowler

The Paper Trail

Phantom started up in Christchurch in the early 1980s. Offices were opened in Auckland and Dunedin as the company grew, and half shares purchased in a Wellington poster company called Sticky Fingers.

At this point, Wellington was a poster badlands. Bands could claim a space for as long as they could defend it. Local musician Vorn Colgan describes the way it was.

“You’d break a space. Find a wall on an abandoned building or just go try a space out. You’d poster, they’d rip them down and you wouldn’t go back. Or, you would go back and eventually you’d win. It would become a poster space, and then Sticky Fingers would claim it.”

Phantom eventually bought out Sticky Fingers and, in 2002, entered into an exclusive contract with the Wellington City Council. The contract has been renewed several times since then, with further rights of renewal reserved until 2016.

Basically, Phantom get exclusive use of the 53 poster bollards and 36 pole poster holders in the central city. Since this is public space, Phantom are required to provide 10% of the bollard and pole holder space free to community and charity groups. A Council audit is run each quarter to check the “free” provision is being met. In fact, according to both Phantom and the Council, free space usually runs at 25-30%, due to high demand.

Wellington City Council spokesman Richard Maclean says it makes sense to contract out public assets like the bollards. “If we had an ‘unmanaged’ facility as we did in the past, it would rapidly descend into a chaotic mess. People would fight for the space, cover up each others’ posters, and then the Council would need to clean it up. It is more appropriate to engage a contractor to manage that sort of work on our behalf.”

Phantom also lease around 150 private and commercial billboard sites in the central city, surrounding suburbs and Hutt Valley. Some of these are former Sticky Fingers sites, others are more recent acquisitions. A small amount is paid each week to the relevant property owner, and Phantom take responsibility for maintaining the poster site.

According to Phantom area manager Matthew Smith, “most private property owners are more than happy to make a bit of money off their space, especially since we keep it looking tidy.”

The total 200-plus Wellington poster sites are managed by 5 full-time and 7 part-time staff, who book 60 to 100 campaigns a week. Bookings are based on a Sunday to Sunday cycle, with daily check runs to replace vandalised or damaged posters. In theory, a poster is guaranteed placement for seven days.

Once the weekly quota has been filled, late bookings receive part of a shared pool of 1200 A3s. This “pre-emptible booking space” is divided evenly between clients, with credit given for posters that can not be placed.

Bands can either bring in their own posters or pay extra to have posters printed by Phantom. The flat rate for distribution is $1 per A3 poster, a price last raised in late 2007. Unsigned bands are entitled to either 25 A3 posters free, or a 20% discount off the total purchase.

In the last weekly cycle, free service was provided to 24 Hour Party People, A Social Gathering, Amenta, Calibre, the Glue Band, KissKiss BangBang, Lawrence Arabia and Cassette, Little Bushman, Mel Parsons, Odessa, Sinden, State of Mind, and Tony Joe White.

The 10% free provision for community groups was shared between the play “A Brief History of Helen of Troy”, Access Radio, Aro Valley Fair, Craftwork 2.0, Family History Month, “Serendipity”, and the Swamigi Tour.

Paper Cuts

Many local bands and promoters remain unsatisfied. The first argument put forward by critics of Phantom, according to Vorn Colgan, is that the history of many billboard sites undermines the legitimacy of the Phantom business model.

“Those sites were broken by indie posterers, taken over by a small company, and then taken over by a big company. If it wasn’t legitimate for the first indie posterer, then it’s even less so for the next guy.”

“It’s basically on the order of any other mafia scam where you intimidate and hustle yourself into a position where you hold all the stuff, and then you sell the stuff. Yet it’s not the same as staffing a shop or selling a product, because this is arguably public space.”

Matthew Smith admits certain sites on Cuba St. are legal grey space. “There are a number of sites on Cuba that are nobody’s site, really. They’ve been there for so long. Obviously it’s a fine line, but it’s not necessarily legal for other bands to put their posters there either.”

Smith says that leaving Cuba St. free for independent posterers is not a viable option. “We have thought of that idea, but it could get out of control. There is obviously a high demand for those areas, so no one would have their poster up for very long. Posters would go up one night and be covered over by the next.”

He says the best option for bands is to use Phantom’s free service. “We can put them up for you, and you can know they’ll stay up for seven days.”

Colgan disagrees. “It’s a common story for people to pay for a set amount of posters then have them just not go up, especially if you’re from out of town. The Canadian woman who came to Happy last Sunday, for example, she paid for them to put up a number of posters that were never seen.”

“Shit service” is the second grievance put forward by local bands, though only Colgan was willing to be quoted directly. Salient received plenty of anecdotal evidence regarding posters going up last minute or not at all, being covered over, or relegated to low visibility areas like Berhampore or Island Bay.

Rumours of favouritism and revenge policies abound. Colgan believes this perception is partially due to the historical battle between independent posterers and Sticky Fingers. “Back in the day, the concept of a spot was a lot more fluid. Sticky Fingers would go through town, rip down the indies and put up their own.”

For Smith, the problem is that there simply isn’t enough poster space to go round. “Wellington is different to any other city. It’s so compact, there’s half as much space available and about twice as much going on.

“We do get complaints regarding placement. We’re not perfect, and the likes of Courtney and Cuba are by far and away the highest demand areas. We try to give everyone a fair piece of that coverage each week.”

Going Postal

Independent bands and Phantom staff aren’t the only ones vying for central city space. Salient asked two local poster artists for their perspective on the Wellington poster scene.

According to a member of street art collective BMD, competition for spots on Cuba St. is increasing. “There are way less spots than there used to be. It’d be a real shame if Phantom took over all the decent spots on Cuba, because that’s what Cuba St. is all about. The street culture, people doing their own art, gig posters.”

Poster artist Beware agrees. “I understand they’re a business, but they should leave some spaces for street artists and independent bands.”

However, both BMD and Beware say irresponsible independents are as much of a threat to street art as Phantom. “What we’ve found really annoying lately is not so much Phantom, but the people who go put gig posters over street art.

“Bands are generally pretty good, but a lot of people don’t follow the rules. Sometimes you see a whole wall with art on it, and then someone will have just slapped a poster on over it, even if there were other available spots. It’s like they just throw it on without even looking.”

Neither artist can see a solution to the current problem. Beware says Council-sanctioned poster space on Cuba just wouldn’t work. “Graffitti rules would come into play, and it would become just another place to go tag and paint.”

Media Studies lecturer and cultural connoisseur Geoff Stahl is optimistic. “When I walk down Cuba Mall, when I see posters, street art, tagging, when I see the irrepressible desire to be creative and to use space creatively… if you try to suppress that, people will find a way to subvert it.”

Further information:
www.0800phantom.co.nz
www.wellington.govt.nz/services/signage/postering.html
wwwmypace.com/bmdbmdbmd
www.wgtnwallstreet.com

New Salient Editors are appointed by a sub-committee made up of the current VUWSA President, current editor, the two Publications Committee student representatives, and a representative from Nga Tauira. Most student magazines appoint an editor in this way, with Craccum the only magazine in New Zealand to elect an editor democratically.

Once the editor gets her or his grubby hands on the reins, she or he appoint the rest of the Salient staff and set the Salient budget for the year. The editor is guaranteed editorial independence and the right to “criticise and comment on the performance of the Association and its officers.” In return, the VUWSA exec can expect “reasonable coverage” of their priority goals for that year.

Sound cosy? In practice, the balance between mouthpiece and critic of the VUWSA exec is not always easy to maintain. The Eye on Exec column has delivered some scathing criticism over the last two years, and received some equally blistering responses.

On 9 July 2007, News Editor Laura McQuillan reported on the NZUSA conference under the heading “Exec piss on each other, Hayward pissed off but not doing anything about it”. The exec responded with an open letter slamming McQuillan’s “unbalanced, sarcastic tabloid agenda”. An unofficial feud between several news reporters and exec members continued for the rest of the year.

2008 News Editor Seonah Choi’s Eye on the Exec coverage was equally provocative. “I hate VUWSA exec meetings”, she wrote on 28 April. “The upside is that nothing newsworthy or minimally exciting happened—the downside being that I lost an hour of my time in order to report this.”

A more courteous exchange was published on 11 August 2008. In an open letter to VUWSA, Salient called on the exec to sort out their finances and uphold their responsibilities to the student body. The exec responded by acknowledging systemic problems and pledging “big changes” for 2009.

The report of the VUWSA Change Committee spells out some big changes indeed, and not just for the exec. The initial report recommends tweaking the constitution to make Salient more consistent with VUWSA “principles, objectives, values and goals”, and giving the VUWSA Exec greater control over the Salient budget.

According to VUWSA President Jasmine Freemantle, the wording of the original recommendation is “a bit dodgy”. She stresses her support for Salient autonomy. “The relation between Salient and VUWSA is worth fleshing out, but not in a way that would restrain Salient. I do have some recommendations which I’m sure Salient will be partial to.”

Editor Jackson James Wood is open to suggestions, but equally wary of reducing editorial independence. “I am not opposed to Salient and VUWSA working closer together. I am opposed to VUWSA politics interfering with Salient.”

The Change Committee report is currently being considered by a VUWSA sub-committee, with a revised set of proposals to be released over the next few weeks.

The Waghorn Affair

Recent spats between Salient and the exec pale in comparison to the dismissal of Editor Vic Waghorn on 22 September 1995. A prelude to the final clash occurred in June. Ten people signed a petition to remove Waghorn from office, enough to force a special general meeting. After the students behind the petition failed to come forward, the motion to dismiss Waghorn was defeated by around 250 votes to 3.

The fall-out from the botched petition was reported in the subsequent issue of Salient. Waghorn accused the exec of moral and legal negligence in their capacity as her employer, and described the VUWSA constitution as an “archaic, inflexible joke.”

In an interview with the current Salient, former VUWSA President Paul Gibsen admits the exec’s decision to hold a general meeting to vote out an employee contravened the Employment Contracts Act. However, he argues that the outdated VUWSA constitution left the exec no alternative. “At this point, the only way to remove a Salient editor was by rolling.”

The reasons behind the petition remain murky. The experimental typography and radical content of the 1995 Salient were infamous. However, Gibsen says that verbal complaints regarding the content and style of the magazine were in fact “taken on board” by Salient staff.

Personal grievances and rumours regarding Waghorn’s misappropriation of Aotearoa Student Press Association (ASPA) funds appear to have been a more likely cause. These allegations eventually led to Waghorn’s suspension on 22 September pending an “investigation into [her] conduct”.

The controversy continued even after Waghorn’s dismissal. She managed to intercept the final issue of Salient on the way to the printers and change the cover to a cartoon depiction of cunnilungus captioned “suck it hard”. Most of the covers were ripped off by the exec, with an heirloom copy preserved for posterity in the library’s J.C. Beaglehole room.

Following the Waghorn affair, the VUWSA constitution was changed so that an editor could no longer be “rolled” via a vote of non-confidence. The Editor’s employment can now only be terminated “in the case of death or resignation, or termination by the employer”.

Observation #1: Jasmine Freemantle is a paradigm of blazing efficiency. She slammed through the initial formalities before I could lift my pen.

Observation #2: The rest of the VUWSA Executive members are also pretty sharp. Points were made quickly, and five out of twelve were clad in regulation VUWSA gear.

Business #1: Work reports were submitted. Jasmine is currently working 100 plus hour weeks, and is aiming to cut this down to a leisurely 70 hours over the next month.

Business #2: Joel Cosgrove has still not repaid the money he owes to the exec. Court action will be expensive and hopefully unnecessary.

Business #3: Work requests made by VUWSA exec members to VUWSA staff need to go through Jasmine, as do offers of assistance made by VUWSA staff to VUWSA exec members.

Business #4: The vice-president quarterly reports were deferred again, sparking a brief and respectful discussion about relative workloads.

Business #5: NZUSA (New Zealand Union of Student Associations) Women’s Rights Officer results are in, and candidates Tui Head and Rachel Wright were both defeated by no confidence votes. A temporary administration position will be advertised via Student Job Search, and a sub-committee appointed to investigate results.

Business #6: Six different student rep groups have put forward motions for the next Special General Meeting, and Jasmine is investigating the university’s decision to ban the Hare Krishna caravan from the quad.

With official business wrapped, the exec moved into a special training session facilitated by NZUSA leaders Jordan King and Sophia Blair.

It could all have been so different. Salient presents… the Victoria University That Might Have Been.

In 1902, Victoria University College had no place to call home. Classes were held in rented rooms at the Wellington Girls’ High School in Pipitea St and the Technical School building in Victoria St, an arrangement that irritated pretty much everybody. Students took to the streets in protest. “We have eyes,” they chanted, “but no site.”*

A decision had to be made. The Victoria Council favoured the empty Mt Cook prison on Buckle St, as did the blossoming Victoria College Student’s Association (VCSA). This grim brick building, voted too spectacularly ugly to be used even as a prison, was located on thirteen acres of prime Crown real estate. Perfect! However, Prime Minister Richard Seddon was mighty attached to this particular piece of colonial property. “If the Council persists,” he shouted during one House session, “we shall appoint a Royal Commission to choose somewhere in Palmerston North, Nelson or Blenheim.”

Enter cable-car magnate Mr. Charles Pharazyn. He came like the snake to Eve, offering a juicy thousand pounds if the University were built on the six acres between Kelburn Parade and Salamanca Road. The cash-strapped Council were sorely tempted. However, after hours of discussion, the decision was made to continue fighting for the Mt Cook site. “We must think about the long-term implications,” one Council member is reported as saying. “If we buy the Kelburn site, we sell out on our aspirations for a spacious and attractive campus.”

The battle took another four years. Extra arts classes were opened up in the ministerial residence on Tinakori Rd, and a rudimentary science facility on the Wellington College grounds. Shortly before Seddon’s death, the Council finally negotiated the purchase of the thirteen acres between Taranaki, Tasman and Buckle Streets.

Classes were immediately moved to the old prison, affectionately nicknamed “the Brick”. The central location and luxurious grounds attracted hundreds of new students, and the Council began construction on a second building. Materials were readily available, since Mt Cook was the centre of the Wellington brick and pipe industries, and the Hunter building was officially opened on 30 March 1910.

Student accommodation became the next challenge. A host of boarding houses had sprung up around the campus, including the notorious Miss Ewart’s on Brougham St. A women’s hostel, Victoria House, was set up on Tasman St in 1908 and the male equivalent, Weir House, opened on Brougham St. in 1933.

The Mt Victoria bus tunnel was an obvious choice for Weir House initiation rituals. New residents were stripped naked and sent to run through the tunnel and back. The practice was discontinued in 1967 when first-year commerce student Michael Fay was severely injured after being hit by the Miramar bus.

Scandal struck again in 1969, when an off-duty police officer discovered a hostel student tending several marijuana plants in Brooklyn Central Park. This triggered an all-out offensive by the Mt Cook Residents’ Association, demanding that Victoria students living in the area “shape up or ship out”.

Though the Residents’ Association were reluctant to admit it, the Mt Cook area had benefited hugely from the student population. Lively student flats, cafés, art galleries, theatres and small retailers lined Tonks, Arthur and Buckle Streets, along with the upper stretches of Cuba and Willis.

The Victoria campus was the hub of this creative activity, the jewel in a bohemian utopia. Special schools for architecture, design, fine arts, music, and film-making were set up alongside the old academic staples. The close proximity of the different schools fostered cross-pollination between disciplines. Politics students presented their theses as documentaries; musicians, physicians and mathematicians collaborated on stunning sonic equations.

Enrolment roared in the 1970s and 1980s. Student accommodation again became a problem, as did student transport. Luckily, the area surrounding the campus was nearly dead flat. With the help of a Victoria University of Wellington Students’ Association (VUWSA) subsidy, cycling to class became the default option. Bicycles could be permanently rented from the Mechanical Tempest at 128 Abel Smith St for around $40, a service still available today (for real).

Thousands of students mobilised against the 1981 Springbok Tour and 1993 fee rises. However, these protests paled in comparison to the 1998-2001 movement against the inner city bypass.

The bypass would have cut through the heart of student space, creating a pedestrian dead zone from the Basin Reserve up Buckle and Arthur Streets to the Terrace Tunnel. After three years of protest action by an estimated ten thousand students, the WCC scrapped the bypass proposal and began developing the light rail system that now runs from Owhiro Bay to Eastbourne.

Fast track to 2009. The Victoria University That Might Have Been continues to develop as a centre of creativity, innovation and excellence. Student activists keep fighting the good fight, gripping the slippery problems of student housing and fee rises firmly by the scrota. Our alumni include Oscar winners, Chief Justices, poets, millionaires, chess champions and comedic geniuses; our academics are among the country’s finest…

Just like the real Victoria, really, only without that bloody hill.

* Stephen Hamilton. A Radical Tradition: A History of VUWSA 1899-1999. (Wellington: VUWSA and Steele Roberts), p. 21.

“If it wasn’t for the news,” says 22-year old BA student Rosie, “I wouldn’t even know it was happening.” She has a point. We’ve seen the headlines, read the daily roll of corporate casualties. Some of us may even be cracking recession jokes to explain why we can’t get that dream job/bargain/date. Yet, for the average New Zealand tertiary student, nothing really seems to have changed. Is the worst yet to hit? Is it all just media hype?

When the governments of Iceland and Latvia collapse, we know we’re dealing with something serious. Most commentators are now placing us in the middle of a global recession comparable to the Great Depression of the 1930s. There is little that can be done to avoid the downturn. However, a clear understanding of the situation will make it more difficult for politicians and lobby groups to use the “R” word as a scare tactic. With this aim in mind, I set out to map the causes and implications of the global recession.

Boom & Bust

Geoff Bertram, senior economics lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington, believes the current crisis arose from “boom-bust processes in the financial sector, which makes it comparable with the aftermath of the South Seas Bubble scam in the 1720s, the Long Depression of the 1870s-1880s, the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the minor stock-market hiccups of 1987 and 1997.”

Economics is an excitingly psychological game. Assets are rarely bought and sold at fundamental value, rather, investors seek to make a profit by buying low and selling high. This exchange of risk for reward is a driving factor of economic expansion. However, as John Maynard Keynes pointed out in The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money (1936), problems can arise when speculation becomes a disproportionately important part of an economy. “Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation.”

The prosperity of the ‘Roaring Twenties’ gave many investors a false sense of security. As the value of the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose steadily over a six-year period, speculation seemed like a direct route to profit. American investors borrowed heavily to ensure they received a piece of the action. This optimism drove share prices even higher, creating an economic bubble which peaked on 3 September 1929. A sharp, short drop in prices, though followed by a quick recovery, was enough to collapse the unrealistic expectations of amateur investors. A steady decline accelerated into “Black Tuesday” on 24 October, the market losing billions of dollars as stock prices crashed.

The Wall Street Crash of 1929 triggered the Great Depression, though debate over structural causes continues. Keynesian economics became the dominant paradigm and basis for President Roosevelt’s “New Deal”. Widespread bank and monetary reforms were passed to regain government control of the financial sector.

Unfortunately, according to Bertram, the lessons learned in the 1930s were quickly forgotten. “The lessons learned in the 1930s regarding bank regulation and the need for prudence in the financial system were forgotten once that generation of bankers and policy makers died out. The new generation saw huge opportunities for private profit and rent-taking if regulatory restraint could be removed or avoided; from 1980 on these financial-sector players—in alliance with neoconservative ideologues opposed to government per se—managed to neuter the Depression-era rules and regulations.”

Subprime Sinkhole

One of the most significant regulations laid down by Congress post-Depression was the separation of commercial and investment banks under the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. This was partially repealed in 1999 by the GrammLeachBiley (GLB) Act. Single financial institutions could now engage in both banking activities (provision of cheque and savings accounts) and capital market activities (loans, mergers, security trading).

The GLB Act did not directly cause the current financial crisis. It is worth remembering that many other developed countries never had Glass-Steagall-type legislation to begin with. However, the GLB boosted the development of securitised lending, which allowed different types of debt obligations to be packaged for sale as “assets” on the global investment market.

As profit-seeking Wall Street wizards played with new ways to offload and manage risk, easy credit conditions were fueling a housing bubble in the United States. Residential real estate became flavour of the month, with speculation pushing housing prices well above the rate of inflation. Increased demand for credit led to high-risk lending and the creation of ‘subprime’ mortgages. This risky debt was packaged with other securities and sold to offshore investors.

These little parcels of mixed debt were initially left unrated by credit rating agencies. This kept them as a small corner of the global derivative market, limiting the potential for massive fallout. Luckily for investment sharks, innovative collaterised debt obligations (CDOs) could be used to bypass rating barriers.

CDOs basically allowed books of mortgages to be opened up and repackaged. Banks could buy dodgy hunks of debt, pluck out the best bits, and present it to rating agencies as low-risk. Once a coveted AAA credit rating was received (or purchased, given the juicy fees paid to credit rating agencies for their trouble), “good” CDOs became extremely profitable.

This left the problem of toxic debt—the dregs of the original mortgage packages. Banks could either sell these “bad” CDOs at heavily discounted rates, or hope that their other investments would cover the risk of holding on to them. Since only the very naïve or very reckless took the bait, a concentration of toxic debt accumulated in the asset pool of many major financial institutions.

It got worse. Certain unscrupulous characters saw the potential to make big bucks off the back of ‘Mum and Dad’ investors. ‘Bad’ CDOs were bought, opened up, and repackaged for a second or third time. It may have looked good on paper, but amateur investors around the world were left holding derivative assets about as secure as Chernobyl.

Countdown to Meltdown

Globalisation gave momentum to the developing crisis. Relaxed foreign investment controls allowed international credit flows, the lifeblood of developing countries and small economies, to circulate freely. This big, fluid money blob itself became the subject of speculation, leading to the Asian financial crisis in 1997 and the economic crisis in Argentina between 1999 and 2002.

There were a number of precursors to the current financial crisis. ‘Black Monday’, 19 October 1987, saw the largest one-day percentage decline in stock market history. A second global mini-crash occurred in 1997, in response to the economic crisis in Asia. According to Bertram, there was a key difference between these “minor hiccups” and the current crisis.

“The 1987 and 1997 busts affected investment spending rather than consumption, which meant their impacts on the macro-economy were relatively minor and could be met by cutting interest rates (the standard monetary-policy response to a recession of demand).”

“The 2007 bust was far more serious because it hit household balance sheets, as the unsustainable house-price boom unwound first in the US, then in Europe and NZ and Australia. With household wealth dropping and credit tightening, the effect was to slash household consumption spending, which is about 80% of aggregate private-sector demand, which resulted in a slump too big to be stopped just by orthodox monetary policy.”

Natural economic expansion and contraction have aggravated the current downturn. As pointed out by VUW senior economics lecturer Stephen Burnell, the recession in New Zealand has been overdue for years. “Over the last 3–4 years, everyone said ‘it is coming next year’ … since 1990, the world economy has been very benign; very few shocks and very little volatility in output. Right now we are paying for all the smoothing in one hit.”

The speculative shit hit the fan in late 2007. Major British mortgage lender Northern Rock was the first to seek liquidity support, triggering a bank run in mid-September. Fifteen US banks failed before the end of 2008, including top US mortgage lender IndyMac and global financier Lehman Brothers. Giants Bearn Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were saved from collapse by government bailouts or competitor acquisition. Major financial institutions in Europe began experiencing similar problems.

During ‘Black Week’, 6–10 October 2008, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 18% in the worst weekly decline ever recorded. Many of the world’s stock exchanges followed suit, causing International Monetary Fund (IMF) head Dominique Strauss-Kahm to warn that the global financial system was on the “brink of systemic meltdown”.

The Fallout

OECD quarterly accounts show that most countries experienced a recession in 2008, with Estonia, Latvia, Ireland, New Zealand, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Italy, Russia and Germany currently registering negative GDP growth. As major industries and corporate giants begin to suffer, the International Labour Organisation is predicting that global unemployment will increase by more than 50 million in 2009.

Several governments have responded with bulk bailout packages. The Obama administration has pledged US$787 billion, while the British bank rescue package weighs in at £500 billion. These whopper figures have launched a blistering blogosphere debate between neo-conservatives and Keynesians.

Professors Eugene Fama and Kenneth French, heavyweight guns from the University of Chicago and Dartmouth College respectively, emphasize that the money for the bailouts must come from somewhere. “The problem is simple: bailouts and stimulus plans are funded by issuing more government debt. The added debt absorbs savings that would otherwise go to private investment. In the end, despite the existence of idle resources [unemployment], bailouts and stimulus plans do not add to current resources in use. They just move resources from one use to another.”

The assumption that government spending will crowd out private investment is hotly contested by liberal US economist Paul Krugman. “What’s so mind-boggling about this is that it commits one of the most basic fallacies in economics—interpreting an accounting identity as a behavioral relationship. Yes, savings have to equal investment, but that’s not something that mystically takes place, it’s because any discrepancy between desired savings and desired investment causes something to happen that brings the two in line.”

Looking to our own academics, Geoff Bertram agrees that models used by critics of the fiscal stimulus tend to assume a closed economy when in fact “real-world economies are open, big-time.” Stephen Burnell says that, while government is able to soak up unemployment in the short-run, it is vital that government stay “smart” about infrastructure spending rather than simply “throwing money at the problem”.

At least the US and New Zealand still have options left. On 26 January, Iceland’s Prime Minister Geir Haarde announced his resignation following weeks of popular protest. Iceland, voted world’s most desirable country to live in by the UN in 2007, is now crippled by raging inflation and foreign debt—not least the repayment of a US$10 billion bailout loan from the IMF and foreign governments.

Latvia, until recently nicknamed the ‘Baltic Tiger’ thanks to rapidly expanding GDP, has become the second political casualty. Prime Minister Ivars Godmanis resigned on 20 February, after accepting US$2.4 billion from the IMF. Hungary, Serbia, Belarus and Ukraine have also received IMF bailouts, with Turkey next in line.

The Forecast

New Zealand has so far gotten off relatively lightly. Unemployment is rising, household consumption is down, retailers are suffering. Shares in household name Fisher & Paykel dropped 40% on 16 February, prompting John Key to announce a possible government intervention. The Treasury books are running an operating deficit NZ$1.1 billion worse than forecast, and the New Zealand Stock Exchange reached a five-year low on 25 February. While average house prices have dropped dramatically, the situation is not yet critical.

The government response has been equally mild. John Key has promised to spend NZ$5 billion to take the “rough edges” off the recession, and called a summit between unions, banks and employers’ groups on 27 February to discuss ways to limit unemployment. Most of our fiscal stimulus package will be invested in roading and other infrastructure, with project consent lubricated by recent changes to the Resource Management Act 1991. The Reserve Bank, for their part, have cut the official cash rate to 3.5% with further cuts to come.

So, how much worse is it going to get?

Economic weatherman Geoff Bertram predicts three years of acid rain. “Most New Zealanders still have not the faintest idea what is about to hit them. This is a big global downturn which will knock the stuffing out of our key export sectors—tourism and dairying. There will be very widespread bankruptcies or closures among small businesses serving these markets, plus bankruptcy for a lot of over-indebted dairy farmers. The New Zealand dollar will drop a bit further yet, which means prices for imported items like computers and books will be under upward pressure. House prices still have 20% or more to fall before there’s much chance of hitting any bottom—and they could go much further.”

Bertram’s advice? “There are at least three very grim years coming up, during which it will be a good idea to have vegetables planted in the back garden and a sewing-machine handy.”

The official line is somewhat more guarded. In the latest Treasury forecast, released on 18 December, two forecasts are put forward. In the pessimistic scenario, unemployment is set to peak at 7.2% in 2010, with national debt rising from about 20% to about 30% over the next two years. The optimistic scenario shows economic growth slowing rather than reversing, with unemployment rising to a more moderate 5.7% in 2010. As it is too soon to know what is more likely, the Treasury report leaves us sitting somewhere between thunderstorms and light drizzle.

The Reserve Bank are hoping for the latter. In an address to the Canterbury Employers’ Chamber of Commerce on 30 January, Alan Bollard and Tim Ng emphasize the relative stability of the New Zealand economy. “As a small, open economy with flexible product and labour markets, we should be better positioned than many others to re-orient production and income generation in response.” Bollard and Ng do, however, point out the significant risks associated with New Zealand’s reliance on offshore credit and volatile export commodity prices.

Economic Evolution

Though small consolation for those worst affected, it is worth remembering that the current problems are probably a necessary part of global economic evolution. New standards for ethical investment must be developed, and there is plenty of scope for bulk government spending to be directed towards some kind of ‘Green New Deal’.

While acknowledging that National’s ideological commitments tend to run in the other direction, VUW senior lecturer Ramon Das is positive. “The global crisis presents a real opportunity to think about very different ways of structuring an economy, ones that are geared much more toward the provision of basic needs for all and much less toward the massive accumulation of wealth for a few.”

Geoff Bertram is not so hopeful. “Undue influence for ACT will probably drive the government to counterproductive tax cuts, fiscal slash-and-burn, and privatisations that make no difference to aggregate demand but enrich political insiders.”

Seems it’s still too soon to tell. The best we can hope for is that dialogue between National and minor parties remains open, and that recession panic does not drive back hard-won environmental and social welfare advances.

Recession for Students

It’s a great time to be a student. Living costs have been pegged to inflation and National has pledged to continue interest-free student loans. Burgeoning student debt aside (total $10 billion and counting), students and recent graduates are far less likely to be locked into mortgage repayments or significant credit card debt. With few assets or business ventures to worry about, we are free to reap the benefits of recession-scare sales and specials. Even better, those beginning a three year course of study can relax in the knowledge that by 2012, surely, the worst will be over.

Many prospective students have reached the same conclusions. University of Auckland (AU) Deputy Vice-Chancellor Raewyn Dalziel told The New Zealand Herald on 20 January that AU had seen a 12% rise in applications across courses and a 24% increase in the number of applications for postgraduate study. While Victoria University figures have not yet been released, Student Administrator Director Pam Thorbum reports initial figures “well up over 2008 levels” and that this increase is “reflected across all faculties”.

For Tertiary Education Union spokeswoman Associate Professor Maureen Montgomery, enrolment growth is directly linked to the tight job market. “At a time of recession, it makes good sense for students to seek to improve their chances of employment by gaining tertiary qualifications. At the same time, a more highly skilled workforce will make an important contribution to New Zealand’s recovery from the recession and for the future.”

Graduate Blues

Recent university graduates are also hearing the call. Independent careers planner Tim Smithells has observed an influx of graduates returning to plan post-graduate study. “Lots of young people take a BA for interest, then find they need to add a specialist fourth year to give them leverage when job-hunting.”

Smithells is reluctant to pin increased post-graduate enrolment on the recession. “We’ve noticed it over the last 18 months, a longer period than the economic downturn.” Instead, he points to a mismatch of graduates with the labour market. “There are few restraints on entry to university, leading to a plentiful supply of degrees without an equivalent level of demand.”

Vic Careers Manager Liz Medford agrees. “People also need to remember that the last two years have been particularly buoyant. The number of graduate vacancies advertised were above average, to the point where we had more jobs than students applying.”

While not the root cause, the recession is likely to make that first ‘real job’ even more elusive for graduates. As corporations downsize, further pressure will be placed on a labour market already flooded with arts, marketing and management graduates. Architecture, another existing problem area, will also struggle as the building industry weakens.

This is no reason to abandon your BA or BArch and scurry for the nearest polytechnic. Smithells’ advice to university students in the face of the recession is to “make your career the best fit for your unique strengths, skills, interests, values and preferences. Stick with what you enjoy and then add an extra year of specialised graduate study if you need to.”

Medford is equally optimistic. “There are still plenty of opportunities out there.” She recommends that students take advantage of the Vic Careers services well before graduation, and make sure they gain some sort of work experience while studying. “We ran a careers week last year for the humanities and social sciences, and not a lot of students went. It makes it hard for us to attract employers back when we don’t get a good turnout and yet the students really need that information. You don’t need to be specific, you don’t need to target a specific job. You just need to start thinking about what skills are necessary in the workforce, and how you can present those skills to a potential employer.”

The most important tip Medford offers to students is to “use Victoria CareerHub via myVictoria or careerhub.vuw.ac.nz. This is where all the summer internships and graduate recruitment programmes are advertised along with all the job search workshops, employer presentations and career expos.”

Get Your Bread

Nearly all students seek out part-time work to supplement their living costs. As the job market tightens, part-time unskilled jobs in the retail, hospitality, household and office/professional industries—bread and marmite for students—may become increasingly scarce.

Student Job Search, the most lucrative free employment service available to students, is reporting 20% fewer vacancies advertised than at the same time last year. “This is the first time in recent years where there’s been less jobs for students,” said SJS Marketing and Communications Manager Lorna McConnon. “The last time we noticed this trend was back in the late 1990s when the economy was also uncertain.”

This job shortage may be the result of increased student demand. Over one week in January, 58% of the positions that were listed with SJS were filled within 1–4 days. This was confirmed by SJS National Operations Manager Jill Wainwright as a pattern “consistent with our summer so far.” Students are advised to check www.sjs.co.nz on a daily basis, and be flexible in the work they seek.

Smithells recommends becoming “creative and entrepreneurial with your job hunting. Rather than an A4 CV, hand out printed business cards with a photo, your details, and the kind of work you’re after. These can be pinned up in the offices of prospective employers to keep you visible if work becomes available.” He also recommends that students return to holiday jobs once they find them, as students who stick with the same employer will be bumped up the payroll quicker than those who don’t.

Once basic expenses are met, students can sit back and enjoy the perks. Bertram explains, “There will probably be more part-time casual work available as companies dump full-time staff. Housing will become cheaper, which may mean lower rents for flats. Textbook prices may stop rising for a while, travel will probably become cheaper. Sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll will still be as much fun as ever…”

Good night, and good luck.

Blending an astonishing array of archived footage with excerpts from leaked emails and reports, The Hollow Men follows Don Brash and his campaign team as they seduce and are in turn seduced by big business, big money and big political marketing guns from Australia and the US. Viewers who have developed an allergy to the political documentary genre in recent years need not fear: veteran documentary maker Alister Barry (Someone Else’s Country, In a Land of Plenty) has created a visually stimulating adaptation of Nicky Hager’s book without lapsing into sensationalism a la Michael Moore. Less happily, the political deception uncovered in the film is not safely ensconced in Washington but lurking around the corridors of our very own Beehive.

Barry is familiar with his subject matter, having previously released three films dealing with the continued legacy of the New Right revolution. His latest collaboration with Nicky Hager began with a frantic call to secure the film rights, in that turbulent week that saw Don Brash lift the injunction preventing the book’s release and step down as National Party leader. Much of the 20 months since appears to have been spent trawling the TVNZ archives for the rough and unaired footage that makes up the bulk of the film’s visuals. Brash being groomed by his minders and interacting with media personnel prior to press releases comes as a refreshing antidote to sound bite political media coverage, and is supplemented with re-enactments and retrospective interviews with political commentators as needed.

A sly sense of humour guides the first half of the film. While the smirking voiceovers to some of the leaked emails read as excessive, the live footage cannot be dismissed as artistic license. When told by a virulent Kim Hill that his campaign is “right wing populism… to be frank, [your] supporters are right wing rednecks,” Brash meekly admits “that may be right.” The enthusiastic opening-night laughter that followed such gaffes suggested that in this case The Hollow Men had the luxury of preaching to the converted.

Laughs are off, however, as the narrative hits Orewa. The leaked discussions of “dog whistle” tactics and instructions to “massage the message… tell ‘em what they want to hear” will shock the politically naïve, while Brash’s repetition of a stock party line in response to media questioning is as ridiculous as it is appalling.

Sure, it is election year, but The Hollow Men should not be sideswiped with accusations of political bias. Those who have not read Hager’s book will find the film adaptation an entertaining and revealing insight into modern New Zealand politics.

Einstein is divided into science and nonscience chapters. The science chapters cover Einstein’s special and general relativity theories, his attempts to find a unified field theory, and his struggle to accept the blossoming field of quantum physics during his later years. The non-science chapters cover such equally fascinating topics as Einstein’s pacifist activism, religious beliefs, position as a “wandering Zionist”, his role in the development of the atomic bomb, and the cult of celebrity that surrounded him. To my surprise, I far preferred the science chapters. By page two hundred I had progressed from no physics knowledge whatsoever to a basic understanding of spacetime, the thought experiments that birthed it, and why Einstein’s theories were revolutionary. This arts student has realised what those in Cotton already know: physics and maths are super sexy. That struggle for comprehension followed by sweet and powerful epiphany… oh my.

Isaacson’s general writing style is best described as unobtrusive. I found this refreshing. After all, one does not generally read a biography in order to marvel at the snappy prose of its author. My one critique is that Isaacson occasionally overindulges his respect for the great man. I’m not saying that this is unjustified, it’s just the cynic in me catching a whiff of something nasty in the adulation of one white, highly educated and highly successful intellectual for another. This feeling intensified as I flicked through the “old boys’ club” photos of Einstein grouped with Schrodinger, Planck, Bohr and company at the Solvay Conferences of 1911 and 1927. I would have been particularly interested in reading a little about the physics research and development that, surely, was being undertaken by Einstein’s non-Western contemporaries. Sadly, no dice. However, I guess we can excuse Isaacson’s occasional lapses into sweet, literary love-making. I think I’m now half in love with the guy myself.

In fact, Einstein certainly delivers if all you want is some juicy trivia about your favourite celebrity scientist. Isaacson has turned up with some absolute gems. My personal favourite is the following love poem sent by Einstein to his future wife Mileva Maric: “Oh my! That Johnnie boy / So crazy with desire / While thinking of his Dollie / His pillow catches fire.” (p. 52) Or this, as an autograph for 17-year old Anna Meyer-Schmid: “What should I inscribe for you here? / I could think of many things / Including a kiss / On your tiny little mouth / If you’re angry about it / Do not start to cry / The best punishment / Is to give me one too.” (p. 153)

Despite my newfound lust for science, it was ultimately the non-science chapters that left me with the most food for thought. As implied in the title, Isaacson maps not just a man but an entire era. I found particularly interesting the final paragraph of the introductory chapter:

“Einstein [was] a rebel with a reverence for the harmony of nature, one who had just the right blend of imagination and wisdom to transform our understanding of the universe. These traits are just as vital for this new century of globalisation, in which our success will depend on our creativity, as they were for the beginning of the twentieth century, when Einstein helped usher in the modern age.” (p. 7)

There are certainly uncanny parallels between the threats of nuclear war/communist witchhunting faced in the twentieth century and the threats of global warming/terrorist witchhunting that we face now. I agree with Isaacson’s implied call for a paradigm shift based on creativity and the willingness to embrace change. What I disagree with is the implication that we must wait for some sort of revolutionary genius/hero to lead the way, or for “American democracy to right itself, as it always has.” (p. 534)

A commonly held misconception “designed to reassure underachieving students.” (p.16) Thanks a bunch, Walter. We didn’t need that small slice of hope anyhow.

With the exception of the babe-a-licious Madame Curie.

Pre-gig, I was not a die-hard fan of Cat Power. I bought tickets because I was feeling affluent, I felt like a trip to Auckland, and I quite liked what I’d heard of her music. Don’t get me wrong. It’s obvious this lady from Atlanta is a gifted singer-songwriter. Nevertheless, I’d never fully engaged with her sparse arrangements and sprawling vocal style. Post-gig, I’m happy to eat humble pie: Marshall is the most compelling performer it’s been my privilege to see live.

I’d braced myself for a night of Bath House-esque steaminess. Turns out a sold out crowd at Retro (previously known as the Powerstation) is cool and fragrant in comparison. My neighbours in third-row centre gave me plenty of elbow room and were all shorter than average. Even so, I’d happily have paid more and been at a smaller venue. Full credit to Marshall and the Dirty Delta Blues for their surprisingly intimate performance, to the point where Marshall and her organ player scored a couple of ciggies from the front row during a leisurely mid-set jam.

Opening song ‘Don’t Explain,’ originally released by Billie Holiday, set a high benchmark for the gig to follow. Marshall’s voice is exceptional both in range and control, going from near hiss to full strength within a few bars. Vocal dynamic shifts were complemented perfectly by the Dirty Delta Blues: the amalgamation of Dirty Three’s Jim White (drums), the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion’s Judah Bauer (guitar), the Delta 72’s Gregg Foreman (bass) and Lizard Music’s Erik Paparazzi (organ). All four are more than capable of holding a stage on their own, and it was good to see each given literal time in the spotlight rather than being left in Marshall’s shadow.

Marshall stuck to recently released covers album Jukebox for most of her set, moving fluidly through such classics as ‘Woman Left Lonely’ (Janis Joplin), ‘New York, New York,’ and ‘Ramblin’ Man’ (Hank Williams). For me the stand out track was ‘Silver Stallion’ (the Highwaymen), with Paparazzi joining Marshall on vocals as she pony-pranced across the stage to Bauer’s twanging, sliding guitar.

As a covers artist, I’ll readily hail Chan Marshall as successor to folk legend Karen Dalton. That said, her performance reached new heights with the Jukebox version of ‘Metal Heart,’ a rhymically reworked ‘Lived in Bars’ and the sweetly impassioned ode to Bob Dylan ‘Song for Bobby.’ Marshall introduced the latter as ‘Song for Chris Knox,’ with a nod to the Flying Nun godfather who was presumably lurking somewhere at the back.

I’m told Cat Power performances of a few years back were notoriously scatty and that Marshall alternated between severe stage fright and alcohol-induced walkouts. Maybe, but the woman I saw in Auckland was confident, vivacious and highly professional. She mimed as much as sang her songs, plucking apples from trees/manna from heaven in ‘Lord, Help the Poor and Needy’ (Jessie May Hemphill) and directing venomous loathing into empty space with ‘She’s Got You’ (Patsy Cline). However, there was a hint of more fragile days in her occasionally crossed arms and re-buttoning/unbuttoning of her shirt. The interplay between Marshall, Bauer and Paparazzi seemed to play a large part in keeping her grounded, with the majority of songs directed to Paparazzi at stage-left. The big post-gig question became whether or not she was sober. One friend swore to me she’d seen an alcoholic glass being sipped; another claimed the gig as proof that bands don’t need to be wasted to put on an intense and memorable show. For me it’s irrelevant. From start to finish, whether singing straight or not, Cat Power had me in the palm of her hand.

As an aside, local folk-pop trio Teacups played an opening set that was cute and catchy as hell. Chelsea Metcalf, familiar from her cameo appearance with Broken Social Scene at the Bath House, has a rare voice that is much more suited to her own songs. I would have preferred more music and less cutesy banter, but this was more than made up for by tight three-part vocals and the excellent musicianship of Talita Setyady (double bass/harmonica/percussion) and Elizabeth Stokes (guitar/ukulele). Check ‘em out!