I watch documentary film to look at something real—and preferably shocking—without having to leave my own city. Every film is constructed by an artist, but when they’re constructed from footage of real people being themselves, we expect not to be lied to. The ‘Framing Reality’ section of this year’s New Zealand International Film Festival indicates that its documentaries take something from our world and frame it for easier consumption—but the centrepiece film, We Live in Public, breaks down this distinction between real and acted footage.

Director Ondi Timoner (Dig!), almost certainly the most interesting documentary maker of this decade, appears on screen for the first time, and turned up in person to discuss her film with us: We Live in Public follows internet pioneer Josh Harris, particularly during his December 1999 project Quiet. Quiet collected dozens of people who volunteered to be imprisoned in a New York basement for a month, surrounded by cameras and monitors upon which they could watch each other talking, eating, defecating, firing guns and rutting—there was no hiding from the camera, and Harris was delighted that people would subject themselves to surveillance and manipulation, apparently out of some desire to be seen; by the time police shut down the project, he found that constant electronic connection actually alienated the participants from one another. What Harris created has subsequently fed into Big Brother and Facebook status updates. The people on Quiet or on Facebook are real, but their real behaviour is modified by the knowledge that they’re being watched.

In another ‘Framing Reality’ doco, Examined Life, philosophers Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor walked on camera while talking about what it means to walk (Taylor is in a wheelchair). So one way of overcoming the problem “how manipulated is the reality of this footage by the fact that the subjects know they are on film?” is to acknowledge and discuss this very fact. But documentaries also have to grip and entertain us: We Live in Public would not have been so effective if Timoner hadn’t held back certain facts (Harris’ escape to Africa) until late in the film, just as last year’s Dear Zachary wouldn’t have left the entire audience in tears if it had been honest with us from the start. This is not a criticism, just so long as the film becomes honest by the time it ends, and admits that the appearance of its subjects on film is not “authentic”.

The very act of pointing a camera, then, affects what is caught. Dutch filmmaker Renzo Martens uses Enjoy Poverty to point out that, because Westerners will pay more to see pictures of African war and poverty than for pictures of African parties, therefore poverty is a resource. The document is determined by the demand: we see more images of African corpses than African wedding ceremonies not because there are more corpses than marriages on the continent, but because corpses seem more important to us, they make us feel something. Now, while Martens’ film makes this point, he is honest enough to show us himself as a rather annoying little man, egging his subjects on, encouraging them to perform and sell their poverty. This makes his film less effective than a less honest version might have been, but surely this is a virtue. Martens resisted dramatising his document as a quest for good.

Double Take, in the festival’s ‘New Directions’ section, played with the distinction between drama and documentary by cutting news footage of the cold war space race with scenes from Hitchcock and sixties coffee ads. The glue that held all this together was a fictional Borges story, but the film is still a documentary since it uses news footage to make an argument about a real event—director Johan Grimonprez suggesting that the cold war was all a joke designed to frighten us. Contrast the highly stylised, self-acknowledged manipulation used in non-fiction films like Double Take, Examined Life and We Live in Public with the deadly serious realism of festival fictions Firaaq and Balibo: both are deeply affecting dramatisations of ethnic violence (in Gujarat and Timor Leste respectively), relying on down-to-earth performances and camera work to convince us that what we are seeing is at least similar to what really happened. It’s as if by using real footage and calling your film a documentary, you can get away with more flashy self-analysis that you can in a dramatisation.

However, the six Barry Barclay documentaries the festival put on entirely reject the hyperreal self-awareness and flashy filmmaking of Timoner and Grimonperez. In particular, Barclay’s 1974 Tangata Whenua series simply shows members of various Maori communities walking their land while discussing loss, and cooking food while discussing family. Presenter Michael King occasionally appears on camera—he certainly isn’t being ‘hidden’ to make the footage seem more genuine—but only as a listener. Barclay’s style is not as gripping as Timoner’s, but it is neither better nor worse. Perhaps what Harris, via Timoner, is telling us is that we are inevitably, to paraphrase Judith Butler, performers, who dramatise ourselves even when we’re not on camera, so the notion that documentary footage can be fake is problematic. On the other hand, when you compare the Soundtrack to War clip of the filmmaker egging on a US soldier to sing ‘The Roof is on Fire’, with the edited version of the same clip that appears in Farenheit 9/11, without the egging on, you realise that while documentary footage will always be manipulated, it’s not too much to ask for a little honesty in this manipulation: great documentaries are able to remain true for the very reason that they acknowledge their own status as film.

Shannon Gillies comic book The Dangers of P is a response to the extraordinary media hype surrounding this drug: “When someone commits a crime, be it cutting off someone’s hands with a sword or beating up their loved ones, if they were on P at the time it is presumed that is why the crime occurred.” Gillies notes that when the media focuses on the role of P in a crime, they present P use as an excuse for this behaviour: not only do they not bother commenting on “the social causes that led to the commitment of the crime”, they also refuse to examine “those who take P and do not commit crimes.”

To my mind, the strongest example of such poor journalism occurred after P-addict Steven Williams murdered his six-year-old stepdaughter Coral Burrows. Following his conviction, his mother was given extensive television airtime in which she stated again and again that her son was a good man who would never have done such a thing without P, and that therefore the drug was the real murderer. Given that I’ve met a number of P users, most of whom are slightly fucked, but none of whom are at any risk of murdering a child, this is quite patently bullshit.

Gillies response’ to such hype is several pages of images of the letter P committing crimes, such as raping a cow, whaling, abducting a child, and “hunting animals to the point of extinction.” Both the sentiment and the drawings are simplistic, but such simplicity helps Gillies get his point across – and it’s a point that needed to be made.

Copies of The Dangers of P are available at Graphic on Cuba for $5.

So what exactly is VUWSA? It stands for the Victoria University of Wellington Students’ Association. Every student, whether they know it or not, is a member. If you ever bother to look at the invoice that the University sends you, you’ll see a little line that says “VUWSA Subscription” and next to it will be the small total of $131.90.

With this money VUWSA provides services like the Food Bank, advocacy and support, puts on activities like Orientation and Re-Orientation. Funds student media like Salient and the VBC, organises and helps fund affiliated clubs and sports teams and heaps of other stuff.

VUWSA is and has always been an open organisation. Because you are paying members of the association it means that you should care how the money is spent. Because of this VUWSA runs a democratically elected executive that decides how much money goes where and to whom. Any student can stand in a VUWSA election, attend VUWSA meetings, vote at General meetings and put forward motions.

The VUWSA executive is made up of thirteen representatives. At the head is the president.

The president is not only the elected representative but the CEO of VUWSA. The Prez works alongside three vice presidents who cover the areas of Education, Welfare and Administration. In the remaining ten there are specific reps such as the Queer Rights officer, Environment officer and Women’s Rights officer. They all help out with VUWSA events and attend exec meetings. In a first for VUWSA, this year you will be able to access their work reports online and comment on them to tell them if they’re doing a good job or a bad one!

Like most organisations it has its own internal rules and regulations. These are enshrined in the VUWSA constitution. Read up on these if you have time, knowing the rules is a valuable way of being able to hold your representatives accountable.

Traditionally turnout in VUWSA elections has been low, averaging about 10 percent of the entire student population. Whether this is through apathy, not giving a fuck, or whatever, it is kinda startling. Over the course of three years here you may never use any of the services but it is a handy insurance policy, especially as this recession thing kicks in.

History

In 1899 when Victoria College was founded, the Victoria College Students’ Society was formed. The original exec was comprised of seven men and five women. The first few years were mainly about fostering clubs like the Debating Society and the rugby team, and at times supporting and offering mild criticism of the World Wars.

It wasn’t until the 60s that VUWSA became a real bastion of radical left-wing thought and action. The change to having a campus of primarily full-time students meant that there was a little bit of extra time and will to protest. The opening of the Student Union Building added an administrative factor to the running of the association.

Radicalism grew over the next decade. Salient took a vocal stance on political matters and printed informative diagrams about how to build bombs and covered issues like abortion, lesbianism and Maori rights. VUWSA also donated some money to the Viet Cong so that they could purchase a tank. In 1975 the VUWSA Trust was founded to aid students with their legal costs.

In 1992 the Student Union Building was renovated at the expense of students. The University handed over its control to a separate entity—The Union—which students have no control over. The Union, aside from its misleading name, has proven unhelpful on many occasions. In 2002 the relationship with VUWSA blew up but since the signing of an agreement in 2006 things have been improving.

The neo-liberal reforms of the late 80s and 90s added to the woes of students. Radicalism declined because students had to start relying on part-time work so they could live. Add onto that increased cost of study that the fourth Labour government sprung on students and you got yourself a doozy of a problem.

These days VUWSA is struggling to stay relevant. While all of the services are widely used there is a strong section of the student population that believe that they shouldn’t be coerced into joining an association which many of them think does nothing for them.

A series of mildly left-wing to self declared “radical socialist” presidents and executives providing many shenanigans that amuse many students have also done a whole lot of good work resolving issues over ownership of the Student Union Building, the growing amount of Student debt and issues with Ngai Tauira.

So take part. VUWSA is your association. Take pride in it. Get involved. Hold the exec accountable. Help out your fellow students and most of all have fun!

Entering the gallery, one is confronted first by material detailing the armistice of November 1918. To the left is a lounge area with comfy leather sofas and headphones on which you can listen to interviews from the World War One Oral History Archive. Walking through into the exhibition’s main chamber, you’ll find documents detailing the 1918 influenza pandemic and the 1919 vote over whether to introduce alcohol prohibition, which looked like it would succeed until overturned by the votes of returning soldiers. This part of the exhibition is illustrated by a wealth of cartoons, many from prohibitionist papers War Cry and Vanguard—one cartoon from War Cry shows wholesome ingredients (barley, oats, hops) put through “Satan’s Sieve” and emerging as evil spirits to drown the globe; this image is set against one from the soldiers’ paper Quick March, depicting a soldier telling a businessman that as he defended him from the Hun, it is now the businessman’s turn to defend the soldier from prohibition. Next to this material is a newsreel showing Dunedin’s peace celebrations in July 1919.

Tragedy

The exhibition’s really moving element comes from the material detailing soldiers’ experiences returning home—besides photographs from their journeys and village memorials are advertisements informing soldiers how they can now become farmers. These experiences were recorded by Nicholas Boyack and Jane Tolerton in the Oral History Archive and their subsequent book In The Shadow of War. As part of the exhibition, Boyack and Tolerton gave a talk detailing how badly this country treated its servicemen. After being heavily pressured into fighting (partly by campaigns telling girls to marry only soldiers), their harrowing experiences on the battlefield were ignored by countrymen who simply didn’t want to know, treated those with shell-shock (almost all returned servicemen) as insane, looked down on and attempted to prohibit their drinking, and advised girls not to marry soldiers for fear of VD. On top of all this, the few soldiers who managed to make their under-supported farms thrive often lost them once the depression set in.

Comedy

Yet the tragedy of our mistreatment of soldiers is set off by the final part of the exhibition: letters from Edward, Prince of Wales, to his mistress Freda Dudley Ward, about his 40-stops-in-29-days tour of New Zealand in 1920. Besides their appearance in the exhibition, the letters were narrated in a talk by the Turnbull’s Curator of Manuscripts David Colquhoun. Edward, although adored by the local press, privately despised us as a nation of ingratiating drunks and “ham-faced” women incapable of dancing. The Governor, Lord Liverpool, was “hopelessly pompous” and grossly fat; his wife incapable of conversation. All-in-all, the Prince remarked that it was “a rotten way to see a fine country… Returned soldiers and shrieking crowds and school children are all I shall remember.”

Tristan Egarr

The exhibition closes on 14 March (this Saturday!), and a guided tour will take place at midday this Thursday, 12 March. Meanwhile, the National Archives has a similar exhibition, ‘An Impressive Silence: Public Memory and Personal Experience of the Great War,’ which runs until May.

This story has been told twice before – in Baxter’s memoir We Shall Not Cease, and in Paul Baker’s history of all aspects of conscription in the war, King and Country Call. Opening Grant’s book, I was a little apprehensive as to whether he could really add anything to the story. We Shall Not Cease is a harrowing, personal ordeal, and stands alongside Owls Do Cry and The Bone People as the most powerful of our nation’s literature. King and Country Call’s detailed research reveals so much pain that the New Zealanders of the 1910s inflicted on one-another that you feel betrayed by your own people. Field Punishment No. 1 reaches neither the personal passion of Baxter nor the historical breadth and scope of Baker, but it does add several important details to the story.

First of all, because Baxter (the religious objector) wrote an important memoir and had a famous son (poet James), he is far better known than Briggs (the socialist objector), even though the latter took on more leadership duties among their fellow objectors, and Grant seeks to redress this imbalance. Secondly, Grant spends the last third of his book putting Briggs and Baxter into an “anti-militarist tradition” stretching from Parihaka to the present: this helps us to understand where their strength came from, and what they have inspired. Thirdly, the book comes with sixteen pages of colour prints showing Bob Kerr’s paintings of the ordeal; Kerr’s haunting work is perhaps the book’s major selling point. And finally, if the book sells well, it will help inform another generation of the time in our history when Pakeha were crueller to our own kind than in any other era – equal with the racist treatment of Maori and Chinese in the 19th century as the most damning indictments of my people’s character.

By David Grant,
Paintings by Bob Kerr

However, due to AUS action Victoria University of Wellington instead accepted another 13 voluntary redundancies instead of the 18 proposed. Senior College of Education staff member Dr. Joanna Kidman had said that staff would protest via an “information boycott”, as “information provided by staff appears to have been used to target individuals for redundancies without them knowing it would be used for this purpose.”

Victoria Communications Adviser Heidi Stedman disputed AUS’ claim that staff hadn’t been notified of the cuts, pointing out that University policy is to personally notify staff affected by any potential changes. Although Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Education) Prof. Dugald Scott did advise College staff in June that there would be no more cuts, the second round “was prompted by forecasting for the 2009 budget.”

While the voluntary redundancies removed the need for the boycott, the quality of teaching the College can now offer remains a concern. In particular, AUS told Salient that reduced staffing numbers mean lecturers are now having to teach outside of their specialist areas, and so are not providing the quality of training promised in the Education Act. Stedman told Salient that the allocation of teaching responsibilities is ultimately the job of the Head of School “in consultation with staff.”

Besides staffing reductions, Dr Kidman also claimed that “face to face hours between lecturers and student teachers have been cut by more than half—from 66 hours to 25 in English, say, or 58 to 25 in Maths.” This further reduces the quality of training—for which students continue to pay the same level of fees.

The cuts to the College of Education are a result of the way university funding is allocated between different subjects. In August 2006, as Victoria University’s budget surplus fell below the level recommended by the Tertiary Education Commission (TEC), Vice-Chancellor Pat Walsh stated that “The level of fees increases proposed in 2007 will need to address the issue of the under-resourcing in our humanities & social sciences and education programmes.”

The TEC’s recent review of the Performance Based Research Fund suggests such under-resourcing is compounded by assessment procedures that favour the physical and biological sciences over the humanities. On 26 November, the Vice-Chancellors’ Committee stated that it is “nonsense” for the Government to restrict fee rises via the Fee Maxima, as they do not understand funding requirements, with Auckland University’s Hugh Fletcher pointing out that law students should be paying a lot more than history students “because of the difference in lifetime earnings.”

Perhaps most damaging, the increased allocation of university funding to research has come about at the same time that New Zealand’s colleges of education were absorbed into her universities (the final merger between Vic and the College of Education didn’t take place until January 2005, and mergers in Dunedin and Christchurch were ongoing throughout 2008). We expect teachers to help sculpt us into capable adults, but their training appears to be dangerously undervalued.

December

Last December, as soon as the new Government came into being, it passed under urgency two justice and two money-related acts. The Bail Amendment Act reversed changes made by Labour in 2007 which had meant bail could only be denied to offenders presenting a “real and significant risk”—National have turned the clock back so that bail can be denied to those who present any degree of risk. The Sentencing (Offences Against Children) Amendment Act makes an offence committed against a child an aggravating factor during sentencing. The Taxation Act brought in a new set of tax cuts, while the controversial Employment Relations Amendment Act puts all employees of small businesses (i.e. those with fewer than twenty workers) on a 90day “probation period”, during which they can be fired without any particular reason. National also introduced the Domestic Violence (Enhancing Safety) Bill, allowing police to issue on-the-spot protection orders to those at risk from abuse, without having to go through the courts seeking a warrant—this bill is now at the select committee stage. Besides these justice and economic bills, National also passed acts discouraging renewable electricity and biofuels.

Summer Holidays

While parliament took a break through January, John Key broke his arm, and Health Minsiter Tony Ryall continued cracking down on under-performing district health boards. Education Minister Anne Tolley baffled teachers throughout the land by suggesting they split the school-day into two separate streams, something which would require far more resources than the government is willing to use. Other than that, not a hell of a lot happened, because everyone was too busy being drunk, suntanned and swimming to pay any attention to politics. Oh, and John Key turned up and smiled at Te Tii Waitangi marae on Waitangi day, something Clark had given up on as it proved too stressful.

February

When parliament resumed in February, National returned to the business of passing new legislation under urgency. Their repeal of the controversial Electoral Finance Act was supported by everyone except the Greens, and they also introduced a bill to streamline the Resource Management Act, now at the select committee stage. However, the main work has been undertaken by Simon Power and Judith Collins in introducing law-and-order bills, at the same time as Judith Collins took Corrections head Barry Matthews to task over an auditor’s report showing his department was still allowing prisoners to breach their parole conditions without facing the consequences. Two of these new bills—the Corrections Amendment Act 2 (cracking down on prisoners’ communication with the outside world, for example by confiscating cellphones) and the Criminal Proceeds (Recovery) Bill—were actually written by Labour but had been allowed to languish until the Nats brought them into play (as we speak, the latter bill is awaiting a final reading). National’s Criminal Investigations (Bodily Samples) Amendment Bill, which grants police greater powers to take DNA samples from alleged offenders, also passed its first reading.

Finally, Power and Collins have introduced four more bills which await final readings and select committee approval. The Gangs and Organised Crime Bill makes membership of a criminal organisation an aggravating factor in sentencing. The Sentencing (Offenders Levy) Amendment Bill requires all offenders to pay a $50 levy to cover their victims’ legal costs. The Children, Young Persons and Their Families (Youth Court) Bill brings 12- and 13-year-olds into the jurisdiction of the youth court, and gives the court a wider range of tools and punishments. Finally, the controversial Sentencing and Parole Reform Bill would bring in the Act Party’s beloved three-strikes policy, denying parole to repeat serious violent offenders—however, National have not promised to support this bill beyond the select committee stage, where it sits currently.

Final Thoughts

So, at the end of 100 days we’ve seen a tough approach to departmental heads in both justice and health, and a swathe of tough-on-crime legislation. This legislation only deals with toughening up the response to the effects of crime, but largely neglects the causes (domestic violence, socio-economic stress, poor quality education) that National promise to now turn to. John Key making a proper appearance at Waitangi, on the heels of appointing both Maori Party leaders to ministerial portfolios, makes this perhaps the first time in its history that National is more in touch with Maori voters than Labour is. The response to the “economic crisis” has been slight but certain, while the details of a promised RMA reform are yet to be really nutted out. National also sought to please the crowd by removing “nanny state” restrictions on fatty foods in schools. So, all-in-all, a bouncy, well-presented first one-hundred days in office, with a respectable amount of cross-party cooperation, but ultimately lacking in meaningful long-term solutions to the economic, environmental or justice concerns at the heart of their programme.

Tom Cosm

Tom Cosm’s set at Canaan Downs proved once again his standing as Aotearoa’s greatest trance DJ. Last year he played the midnight-on-New Year’s set to thousands of trippers under fluoro lights; this year he played the final set to a few hundred dedicated folk, dancing all the sweat from their bodies under the intense sunshine, clad in outrageous costumes as they spun about, grinning mildly and sharing waterbottles. Cosm, who despite gigantic dreads comes across as a sweet lil’ computer geek when he speaks to his audience, mixed in ‘Poi E’ and ‘Bad Boys’ among his own ‘The Sluzziest of Fuzz’. He gives all of his music away for free, and even hosts online electronic music tutorials—check out www.cosm.co.nz for downloads.

An Emerald City

Standouts at both Canaan Downs (playing before Little Bushman on New Year’s Eve) and the Big Day Out (morning in the boiler room), An Emerald City’s 2008 EP heralded their arrival as one of the most interesting acts in the land, playing a sort of instrumental pixie jam with sitars, capes, twigs-in-the-hair and large dancing eyeballs. Imagine Godspeed You! Black Emperor without the annoyingly drawn-out silences. They have been recording an LP in a cave somewhere, so keep an eye out.

Fantomas, Pendulum and the Prodigy

While a sadly mediocre selection of guitar acts (Bullet for My Valentine, The Datsuns, and Elememo P) left thousands of rock fans underwhelmed with their presence on the main stage at this year’s Big Day Out, the three incredible performances of the show were given by these three acts at the frontier between guitar rock and electronica. Fantomas, the demonic spawn of Mike Patton (Faith No More, Tomahawk) who cover old movie tunes and ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game’ with heavy guitars and drums playing narratives more often than the beat, featured Patton at a mixing desk, screaming into the mic and gesturing directions at his guitarist, bass player and drummer who perched on the other side of the stage. Pendulum played to the biggest crowd of the festival, blasting bleepy, bloopy synth, whammy guitars and pulsing bass, penetrating the wind interference in its cocky, laddish delivery to reach our ears. The Prodigy’s closing set in the boiler room saw their two MCs—the punk one and the dreaded one—strut across the stage, calling out to their audience as if leading them into battle. Okay, so neither Pendulum nor the Prodigy were exactly intelligent music, but their sound was fucking massive, and Fantomas was just fascinating. Also, Neil Young was Neil Young, which is sweet and all but not all that amazing to watch.

Leonard Cohen

He’s 75, he wears a pinstripe suit and skips onstage. Leonard Cohen is still a holy man. Warming up from newer tracks like opener ‘Dance Me to the End of Love’ to hit his great folk work (‘Suzanne’, ‘The Partisan’) in full stride with just his voice, the heavenly voices of long-time collaborator Sharon Robinson, alongside the cartwheeling Webb sisters, and Javier Mas on the bandurria. I’m not sure why the promoters felt he needed a warm up act – Sam Hunt was just embarrassing. Perhaps they thought that by showing us something mediocre, Cohen’s greatness would shine all the brighter, but he didn’t need it. ‘Democracy’, adapted from the words of a perverse madman in Cohen’s novel Beautiful Losers, became an ode to the progress of the ship of state, was the most perfectly apt statement one could make in the days following President Obama’s inauguration. His years in the Mount Baldy zen monastery have clearly left Cohen in great health, joking that he had tried all the pharmaceuticals and philosophies he could, “but cheerfulness kept creeping through.” Nevertheless, it is unlikely, given his advanced years, that we will see him again, and given his unparalleled lyrical genius, it’s not unwarranted to claim that we shall never see such greatness on stage again. But we still have those incredible words

History

Opening in Sydney in 1992, the Big Day Out came to Auckland in 1994. In those early years, the event was very much about bringing the big grunge acts of the day to an antipodean crowd – in its first six years, headliners included Nirvana, the Violent Femmes, Primus, Sonic Youth, Soundgarden, the Smashing Pumpkins, Rage Against the Machine and the Prodigy, as well as a bit of brilliant eccentricity with Bjork and Nick Cave. In 1998 the Big Day Out was canceled and replaced with an electronic-only event. After the combined rock and techno event’s return in 1999, there followed several years of Industrial and Nu Metal domination, with headliners Korn, Marilyn Manson, Rammstein, System of a Down and Tool where the big grunge acts of the mid-90s had once stood. With Metallica headlining 2004 and Iggy and the Stooges in 2006, the organisers began to show a penchant for aging nostalgia acts, repeated this year with Neil Young. In the last few years, the popularity of retro garage rock has come to the fore, with the Kings of Leon, the Strokes, the White Stripes and this year’s Arctic Monkeys performance.

Local Morning Delights

Although it pains me to admit it, the banality of this garage rock means that the guitar-heavy acts are now looking weaker when compared to the boiler room’s practitioners of innovation. Arriving around eleven in the morning, me and my reviewing companion headed straight for this tent, where An Emerald City were warming up. Probably the best addition to local music in 2008, these guys are a lot like Godspeed You! Black Emperor only without the overly drawn out silences, but with a violinist, a guy with a sitar and a cape (because why have just a sitar when you can accessorize it so?), a dancing eyeball (probably the spirit of the Residents come to help out), and general shamanic instrumental awesomeness. The violinist wasn’t wearing a twig on his head as he was at their Canaan Downs performance over New Year’s, but that’s okay because they had an extra level of intensity shooting through their sound at the Big Day Out.

An Emerald City’s strange, beautiful instrumental strumming was followed by some New Zealand Drum and Bass from Antiform and State of Mind. Antiform’s set sounded promising, but I really had to head to the beer tent at this stage, and arrived back for the beginning of State of Mind. Given the heavy, dirty punch of their 2006 long player Take Control I was expecting a lot from these guys, but a lack of bass kick gave them an underwhelming build up. However, the sweaty crowd was having fun, and when they finally pulled out ‘Sunking’ as their last track our hands exploded into the air, and at the end of it I remembered that one of my sarong’s main uses is to wipe everyone else’s sweat of my back after such intense dance sets.

The Boring Part

Moving from State of Mind’s boiler room set to the afternoon acts on the main stage was like witnessing the death of rock’n’roll. The only big “metal” act this year was the sanitised tweeny metal of Bullet for My Valentine; the Datsuns gave their usual energetic but uninspired and simplistic set of three-chord tracks; the Living End played catchy and enjoyable yet ultimately empty and repetitive pop; and somehow, someone once again thought that booking Elemeno P – easily New Zealand’s worst band – on the main stage was a good idea. This last group’s mediocre pop-“punk” is made unendurable by their vocalist’s total and utter lack of singing ability, and while it’s perfectly fine for them to play awful music if they enjoy it, what makes them such a blight on our vocal landscape is the fact that putting their songs on all those C4 and Telecom ads forces an otherwise unhostile public to suffer. Seeing the Telecom-branded video screens by the stage, I began to realise why such an obviously unbearable band had been given such an inexplicably central position in the lineup. They were followed by Bullet for My Valentine, who tried to be hardcore but couldn’t help coming off as cute, while their endearing lil’ fans ran around in circles.

Perhaps the best guitar-based act of the day were the Arctic Monkeys. Personally I find these Brits dull and overrated, but since I wanted to find out why they’re so popular I went along to watch: yes, their music is so simple they can play it well while entirely pissed (which they were), and yes there is no emotion in their lyrics, but the lyrics are nonetheless quite witty, and I finally understand why they are so popular – because they put on a fun show, and because their drunkenness and quirky accents are engaging. So although I still find nothing in their stuff to connect with, it was fun and I danced along. Next up was Neil Young, whose Harvest is still a truly great album. However, seeing this aging rocker on stage was nothing special – he looked cool, and sounded like, well, Neil Young. But Fantomas were on at the same time, and as interesting as Young is, he’s no Mike Patton.

The most thoughtful acts of the day had to be My Morning Jacket and TV On the Radio, who both put out insightful and creative albums in 2008, mixing quiet, brooding guitar with heavy electronic bass lines. Sadly, both acts were let down by the sound systems, as their delicate performances could not stand up to the wind interference. Nevertheless, they still stood out as some of the most interesting acts of the day, and TV’ were a lovely comedown from Pendulum, even if singer Tunde Adebimpe’s usually soaring vocals were muffled – but the starring roles went to the three acts that put out electronic bass lines and guitar textures so powerful nothing could stand in their way…

The Highlights: Pendulum, Fantomas and the Prodigy

That Perth Drum and Bass metalheads-turned-rock act Pendulum could kick the shit out of any of the proper rock’n’roll acts of the day was demonstrated by their audience size: whereas the D (the fenced in mosh pit) was barely full for Bullet for My Valentine (who played before Pendulum) and the Datsuns (who followed immediately after), Pendulum packed out Mount Smart stadium’s field almost to the back, and had people dancing in the stands. BLAM is probably the most appropriate way to sum these guys up. Well, maybe beep, Blam beep BEEP BLAM, because a) Jesus Christ that was enormous, and b) their synth bleeps really are quite silly, although yeah they’re a helluva lot of fun. ‘Voodoo People’, ‘Propane Nightmares’ and ‘Blood Sugar’ had the whole stadium leaping about, howling with pleasure. Their MC managed to get in a fair bit of hyping up without becoming really annoying or ruining the music. Of course, unless you like to ponder the confluence of techno and metal as if their fusion were a great philosophical question, Pendulum are hardly what you would call deep or thoughtful music, and they sounded positively shiny under all that sun when set against State of Mind’s serious, cavernous set – but the beats were stronger than anything else on the day, and it worked.

Fantomas, the creation of Mike Patton – the intellectual powerhouse behind Tomahawk, Faith No More and Mr. Bungle – saw Patton sitting on one side of the stage, squealing into the mike, feeding everything through his console and conducting with hand signals his guitarist, bass player and drummer as they looked on. He stared at the audience until we got goose bumps and, playing baseball classic ‘Take Me Out To The Ball Game’, told us to wave our hands along and pretend that it was “cricket, or something.” Giving us such a brilliantly eccentric act as Fantomas has to be the organiser’s greatest achievement. Thanks guys – I will never forget Patton’s soul-piercing stare, or the way my reviewing companion Haimona turned to me and said “that man is raping sound” with a gigantic grin on his face.

The last act of the night were the Prodigy, come back from the dead to attempt to reclaim ‘Voodoo People’ from Pendulum, and pack out the boiler room until it damn near exploded. MCs Maxim Reality (he of the monstrous dreads) and Keith Flint (he of the punky spikes and snarl) strode across the stage, strutting and issuing such commanding arrogance that I felt like I would follow them into battle. The lack of space didn’t prevent us from jumping about madly, and the day’s weirdest moment came with thousands chanting “Smack my bitch up!” I was a little too creeped out to chant along, although knowing that this was really just musical irony at its bluntest kept me amused.

So while the dearth of decent rock’n’roll or metal did sadden my old guitar player’s heart, the massive impact of these three acts, the bass that shat upon my ears and fierce attack of Patton, Reality and Flint’s vocals made the day more than worthwhile. Add in the beauty and promise of An Emerald City’s set and the satisfaction of hearing State of Mind do Sunking live, and we have one well worthwhile day of noises.

Faculty of Graduate Research
Assistant Vice-Chancellor (Research) Charles Daugherty spoke to Council about the way VUW’s system for managing postgraduates is devolved to each faculty, creating a recruitment disadvantage which hampers the University’s strategic goal to increase the proportion of postgraduates at Vic, which at 3.7% of full time students is lower than any other New Zealand university except AUT. As Chancellor Tim Beaglehole noted, the Academic Board has unanimously agreed that a single Faculty of Graduate Research to manage postgraduate thesis students is the way to go. Dr Jock Phillips expressed concern that individual departments were already shirking a responsibility to channel talented undergrads into postgraduate studies, but Assoc. Prof. Dolores Janiewski disputed this and noted that the three separate processes for international students’ to enrol in thesis study was confusing, as US universities all have a single process.

Investment Plan KPIs
Council’s discussion of the Investment Plan KPI report (information from which influenced the decision to create a Faculty of Graduate Research) largely focussed on the external relationships section, with VUW’s relationships with both other universities and local iwi brought into question. Rosemary Barrington said the report was frustrating as KPIs are process- rather than outcome-oriented. Vice-Chancellor Pat Walsh commented on the relationship between VUW’s and Massey’s engineering programmes, and the potential for greater collaboration. Shaan Stevens criticised the decline in interaction with local iwi, linking this to increasing numbers of Maori going overseas to study. Outgoing VUWSA President Joel Cosgrove questioned students’ experiences of hostels, with the Vice-Chancellor responding by noting additional placement numbers in 2009 due to Te Puni and St George.

Accounts
VUW’s management accounts for the period ending 31 October were presented by Chief Financial Officer Wayne Morgan and Finance Committee chair James Ogden. Year to Date revenue is currently $0.4m below budget, but expenditure is $1.4m below budget. Ogden stated that a decline in EFTS numbers could herald “unpleasant surprises”, while the fact that restructuring costs would be brought into the accounts when audited would bring VUW’s surplus down to $3.2m.

Bad news: Faculty of Science revenue is down $791,000 due to a decrease in external research income; Faculty of Commerce revenue is $514,000 below budget due to a decrease in enrolments; Faculty of Humanities revenue is down $550,000 mainly due to a decrease in Malay Teaching Contract revenue; Faculty of Education people costs are $940,000 over budget due to restructuring; and Library expenditure is $242,000 over budget due to database, copyright and depreciation costs.

Good news: International student revenue is $443,000 above budget, while Finance and VC revenue is above budget and Deputy Vice Chancellor expenditure is below what was budgeted for. The accounts also lay out expenditure on projects such as Te Puni Village, the Teaching & Research Building, and Campus Hub Redevelopment.

Equity
The Equity Advisory Group’s 2008 report, tabled by Pro Vice-Chancellor (Equity) Deborah Willis, analyses the “recruitment, achievement and retention of Maori, Pasifika and disabled students.” Chancellor Beaglehole noted that the report’s substantial length was justified, before a number of Council members raised their concerns. Student rep Jordan King noted that the problem of high fail rates among Pasifika students, particularly in Law (with only 51% or Pasifika students passing, as opposed to over 70% for both Maori and overall students), had not been addressed. Jock Phillips noted that in addition, the report contains little in the way of comparison between student numbers and the wider community, and does not provide strategies to change problems identified. Shaan Stevens asked how the drop in Maori and Pasifika enrolments at Vic in 2007, and Pro Chancellor Ian McKinnon asked whether more of these students were now going to other institutions. Joel Cosgrove noted the worrying 34% decrease in first year Pasifika enrolments despite an increase in programmes seeking to reverse this. Willis responded that the drop at Vic was largely in sub-degree programmes, and suggested some changes were being made to address the problem. Pat Walsh noted that much of the decline in Maori and Pasifika numbers was due to a decrease in mature student numbers.

Helen Sutch asked whether equity reporting should be extended beyond issues of gender and race, and whether equity strategies were being incorporated into everyday decision making; Willis replied to the latter question that heads of schools were showing positive signs of taking ownership of equity issues. Fleur Fitzsimons praised the report, but stressed that it must be put into practice and compared with other universities.

In regards to staff equity, Cosgrove noted that while men outnumber women at the top of the staffing hierarchy, woman outnumber men at the bottom; Dolores Janiewski pointed out that the large number of women at the bottom of this hierarchy were often in general rather than academic staffing roles, and that the gender equity issues examined by the report focused almost solely upon academic staff.
Besides the Equity Report, Council also discussed a Pay and Employment Equity Review, which will not be undertaken in 2009. Some members questioned the decision not to undertake a review in the coming year. Jock Phillips discussed how a similar review had been conducted in the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, noting that oral submissions had been valuable in giving personal evidence of discrimination, but that the review had been time-consuming and restricted to issues of gender equity. Fleur Fitzsimons put forward a motion that high priority be given to undertaking such a review in 2010, seconded by Jordan King; the motion passed.

Yesterday, a friend of mine remarked that the election of Barack Hussein Obama is the first historic moment we have lived through that actually feels good – sure, I lived through the fall of the USSR and Berlin Wall, but I was too young to notice. 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq were historic, and truly awful; China overtaking the USA as the largest manufacturer of technological goods a couple years back was historic, but in a hidden, unremarked kind of way, and I don’t know that it’s a positive thing.

Obama gives me hope. But I’m somewhat frightened of the hope he gives me. When he spoke about his presidency being “the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian , Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled,” I cried because I never expected a US President to speak so genuinely with respect for queer people, to include us in an historic thankyou as if we are not an embarrassment. I think back to the utter cynicism of 2000’s race between the twin evils of Gore the empty block of wood and Bush the walking joke; at the mad arrogance of Bush’s march towards war, and remember that I never thought a US President could ever make me cry with joy.

I grew to an awareness of the world and America’s role within it during the superficial media circus of the Clinton impeachment, but the cynicism I gained from his eight years were nothing compared to the next eight, as Bush, who began his tenure as a clown notable only for statements like “Africa is a very poor nation” and “is our children learning?”, would go on to demonstrate just how corrupt US democracy could be. Defending the torture of prisoners of war just as long as it didn’t cause organ failure; massive tax cuts for the rich alone; unfettered corporate freedom, allowing Enron and Wall Street to swindle the American people; his support for high schools that prohibit mixed-race dating; religious Puritanism that allows Kansas to prohibit the teaching of real science, and bans on gay marriage; and of course Bush’s legacy as a Texan governor allowing virtually unconstrained gun sales and the execution of mentally retarded inmates. All this is over because millions, led by our generation, said Yes, we can put a stop to this; fuck our cynical hip disdain for the system, let’s try to change it.

During election night, a CNN pundit noted that Obama’s election was due to a new youth movement, and that whereas the movement of ’68 – the Yippies with their porcine candidate Pigasus – rebelled outside and against the system, we are now working to right it from within. But this is only half the picture. Between the assassination of Kennedy and the election of Obama, the USA has waited 45 years for an inspirational leader. Kennedy’s election constituted a youth movement for civil rights, acting within the system. It was only his death and the Great Society’s descent into the quagmire of Vietnam that forced the youth movement to reject the system entirely.

And I remember back to my involvement with the anti-globalisation movement of the late ‘90s and early new millennium, our rejection of a capitalism that undermined farmers in the poor world and shifted manufacturing from Detroit to sweat-shop nations without any notion of a minimum wage, all in the name of ‘liberty.’ We fought the system from outside – and lost. For just as hope seemed possible, with the dissolution of the Cancun talks suggesting the WTO could no longer dictate to us, along came 9/11. We couldn’t fight the underlying, fundamental issue of global inequality when we were hit with the need to fight the more immediate issue of an unjust war. Not only were we distracted from the economic battles, we also, despite the march of millions for peace on 15 February 2003, lost the battle for peace too. And slowly, through undergraduate debates and extensive reading, it dawned on me that the anti-globalisation movement got a lot of things wrong. Free trade is not itself the cause of poverty: rather, it is the manipulation of free trade by monopolies; the absence of free migration, meaning that while companies can move production to low-wage areas, workers are not free to migrate to higher-wage nations, which allows the downward spiral of living standards; and finally, it is the fact that rich nations preaching ‘free trade’ in order to remove regulations protecting poor-world farmers then refuse to remove subsidies and protections for their own farmers, that causes inequality. The problem is not globalisation, but unfair manipulation of trade rules – which can be fought within the system, by using the WTO for good – not by attempting to bring it down by smashing the windows of people’s shops. So just as the youth of the sixties moved outside the system when their attempts to reform it from the inside failed, our generation has moved within the system when we realised that throwing stones from the outside was not making anything better.

But hope is a very unsettling thing. Under eight years of the blatantly callous Bush administration, an attitude of lazy cynicism was easy to maintain. If things worked out well, then good; but we didn’t expect them to, so when, for example, Iraq turned into the sectarian violent mess we expected, we could just intone “I told you so.” Now that I actually trust Obama to make things better, what happens if he fails? What happens if withdrawing from Iraq makes things worse? I have to take the risk and trust that he’s right, but if he isn’t I’m going to have to eat the sort of humble pie my conservative opponents have had stuffed in their mouths, to my delight, for so long.

Of course, Obama knows he cannot fix the world – as he writes in The Audacity of Hope, “I am bound to disappoint some, if not all” and although “we might not solve every problem, but we can get something meaningful done.” It would be wrong to expect too much – indeed, even though I was unhappy with the state of the world in 2000, things have gotten so much worse in the years since that I would be happy if he merely reversed this slide and got things back to where they were at the turn of the millennium, when despite gnawing poverty we did have a stable global economy and no major international conflict.

As Obama demonstrates in The Audacity of Hope and in his acceptance speech – “to those who would tear the world down, we will defeat you” – he is no uncompromising pacifist, and although part of me worries, I’m okay with this. One of the reasons I flocked to his movement over 2005-6 (besides the maturity of his honest declaration that he had tried drugs in his youth and, unlike Clinton, actually inhaled), was the fact that one of his major advisors was Samantha Power, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. While Power, like Obama, strongly opposed the invasion of Iraq, she supported military intervention in Yugoslavia and has encouraged Obama to support intervention in Darfur, based on her discovery that the leaders of the USA have not only known about every genocide from Armenia and the Holocaust to Zimbabwe, Yugoslavia and the Sudan as they were happening, but they have consistently refused to act until the number of victims in each case had already become overwhelming. Obama will not support the kind of isolationist pacifism that Robert Fisk (and sometimes myself) avows; but he will think long and hard about how best to utilise his massive military resources for good. Yes, he will get things wrong, and yes, in a military situation, this means the death of innocents. But I have to trust his judgement, just as I trust Power’s (sadly, she had to resign from his campaign team in March of this year after an offhand remark in which she called Hillary Clinton a “monster”, but her arguments remain a part of the new President’s philosophy). Whereas McCain wanted to draw out the war in Iraq, ludicrously believed he could defeat Al Qaeda within one term, refused to engage in diplomacy with Iran or North Korea, and sought to remove Russia from the G8, Obama has pledged to talk directly with the USA’s enemies, in the belief that diplomacy is the best option, and in the knowledge that places like Iran – whose voter turnout is usually around 80 per cent, double that of the USA’s, and whose people held massive pro-USA rallies after 9/11 to demonstrate their empathy with the victims of terrorism – are not so different from his own country, after all. Obama has pledged to close Guantanamo Bay and withdraw from Iraq within 16 months of assuming office, moving 7000 troops to Afghanistan, which was always the more justified of the two wars (although it may be no less futile). The challenges are huge, but the leader now has the right attitude to meet them. One French pundit observed that Obama is the America of jazz and the beats, of Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., not the America of religious intolerance, processed fat and crappy action comedies embodied by Bush. As Sarah Silverman noted, Americans no longer have to pretend to be Canadian when they travel abroad.

The victory is not significant just because a man who was four when black Americans were finally guaranteed the right to vote has gone on to become their first black President. It is significant because his politics and policies signal a change of direction, replacing fear with hope. And yet I fear for this hope, because now we have something to lose. But fuck it, let’s celebrate. Hells yeah.

In a 2006 speech to the University Chancellors of New Zealand at Wellington’s Intercontinental Hotel, Dr Cullen outlined his history of a Hegelian dialectic in tertiary education funding. The thesis of elitist funding was found in the 1980s to be holding back innovation, with low participation rates compared to the OECD average. The antithesis of reform replaced the “highly stratified funding system” with the Equivalent Full-Time Student (EFTS) system, under which funding is apportioned to enrolment numbers. The Education Amendment Act 1990 disestablished the University Grants Committee and the Department of Education, devolving responsibility for financial management to the schools themselves. This forced universities to take responsibility for balancing their own budgets, making them commercially-minded entities.

But Cullen argues this new system resulted in a glut of “middling degrees in law, business and communications” rather than the trained engineers and scientists our economy needed. Dr Cullen presented Labour’s new strategy of multi-year education planes as a synthesis of students’ market choices and the needs of the country as a whole for quality research and targeted training. Thus the Government have been gradually decreasing the level of EFTS funding (which is still the largest slice of the pie), and increasing the level handed out via PBRF ratings.

The Association of University Staff (AUS) have been consistently critical of the way PBRF functions, even as they have welcomed a focus upon rewarding quality research. AUS’ National President, Associate Professor Maureen Montgomery, has criticised “the improper use of individual PBRF ratings in staff performance appraisals,” which “creates anger and disillusionment among academic staff.” More broadly, the Vice-Chancellors argue that the current Tertiary Education Strategy’s “emphasis on goals and outcomes rather than the broader social, economic and environmental context” combined with a lack of university consultation and Parliamentary scrutiny, “has the potential to narrow the educational focus of universities.” Cuts to the Humanities programme at Canterbury and Education here at Victoria are indicative of this narrowing.

While the Vice-Chancellors’ Committee notes the many concerns with both the Tertiary Education Strategy and the PBRF evaluations, they argue that the basic problem with current tertiary education funding is still one of size: there simply isn’t enough state funding to cover the cost of educating students, given the capped increases to their fees. The Vice-Chancellors argue that polytechnics are getting too large a slice of the funding pie relative to their value to society (ouch). AUS also argues that since only 11 per cent of applicants to the Marsden Fund for research grants are successful, the fund must be increased. Dr Cullen’s budget this year informs us that the Government are “making significant additional investment in tertiary education – more than $900 million over four years, including student support, to contribute to New Zealand’s transformation to a high-income, knowledge-based economy.” But due to a number of factors, from the increasing complexity and expense of research equipment to the continuing flux of student numbers, the state’s investments will not alleviate the financial pressure on our teachers in the foreseeable future.

Victoria’s Vice-Chancellor Pat Walsh argued in a 3 September Dominion Post opinion piece that Labour’s tentative election promise to roll forward a universal student allowance is the wrong way to go forward with tertiary funding. The Government has costed the scheme at $728 million over four years, and while Walsh writes “we understand the financial pressures our students face and are well aware that many baby boomers remember the benefits they received” from free education, he argues that “students are already getting a far bigger slice of the tertiary education funding pie than the institutions that educate them.” He adds that the nation’s universities are collectively “$230 million a year worse off in real terms than they would be if government funding had been maintained at the level of the early 1990s.” Walsh goes on to note that the we spend 42 per cent of tertiary funding directly on students, whereas the OECD average is 18 per cent, meaning we are sacrificing quality for affordability. At the end of last year, the Tertiary Education Commission denied Victoria’s request to raise fees by the maximum 5 per cent, but before you join in those angry “fuck VUW management” protests, you might want to think about whether affordability is really more important than quality. Personally, I have to side with Walsh on this one.

So how does the University receive its funding, and how well does this meet its expenditure? As shown in the table below, VUW had a total revenue of $289.3 million in 2007: 44 per cent from the state, 19 per cent from domestic student fees, 11 per cent from international students fees, almost 10 per cent via research grants, and the rest through commerce and donations. Expenditure of $272.6 million (58 per cent of which went towards staff wages) left a surplus on $16.7 million, so unlike Wellington’s major hospital, her major university is able to balance its budget. The question is, does this balancing act damage the quality of Victoria’s services? To answer this, we need to look at evidence much wider than the numbers laid out in a budget – we need to look at the feelings of our staff and students, as explored over the following pages.

—

Victoria University of Wellington’s COnsolidated Statement of Financial Performance for the year ended 31 December 2007

Revenue
Government Grants                            $126,756,000
Domestic Tuition Fees                        $56,216,000
International Tuition Fees                   $31,254,000
Research Support                                $27,795,000
Commercial                                        $19,367,000
Student and Family                             $11,007,000
Other Revenue                                    $12,883,000
Earnings from Trusts and Surpluses     $4,119,000
Total                                                 $289,397,000

Expenditure
People                                               $157,933,000
Occupancy                                          $19,787,000
Equipment                                             $1,779,000
Information Technology                        $8,597,000
Operating                                             $57,281,000
Depreciation and amortisation             $27,292,000
Total                                                  $272,669,000

2007 Surplus                           $16,728,000

I’d love to thank so many people for making this year enjoyable, and for improving Salient markedly over the course of the year. First and foremost, Tony for not only putting the magazine together and designing its look, but for anchoring the rest of the team with his phenomenally amicable attitude. Seonah and her newshounds Sarah and Sam (among others) for digging up the dirt. Jon for keeping Salient afloat. Tania and Jenna for delving into the wider issues and taking risks. Matt and Miriam for both trawling through all the copy and columnising. JJ Wood, Conrad and the rest of the political team for spiking MPs’ drinks to make them say compromising things. Haimona, for not only providing acerbic film reviews but for opening his sex life to the world and acting as my consultant on… matters. Jackson Coe, Tom, Sophie, Steph and Chris, and of course Mr Drinkwater, as well as all of their associates in reviewing for putting some culture into our pages. Neil for reminding us that the heart of all this culture is Beer, some varieties of which are incomparably better than others.

Michael, Anna, Eleanor and Jessica, Bobby and Rachael, Yvette, Miyuki, Brent and Dusty for planting our columns with fertile ideas (and other springtime metaphors – I’d also like to thank Spring for whooping Winter’s arse). Sarita for producing quirky crosswords that generally go right over my head, and for cranes. Ashleigh for her dogged determination to find interesting vox pops, and for the saga of the monsters… Mariko for the animals. Nina for cataloguing social causes. Guy, Hayden, Helen, Robbie, Martin, Grant, Matty and other wits for spicing our magazine with insanity. Our volunteer feature writers including Jenah and Matthew; our budding writers moonlighting as distributors Vinh and Jeff. VUWSA, Ngai Tauira, UniQ, The Women’s Group, DebSoc, and innumerable more clubs and societies for your support. And finally, to everyone who picked us up and took a gander at our pages.

The downside to this job is the managerial side. I love my staff and volunteers dearly and have had a ball with you guys. I’ve found Madeleine Setchell and by extension Pat Walsh approachable and helpful, so at least at the top our university is in good hands. But middle management such as campus facilities are often obstructive and more interested in their own power than in providing student services. VUWSA, of course, is dysfunctional, a childish squabble between the Workers Party (whose favourite tactic is ideological scaremongering) and Young Labour (who prefer shrill personal attacks and self-interest). And I feel myself being sucked in to these squabbles.

If there’s one thing I most regret it’s letting slip all those obvious errors and pieces of appalling grammar in the articles we’ve furiously put together late on a Thursday night. Last week I wrote that “continuing problems… demonstrate that problems remain” in the health system. Gross. I guess we just have to hope you readers laugh at such inane tautologies and other fuck-ups, and understand the unbeatable power of our Friday morning deadline. The thing is printed throughout that day and trucked down from Tauranga over the weekend (local printing being more expensive). I guess if I was less stoned we’d be more organised but, honestly? Meh.

Rather than trying to be a junior news magazine, Salient I think has been a more ponderous, academic beast this year, with smatterings of obscure humour. I know it’s been rather odd, and that my love of dragons, drug law reform and history will have moved many of you to yawn and exclaim “lame,” but there’s always been enough other content over the page to stop this being a real problem. And I am happy that I will be passing the magazine over to a pair of talented and responsible hands in the form of 2009 Editor Jackson Wood, who has displayed both a flair for informed humour and a great deal of organisational maturity as unpaid Political Editor over the course of this year. Give the man an email and take part, because after all, this is your magazine: jackson@Salient.org.nz

Several fellow El Schlong fans have described their music as epic, and I think the description fits. The title track on The Baddies Are Coming opens proceedings with a frightening crowd chant and military drumbeat, descending into guitarist (and main creative force) Leah Hinton’s signature bopping lead breaks. The sheer size and complexity of the music makes the album something to sit up and take notice of, however their lack of a vocalist is a problem – whereas with Jake the band made an immediate cackling impact, they’re now a dense and difficult listen. Sure, it’s rewarding, but with a singer taking charge El Schlong would be the most magnificent force in Kiwi metal.

Perhaps the weirdest and most striking track is ‘Arthur R Nevilleson-Robertson-Brown’, where Mr Nevilleson- Robertson-Brown’s droll narration recounts the loss of his slippers. As a novelty the completely tuneless voice makes for a cool storyteller, but since this is the only vocal technique the band use, it wears thin.

Other than my quibble over the vocals, The Baddies Are Coming is bloody impressive. The scope and oozing stench of the music is like an oily insect raping my brain. The band once said they’re “like Satan in the bathtub, puzzled by the ginger pube on the soap.” Too true.

Early Days
New Zealand’s first public hospitals were set up by Governor George Grey to provide care to those who could not afford a private doctor. The Public Health Act 1872 set up local authority health boards, largely funded by local ratepayers with a subsidy from the central government, to support the hospitals (each under its own hospital board). The prevailing political philosophy of the time emphasised the need for hands-off government to encourage self-sufficiency among the colonial population. Many feared that too much taxpayer-funded healthcare would dilute people’s natural instincts towards voluntary charity, although this was tempered by the state’s desire not to see anyone starve. A subsequent Public Health Act in 1900 created a Department of Public Health to take charge of regional authorities in times of crisis; central control was further strengthened by the Hospitals and Charitable Institutions Act 1909 (which provided higher government subsidies to poor districts) and Health Act 1920, which expanded the Department of Public Health into a Department of Health (DOH).

In 1938, the First Labour Government’s Social Security Act attempted to provide free and universally available healthcare to all. However, Labour were foiled by the Medical Association (the organisation of doctors), who refused to comply with the demand that they stop charging wealthy patients fees and become salaried state employees. The Government compromised by instituting a General Medical Services benefit to pay the fees of poorer patients. From then until the 1970s, doctors’ fees rose on average from one-third to two-thirds of the cost of care, straining the health budget. This led to reviews under the Kirk Labour Government, instituted by Muldoon’s subsequent National Government in 1983. National saw a need to integrate the curative services of hospital boards with the largely preventative focus of district health offices. To this effect, they set up 14 Area Health Boards to provide funding to each region on a population basis; over the course of the 1980s the Fourth Labour Government continued this reform, slowly dissolving the old hospital boards.

Markets: Making Hospitals Compete
The Fourth Labour Government also instituted a series of reviews and inquiries with the aim of reorienting the health system around a competitive market ethos. They retained the Area Health Boards because they provided a simple, transparent funding system, but attempted to tighten funding. The health system then and now takes up around 7% of New Zealand’s GDP, notably lower than the US health system – the most market oriented in the world – which costs around 12% of GDP. By 1990, the Area Health Board structure was finally in place. But in 1990 National was elected to power and the shit really hit the fan.

Taking Labour’s various reviews to heart, the Fourth National Government under Jim Bolger argued that the Area Health Board system provided little incentive for efficiency in public health. On 1 July 1993 a massive reform took place, characterised by an explosion of acronyms. The Area Health Boards became 23 Crown Health Enterprises (CHEs), which were expected to compete via the market and meet service-for-money targets. Meanwhile, four Regional Health Authorities (RHAs) provided the funding to CHEs; they in turn came under a Public Health Commission (PHC), under the renamed Ministry of Health (MOH, as opposed to the old DOH). This diluted the Minister’s chain of command, so that when Christchurch’s CHE argued it would have to make cutback to meet service targets, then- Minister of Health Jenny Shipley was able to stand back and proclaim that it was a business matter for the CHE and the RHA to resolve. By 1996 the PHC had been dissolved, and another series of reforms under the National-New Zealand First coalition amalgamated all four RHAs into one central Health Funding Authority (HFA), in conjunction with the sole pharmaceutical buyer Pharmac (set up by the RHAs, Pharmac’s ability to control the cost of pharmaceutical funding is regarded as one of the few successes of National’s reforms).

While the creation of a sole HFA removed much of the confusion of the old model, the fact that the RHAs’ 520 staff were forced to reapply for a smaller number of jobs eroded morale, and the single entity’s new power brought it into conflict with the Ministry of Health, whose role was now intended to be one of policy-making rather than operations – but the two organisations’ roles were never clearly delineated. CHEs were renamed Hospital and Health Services (HHSs), with greater emphasis on service provision. However, the idea that hospitals should compete remained. Most commentators note that the service ‘targets’ competing hospitals should meet cannot be clearly defined, and the idea of reporting on the effectiveness of these targets within the medical world is not always possible. Basically, the idea that hospitals should compete for patients and dollars is just retarded. For instance, the HHS HealthCare Otago felt obliged to sell off its geriatric homes in order to provide more efficient ‘core’ services. Fuck you, Fourth National Government.

Another facet of National’s reforms was the initiation of a prioritized points-based booking system to reduce the problem of waiting lists for surgery. While this system had some success, it functioned differently in different regions, leading to an unfair provision of services depending upon where a patient resided.

The final round of reform, carried out in 1999 under the Labour- Alliance coalition, replaced HHSs with the current District Health Boards. While this acronym shift may have been unnecessary, the new regime under Minister Annette King eventually saw a reduction in the amount of change and a reduced emphasis on market competition. The HFA was absorbed into the MOH, reducing conflict and the duplication or roles. Problems with waiting lists remained, with Labour courting controversy when it dumped thousands of low-priority patients in an attempt to clear the lists, but overall the amount of health turmoil has been reduced. But continuing problems, particularly with our own Capital and Coast District Health Board’s fraught efforts to secure adequate funding, demonstrate that problems remain.

For more information, read Revolving Doors: New Zealand’s Health Reforms by Robin Gauld.

Spending your youth in either a dank, overpriced, tiny flat or the dank, overpriced, architectural nightmare that is this university (while hiding from debt monsters at StudyLink) is bound to get even the most peppy of us down. It’s understandable to feel a tad blue around this time of year, when the essay monster and exam robot/monster hybrid unite with the debt monster to ruin your “It‘s almost summer!” cheer. Sometimes the world’s a bit shit, but left unchecked this shitty feeling can lead to depression and anxiety which are not grouse.

So if you’re just feeling a touch on the crap side then try some of these non-copyright protected mood enhancers:
Loud Music (headphones preferable, as is Wu Tang)
Smashing cardboard boxes
Standing in a field
Yelling
Kittens
Standing in a field yelling “KITTENS”

If symptoms persist talk to someone. Seriously. Depression is treatable and current treatments for depression are safe and effective. It is important that you do seek help, as the effects of depression can
be a tad cunty.

Depression affects thinking, motivation, communication, physical activities, sleeping, loss of appetite and hinders your ability to put up with the ridiculous nature of life. This can lead to the cycle of lameness which – like most cycles – is detrimental in the long run.

People are people and people need people. If you are a person and need a person, or if you know a person who needs a person, then be that person. Or if you can’t be that person then help that person find a person who will help that person. In other words, look out for your mates and family; if you are concerned about them then speak up. If you can speak and don’t then you are not being fair to all the people/things that can’t speak (babies, pandas, walls).

If you want to talk to somebody and feel like you can’t talk to a friend, loved one or family member, there are people you can talk to.

Student Health Service: Your student levy fees entitle you to use Student Health Service. You pay for ’em, you might as well use ’em. If you want to know more about the Student Health Service, or make an appointment, visit or phone:
Kelburn Campus – (04) 463 5308
Te Aro Campus – (04) 463 5308
Karori Campus – (04) 463 9537
Pipitea Campus – (04) 463 7474

Strip clubs:
Counselling services aren’t open at 3am, but strip clubs are, and you can pay them to listen to your problems. While these girls aren’t trained to give you proper medical advice, they are trained to be receptive and to make their customers happy. They are kind of expensive, but if you just need someone to listen then naked people might help.

Other peeps to talk to:
Lifeline 0800 543 354
National Depression Helpline 0800 111 757

Alcohol Drug Association 0800 787 797
Alcohol Hotline 0800 787 797
Gambling Problem Helpline Service 0800 654 655
Gay Line / Lesbian Line 0800 802 437

And finally if you just want to vent your “hell is other people” frustrations to someone then you can have a bitch to us. Think up a witty pseudonym and tell us why we suck, we totally have it coming.

So next time you or someone you know is getting stressed about uni or the aforementioned monsters remember that life is absurd and sometimes laughing at it makes you feel better. Sigmund Freud once said that “Man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them: they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world.” And for once he is right. Let not neuroses cripple your life, get help and remember you are not alone.

Five things about life that are awesome:
1. Summer – It’s warm which means cheaper power bills, beaches and walking to uni becomes actually bearable.
2. Attractive people – they rule
3. Kittens – They are soft, inquisitive and soooo adorable
4. Films – Cause getting out of your head every once in a while is nice
5. Snoop Dogg – Cause he’s the Dogg Father

Time, and its terrible legacy upon those who have lived it, seeps from Rain of the Children through a succession of clips of a younger Vincent Ward with Nick Cave hair, artfully holding his palm over the lense, interviewing an old woman care for her son. It stares at us through old stills and new recreations of Rua Kenana’s Maungapohatu. And its curse is explained to us by living descendents of Puhi, married off thrice and bearing fourteen babes to a fiercely independent secluded sect. The older Vincent, riding his horse to Puhi’s now-abandoned cottage, solemnly informs us of the depth of his tale, and mixes his various media in an entirely humble manner.

The key, Ward tells us, is Puhi’s fourteen children, most of whom died at Maungapohatu. Their death put Puhi – the special one – out of favour with the self-styled Moses, Rua. Though her stepbrother killed her last husband for her protection, she never forgave him for the act. All that remains is his son, haunted, withdrawn Niki, whom Puhi mothered so that he wouldn’t care for himself. Ward wisely refrains from passing any sort of judgement on his subjects, but he does suggest many of the pressures put upon Puhi at Maungapohatu, where men were required to bring back money from work or be denied kai, and where women returned to work around the village as soon as each babe was produced. Rena Owen’s convincing elderly-Puhi narration digs at Rua’s control of her life.

Meanwhile, the delicate issue of mental illness, among her last son and a number of grandchildren, is linked to a curse upon Rua’s descendents. These descendents tell Ward’s camera they believe the curse came from Rua through his son Whatu to Puhi; Rua in turn believed himself a healer of the curse that killed off a third of his iwi within a few years, but that struck again as influenza after the Great War. One Tuhoe elder tells Ward when “there was sickness or death, our people needed a reason,” and deeper darker things lie behind every action we now perform. This is a world in which everything is imbued with significance: I crack open a stone and its years bore into my eyeball. Karl Marx, in a rare moment of wisdom, said that “the tradition of the dead generations hangs like a nightmare on the mind of the living.” It is this weight that lay across Puhi, pressing her to walk bent double; this nightmare, the nightmare of seeing his many dead siblings while lost in the bush one night as a teenager that afflicted the mental health of her last son Niki. But there is, at the end, the suggestion of release.

Finally, it’s odd that the two best new films I’ve seen this year – Rain of the Children and Dear Zachary – are both documentaries about a deceased friend of the director’s. Rain of the Children is less passionate, but its respectful attempt not to manipulate your emotional heartstrings allows the full breadth of its tale to unfold.

Directed by Vincent Ward

The cold I caught last week from trying to sunbathe in spring is slowly receding. With it the enhanced need to consume ginger, garlic, soup and citrus fruit is relaxed, and the cloud of tiredness stops clogging my brain and limbs. Sweet. Health is the sort of balance you only notice when it’s off, and stopping you from being your own glorious self. But before we let medical practitioners tell us not to do anything that would harm our health, we need to remember that striving for ‘perfect health’ is neither the most enjoyable nor the most productive way to live our lives, since we’re still going to cark it in the long run.

Humans show a fairly habitual capacity to appreciate pain and disability. You can see it in Saint Dominic Loricatus’ habit of lashing himself with 300,000 strokes every Lent to cure a century’s worth of sin, and smell it when extreme sportsmen get high off the adrenaline rush that comes from snapping bones in a crash. Many of the tetraplegics interviewed in Murderball insisted that their paralysis had been a blessing, since it allowed them to play wheelchair rugby (which is even more HARDCORE than the American football they played before). They wanted to deck that pussy Christopher Reeve, who instead of accepting his condition worked single-mindedly towards a ‘cure’.

Besides, my awful head cold went away when I finally doused it in the replenishing antisepsis of white wine and whisky. But I’m not going to say “fuck the doctors” since I also have a massive cavity in my canine from smoking pipe tobacco and drinking too much coffee, which would be nice to have fixed if dentists were cheaper. And I’m happy that, should I someday get really fucked up, there’s a massive network of hospitals and medical folk that the state will send to fix me. If it works – and that’s half the point of this week’s issue: how can we ensure that our hospital, mired in public controversy, gets us our fixings?

Health funding in this country is handed out according to population, and our Capital and Coast District Health Board has a smaller population catchment than Auckland and Christchurch. Yet Wellington Hospital is also used by patients in surrounding districts up to Hawke’s Bay, making it uniquely stretched for cash. It’s easy to find the whole thing irritating and uncomfortable if you’ve never actually been to hospital, but if you want to take the risk of drinking yourself into the gutter once in a while, snapping your femur for the sake of dropping into a pipe vertically, or engaging in risky sexual escapades (all of which can add to the enrichment of being-in-the-world), you’re going to want some assurance that the system is there to catch you when you fuck it up. That’s why some of your wages go towards tax instead of entertainments.

The other point of this week’s issue is that John, Paul, George and Ringo have a piece of wisdom to offer about everything. Also some dragons will appear.

VUWSA began as the Victoria College Students’ Society back in 1899 because the Debating Society felt they needed an executive to represent students. They are perhaps most famous for buying the Viet Cong a tank back in the 1970s. You and 21,074 students pay a levy of $125 per year to the association, giving them approximately $1.5 million to play with. So what do you get for your dollars?

Almost $1 million goes towards ‘VUWSA Administration’, two-thirds of which is the cost of paying the Executive and permanent staff their wages. Clubs funding costs somewhat more than $130,000. Publications – Salient plus the annual diary and wallplanner handed out with Orientation packs – costs VUWSA around $125,000 (the cost of printing and wages for Salient is actually $300,000 per year, but half of this is paid for by advertising). Activities – mainly Orientation – costs a bit more than $60,000, and Rep Groups (which are like really serious clubs) cost $80,000.

The other areas of VUWSA’s budget are pretty small: the Welfare Office (including food bank), Education Office (including the class rep system), and Executive Expenses all cost between $10,000 and $20,000 each. The Campaigns, International, Environment, Women’s and Queer Office budgets all cost less than $10,000.

So now that you know what VUWSA does with your dollars, who do you want to run it? There are two ‘blocs’ of candidates running in this election, from Young Labour and The Workers Party, besides a number of unaffiliated candidates. While you can read more about each candidate in the election guide, let’s run through each of the four presidential candidates:

Jasmine Freemantle
The Workers Party candidate, Jasmine is campaigning as the most ‘experienced’ candidate, as she is not only both a PhD student and Assistant Lecturer (in Gender and Women’s Studies), but has also been on both the Exec and Publications Committee in the past, despite losing a vote to No Confidence in 2002. Nevertheless, her email to clubs accusing competitor Thomas of “selling them off” (even though VUWSA does not own affiliated clubs, per se) via his change proposal has provoked something of a shit-fight, which may not bode well.

Sean Connors
If students voted for the most fun candidate, no doubt Sean would win. His blurb in the election guide lays out plans to “twirl” against “big falafel” and the “corporate fat-cats in Kelburn”. His election poster is all about beer and mohawks. Need I say more?

strong>Sonny Thomas
The Young Labour candidate, Sonny’s political involvement goes back to protesting against Destiny Church meetings during high school. Currently VUWSA’s Campaigns Officer, Sonny is widely regarded as a competent organiser and has led the current Change Proposal to restructure VUWSA. However, he also has a reputation for being very partisan and abrasive, due both to his rhetoric against the A-Team last year and to his habit of storming out of VUWSA Exec meetings – and his Change Proposal has been criticised for a perceived lack of staff consultation.

William Wu
Current International Officer and President of the Chinese Students Association, William is obviously a good organiser: in April, he led some 700 young Chinese students in a march to support the Olympics. He also handed Salient a petition with 133 signatures opposing our use of a photoshopped Hu Jintao on the cover – but he was pretty nice about it, so no hard feelings. However, while he certainly understands English perfectly, he is not entirely confident when speaking, which may be an issue.

So all four candidates have their strengths and their flaws. Your job is to select the one you believe will best administer your levy, and best represent your concerns. Meanwhile, if you turn to page 16, you’ll notice that the redevelopment of Kelburn campus is getting closer. Personally, I find the images of an indoor campus hub area with sofas to loll about (I mean, er, study) on absolutely delicious. Whoever you elect will be representing your views on this development when it comes up for debate early next year, and I urge you to keep this in mind when voting. Other than that, have fun!

Thirty years ago, young art student Vincent Ward spent 18 months in the Ureweras filming 80-year-old woman Puhi care for schizophrenic adult son Niki for the film In Spring One Plants Alone. Although historian Judith Binney managed to dig up information linking Puhi to the prophet Rua Kenana, whose community Maungapohatu was raided in 1916, Ward decided not to probe her on this at the time, as he was interested in how she lived in the present, rather than the factual details of his past.

But as Ward told Salient, there were always elements of Puhi’s story that just didn’t fit. When he asked locals why she always walked bent over, they told her she “walked with the dead” and appeared to feel that she lived under a curse. After a successful filmmaking career, stretching from gothic tales of New Zealand life in Vigil and The Navigator in the 1980s to big-budget fantasy What Dreams May Come (which accurately displays the Mormon afterlife) in the 1990s, Ward felt compelled to return to Puhi while working on his historical epic The River Queen. The personality clashes and budget issues of this film are now infamous, and Ward was able to take time out conducting interviews for his new documentary Rain of the Children.

Unlike the massive cast and crew used for The River Queen, Ward chose to film much of Rain of the Children with a tiny crew, at one stage dragging a mere six people up a snowy mountainside to film battle sequences. But this is surface detail: what is really compelling about Rain of the Children is its depiction of what Ward describes as mythological psychology – the examination of how historical grievances have led to contemporary ills. In the 1890s, Tuhoe felt they were under a curse due to interactions with Pakeha, as their population dropped by one third. Rua Kenana’s community was an attempt to address this curse, but opposition to conscription during the Great War gave authorities an excuse to raid Maungapohatu, so the curse continued.

Puhi’s father was one of Rua’s tohunga, and she was chosen (at age 12) to marry his son, her first husband, who was taken in the raid, which also killed her lover. Puhi went on to have other marriages with similarly unhappy endings, and give birth to 14 children, many of whom were taken from her. These facts led Ward to realise what her neighbours meant when they said she walked with the dead – a legacy of dead relatives lingered about her wherever she went, forcing her to bend under the weight of these dead generations.

This story of mythological psychology is one not often told, and perhaps never told in film. It makes me think back to something documented by Bill Payne in Staunch: Inside the Gangs of New Zealand, where he discusses the pain felt by Maori members of the Mongrel Mob who tattoo a bastard mix of moko and Nazi imagery on their faces. While they did so nominally to show their disdain for tikanga, Payne felt they believed they were intentionally cursing themselves. Puhi was forced to live with such a curse because of her inability to escape the past she’d lived.

Ward took Rain of the Children to small-town screenings, particularly for Tuhoe, before opening it up to general screening last Thursday, and says that reactions from Maori and Pakeha have been strong but different – from staunch Tuhoe hunters crying through screenings to Pakeha feeling, like Ward, that they had been granted privileged access to another way of life. But like In Spring One Plants Alone, this is not a documentary about history so much as a film about people, with Ward proclaiming “I haven’t tried to make an academic film, I’ve tried to make a humanistic film where you walk in her shoes for an hour and a half.”

Over the next day a number of blog posts relating to the VUWSA elections will appear on this site, written by people involved in the elections, either as candidates or observers.

These posts do not necessarily reflect the views of Salient or its regular staff, but will appear in the name of open information.

We hope you enjoy the debate.

Growing up in an apple-growing region near Nelson, I’ve had to listen to countless horror stories about farmers jumping through bureaucratic hoops to gain resource consent to carry out what they consider to be everyday activities. The most extreme example was one farmer who went through six different consent applications to put a pump shed on his land, because his neighbours objected to each step of the development. Restrictions upon resource use are not listed in the RMA itself, which simply outlines how local councils can use the Act, and much of its confusion comes from how different councils use the Act in different ways. Nevertheless, the National Party plans to reform the Act itself, and sides with those who see it as overly restrictive: they promise to remove the Environment Minister’s ability to veto resource consents, reduce the number of consent categories, end “frivolous and vexatious objections”, and fasttrack ‘Priority Consents’ for large infrastructure projects they see as being in the interest of the nation so that they are either approved or denied within nine months.

On the other hand, environmental groups complain that many consents are granted without public notification for activities that ruin our natural waterways or crowd our cities with ugly towers. While farmers and environmentalists may seem fated to clash regardless of the legislation, much of the controversy over the RMA comes down to its ambition: it is the only piece of legislation in the world that attempts to regulate every single natural resource under one umbrella. To understand why, we need to go back to 1991.

The Legislation

The Resource Management Act repealed 69 Acts to create one integrated regime for the management of resource use. Victoria University’s environmental law lecturer Tom Bennion describes it as “awe-inspiring in scope.” It is the world’s first national statutory planning regime to hold up the principle of sustainable management as its explicit purpose. Passed by National’s then-Minister for the Environment Simon Upton, it followed Geoffrey Palmer’s review of resource management law under the previous Labour Government. This review amalgamated a whole series of management Acts that had grown up throughout New Zealand’s legislative history. Most important were: the Soil Conservation and Rivers Control Act 1941, which created catchment boards under the jurisdiction of regional councils; the Water and Soil Conservation Act 1967, which created a consent procedure for water use; and the Town and Country Planning Act 1977, which outlined consent and planning procedures for other resources.

Palmer’s Resource Management Bill was still in select committee when Labour fell, and Upton’s review team concluded that its stated purpose, to balance sustainability with the needs of social justice, should be replaced with a simple purpose of sustainability, so that administrators would not have to cope with several conflicting intentions within the act. Nevertheless, the purpose of the Act, as set out in Section 5, does note the importance of “social, economic and cultural wellbeing” in the use of resources, while Sections 6, 7, and 8 list other matters of importance (such as the Treaty of Waitangi), so that by 1997 the Environment Court recognised that the RMA’s purpose could Walk into any rural pub and sooner or later you’ll hear someone bitch about “the RMA” over their pint. What they’re complaining about is the Resource Management Act 1991, a gigantic piece of legislation governing the sustainable use of our country’s resources. It regulates everything from the erection of buildings in central Wellington to the way a farmer washes down his milking shed on the Canterbury plains. Many thousands of New Zealanders are unhappy with the way the Act is implemented, and the National Party has promised to rewrite it within 100 days of taking office. But before we know whether this is a good thing, we need to identify exactly what is wrong with the Act, and whether National’s plans will address these flaws. be interpreted as both a “balancing” of sustainability against human needs, and as a simple environmental “bottom line.” Upton argued that the RMA was intended merely to identify a “biophysical bottom line” that could not be crossed by development, while any activities that respected this line would be untouched, making for a “more liberal regime for developers.” However, the conflicting interpretations mean the RMA is now seen as providing broad, overall judgements regarding development.

Resource Consents

The RMA requires that a resource consent is required for a) any activity that would otherwise contravene a rule in a city or district plan, or b) any activity that might affect the environment, and that isn’t allowed ‘as of right’ in the district or regional plan. Consents are granted or denied by regional councils and territorial authorities; appeals may be lodged with the Environment Court. Applications for resource consent require an Assessment of Environmental Effects (AEE), which should include all potential impacts on the environment, whether they would occur immediately or over many decades.

It is these consents that have stirred up the most frustration among developers, as the consultation and approval process can cause project-ending delays, especially for smaller players unable to draw upon costly legal advice while applying for consent. Federated Farmers last year surveyed 3750 of their members’ views on the RMA. Respondents’ major concern about the Act was that they felt Councils were using it “to control land-use decisions to achieve a desired outcome” not related to sustainability, with the result that farmers required consents “for everyday activities”. For example, Gisborne District Council recently changed its district plan to force farmers to plant trees on large areas at risk from erosion, which Gisborne-Wairoa Federated Farmers sees as an unfair intrusion. However, Green Party co-leader Russel Norman told Salient that such rules are about sustainability, even if the farmers do not believe so. Furthermore, this problem is not due the RMA itself, but to the way Councils implement it, so reforming the Act would not remove this issue.

Federated Farmers identified two other major concerns with the RMA: that submissions by environmental groups outside of the local community were given “equal weighting” by councils to submissions from within the community; and that landowners are not compensated when their land-use is restricted to protect the landscape. Norman also opposes the idea of compensation, as he believes it would “pretty much mean an end to environmental management” as protecting landscape would become too expensive; he also argues that no-one should have to be paid to not pollute. On the other hand, if farmers are carrying out activities that are only damaging in the sense that they alter the landscape, it seems unfair to prevent them from working their land without some sort of compensation to acknowledge what Federated Farmers call farmers’ “stewardship” of the land.

National’s Reform: “Frivolous and Vexatious Objections”

Federated Farmers’ desire to restrict who can make a submission against resource consent applications was picked up by the National Party when they announced their plan to reform the RMA at their party conference in August. National’s Environment Spokesperson Nick Smith told Salient that until 2003, local councils and the Environment Court could ask submitters to provide ‘security’ for the cost of hearing their objection: if the objection was found to be frivolous, the court would keep the deposit. Smith argues that this clause was used conservatively so that it did not prevent genuine submissions from being held, and believes the clause should be reinstated, but also suggests National might put in place greater restrictions on submissions. Almost everyone Salient talked to agreed that unfair and time-wasting submissions have occurred, in particular from supermarkets opposing their competitors’ developments. Nevertheless, Russel Norman describes the idea of restricting submissions as a “chilling” way to prevent communities from opposing large corporate developments.

The Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society of New Zealand has criticised the RMA for almost the exact opposite of the reason National and Federated Farmers want it reformed: noting that 95% of all resource consents are granted without public notification, and less than 1% of applications for consents are declined, Forest and Bird argue that the process is not open enough. Environment Minister Trevor Mallard also told Salient that Labour has already moved to address the concern of frivolous objections, introducing ‘limited notification’ in 2005 so that for activities with minor effects “only those affected by the proposal can participate” in hearings.

Once these consents are granted, many fail to abide by them. A Greater Wellington Regional Council audit of 146 farms last summer and autumn found that a full thirty per cent breached resource consents, polluting rivers and lakes. Russel Norman argues that these breaches are led by large industrial-scale dairy farms, and that current maximum fines of $750 should be increased to $10,000 if they are to have any effect. Trevor Mallard agreed that increases could be made to these fines, and while National do not seem keen on this idea, they have promised to make Crown entities accountable when they breach their own consents, as the Ministry for the Environment did during the cleanup of Mapua’s DDT dump.

National Policy Statements, Large Projects and Toxic Cleanups

Forest and Bird also note that an absence of national environment standards mean the consent process varies between councils. This is contrary to the spirit of the RMA, and is the one area in which Labour has already sought to address, not by reforming the act but by introducing a number of supplementary National Policy Statements guiding councils’ implementation of the act; National promises to speed up the introduction of these statements. However, Tom Bennion, a lecturer in environmental law at Victoria University, notes that these statements have so far been haphazard: whereas the Coastal Policy Statement was introduced only after several years of consultation, Bennion argues that the Statement on Electricity Generation gazetted this year simply overrides opposition to the construction of new power sources due to fears over our power supply.

Like the National Policy Statement on Electricity Generation, much of National’s plans for reform are aimed not at rationalising the way consents are granted to small projects involving developers with little money (the major issue concerning those who complain about the RMA over their beer), but about fasttracking large projects. National plans to borrow to fund major infrastructure developments, and wants to give ‘priority consent’ to these projects so that they are fast-tracked through the Environment Court without going through local council discussions, and approved within nine months. They also intend to remove the Environment Minister’s veto over consents. Nick Smith points to the Whangamata marina, which a community group spent nine years and $1 million pursuing until the Environment Court approved their project, only for the Minister to overturn its decision.

Furthermore, National want to alter the way the Ministry for the Environment deal with large-scale toxic cleanups, such as the recent cleanup of the Fruitgrowers Chemical Company site in Mapua. The Ministry for the Environment took over the cleanup of Mapua in 2004 after Australian contractor Theiss withdrew. While the cleanup did successfully reduce soil contamination by 80 per cent, the Ministry breached their resource consent by emitting dioxins into the air, and copper into the Waimea Estuary. The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment conducted a damning inquiry into the Ministry’s handling of the cleanup, as the Ministry had a conflict of interest as both the monitor and operator of the cleanup. The Commissioner pointed out that the Ministry “was created as a small policy advisory agency in 1986” and does not have the scientific expertise to take on an operational role. Trevor Mallard told us that Section 4(5) of the RMA could be amended to allow enforcement action to be taken against the Crown, but National wants to go further and create a separate Environmental Protection Authority, expanding upon the current Environmental Risk Management Authority, which would employ environmental scientists to carry out future cleanups. Green MP Metiria Turei told Salient that bringing more scientific expertise into environmental monitoring would be a great thing. However, she argued that this would have to be achieved via greater funding and support for environmental science education, because we simply do not have the necessary people to create such an agency at the moment.

Simplifying the Act

Environmental law lecturer Tom Bennion told Salient that many of National’s plans, such as the removal of a ministerial veto and the creation of an Environmental Protection Agency, are simply scratching “little itches” arising from singular cases (Whangamata and Mapua), so the reforms will have little overall impact. On the other hand, Bennion points to National’s desire to reduce the number of resource consent categories in order to simply the process as a much more significant project. Every single local council in New Zealand has a district plan laying out how the RMA is to be applied in that region, and these plans are determined by the number of consent categories laid out in the legislation. So changing these categories would require thousands of hours of work to be altered to bring such plans in line with the new categories, a process that is arguably more trouble than it is worth.

The fact that the National Party has not fully detailed how these reforms will work leaves them open to compromise once such issues arise during their rewriting of the legislation – if, that is, they become the next government. Certainly, many of the plans appear not to have been fully thought out, and while its clear that priority consenting will speed up large projects, it is not clear how they will help farmers or small building projects navigate their way through red tape with more ease – especially if simplifying consent categories creates more work.

Yet, despite such flaws, the Resource Management Act clearly needs reform. National have laid out plans to change the Act to make it less prohibitive, while the Green Party have laid out plans to tighten regulations for the sake of our natural resources. Labour appear to steer a middle ground between these two contrary motives, but this is probably because they simply do not have any plans for substantial reform. The fact is, there are real problems regarding the way the RMA is implemented: a great deal of pollution that should be prevented isn’t due to lack enforcement, while a number of non-polluting projects are needlessly held up because councils are inconsistent and at times overly restrictive in their policing of the consent process. Fixing these problems may not require a great deal of change to the legislation itself, but what is certain is that change has to take place – and this change is too important to be done in a partisan manner. National, Labour and the Greens all need to have a say in the rewriting of the RMA, because what they do will determine the future of both our natural environment, and our ability to use it for profit. It is easily one of the most important issues facing the nation during this year’s election, and we must demand political dialogue to get the best outcome for all.

Nietzsche: Of course. From the Military School of Life: That which does not kill me only makes me stronger. But perhaps it will kill us, and after all, what really is it in us that wants ‘the Truth’? Why not rather Untruth?

Tristan: Umm… Maybe we do only seek the truth because it’s easier to attain power when you know how things work. But then again, I like to think that I seek the truth for its own sake, ‘cos that’s, you know, romantic. So anyhu, if not for truth, why do we keep on creating all these machines?

Nietzsche: Because we must overcome ourselves again and again. If we sit still in our happiness we stop striving, which makes us unhappy, which forces us to strive again – all woe says fade, go, but all joy wants Eternity.

Blake: Exactly. Joys impregnate, sorrows bring forth; and Eternity is in love with the productions of Time. So of course we keep clocking away new-fangled Things. But I do not much like all these Machines, these Dark Satanic Mills. Jerusalem was not built here.

Mother Aubert: No, I built it on the Whanganui River. Sheesh.

Tristan: Okay I’m not sure where she came from. Well, I kinda like technology, because it allows me to do stuff I otherwise wouldn’t, but then it gets my expectations up so that when it fails I get frustrated and hit things. Take for instance this new version of Microsoft Office – it saves Word files by the extension of .docx, which you cannot open with older versions of Word! That’s incredibly stupid because now people email me articles that I cannot open. I desire a world in which Microsoft doesn’t force us to keep buying new software when the old works perfectly fine, and where Facebook doesn’t keep changing its bloody layout.

Nietzsche: Ultimately one loves one’s desires and not that which is desired. So you don’t desire this world, you just love pretending to rebel against Microsoft.

Tristan: Hmm perhaps, but I think I’m making a genuine point here. I remember when I was sixteen and had just got the internet, and I used to download songs from the peer-to-peer file sharer called Audiogalaxy. It was awesome, they had discussion boards, and you could find anything – even my English teacher’s band Dating Godot was on there, and if someone logged out while you were downloading their song, it could find a similar file from someone else to download. Then the copyright bastards got on their case and closed it down, but this didn’t end music piracy – it just meant we had to use other, crappier p2ps. Noone has ever made one as good as Audiogalaxy in the intervening years. So you know what? Fuck you Lars Ulrich. Fuck you and your shitty band (Yeah, I know they used to be good back in the eighties, but seriously, have you heard ‘The Day That Never Comes?’ Jesus Christ it’s terrible). So… any last thoughts?

Blake: One thought fills immensity.

Skins is what MTV should be, throwing in every hip new song the producers could think of to illustrate the minds of its pill-popping teenage protagonists. Instead of talking overlyarticulately about their non-existent ‘issues’ (a la The OC), they run around with their balls hanging out, get fucked up and fuck one another.

It’s a teenage soap opera, and sure it has its over-the-top moments (epitomized by season one’s finale of oh, let’s just hit the arrogant guy with a bus and make the pathetic one sing ‘Wild World’), but there’s something about the chaos of these kids that I can relate to. The Tony-Sid-Michelle love triangle reminds me of an almost identical situation I went through in my last two years of college (I was Sid, except instead of being in love with my best friend Tony’s girlfriend Michelle, I had a crush on Tony. I mean hey, he gave me some pretty sweet A-class). One of our subeditors insists that every character is two dimensional, but I can’t help but feel that at least crazy, beautiful “I stopped eating and then everyone had to do what I said” Cassie has somewhat more depth.

But really, it’s about the music. That moment where Tony and Sid catch each other’s eye and hug out their issues across a crowded room would be all too typical if it weren’t for the fact that, instead of some weepy strings, they’re doing it to the most abrasive electronic noise pop you can find. And as the last episode comes to its conclusion, they play MGMT’s ‘Time to Pretend’, which I’d been waiting for all season, in the knowledge that it would be the perfect track to sum up these kids’ lives:

This is our decision to live fast and die young We’ve got the vision, now let’s have some fun Yeah, it’s overwhelming but what else can we do Get jobs in offices and wake up for the morning commute?

We’ll choke on our vomit and that will be the end We were fated to pretend

On the night of 2 December 1998, two hundred followers of the Hindu nationalist party Shiv Sena stormed a cinema in suburban Mumbai and smashed equipment in protest at Deepa Mehta’s Fire. The film, which had been running to full houses for almost a month, offended them not so much because it depicts a pair of neglected housewives forming a lesbian relationship, but because they take their names from the goddesses Sita and Radha; they argued that homosexuality was “not a part of Indian history,” and that “If women’s physical needs get fulfilled through lesbian acts, the institution of marriage will collapse.” More vandalised cinemas followed the first, forcing owners to stop running the film and refer it back to censors – fortunately, due in part to Mehta’s candlelit vigil against censorship, the film was free to be rereleased in 1999.

Drenched in red and black, Fire sizzles with the constant tension between these women and the men who threaten and ignore them, but suggests passion can triumph over cruelty. It turned out to be the first in an ‘Elements Trilogy’, followed by the ochre and orange-toned Earth and the cold blue-white Water. Earth, which Mehta adapted from Bapsi Sidwa’s novel Cracking India, is the pinnacle of the trilogy. Set in Northwestern India at the time of partition, the film follows a group of young educated Indians from different religions – Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and Parsi – through the narration of Lenny, a wealthy Parsi girl suffering from polio at the time of film’s setting. Her Ayah, the gorgeous Hindu Shanta, is the focal point of the group, pursued by both Dil, the witty Hindu ice candy man, and sensual, loving Muslim masseur Hassan. As the group is torn apart when their land is partitioned into part of Pakistan, petty acts of attempted genocide (particularly the rape of women associated with the enemy) multiply and the characters lives are crushed. Fortunately, because the film was set in Pakistan, it wasn’t seen to undermine the Indian state and received the best airing of the three ‘Elements’ films.

At the heart of both Earth and Fire are starring performances by Nandita Das – newlywed Sita, forced to serve her husband’s bitter family, in Fire; singer Shanta in Earth. Despite giving two of the greatest performances in the 1990s, Das has admitted she basically just uses acting as a tool to promote the issues plaguing her social conscience. Unfortunately, the first attempted version of Water, with her in the lead, was abandoned in 2000 after protesters burned the set and threw it into the Ganges; it was eventually reshot in Sri Lanka with different (though nevertheless exceptionally talented) actors and submitted as Canada’s entry into the 2005 Academy Award’s Best Foreign-Language Film category.

Set during Gandhi’s tours to spread the cause of independence, Water follows the eight year old widow Chuyia’s exile to a widow’s ashram. Mehta exposes the pettiness of the ashram’s senior widows in exploiting their younger charges, particular the ethereal Kalyani, whom they pimp out to local bigwigs. Chuyia and Kalyani bond over their love of animals, and Chuyia eventually leads Kalyani to the dashing, liberal Narayan, follower of the Mahatma. From there it’s love and political freedom versus entrenched hypocrisy. Where Fire is passionate and Earth is devastating, Water is sad but hopeful for the future.

The Elements Trilogy draws us backwards over a century of talented women oppressed by men’s traditions. Deepa Mehta studied philosophy before taking on her society in film and relocating to Canada. Her understanding of interpersonal behaviour is matched by her ability to suggest tragedies which sometimes come to pass and sometimes don’t. Her women are condemned to the tides of history – something as massive as partitioned smashes them as it sweeps men’s paranoia and other women’s greedy complicity into an unstoppable, elemental force. The trilogy’s historical arc is unmatched in the last twenty years of filmmaking and provides a compelling cinematic condemnation of the patriarchy.

Two significant events have propelled Russia into the spotlight over the last month: the first was the death of nationalist, anti- Stalinist author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; the second was the invasion of Georgia. While the death of a single writer may seem unimportant when compared with the bombing of a sovereign nation, the second event can best be understood by looking towards Solzhenitsyn.

In 1945, aged 26, the twice-decorated soldier Solzhenitsyn was arrested for criticising Stalin’s handling of the war in a letter to a friend. He was then imprisoned in several gulags before being released to a cancer ward in 1953. At the same time Krushchev replaced Stalin and, nine years later, published Solzhenitsyn’s account of the gulags One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich as an indictment of his predecessor. However, Krushchev’s reign would end within a couple of years, and his successors would not tolerate dissidence in literature, so Solzhenitsyn fled the USSR in the 70s, becoming its most prominent critic-in-exile. Lengthy tomes such as The Gulag Archipelago would lay out Stalin’s crimes in detail, but it was in Ivan that Solzhenitsyn really undermined the Soviet system, detailing the minute details and irritations of the gulag – hiding one’s Bible, having to bitch at other inmates to work faster so as to avoid food reductions – that took away prisoners’ individuality.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 allowed Solzhenitsyn to return to his homeland – and here’s where things really get interesting. Because Solzhenitsyn wasn’t at all happy with Russia’s new found freedom, seeing in democratic capitalism the worship of materialistic mammon killing the spirit of his beloved Orthodox faith. In 1978, he had criticised the USA as unmanly for pulling out of Vietnam. So he became a supporter of Vladimir Putin’s drive to restore the glory of Russian nationalism. Even Russia’s greatest anti-Communist dissident longed for her military to return the Bear to glory, and this explains why she could not tolerate Georgia asserting her sovereignty over an area Russia still feels responsible for.

Georgia
The Georgian town of Gori is the birthplace of Stalin, and many Russians still cannot see Georgia as separate from the motherland. The peoples of South Ossetia and Abkhazia are also unhappy that they are supposed to be a part of something called Georgia, rather than the Russia they have always known, and have hosted Russian troops since the 90s. Their ill-defined status would always cause trouble if Georgia sought to act independently of Russia on the international stage.

The Economist describes South Ossetia as “headed by a thuggish former Soviet official, Eduard Kokoity, and run by the Russian security services. It lives off smuggling and Russian money.” One of its major exports is counterfeit currency. But what makes South Ossetia so dangerous is the fact that it is a patchwork quilt of Georgian and Ossetian ethnic villages, with Ossetians making up two thirds of the population and Georgians the remaining one third – and any moves towards independence could lead to ethnic strife. Over the last few years, Russia has distributed Russian passports and citizenships to Ossetians, which the Georgian government sees as an act of provocation. Then in July Russia staged military manoeuvres by the border, and Ossetian separatists exchanged fire with Georgia, culminating in Georgia’s invasion of what is still, technically, its own territory, on 7 August.

Russia immediately responded not only by moving troops into South Ossetia, but also by bombing and occupying Georgia proper, just as the Olympics began halfway around the world. On 10 August, Georgian and Russian athletes took bronze and silver medals in the women’s 10-metre air pistol, and embraced upon the podium, while back home Russia continued to drive back Georgian forces with around 150,000 people fleeing their homes. With the help of French President Nicholas Sarkozy, the warring nations agreed to a ceasefire on 12 August, and Russia has slowly been pulling back – though they claim those troops that remain are ‘peacekeepers’.

Why would Georgia provoke Russia into such a conflict, given their vastly uneven military resources? Russia has over a million soldiers, 6000 tanks and 1700 combat aircraft; Georgia has 37,000 troops, 230 tanks and 12 aircraft. Surely they knew they wouldn’t win, so why provoke the Bear to swat them like this? The answer lies in Georgia’s enigmatic president and his love for the West.

Mikheil Saakashvili, known affectionately by his people as Misha, is at 40 one of Europe’s youngest leaders. A lawyer in New York during the 90s, Misha returned to Georgia as Minister of Justice under President Shevardnadze, but his attempts to fight corruption brought him into conflict with his superiors; in 2004 when he stood against his former bosses for the presidency and lost in a blatantly rigged election, subsequent mass peaceful protests overthrew the government. This ‘Rose Revolution’ led to a new round of elections, in which Misha was elected president with a genuine majority of over 90 per cent of the vote.

Like Solzhenitsyn, Misha believes in a kind of jingoistic democracy, combining a desire for economic and political openness with military defence of Georgia’s borders. In return for his support of the US invasion of Iraq, the US has trained and equipped the Georgian military, and Misha has been pursuing Georgia’s possible entry into NATO. So perhaps he believed that NATO would defend him against a Russian attack, which would explain why he was so willing to take on a clearly superior force. But this plan backfired – perhaps, having defended the independence of Kosovo against Russian wishes, the West knew it would be hypocritical to oppose Russia’s support for the independence of South Ossetia. If, indeed, South Ossetia really wants to be independent.

At the end of the day, this conflict should not be about Russia’s need to remain a global player, or Georgia’s desire for closer links to the West. What has been forgotten in much of the coverage of this issue is the wishes of the inhabitants of South Ossetia. Unfortunately, these wishes are almost impossible to determine, since the province is so ethnically divided. In a 2006 referendum, 99 per cent of voters demanded independence from Georgia – but since almost none of the one-third ethnic Georgian population voted, the referendum does not reflect the will of the entire community, and like in Northern Ireland, simple independence is not the option. Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch claims that both sides used disproportionate force during their invasions, while villages have burnt and several thousand people have been killed. Stink.

The three upcoming elections are of course the New Zealand general election, the VUWSA executive’s elections, and the US presidential election. Sadly, most of you cannot vote in the one election that will have the most impact upon the world and its future, and I often feel that given the globally important role of the US president, there must be some way for us to have our say on this issue. And, for what it’s worth, I’d like to come out here and now as an Obamaphile. If Obama was a candidate in New Zealand’s parliamentary elections, I might not vote for him – he’s far more conservative than me. However, given how fucked the bipartisan US political system is, and given how bad the last few presidents have been, I cannot imagine anyone more suited to doing this job well – and replenishing the USA’s image in the eyes of the rest of the world – than Mr Obama. Perhaps I’m just being naïve, and an Obama presidency won’t stop the rot – but unlike any other candidate, he might at least have a slim chance of doing some good, and it’s worth taking the chance.

Meanwhile, the New Zealand elections will continue to get the most coverage, but much of what the newshounds tend to focus on will be personality politics and shit that doesn’t really matter, so we’ll try to cover actual policy issues in the next few weeks – from reforming the Resource Management Act to fixing Wellington’s District Health Board.

The VUWSA election probably seems the least important, but you’ll soon be voting to elect a group of students to manage $1.5m of your money. Last year’s election was actually quite interesting, because a coordinated group of students ran on a right-wing ‘A Team’ platform: calling the sitting exec ‘muppets’, the A Team promised to reduce the annual levy we pay to VUWSA by reducing clubs’ funding. While some of their advertising was childishly personal, their presence could have created lively debate over the future of VUWSA. Sadly, the left responded with even worse personal attacks: members of Young Labour put up posters accusing the A Team of being ‘sexist’, then hypocritically put up other posters calling one of the female A Team members a ‘whore’. I don’t raise this example to try to shit on Young Labour, but I do think we really need to stress that this sort of campaigning is unacceptable, and to plead with all candidates to debate policy, not throw around personal attacks.

Don’t worry – it won’t all be politics, and we will continue to publish four-page rants about how to get a girlfriend, along with the hand-drawn cartoons people put into the purple box in the Student Union Building atrium. But that voting shit is pretty important, and we do have to think about it.Elections

The plot, essentially, is this: after self-proclaimed masked heroes become too active in fighting crime during the 1970s, America’s police go on strike against the use of scab super-labour to do their jobs; eventually masked heroes are outlawed. Somewhere down the line, the nastiest of these heroes, the Comedian, is murdered. Moore uses the investigation into this killing to reveal the dark past of his outlawed heroes, from rape and alcoholism to winning the Vietnam War for Nixon. Around the time they are outlawed, the heroes also realise that the world’s true problems – i.e. humans treating each other like shit, from domestic violence to drug abuse – cannot be solved by a bunch of guys running around in their underwear.

Perhaps my favourite aspect of The Watchmen is the fact that each episode ends with a short section of excerpts from various texts mentioned in the illustrated storyline, from one character’s autobiography to a police file on another character, to news clippings and a brief history of piratethemed comics. Whereas the main illustrated sections subvert the classic superhero formula, Moore uses these text sections to pay homage to the comic book industry as a whole. So this book is both a meta-comic book about comic books, and itself a brilliantly compelling story illustrated in off-putting browns and purples.

These zines, ranging in price from $1 to $5, are mostly A5 black and white booklets by Kiwi cartoonists. These guys make very little from their work, but some of their stuff is fantastic, so I want to share some of my favourites with you:

Omnisexual by Robbie Neilson
This zine, by Salient’s own cartoonist, explains through a series of images and rants, what it means to be an omnisexual. And just what is an omnisexual? I hear you ask. Well, one character in the zine, when asked what is their sexuality, ponders their past escapades for a moment before responding: “I like to put my penis in things.” This is right next to a page where the author declares that if he could have sex with anyone, real or fictional, from throughout history, he would do Jesus.

Black Sheep Comix by students of The Learning Connection
The three editions of Black Sheep Comix collect cartoons by students of Island Bay’s art school. While the work varies widely in quality, there is one outrageously brilliant tale in Issue 2: ‘Hunter’ by Ben Smith. It tells the story of a gigantic hunter who lives under Wellington harbour, emerging every two centuries to travel back in time to Te Wai Pounamu to hunt moa: “They are his favourite hangover food the Hunter equivilant of eggs and and baked beans on toast after a hard out night on the piss. Another popular misconception is Moa died out through over-hunting, but Maori are not guilty of this historical blip.” Once the hunter has gorged himself he “spews his ring out then has to have a wee lie down” before returning to the harbour floor for another two centuries of farting earthquakes.

Ninjet the Ninja Cat
A zine about a ninja cat with some dynamic lines in its artwork. Ninja cats are inherently awesome. That is all.

Progress by Jared Lane
This series of comics is set in a dystopian future Christchurch, where a stoner boy who works as a cleaner at the university discovers a bionic girl, whom he liberates and takes home to… play with.

Book
Book is a local zine featuring sketches of frighteningly damaged people and some text discussing mental cases. Rather surreal.

Spike, VUWSA’s in-house IT support dude, turned up to speak about this week’s other important piece of business: the possibility for VUWSA’s computers to rejoin VUW ITS’s central intranet. Back in 2004, ITS decided they no longer wanted to support VUWSA as part of the university network, and decided to charge VUWSA $90,000 simply for the cost of support and maintenance. As Spike noted, ITS had already been giving VUWSA a low priority, which meant that whenever something went wrong with VUWSA’s email accounts or intranet link, ITS would wait several days before attempting to fix things. So we decided to set up our own network, paying high commercial rates through outside providers.

However, VUW now want VUWSA to rejoin the network without the support charge they had formerly demanded. Spike noted that this would save VUWSA the $80,000 we currently spend on our own network each year. However, he noted that going on to this network would mean that he would no longer be able to intervene when something went wrong; we would have to rely upon ITS once again to take several days when something goes bung. Furthermore, ITS’ content filters would restrict Salient’s ability to research porn, and the vbc would probably not be able to stream online via ITS’ network. Campaigns Officer Sonny Thomas noted that going back to the uni network would give VUW management the power to shut down our emails and website during protest action, and Neilson noted that if the server crashed on a Thursday night when Salient sends its weekly PDF file to the printers, we would no-longer simply be able to call Spike to fix things – meaning we would not be able to get the magazine printed by Monday.

Education Officer Stefan Tyler and Welfare VP Melissa Barnard suggested that if VUWSA could get VUW and ITS to sign a contract promising not to interfere with our internet usage, then VUWSA could sue them if they tried anything sneaky. However, Neilson pointed out that it would be better never to have to sue them in the first place, although Education VP Rev. Paul Danger Brown noted that the spare $80,000 could be used to set up an emergency back-up system, possibly using the on-campus wireless access. Queer Officer Rachael Wright argued that we could use carrier pigeons as a back-up, and although President Joel Cosgrove tried to argue that we had never used pigeons, Spike pointed out that VUWSA does already have pigeon-hole infrastructure in its mail room which could be rolled into use as soon as some pigeons were brought. However, what the Exec eventually decided to do was set up a working party consisting of Joel, Spike, Dusty the Activities Monkey, Paul and Sonny (who was appointed in his absence, muahaha).

Spike then spent some time discussing the possibility of creating a VUWSA database to help with the class rep system and other databasey things. Rev. Paul Danger Brown chimed in with a declaration that databases relating to the class rep system are one of his major lifetime goals, and it was decided to use the same working party to decide what to do. Possibly by investigating Massey Albany’s database system, which is apparently sweet and provides (according to Brown) an excuse for staying at Auckland’s Sky City, though Cosgrove questioned whether the $25 per night VUWSA would be willing to fork out for accommodation would actually pay for a room at such a nice hotel. Spike then also noted that both Salient and VUWSA’s Karori office need new printers, which the Exec duly agreed to pay for (at which point I went “YUSSSSSS!”).

We then turned to the less important stuff: a request from a charity group for $250 to send five disabled kids to some entertainment; a request from VUWSA’s receptionist Carey for a lockable cabinet in which to keep his things – Wright said she’d give him her locker, then the Exec went into committee for a bit; a discussion about attending an NZUSA conference in Dunedin in October to elect a new NZUSA president; and requests from the Sailing, Hockey, Football and Flying Disc clubs for grants. Barnard asked everyone to agree not to hold meetings in the Union office or anywhere other than the VUWSA meeting room in future, due to last week’s meeting being “hijacked”. Cosgrove presented his President’s Report which was unanimously passed, although Wright questioned whether it was really a month’s work, and Brown noted that the entire Exec had been lax in their reports.

I was briefly given speaking rights to inform the Exec that the police told me they want to form a closer working relationship with students. Finally, Neilson noted that the proposed date of VUWSA’s AGM would have to be pushed back to 24 September so that Salient can print a request for people to send in proposed constitutional amendments, which must be lodged at least 14 days before the AGM. As the meeting broke up, Barnard talked about Katherine Mansfield and what it’s like to study four papers and work 20 hours a week besides being on VUWSA, and Wright talked about dominatrix training. The meeting took just over an hour.

Fortunately, you can get more involved in making change very soon: The 10-year City Council plan for Wellington (LTCCP) is coming up for its 3 yearly review, so the Federation of Wellington Progressive and Residents Association is hosting a meeting, open to all, in the Committee room 1, Council Chambers, at 10 am on Sunday, 31 August.

For more information, contact Dr. John Robinson: johnrob@paradise.net.nz

“Bodyguards positioned outside Britney’s vagina”
“Theodore Roosevely was a gay man”
“Paris Hilton to Operate New Atom Smasher”
“BREAKING NEWS: Attack of the Zombie Negroes: Dick Cheney”

These pieces of genius all give me a little chuckle in the morning. Slightly more perturbing, however, are the ones that could conceivably be real news – such as “Obama withdraws from Presidential race”. Although I know that such news is all false when I clear them from my junkbox, they are nevertheless imprinted on my brain, leaving me with the impression that a bunch of stuff which hasn’t happened actually has. And that’s some freaky shit, y’all.

National’s new policy scraps this inefficient moralizing, but retains the sensible idea that work is good. Under Labour, the number of people on the unemployment benefit has gone down from over 150,000 to 17,710, but Key believes that the third of these people who have been out of work for over a year should be obliged to reapply for their benefit, and demonstrate that they were genuinely looking for work. Setting aside for the fact that everyone on the unemployment (as opposed to sickness, domestic purposes or widow’s) benefit already has to look for work, making this scheme little different from the status quo, there is also the matter of whether there is enough work available. A friend of mine is currently working for a temping agency in Dunedin. While she has been fortunate enough to be placed into clerical work, the large number of factory closures in recent months means there are over 2000 labourers desperately searching for work through this service, and it simply isn’t available. That said, National is only requiring people to look for work, and I can’t argue with that, so long as their economic policies encourage the kind of growth that will create jobs (i,e, reforming the RMA and other bureaucratic blocks to help entrepreneurs start up businesses with ease… more on this in the next issue of Salient).

Thresholds
The second major change to welfare announced by Key is raising the threshold amount that beneficiaries can earn before their benefit is affected from $80 to $100. This is excellent, as it encourages people to work by removing the penalties on earning. However, since their new DPB policy (see below) requires parents to work for 15 hours or more, and since 15 hours work on the minimum wage = a wage of more than $100 per week, simply raising the threshold isn’t enough. National needs to adjust the extent to which earning affects the benefit, so that people on the DPB earning more than $100 a week aren’t overly penalized.

Making Babies
The third and most fascinating change to National’s welfare policy is a softening of it’s domestic purposes benefit (DPB) policy. Two years ago, then-leader Don Brash announced a Malthusian plan to take the DPB away from mothers who gave birth to more children while already on the DPB. While he may have intended this to reduce the number of unwanted and unloved children, it came across as a nasty attack on struggling parents, and led to the resignation of then-welfare spokesperson Katherine Rich.

National’s new policy is to require parents on the DPB to start looking for 15 hours work per week once their youngest child turns six. This continues National’s belief that work is best, while not overly penalizing parents on the benefit. But while their previous policy was intended to discourage parents from giving birth to children in poverty, this new scheme actually seems to encourage it!

Imagine you are a parent on the DPB, and your youngest will soon turn six. Your welfare officer informs you that this means you will have to look for work. You now have two options: either go out and work for 15 hours, or get knocked up so that you can wait another six years before having to work. Now, if everyone in this situation thought rationally, they would choose the 15 hours work over the new baby, due to the simple fact that the DPB does not actually provide enough money to raise a child, let alone to make a profit. But humans are not rational.

Of course, while National’s new policy may have the side effect of encouraging some parents to have children they neither want nor love, the fact is such occurrences will likely be rare. On balance, their new welfare policy is sensible, rather similar to Labour’s, and still has a number of holes to be filled in. But we certainly cannot accuse National any longer of having no policies: the substance is there, whether we agree with it or not.

Dear Zachary is the most personal film I’ve ever seen – raw, human and painfully upsetting. Kurt Kuenne tells the story of his murdered friend Andrew through the home movies they made together, and interviews with everyone Andrew loved, as a message to Andrew’s son Zachary. We get to know Andrew as a kind-hearted, comically self-deprecating chubby young doctor, before meeting the woman who shot him dead in a park after he rejected her. The documentary then follows his parents’ quest for justice and the custody of his unborn child.

At one point everything looks like it will work out well, and Zachary begins to experience a loving home environment, before the Canadian legal system releases his mother on bail. She spends the next few months torturing Andrew’s parents with infrequent supervised visits and growing demands for money before, finally, she kills again.

Although the film threatens to turn overtly political, and it does wear its biases on its sleeve with editing that can seem emotionally manipulative, these biases and emotions are one hundred per cent justified.

Andrew’s parents turn out to be simply too good for this shitty world, and Dear Zachary is the strongest argument for vigilante killing I have seen, period. It had the audience shaking, crying and calling out for justice from our seats. Then we had to go and get drunk because it was all too much.

Fuck.

The New Zealand Drug Foundation have been urging New Zealanders to discuss cannabis more openly. Their Executive Director Ross Bell told Salient that our current National Drug Policy recognises that drug use is a health issue first and a criminal justice issue second, but the Misuse of Drugs Act 1975 does not take health treatment into account. At the government’s request, the Law Commission has begun a review of the Misuse of Drugs Act, to investigate “whether the legislative regime should reflect the principal of harm minimisation underpinning the National Drug Policy,” and what the most suitable models of regulation are. In particular, the Law Commission’s review will ask whether the current A, B and C class categories should remain, given that the NZ Drug Foundation argues they do not reflect evidence of addictiveness or harm.

So let us evaluate whether our current cannabis laws are working. A law should serve three functions: to deter potential and actual offenders through the threat or application of punishment; to improve the offender through the Corrections system’s ability to rehabilitate those caught; and perhaps most importantly, to reduce whatever danger the crime poses to the wider public. So we should evaluate prohibition on the grounds of deterrence, rehabilitation, and public safety.

Deterrence
i) Do cannabis laws stop the public from smoking cannabis? Under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1975, possession of cannabis is punishable by conviction as well as “imprisonment for a term not exceeding 3 months or to a fine not exceeding $500 or to both”. The risk of being caught and punished is intended to deter the public from using cannabis. However, recreational cannabis use was relatively unknown in New Zealand at the time it was restricted by the Dangerous Drugs Act 1927. Contemporary statistics relating to cannabis use vary: Alcohol and Public Health Research Unit surveys of over 5000 people, conducted for the Health Select Committee inquiry into cannabis, show that 50 per cent admitted having used cannabis in 1998, rising to 52 per cent in 2001. A more detailed study has been conducted by the Christchurch Health and Disability Study (CHDS), which records detailed information on 1,265 people born in 1977. 67.3 per cent of the CHDS’s subjects reported using cannabis by the age of 21. At the other end of the scale, a World Health Organisation report this year found that only 41.9 per cent of New Zealanders have used cannabis – but this is still the second highest rate in the world, behind the USA.

Whatever the correct figures, we know that around half of our population have used cannabis at some point. While this suggests that penalising cannabis does not prevent use, further evidence comes from a 1997 article in the journal Science, which found rates of cannabis usage remained statistically identical between the Netherlands – which legalized cannabis use in 1976 – and the USA throughout the 1990s.

ii) Do penalties for cannabis use reduce reoffending? While the above evidence suggests prohibition does not prevent the public from trying cannabis, we also need to know whether being caught and punished deters a user from reoffending. A 1976 Canadian study that interviewed those found guilty of possession found neither the certainty of punishment nor its severity had any correspondence to an offender’s intention to use in the future (Patricia G Erickson, The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, June 1976). The CHDS study shows the same thing happening in New Zealand – of those subjects who reported being arrested for cannabis use, 90 per cent did not change the amount they used after arrest, 5 per cent decreased use, but the remaining 5 per cent increased use. This research suggests that prohibition has no effect on an offender’s use.

Deterrence relies upon the perception that if you break the law you’ll likely be caught – certainty of punishment. But it is common knowledge that very few of the large minority who smoke pot actually get caught (5.1 per cent, according to the CHDS), and fewer (3.6 per cent) are convicted. The law is not applied often enough to actually deter, but is common enough to damage a large number of lives. The law is commonly ignored, and the police could not change this even if they wanted to, but they still have to technically enforce it, and so over 14,000 people are arrested every year on cannabis charges. As the CHDS state in summing up their evidence: “The findings [of our study] show that the law was administered in an inefficient way, the application of the law was biased, and the law was ineffective in reducing cannabis use.”

Rehabilitation
While prohibition does not deter New Zealanders from using cannabis, advocates of prohibition would argue that police intervention also helps to rehabilitate offenders – for example, families and schools can get the police involved when their kids are caught using. It is debatable whether or not this “tough love” approach actually works. Even presuming that it does, if cannabis were legal for only those aged over 18 to use, parents would still be able to get the police involved.

The argument that imprisonment helps addicts get off drugs is deeply flawed, as Corrections freely admits its guards do not prevent visitors smuggling cannabis into jail (indeed, guards at Rimutaka have been caught smuggling themselves). Furthermore, while around 80 per cent of prisoners in this country have some form of drug or alcohol dependency, there very limited places available in drug treatment programmes – this means that in jail, drugs are easier to get than treatment.

Public Safety
Arguably the most important function of the law is to keep the public safe from criminal activity – for example, preventing public cannabis smoking. This argument is undermined by the public J-day smokeups that occur in major cities each May, where hundreds flout the law with only infrequent threat of arrest. Furthermore, opponents of prohibition argue that it forces users to buy their supplies from criminal gangs. University of Canterbury criminologist Greg Newbold wrote in Crime in New Zealand that much of the nation’s illegal drug trade was initiated by members of Hell’s Angels serving time in Paremoremo in the late 1970s, suggesting that imprisonment has facilitated the drug trade.

The Successes of Prohibition
If prohibition does not deter users, does not rehabilitate offenders, and decreases rather than increases public safety, does it do anything positive? Newbold argues that until customs stepped up border control in the late 1970s and 80s, most of New Zealand’s cannabis was imported form South East Asia, but following this crackdown local users have had to rely upon local producers. This has not reduced the amount of pot available, but it is good for our trade deficit, so at least that’s something.

Arguably the most positive aspect of prohibition is that it has inspired a counterculture rich in protest songs that would not exist if they had nothing to protest. So if you like Peter Tosh’s Legalize It or NORML’s quarterly magazine, then you have something to thank prohibition for.

Abuse
Many of the arguments in favour of cannabis legalisation – for example, that it’s a breach of human freedom – would fall flat if we could show that prohibition reduced drug abuse. But since the statistics show this is not the case, we should ask whether it may in fact increase abuse. Technically, the sanctity of the doctorpatient relationship means addicts can seek treatment without fear that their details will be leaked to the police. However, many employers will fire workers who admit to using drugs, which means addicts are pressured to hide their problem. It is primarily this fact – that addicts are pressured into hiding their problem – which suggests that prohibition may increase the harms of drug abuse. Furthermore, by forcing users to seek cannabis on the black market, prohibition brings users into contact with vendors of harder drugs.

Why the problem remains
Legalisation will not solve drug problems; in fact the legalisation debate largely focuses on the relative harms and benefits of cannabis, while ignoring the real issue, which is the harms and benefits of the law. Ross Bell notes that during the Health Select Committee inquiries into cannabis New Zealand was able to have this debate; indeed, when the last inquiry reported its findings in 2003, it stated the prohibition “inhibits people’s education, travel and employment opportunities. Prohibition makes targeting education, prevention, harm minimisation and treatment measures difficult because users fear prosecution. It also facilitates the black market, and potentially exposes cannabis users to harder drugs.”

Although the government’s own inquiries have suggested that the law does not work, Ross Bell notes that the potential for change has been stifled by politics: “The ability to even talk about cannabis was taken off the table by United Future’s coalition deal, and since that time the awareness and understanding of cannabis has dropped.” Bell hopes that the Law Commission will provide a “neutral territory where we can have these bigger conversations about a better way that we can get our law to support policy.” It is also possible that an Obama victory in this year’s US Presidential election could see an end to the USA obstructing any efforts to focus the war on drugs on harm minimization.

You can get involved in creating drug laws based upon evidence rather than fear. The Law Commission will produce an issues paper about the Misuse of Drugs Act by the end of the year, at which point they will ask for public submissions. Tell them what you think: com@lawcom.govt.nz

References

1) Fergusson DM, Swain-Campbell NR, Horwood LJ, “Arrests and Convictions for Cannabis Related Offences in a New Zealand Birth Cohort.” Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 2003.

With the passage of the Civil Unions bill and widespread (though by no means complete) support for homosexuality, it seems that we’re reasonably comfortable to express ourselves in homosexual ways. But, lest we grow complacent, we need to observe that our society is much less accepting of other forms of personal and romantic expression. Polygamy and sadomasochism are still generally frowned upon by the majority. Even more worrying is our treatment of transgendered people.

More times than I care to remember, friends of mine have spotted a person who has clearly altered their gender, and remarked something along the lines of “who do they think they’re fooling.” What my friends don’t seem to realise is that the people they’re insulting did not choose to change their gender from the one forced upon them at birth – indeed it’s unlikely anyone would put themselves through the pain of trying to convince others that their immediate perceptions are incorrect.

What makes being transgendered so difficult is that, whereas most homophobes accept that gay people are actually gay, a great many otherwise tolerant people simply refuse to consider transgendered people by the sex they identify with. Being constantly referred to as ‘her’ by everyone and their toddler at the supermarket is a painful experience when you know, deep in your heart, that you’re not a woman. As a dear friend of mine once wrote: “I know I’m a special kind of man and blah blah blah, but really. I would trade all the insight that my female upbringing gave me for the ignorant reality of a proper body.”

It’s really fucking painful to see what we put him and others like him through. Even many of those who consider themselves liberal still find it necessary to make snide remarks every time they see a transgendered person. Georgina Beyer tried to get the current Labour government to legislate against prejudice based upon gender identity, but withdrew the bill on the Solicitor-General’s advice that the current Human Rights Act already outlaws such discrimination. But this doesn’t change the fact that we still treat transgendered people badly, and that sometimes this treatment is simply too hard to bear.

Unfortunately, you can never entirely change your body. You can never get back the childhood you lost because you were in the wrong body, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. Being transgendered takes a whole lot of courage and determination, and I want you all to know that you’re awesome people, and I have the deepest admiration for you all.

Letter of the Week: Fuck Unicomm

To all Unicomm residents, lets wake the fuck the up and organize. We’re being exploited and it’s bullshit. We haven’t had access to half the services we were promised last year, such as the gym, the McKenzies laundry, the bar. We’ve received no compensation for the extensive renovations that have been going on for the entire year, including the jack hammer right the fuck outside my window every fuckin morning. Management’s response to these renovations was an apology, a promise that all construction work was over, and a shitty icecream night – and now it’s started again. McKenzies might as well not even have a roof it leaks so bad, eighth floor Cumberland are so pissed off they sought legal action apparently, and we now have to go through the seemingly pointless process of wasting our cellphone credit on those power cards. Not to mention the hideously expensive laundry system. What the fuck?

And the most infuriating part is, Unicomm is owned by the ninth largest corporation on the planet – the Dutch ING Group. The only reason a multi-national corporation like ING would accquire an asset such as Unicomm is to invest in that asset, which is to profit from it, which means some fuckwit corporate CEO is sitting in an office in Europe makin money off us.

So for fuck’s sake let’s do something. Those posters were so encouraging but nothing seems to have come of them? And yeah I tagged the lift. It took a shitload of weight off my chest, and it resulted in those posters. And every resident should be taking similar action. Fuck Unicomm. Let’s make demands, organize a dialogue with management to try and reason, then respond accordingly in solidarity.

Rise up. It’s fun.

Sam. Peoples Army. (Salient I KNOW THIS LETTER IS LONG BUT IT IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT. OUR CAUSE IS DESPERATE. PRETTY PLEASE PRINT THIS. WE HAVE LITTLE OPTIONS)

Yet the problems encountered via the RMA by those attempting to build and develop the economy are not so much errors in the RMA’s legislation when compared with previous regimes, as problems created by its implementation. Small renovators cannot hire someone else to do their paperwork as large property developers can, and correcting this inequity would require a reform of the actual day to day implementation of the RMA as well as its wording. But National’s promise is a good sign.

Their second most important announcement, a continuing series of tax cuts, reeks of double-speak. Finance Spokesperson Bill English announced yesterday that National would follow this year’s tax cuts with annual successors in 2009 and 2010. Today John Key said National would not borrow to fund these cuts, but would also increase government spending on infrastructure by $500 million (coupled with RMA reform this appears to be a solid plan for economic growth), partly funded by public-private partnerships. Yesterday, English had said that while National would not borrow to fund tax cuts, it would borrow to fund infrastructure. Now, this doesn’t make sense. If the government has less money because of increased spending on both tax cuts and infrastructure, and has to borrow, you cannot claim that the borrowing only applies to the infrastructure – it applies to everything that needs funding.

Borrowing isn’t necessarily a bad thing: given that we have been operating with, on the one hand large government surpluses and, on the other hand, $10bn+ per year trade deficits, increasing the government’s deficit to try to reduce our trade deficit is an acceptable plan – so long as it works, and the profits from planned growth do not all drain offshore. So why does National have to be so dishonest about borrowing? Because it has already promised for argument’s sake that it won’t borrow for tax cuts, and cannot bear to backtrack? Whatever.

Anyway, if you’re going to look for a villain in the current National Conference, you’ll find it not in the party itself but in the media coverage. The Sunday Star Times opens a full-page article on Key with the claim that he has “a bottomless amiability” because he turned down their fetishistic request that he sit in Helen Clark’s Prime Ministerial chair. Meanwhile, their cover claims that National’s tax cut announcement constitute “the opening salvoes in the election year battle over the economy.” Forgive me for having a memory, but I do believe Cullen’s larger-than-expected tax cuts on Budget day may have constituted something of an opening salvoe.

Student media probably bitches about the mainstream media a bit much: their fact-finding abilities regarding local events are excellent, and we generally steal their information without bothering to credit them. But when it comes to political coverage they become either whining or fawning children. Duncan Garner’s inanely irrelevent question regarding party finance after Condoleezza Rice called us an ally may be the worst current example, but the SST‘s National Party Conference coverage this weekend is almost as bad: lots of snappy Key quotes about growth, little analysis of exactly what in the RMA should be reformed except to say that the private sector will be involved in speeding up building consents. How is this going to work? Consents don’t take time because of funding, they take time because of discussion. If Key means National will speed up consents when the projects involved have large-scale funding behind them, then he’s talking about making the RMA’s current disparity in favour of large developers worse, and National will have failed to address the RMA’s real problem – the amount of effort it drains from smaller players.

So what does all this mean? 1: National has put forward a very real plan to increase productivity. 2: The details are so vague that the don’t actually know whether this plan will make things better or worse. And 3: We probably can’t rely upon our journalists to discover what the actual details are.

P.S. Yes, I am perfectly aware that the biggest story this weekend is not National’s conference but the fact that Graham Henry just saved himself from assassination. Unfotunately I’m not a good enough reporter to give this moment adequate coverage, so we’ll have to leave it at ‘yay’.

P.P.S. It’s also worth noting that National Radio’s Mediawatch has covered the fawning-over-Key issue in much more depth than us, check out their broadcast from today http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/mediawatch.
The Gone Fishing interview is pretty lulz.

Of course there are problems with this place. Its creativity rocks but it’s perhaps too aware of this fact. And while proximity to Parliament allows us to think we’re ‘making a difference’, the Beehive really just infects everything with party politics and clouds intellectual debate with personal ties and schmoozing. This is not a town that favours straight talking or transparency.

I love walking around this city, and I love laughing whenever two cars try to drive in different directions down Kelburn’s tiny windy streets. This city is the perfect pedestrian city, whatever you think of its hills, but these streets aren’t made for cars. So I often wonder what it would be like to simply remove all cars from the city centre. Of course we’d have to allow access routes for delivery vehicles to fill all the offices with computers, but other than that…

Whatever we do, the point is that Wellington is both mad and wonderful, and much of this issue of Salient is devoted to considering its future. As Lenny Henry recently pointed out, her buildings seem to creep closer to the sea each night in search of salt. We’re built on reclaimed land that may one day subside, but in the meantime, it’s just great to walk around and run into all the crazies.

“That parliament give urgent attention to changing the law to allow individuals to obtain, possess and use cannabis for treatment of serious medical conditions when this
has been recommended or endorsed in writing by the individual’s registered medical practitioner.”

While the number of signatures may not be overwhelming, the reasoning of the petition’s argument is. It simply asks the government to let doctors treat their patients in the most appropriate manner. NORML’s vice-president Will de Cleene points out that “What [NORML] seek is not novel, nor unreasonable. We ask that medicinal cannabis is
permitted to be used by consenting adults in consultation with their medical practitioners.” Many other nations, including Canada, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Spain, as well as some U.S. states, have already legislated to stop prohibition from interfering with medicine, and New Zealand should do the same.

Meanwhile, Jagerbombs and Martinis will never be prescribed for anything by any doctor in their right mind, since all they do is make you convulse, throw up stomach acid and miss the first five hours of work on a Thursday morning. And what the fuck is with martinis anyway? They remind me of sculling vodka when I was little, only with an olive in it so that it’s “classy”, ooooh NO.

However, despite the fact that the magazine is full of cuss words, “fucked” turns out to be unacceptable language; someone ripped the signs down and laid a complaint with VUWSA, so I had to put up new signs containing the word “f*d”.

This got me thinking about how people complain about shit that doesn’t matter, probably because they have nothing to do. I then went back to the office and opened up The Dominion Post when, lo and behold, what do I see but an article about the Iranian embassy bitching about the film fest.

As the article explains, the Iranian embassy is “irate” that the Iranian animated feature Persepolis distorts history, “especially Iran’s revolution and the role of people in it”. What am I to make of this? Were there no people involved in the revolution? Was it carried out by cyborgs? Well I guess those cyborgs trained people to bitch and moan good.

p.s. As you can see by this post, I also enjoy complaining about shit. And swearing. Fuck yeah.

On the chill morning of 14 August 1981, local Mongrel Mob leader Lester Epps awoke outside his pad to the sight of the Eastern Suburbs Rugby League Club – with whom he’d scrapped at the Tramway Hotel (now The Adelaide) the night before – standing over him looking mean. Though he fled to the Basin Reserve, the League players caught and beat him to a pulp, eventually receiving 18-month prison terms for manslaughter. A couple of decades ago, young women walking through Newtown at night ran the risk of being abducted and put on the block. Although this may no longer be a common occurrence, the area still seethes with gang tension, and young men (who may or may not be gang prospects) are still known to lay in to students who pass through in the night. In 1996, two Samoan newspaper boys fought off members of the Satan’s Slaves, but not everyone is so lucky.

My earliest gang experiences date back to the summer of 2000-1, when I’d hang out in a grotty flat in Washington Valley (the closest Nelson comes to a ghetto). One of our drunken flat parties was interrupted by some little shit, whose older brother was in the Mob, trying to beat the shit out of my mates. A few weeks later he jumped us on a back road by the beach. However, most of my experiences with actual patched members have been sweet: around the same time as the above incident, when walking my dog in Anzac Park (across the road from the Lost Breed pad), a Lost Breeder came past with two great big Alsatians who chased my pup under a bench. Their owner got his dogs under control and apologised, but told me to remember there were often giant fuck-off dogs in the area. A couple of years later, I hitched a ride with four patched Maori dudes called Wiremu, Wiremu, Kingi and Rangi. When I sat down between the two in the back, they turned to me and said “Hey, you know we’re gonna kill you, right?” But after a brief awkward silence I said “Err… no you’re not,” and they started to giggle, then offered me some fried chicken.

My experiences support the common observation that it is the young guys, the prospects out to prove their toughness, who cause the most problem for outsiders. However, it would be naïve to conclude on the basis of a couple of anecdotes that patched gang members are not dangerous. For every positive gang story, there’s a negative. I met a girl in Christchurch who used to skate over to the local Mongrel Mob pad to buy acid; they called her ‘roller girl’ and she never had any trouble from them. But I met another girl in Wellington who was chased out of Hamilton by the Headhunters after refusing to sleep with one of their leaders. Perhaps it’s worth taking some time to examine just who these groups are, and where they’ve come from.

The Bikies
The Hell’s Angels Motorcycle Club Auckland was formed in 1961, the gang’s first chapter outside California and now the oldest major gang network in the country. Over the next two decades a number of rival bikie gangs started up, including Highway 61, the Road Knights, the Headhunters, the Nomads and the Lost Breed. During the early years, these gangs were largely involved in boozing, biking, fucking and occasionally brawling. However in 1975 twelve Hell’s Angels (half the gang) were jailed for the manslaughter of a Highway 61 member. Confined in Paremoremo, the Hell’s Angels developed contacts among Aotearoa’s criminals, and according to Canterbury University criminologist Dr Greg Newbold, the Hell’s Angels emerged from this experience to form the nation’s major drug-trade network.

Since then, the bikie gangs have largely drifted under the radar. Many have come to redefine themselves as ‘motorcycle clubs’ and argue that their love of bikes, and not crime, is their reason for being. Many such clubs organise motorbike conventions and run legitimate bike shops. Bill Payne, author of Staunch: Inside New Zealand’s Gangs, argues that “bikies today have more in common with the Small Businessmen’s Association that they do with the outlaw spirit.” However, these groups still control much of the drug trade, and their lack of overt violence may be a ploy to protect their real criminal interests by avoiding police confrontation. Furthermore, the Hell’s Angels have maintained a membership of around twenty, as any new member must go through a lengthy recruitment period and be approved unanimously by the gang – but this has not entirely kept the gang away from violence. In the mid- 90s, the Hell’s Angels tried to work with Timaru’s Road Knights to establish a southern presence. This led to a brief war between the Road Knights and the Epitaph riders for control of Christchurch, which ended in the April 1996 shooting of an innocent bystander and the imprisonment of most Road Knights.

Ultimately, what defines the bikie gangs is the symbolic freedom and masculinity of their bikes. Thus the Mongrel Mob’s theft and arson of two Road Knights bikes in Invercargill recently was a deliberate attack on the heart of their rivals.

The ‘Ethnic’ Gangs
New Zealand’s two largest gangs, the Mongrel Mob and Black Power, are commonly referred to as ‘ethnic’ gangs – a term that does not include the Triads. The police website (http://www.police.govt. nz/service/cib/organised_crime.html) states “Identifying organised crime by ethnicity or activity remain useful aids for Police when dealing with the day-to-day activities of overt organised groups” and goes on to explain that membership of both gangs is “dominated by Pacific Island and Maori people” whereas the bikie gangs “can be of mixed race.” This is misleading, because while the Mongrel Mob is dominated by Polynesians and most bikie gangs are dominated by Pakeha, the Mongrel Mob was originally a Pakeha gang, formed in the mid-60s in Hastings by a group of fucked up young people, many of whom had been abused in state homes and institutions; when a local judge referred to them as a “pack of mongrels” the legend was born. In the documentary Ross Kemp on Gangs: New Zealand (which cannot be screened in this country, although you can still download it from the Pirate Bay – see review page 51), bald white Gary, a founding member, says because they “despised the system for the treatment we got as social welfare kids” they acted as offensively as possible: putting a German Stahlhelm on a British bulldog to undermine those who fought in the Second World War, chanting “Seig Heil!” and waving swastikas. As the mob have become dominated by Polynesians, they have grown into Aotearoa’s largest gang, with branches stretching from Invercargill to the far North. The mob became a substitute whanau for Maori and Pacific peoples who emigrated into the cities and felt disaffected with the dominant culture; both white and brown mobsters continue to tattoo their faces with a mongrel mixture of Nazi and Maori symbolism, an affront to both sides of bicultural Aotearoa.

Former mobster turned Christian Tuhoe ‘Bruno’ Isaac recounts in his book True Red how they would wear ‘reggies’ – multiple pairs of jeans sewn or glued together and never washed, despite being stained with liquor, sexual juices and excrement. Gary told Ross Kemp how he loved ripping a girl’s tampon out with his teeth 26 Issue 13 before violating her. Neither Isaac nor the mobsters interviewed by Kemp and Payne had any love for their Maori roots or for women, who were there to cook and be put on the block. In 1986, Isaac organised a massive Mongrel Mob convention in Ambury Park, Auckland to try to change their image, but younger members wouldn’t have a bar of it, and to prove this abducted and blocked a woman passing through the park. In June the next year, Mobster Sam Te Hei raped and murdered 16-year-old Colleen Burrows in Napier.

While the Mongrel Mob may be too devoted to throwing shit at society to ever organise nationally, the same cannot be said of Aotearoa’s second largest gang, Black Power. Black Power began in Wellington around 1970 as the Black Bulls, and were initially much like a smaller Mob. However the developing political consciousness of founder Rei Harris drew in Pakeha social worker Denis O’Reilly and the pacifist elderly ex-Burmese judge Bill Maung. This trio attempted to turn the gang into a political force, introducing a no-rape policy from 1978 (although the policy has often been ignored). O’Reilly became an ally of Robert Muldoon – one night, when Muldoon was PM, he was hanging out at a Black Power pad and one member flicked beer in his face. Muldoon sat through this insult for a few minutes before throwing his whisky at the flicker, and the entire room cracked up laughing. When the cops turned up, Muldoon told them to go away.

In return for the gang’s support, Muldoon introduced government funds for gangorganised work schemes, as an attempt to get the gang members into employment. By the late 80s Black Power had accumulated multi-million dollar assets, including two limousines, and other gangs picked up the scheme. However, when the Mongrel Mob used a governmentfunded work-skills vehicle in an armed holdup in January 1987, soon after the Ambury Park rape, the schemes were discontinued. This despite the fact that, as Denis O’Reilly told Salient, getting gang members into paid employment was the best way to reduce their offending, and the end of these work schemes saw a sharp rise in crime. Meanwhile, Black Power continued to out-organise the Mob; although the Mob outnumbered Black Power in Mt Eden in the late 80s, following an incident which left many Mob members in solitary confinement Black Power were able to ‘take over’ the prison so that when the Mobsters came out of solitary, they had to be kept in isolation from the rest of the jail.

Despite the end of Muldoon’s work schemes, O’Reilly has persevered in his attempts to reform gangs, often working with Mongrel Mob reformer Harry Tam, and blogging about his attempts to fight the drug trade by tackling addiction among gang members on Nga Kupu Aroha (http://www.nzedge.com/features/ar-denis.html). However, a 2002 shootout in Wairoa and incidents between the two gangs last year in Wanganui (leading to the drive-by shooting of two-year-old Jhia Te Tua by the Mongrel Mob) and Porirua (which members of Newtown Black Power allegedly “invaded” to avenge the death of a young Samoan beaten to death by the Mob in December) demonstrate that these attempts to reform our two largest gangs have failed. In 2005, current Black Power president Mark Pitman was quick to distance the gang from a prospect who was arrested for forcing a two-year-old to eat faeces dipped in tomato sauce. But as Greg Newbold told us, the attempts of older members to reform such large, loosely organised gangs may be doomed to failure, since the younger members are there for the very reason the now-regretful elders joined in the first place: sex, drugs and mayhem.

Youth Gangs
While patched gang members are involved in crime, many of their activities are hidden – organising large weapon and drug deals, attacking only other gang members and raping only women within the gang. It is the young guys, prospects for the larger gangs or members of a new breed of gangsta rap gangs such as the Killer Beez, Dope Money Sex, and the Motherfucking Ruthless Cunts, as well as similar girl gangs like the Straight Up Sisters. As Craig Marriner explained in Stonedogs, these gangs roam the streets at night in packs, looking for solitary easy targets; they’re also involved in pretty much all forms of petty crime, from shoplifting to tagging to handbag snatching. Many of these guys will graduate to become patched members of the Mob or Black Power, and Bill Payne argues that such prospects are the real weapon of the gangs, because they feel the need to attack outsiders in order to prove their worth. Tuhoe Isaac describes how Mob prospects would be made to drink piss and shit out of gumboots; others serve as their elders’ servants in jail.

Perhaps the most prominent Wellington youth gang is the Darksyders, loosely affiliated with Black Power, who engage in rap battles and fought a group of goths for control of Manners Mall earlier this year (see Salient Issue 6).

Skinheads
The fourth notable type of gang in Aotearoa are the skinheads. Skinhead gangs are especially strong in Christchurch and Timaru, but they tend to be small and short-lived, generally disintegrating once their members end up in Court for hate crimes and turn on one another. In 1987, Skinheads leader Glen McAllister was jailed for stabbing another Skinhead. I met a poet in Dunedin who used to work as a prostitute in Christchurch, and according to her tale Glen had looked after the street girls, using his followers to keep them safe. A breakaway group had wanted to exploit the girls for their own benefit, and Glen had solved the problem by stabbing their leader. When he was released two years later, he shot another man in Cathedral Square before taking his own life. This story perhaps shows that some skinheads are not as bad as others. Certainly, my closest contact with a skinhead gang came at a Nelson punk party in early 2005, when three turned up to be greeted with cries of “it’s the chemos!” They dared me to eat a lemon, and it was all a good time – but that doesn’t change the fact that they were still a pack of drunken racists.

Then in 1994 a new skinhead gang formed inside Paparua prison: the Fourth Reich. Three years later, Fourth Reich president Ivan Gugich skinned one of his men alive for narking, while two followers killed young Maori Hemi Hutley and threw him into the Buller river. Although one of the killers, Neihana Foster, was also part Maori, he told the Court that his father and his heart were white. This began a reign of terror on the West Coast, involving the murder of transgendered Janis Bamborough in 1999 and Korean tourist Jae Hyeon Kim in 2003. Bamborough’s killers weren’t caught until 2005 due to the complicit silence of the community, while Kim’s alleged killer Shannon Brent Flewellen was only arrested this year. Fortunately, the Fourth Reich were chased out of Nelson by the Lost Breed, but other skinheads continue to attack unsuspecting Asian pedestrians, often in full view of the public and security cameras.

Solutions
The above histories are full of violence and despair. Consequently, many New Zealanders think that “banning” gangs is common sense. However, many others idolise them – hence the Mongrel Mob MySpace layout you can download from
www.layouts.fm, the clips on YouTube of Black Power photos set to heavy rap, and the way local anarchist groups imitate Mongrel Mob and Black Power bandanas and invite these guys to their rallies.

The Labour Party has recently introduced the Organised Crime (Penalties and Sentencing) Bill, amending the Crimes Act 1961 so that when an offender carries out a crime “partly or wholly because of his or her participation in an organised criminal group”, their membership of this group counts as an aggravating factor resulting in a tougher sentence. The National Party has said it will support this Bill, although doesn’t believe it goes far enough; they want to make it illegal for anyone to be a member of a criminal gang, whether or not they have personally been caught committing crime. Wanganui’s mayor Michael Laws wants to ban gang patches, while NZ First’s Ron Mark wants to expand the Terrorism Suppression Act 2002 to cover gangs, given that they terrorise communities.

Many Kiwis support the idea of banning gangs, seeing it as common sense to outlaw groups who exist to commit crime. The problem is gangs do not exist for the sake of committing crime. Greg Newbold argues that gang members do not join gangs to commit crime, but so that they can experience a sense of brotherhood and belonging denied to them by their families and schools; they commit crime not for the sake of it, but because it strengthens the bonds of brotherhood. Lifetime Black Power member Denis O’Reilly told us the best way to address gang behaviour is to give young prospects something better to do, be it sports, a job or involvement in their marae, since “gang life isn’t all that attractive, really, it’s a default mechanism for those with nothing better to do.” Consequently, O’Reilly and Newbold state that “banning” gangs is both totally unenforceable, and an infringement upon our freedom of association.

Dr Michael Rowe, Director of Victoria University’s Institute of Criminology, agrees that “banning” gangs is unrealistic, and points out that since the Terrorism Suppression Act has not been an effective response to terrorism, it is hard to see how expanding such legislation will help combat gang behaviour. Rowe told us the Government’s plan to make gang membership an aggravating factor in sentencing may be a more reasonable thing to do: since hatred towards other groups is already an aggravating factor, it makes sense to make membership of one’s own group a similarly aggravating factor. However, he points out that this policy will probably not be effective since judges already effectively take gang membership into account when sentencing. Furthermore, Rowe suggests that although New Zealanders have an “understandable tendency to believe there should be a criminological solution to this problem”, since the roots of the problem are social, the solutions will probably be social as well.

Former prison officer Celia Lashlie has argued that the major gangs are dominated by Maori and Pacific Islanders because they have lost touch with their roots through urban drift, while being simultaneously marginalised by Pakeha society. Lashlie told Bill Payne that getting Maori gang members in touch with their whakapapa “gives them a sense of pride to know who they are and from whence they came; and because of that they’re not going to become renegades of society.” The Maori Party has also advocated this solution, although Greg Newbold believes it is “rubbish” and reflects the values of middle-class liberals rather than the practical realities of gang life.

One alterative solution introduced by Robert Muldoon but since discontinued, is the practice of setting up government-funded trusts to get gang members into work. Porirua City Council recently proposed spending $100,000 on a WINZ scheme to get gang members into work clearing gorse, only to have the scheme attacked by The Dominion Post. Similarly, Denis O’Reilly notes that ex-gang members and prisoners are often the best qualified to carry out social work among young gang members, since they actually know what they’re doing and command a certain amount of respect; however there is always political opposition to their involvement, and he is inevitably accused of recruiting.

Getting people from the gangs to help solve the most dire gang behaviours may be unpalatable, but it is the most effective practical response to the problem. O’Reilly argues that we must work with reforming gang leaders (he cites Mongrel Mob Notorious chapter leader Roy Dunne as a good contemporary example) to achieve the “least bad outcomes” for people who are drawn to the gangs. O’Reilly doesn’t pretend that gangs are a force for good, noting that trying to make a gang positive is like building a castle on sand: you have to shift the foundations to involve sports clubs and other groups. But if you simply try to attack the sand from the outside until it goes away, you may get caught up in a greater mess.

At the end of the day, there probably is no solution. Both criminologists I talked to, Michael Rowe and Greg Newbold, agreed that gangs have always been present in urban societies. The threat from criminal gangs is often worse where there is a massive divide between the rich and poor, since there is more to be gained by stealing. Wherever there are disaffected people, they will gang together against society, and simply passing laws to say “you can’t do that” will have little effect – after all, these gangs already disregard the laws we have. As many gangsters will tell you, the police are the “largest and most organised violent gang in the country.” Their criminal competitors are our neighbours and our dealers, and they are here to stay.

During the 34th G8 summit, which ended last week in Toyako, Japan, the leaders of the world’s rich nations talked a bit about global food prices, climate change and armed conflict. They munched on a lot of sumptuous Japanese fare. They released a series of important sounding statements in an attempt to send off powerful ‘signals’, but as always they resisted actually promising to do anything. They sent some of their signals to Zimbabwe, Iran and North Korea, and forgot about Iraq or Palestine. They talked about maybe letting China, Brazil, India, South Africa and Mexico into their club, but couldn’t really agree.

Outside in the streets thousands of folk from all over the globe marched with paper mache masks representing the various world leaders. There were few arrests and little violence; a $US280m security presence was forceful, keeping protestors away from the G8’s central resort, but both sides appear to have forsaken the violence of past G8 summits, at least for now. That violence reached its peak at the 2001 summit in Genoa, where 23-year-old Carlo Giuliani was beaten to death by the security forces. Later that year terrorism replaced globalization as the issue of the moment, and the protests begin to die down. Which is sweet, because violence is poos.

Of course most people are anti-violence, but then most will accept violent self-defence – that is, violence for the sake of stopping violence. Conservative opinion counts police brutality as a form of self-defence for society against outsiders; radical opinion counts revolutionary violence as a form of self-defence against capitalism. Hence you get Kiwi teenagers in Che Guevara shirts who think Hizbollah is radical for firing rockets at Israel, even if this means hundreds of Lebanese die in the retaliation. Good one…

Nowadays I don’t like either state brutality or revolutionary violence. Sure, if some shit-head points a knife in your eye you’re justified to retaliate, but when you stretch self-defence beyond such immediate situations – indirect defence, pre-emptive strikes etcetera – things get tricky. Because I used to think I was a bit of a revolutionary I feel an obligation to tell people that, actually, smashing things because it feels radical achieves precisely nothing.

Recently the cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek wrote a book called Violence in which he argued that there are two forms of violence: ‘objective violence’ is systemic poverty and discrimination, whereas being beaten up is merely ‘subjective violence’ and is the understandable result of ‘objective violence.’ Never mind the fact that, say, having your spine broken in four places by your partner’s foot is fairly objectively violent whatever socio-economic background you come from. Perhaps the kids who rioted on the streets of Genoa are better than the cops who beat them up, but really, neither were acting in a particularly constructive manner.

Revolutionary violence is not a particularly effective way to achieve peaceful Utopia. In The Victorians, novelist and historian A.N. Wilson quotes one revolutionary’s fond memories of the Chartist riots of 1848: “I ran like a lunatic and pulled the bell at Schappers… at some corner on my way, knocking over an old woman’s apple-basket (or it may have been oranges!) I was going too quick for her gentle cursing.”

Wilson goes on to explain the fault in the Chartist’s logic: “One wonders how gentle the cursing was, and whether this tiny vignette of political fervour does not tell us rather a lot about the state of mind respectively of a political activist and an actual working-class woman. We know that in after years most of the fruit-sellers of London declared themselves to have been in favour of the Charter. But how many would have favoured days of street-fighting upsetting their apple-baskets?”

I guess it all comes down to the Jesus complex – that is, believing you can drag people through fire for their own good, even if it kills (or impoverishes) them in the process. If you value utopias over the here and now, you can justify anything.

Just remember I will always love you, Even as I tear your fucking throat away. But it will end no other way.

While A Sense of Purpose makes a decent go at developing some of the dark melodies and personal lyrical ideas from In Flames’ recent work, it lack the variety that made Come Clarity so compelling. The bass in particular is muffled and the drum speed never reaches full flight. But the increased emphasis on lyrics occasionally pays off: ‘Alias’ is easily the album’s standout track, a gigantic arena-rock singalong. The album art reflect’s In Flames’ focus on the personal journey through depression with some sweet drawings reminiscent of Where The Wild Things Are. In the end, A Sense of Purpose lacks the power it needs, but whether you appreciate it or not comes down to whether you think “I feel like shit / But at least I feel something” is a brilliant lyrical idea, or not.

Recently a Salienteer’s bro was caught driving some 50km over the speed limit with a friend. He was fined $800, having told the Court about his job at a petrol station, but the fine was dropped to $400 when he showed the judge that he was also studying. Students are not let off scot-free when they get up to shenanigans, but judges are quite openly willing to apply lesser penalties when they believe that a person has a future. This means that sentences are based on the perceived value of the offender, as well as the severity of the crime. Over the last few decades the police have also developed a practice of staying away from campuses, allowing students to tag, smoke pot and loiter without fear of arrest – although this policy has come under threat recently, especially down south.

After last year’s Undie 500 riots sixteen revelers, including Canterbury and Otago students, were charged with rioting (maximum penalty two years imprisonment), and both the Police and University’s security guards have stepped up their presence in North Dunedin. However, the sixteen rioting charges were all eventually downgraded to disorderly conduct (maximum penalty three months imprisonment) and obstruction, and while many of the total 69 people arrested have been fined and convicted, none have been imprisoned. Given that these guys were out to have some (admittedly destructive) fun, rather than maliciously attack anyone, and given that many are still stuck with a permanent mark on their record, affecting future opportunities, their sentencing seems fair. But I put it to you that if a couple of hundred youths set fire to cars on the streets of Porirua and assaulted firemen, the rioting charges would probably not have been dropped, and at the very least those involved would spend time in jail.

Keeping Your Record Clean: Diversion

There are three ways the legal system can leave you with a clear record when you commit an offence. First, the police can let you off with a warning when they catch you. Second, they can apprehend you but give you a diversion if it is your first offence, allowing you to avoid the possibility of prosecution provided you fulfill whatever requirements they lay down. While the official Police Adult Diversion Scheme only applies to offenders over 17, an almost identical policy also known as police diversion is also applied to younger offenders. Third, even if the police do not grant you a diversion, the sentencing judge may discharge you without conviction under Section 106 of the Sentencing Act 2002. The judge may only grant a discharge without conviction if they are “satisfied that the direct and indirect consequences of a conviction would be out of all proportion to the gravity of the offence.” Such a discharge can be applied to any offence that does not contain a minimum penalty.

All three paths to avoiding conviction are vulnerable to bias on the part of police and the judiciary. Many young people are under the impression that diversion is the only way to avoid conviction after admitting to a convictable crime, that you can only get a diversion once if you plead guilty and that from then on you will always be convicted – unaware of the existence of discharge without conviction. Furthermore, although the Police Adult Diversion Scheme was formally introduced in 1988, it has never been codified into statute law, and can be applied whenever a judge and prosecutor feel it should be.

A 1996 Ministry of Justice report showed that of the estimated 10,430 people diverted that year, 42% were for property crimes such as theft and vandalism, 7% were for cannabis possession, 6% were other drug offences, 44% were for other minor crimes such as disorderly behaviour and minor assault, and less than 1% were for “serious offences against the person.” However, this less than one per cent still totaled 98 people given diversion for serious assaults in one year. Official police policy states that diversion should only rarely be applied to sexual or domestic violence cases, but does not entirely rule diversion out. While this flexibility is necessary to allow judges to take exceptional circumstances into account, it also gives them scope to indulge their biases, whether they are aware of these biases or not.

The Police Adult Diversion Scheme policy states that diversion is intended to rehabilitate offenders and make reparation to victims by asking offenders to apologise to victims and repay or repair any damage done in exchange for a clean record. One of the stated aims is the “improved service delivery to Maori and partnerships with Maori communities and service providers.” However, the Canterbury Health and Disability Study (CHDS) has shown that Maori are still convicted at a higher rate than non-Maori who commit the same crimes. The CHDS is a longitudinal study of a birth cohort of 1,265 children born in Christchurch in 1977, which recorded details on all aspects of their lives for 21 years. In one report, the CHDS discovered that Maori are between 2.1 and 2.6 times more likely to be convicted than non-Maori with the same selfreported history of offending. That is, if a Maori and a Pakeha with the same record commit the same offence, the Maori is more than twice as likely to be convicted. In another report, the CHDS discovered that Maori are approximately 3.8 times more likely to be convicted of cannabis use than Pakeha with the same record of cannabis use and other offending. Furthermore, the report showed that males are ten times more likely to be convicted for cannabis use as females with the same use and offending record.

Addressing Discrimination

That diversion is applied more often to students than nonstudents may be reasonable. Senior Law Lecturer Grant Morris agrees that although there is a perceived bias in the way diversion and other aspects of sentencing are handed out, the diversion policy is still a positive step. Since it is partly intended to safeguard an offender’s future, I suppose it makes sense to apply diversion to those studying to improve themselves. But is it fair to punish people with a permanent record because of the fact that they are not working toward their future, given that we know a conviction will only make any such attempts even harder? And even if we accept that students are indulged more than non-students, surely we cannot accept the same form of discrimination when it is based upon race or gender. When I asked Law Lecturer Nessa Lynch if it was unfair for so many students to be let off via diversion, she pointed out that diversion does not mean being “let off” and can still be quite a serious penalty for young offenders, as they will be expected to adhere to whatever behavioural requirements the prosecution demands in return for their clean record. Lynch suggested that the way to address any discrimination in the scheme would be to extend it, so that except where the circumstances demand otherwise, everyone is diverted for their first minor offence. This suggestion was also made by the CDHS.

A 2005 Law Commission report suggested that the government discontinue the diversion scheme and replace it with police caution, in order to remove the courts from the process to free up judges’ time. However, the Government responded that the involvement of the courts “provides a number of safeguards for accused persons.” The Government response notes the Police agree “there are inconsistencies in the way in which diversion operates in different parts of the country” and that therefore diversion should be more rather than less formalised. If both the CDHS and Lynch are correct, and the way to make diversion more fair is to enact a policy whereby all first-time minor offences receive diversion, then presumably the way forward is to codify this into law. But with the terror of youth tagging dominating so much contemporary political debate, putting such a policy into place may simply not be expedient at the present time.

Perhaps most tragic of all is the fact that, because students pay lighter penalties than many others, we are sheltered from many of the negative consequences of our laws. If the predominantly white student population of Kelburn were arrested for our shenanigans at the same rate as the poorer, predominantly brown youth of other areas, perhaps our social consciences would be more likely to prick up, and we would speak out about the laws we face. But since we are sheltered from the full force of the law, it’s easier for us just to sit on our hands and twiddle our thumbs.

Ross is brilliant at acting out simple motions to describe different characters – hands to ears for Princess Leia’s hair, hands sweeping from crotch to indicate someone listening to Darth Vadar (and thus pissing their pants). He clearly thinks that Luke Skywalker is a whinging little bitch while Yoda is a senile bad-ass, and takes great delight in adding “schwing” to Han and Luke’s comments whenever they talk to Leia. He perhaps overdoes the soundtrack a little bit (constantly humming the theme to each scene as he acts it out), but that’s my only complaint.

One Man Star Wars Trilogy
By Charles Ross
At Soundings
May 20 – 26

What’s Hot

Downstage has the Strike Percussion guys. While not strictly theatre, they’re probably a lot of fun. But if theatre’s what you’re after, Metamorphosis opens this week at Bats and is helmed by some of Wellington’s most respected veteran performers. Alternatively, check out some of the work by Vic’s Theatre Honours students. Ralph Upton has helmed a devised work titled 1001 Things You Must Do Before You Die, while Eleanor Bishop has been rehearsing scenes from Sarah Kane’s Cleansed. You can catch them Thursday 10 July at 2:30pm, and Friday 11 – Saturday 12 July at 7:30pm at Studio 77, with a discussion session afterwards.

The rock elements that Pendulum explored through timings on Hold Your Colour (which despite its experiments was very much a dance album) take up far more space on their followup In Silico. Although the title means “performed on computer or via computer simulation”, Pendulum have spread a blanket of live guitars over their electronics (courtesy of mad mulleted axeman Peredur ap Gwynedd), slowed their beats down and spiced them with some live percussion. Band leader Rob Swire uses his vocals more prominently, and has imitated the narrative progression found commonly on progressive rock albums but only rarely on dance albums. Pendulum have gone from being a rock-inspired DJing outfit to a full rock band with an electronic bassline and some synth.

Sadly, this change makes In Silico much less danceable than Hold Your Colour, and I cannot imagine any of its tracks will be bashed by every local DJ the way Hold Your Colour’s title track was back in 2006. However, the energetic burst from mariachi sounds to guitar drone to the beat’s drop in first single ‘Propane Nightmares’ is awesome to behold. The drumming variations and guitar work on ‘Mutiny’ (which reimagines element’s of Hold Your Colour’s ‘The Template’) are superbly executed, and the slow buildup to hand-waving synth on album closer ‘The Tempest’ is almost as gorgeous as ‘Hold Your Colour.’

But while the first three tracks are a burst of heavy electronic dance-rock, and the final four develop this sound to pick it apart and peer at its workings, the middle three are somewhat insipid, so that I inevitably skip them over. I would also like to plead with Swire to actually let his voice ring out without garbling effects for once. For a guy with such a sweet elf beard and a Ztar (synth in the shape of a guitar, for the sake of showing off on stage), he should have more balls when it comes to singing. Swire also overdoes the higher elements of his synth, preventing the guitars from breathing to their full potential. Nevertheless, the beats are still a lot of fun to play with, and as an attempt to combine electronic dance with hard rock, In Silico is remarkable success – satan knows there have been helluva lotta failures there. Pendulum, I salute you.

In 1989, then-Minister of Education Phil Goff raised the cost of university fees by almost 1000%, to $1,250 per year. The Labour Government of the day had also considered charging graduates 20% of the cost of their education as a tax once they had graduated (the first version of a student loan scheme), but scrapped the idea after opposition from students used to paying almost nothing for their degrees. A year later, Labour was voted out.

Lockwood Smith, the incoming National Minister of Education, promised to resign within two years if he had not abolished student fees. Well, he didn’t abolish student fees – indeed they continued to soar so that by the end of the ‘nineties most fees had doubled – yet he failed to resign. Smith also introduced the idea of means-testing students against their parents’ wages before giving out student allowances. In July 1991, 4,000 students marched on parliament demanding that he keep his promise (many also asked the government to “bring back Buck”), but the march had no effect, and we now pay for around a quarter of the cost of our education.

The current Labour Government under Helen Clark claims to have done much to reduce the burden of studying. They initially prevented universities from raising fees, then instituted a Fee Maxima, limiting any increases to five per cent per year (except in exceptional circumstances). However, while this allowed Helen Clark to claim (in her opening speech to parliament this year) that Labour had “capped” fees increases, since five per cent is still higher than the rate of inflation, fees continue to rise faster than wages, and tertiary education becomes more and more unaffordable.

Personally, I am happy to contribute a quarter of the cost of my education. But I am not happy that fees continue to increase faster than wages, so it’s good to see that Labour is finally talking about setting the Fee Maxima at the CPI inflation level (approximately 2.6 per cent) for courses already charging the maximum they can. This resolves one of only two major problems with the current level of financial support offered to students – the other is the fact that, even though you can get an unemployment benefit at 18 years of age no matter what your parents earn, your student allowance is means-tested against your parents income until you’re 24. Although many would say the state should not be funding rich kids’ educations, many students are disqualified from receiving an allowance because they have – for instance – a rich step-father who nevertheless refuses to support them.

So the levels of funding given by the government to both students and the universities they attend isn’t quite good enough, but it isn’t particularly dire either. Almost all students can afford to eat well, and those who cannot can always turn up at their students’ associations asking for a food parcel. In Dunedin, I lived comfortable off a $150 mix of allowance and loan each week by eating a lot of baked beans and drinking only Double Brown. Unfortunately, the cost of renting in Wellington makes such a lifestyle impossible for Vic students, who generally have to work part-time, reducing the effort they can devote to their studies.

Yet the situation is nowhere near as dire as NZUSA claim. Last week NZUSA sent me a press release claiming that the ‘average’ student spends more than $200 a week on rent and groceries, $38 a week on transport and $47 a week on bills. Even if the first figure is correct, the transport and bills figures are not. Almost fifty dollars a week on bills? Maybe if you’re running a massive grow-up in your basement. And if some students are spending $38 a week on transport then they clearly have too much money, because many others choose to walk, which costs nothing. Although NZUSA got these results from their legitimate TNS Conversa Income and Expenditure Survey, and they may reflect the cost of studying in Auckland, it’s clear that the 500-odd students they surveyed do not provide an accurate reflection of average students from across the entire nation.

The fact is, most students own cellphones, MP3 players, stereos and computers. We may spend an average $73 a week on groceries, but this includes the cost of luxuries like beer and smokes. The level of support we receive from the government still contains a number of flaws, but we are not poor, and we should not pretend to be. Of course, it’s NZUSA’s job to demand more money for students no matter what, however faking poverty for sympathy will not get us anywhere.

We received 63 reader’s surveys, which is enough to make analysing them interesting to the folk in the Salient office, but not enough to make our survey anything approaching an accurate representation of, well, anything. Three quarters of you want us to keep the current matte paper magazine format. Around half of you want more thoughtful, challenging articles, the other half wanted more funny shit, and almost everyone wanted cartoons and answers to the crossword. So we’ve moved stuff around, putting a bunch of lulz between the news and the serious features, and shifting some of our columns to the middle. As far as what you don’t want to see in the mag, pointless swearing and ‘boring’ things are the most common. Sweet.

So what do you love and hate about Victoria? Crappy expensive food is a major complaint, along with the lack of a real bar with a warm smoking area, the lack of sofas in the library and subsequent lack of nice places to rest, SCS, and the computer set-up here in general. However, a ‘casual attitude’, tuataras, Hunter and Old Government Buildings, the library’s view, Sandy Rankin, ‘Hot Chicks’, free newspapers and the fact that we’re in Wellington, as well as ‘KNOWLEDGE’ are all win.

Embedded reporters, who accompany armies into battle wearing their uniform, have got a bad rap. Robert Fisk regularly accuses them of being gung-ho propaganda parasites, which they often are. But Rolling Stone reporter Evan Wright is proof of the value of embedded reporting. Wright’s book Generation Kill recounts his time with the Marines of First Recon who led the Humvee charge into Iraq. While Wright clearly loved these guys, dedicating his book with the motto “The strength of the Pack is the Wolf,” his ability to recount their spur-of-the-moment battle remarks provides a disturbing illustration into the mind of the US warrior.

As the convoy recollects after one firefight, a gunner remarks that the experience was just like “Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. I felt like I was living it when I seen the flames coming out of windows, the blown-up car in the street, guys crawling around shooting at us. It was fucking cool.” Earlier on in the campaign, another Marine peers up at missiles whistling noisily overhead and exclaims “I wish I had some shrooms.” As Wright explains, many of these boys signed up after seeing a sweet-as ad where a dragon-slaying knight morphs into a Marine in dress uniform.

These scenes provide us with an alternative explanation for why the USA invaded Iraq, quite apart from the “it’s about oil” conspiracy theories or the transparently bullshit “bringing peace and freedom” line. For these marines represent “America’s first generation of disposable children.” Prior to 9/11, nothing much was expected of them, but war has given them a purpose – the invasion of Iraq was necessary to provide the US government some way to let out all the frustration built up by a generation of narcissistic internet debates a video games glorifying violence.

Salam Pax, Where is Raed? (dear_raed.blogspot.com)

To get a similar sense of the mindset of the other side of the war – that of the Iraqis – you have to turn to the blogosphere. Alongside Riverbend’s Baghdad Burning (riverbendblog.blogspot.com) and the metal band Hometown Baghdad’s video blog
www.chattheplanet.com, the star of the Iraqi blogosphere is Salam Pax (‘peace’ in Arabic and Latin), whose blog Where is Raed (dear_raed.blogspot.com) ran during the lead-up and invasion period (from 2002-3) and has been republished in book form as The Baghdad Blog. Salam Pax is a gay atheist computer programmer with a Sunni father and Shi’ite mother, and is obviously the coolest person in the world. He complains about his friend singing Nirvana’s ‘Pennyroyal Tea’ on the grounds that Iraq does not have cherry-flavoured laxatives; when he meets some gay arms dealers, he laments the fact that his kind are no longer just harmless hairdressers and film producers. He also wishes he was in Syria, smoking hashish and boogying at discotheques, instead of running from explosions and watching religious fanatics burn books in his hometown, but for some reason he refuses to leave.

During the leadup to the war, Salam Pax was neither totally pro- or anti- the invasion, on the grounds that while Saddam needed removing, the US would probably fuck things up through their arrogance. And so they did, and so his cynicism won out in the end. After his blog folded, Pax went and covered the 2004 US Presidential Election for The Guardian. Did I mention that I want to have his babies?

Conversely, the University has bowed to pressure to delay any cuts to the Gender and Women’s Studies programme, to allow for more consultation. VUW had proposed several crazy reforms of Gender, including a minimum of 16 people in all Honours courses (which is far more people than you want in post-grad discussion classes), and moving it away from Kelburn campus and the rest of the arts, to the College of Education campus sequestered in Karori. Gender Studies is currently part of the Department of Education at Vic, although it is more commonly associated with Sociology and Anthropology at other Unis.

Commonwealth Press Union chairperson (and Dominion Post editor) Tim Pankhurst told the health select committee that although he believed the Bill had been drawn up in “goodwill”, it had been formulated in such a way that the Director-General could interpret his powers to include substantial restrictions on creative freedom. Pankhurst’s argument was based on the following belief:

“Good law is law that is clear in its intent and as we are seeing with the Electoral Finance Act it becomes shambolic when the legalities are confused.”

Abortion
The issue of legislative transparency that Pankhurst promotes is also behind the current debate over abortion law. The central law regarding abortion, Section 182 of the Crimes Act 1961, states that the killing of an unborn child is a crime punishable by up to 14 years imprisonment. However, Section 182.2 adds the caveat that “No one is guilty of any crime who before or during the birth of any child causes its death by means employed in good faith for the preservation of the life of the mother.”

This law has actually remained unchanged since the sixties, even though abortion was effectively legalised in the late 70s and early 80s. The liberalisation of abortion law was effected not by changing Section 182, but through the addition in 1977 of Section 187A, which adds a number of exceptions to Section 182: when the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest, when the child would be born “seriously handicapped”, or when the mother is “subnormal”. More importantly, Section 187A defines the various situations in which abortion is “for the preservation of the life of the mother” to include concerns for the mental health of the mother. By the early 80s, doctors and judges had come to interpret this definition liberally: if a woman says her pregnancy could harm her mental health, the abortion is regarded as legal. 98% of abortions are now carried out at least nominally for the sake of the mother’s mental health.

Last week, Justice Miller of the High Court found that the Abortion Supervisory Committee has “misinterpreted its functions and powers” for allowing such abortions to go ahead. Anti-abortion charity Right to Life had taken the ASC to court and expected the judge to order an immediate change to the enforcement of abortion law. However, while Justice Miller has argued that the law and its interpretation should be closer together, he has not asked for any change to enforcement, leaving parliament to decide whether to bring Section 187A into line with current practice.

Terrorism
Last November, the Solicitor General David Collins QC raised the importance of legislative transparency when he called the Terrorism Suppression Act “unnecessarily complex, incoherent and as a result almost impossible to apply to the domestic circumstances observed by the Police in [the October 15 raids].” When the Act was passed back in 2002, it was largely intended to prevent the support of international terrorism networks. However, because it was sloppily formulated the police believed they could apply it to domestic criminals, and put this to practice during last year’s raids on activists. Because the Act was not clear about its application to domestic suspects, it was used in a manner not intended by its legislators. At the same time that this erupted, the Electoral Finance Act was also coming under fire for indirectly banning political placards unless they contained the holder’s name and address.

The Benefits of Dishonest Legislation
It seems obvious that legislation should be written in the statues exactly as the legislators intend it to be applied in case law, to avoid confusion. But things aren’t always done this way in the Westminster system. In 1806, after a decade of unsuccessful attempts to ban the slave trade, William Wilberforce instead passed a motion banning Britons from participating in the slave trade with French and hostile colonies (including the newly independent USA). Since this route constituted almost the entire British slave trade, it allowed Wilberforce to sneak abolition in by proxy. A positive public response then allowed abolition proper to finally make it through parliament the next year. Thus it was by using dishonesty that the abolitionists were able to end a disgusting, inhumane practice.

Just as our judiciary take a liberal interpretation of our abortion laws, so the police of Amsterdam and Vancouver take a liberal interpretation of their nations’ drug laws, with the tacit consent of their governments. Prejudice towards drug users still frightens legislators from legalising cannabis, but they understand that strict enforcement of the law is neither possible nor desirable, so they have instead allowed a fairly obvious misinterpretation to go ahead, to the benefit of pretty much everyone.

Transparent legislation, which is written out exactly as it is both intended by legislators and actually interpreted by the police and judiciary, is ideal, and we should strive to make all legislation transparent. But because politics does unfortunately get in the way of sane social policies, dishonest legislation is often the only way to pursue justice. So dishonesty can be an acceptable compromise.