ISSUE 20

Issue 20 / August 16th / 2010

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FEATURES 18 ART!

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CRITIQUE 42 - 53

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56 EXTRA ELECTION SPECIAL

Disclaimer: the views presented within this publication do not necessarily represent the views of the Editor, Planet Media, or OUSA. Press Council: people with a complaint against a newspaper should first complain in writing to the Editor and then, if not satisfied with the response, complain to the Press Council. Complaints should be addressed to the Secretary, PO Box 10-879 The Terrace, Wellington.

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Critic – Te Arohi

Art and politics – two things that don’t mix. The geniuses at OUSA scheduled Art Week and the elections in the same week. We wanted to cover both so we’ve bought you a magazine that tries to pay both service. Indeed, we are your one stop shop for all your OUSA election needs (sorry, we’ll return to normal next week). Our news team (and special guest pundits!) cover every angle imaginable at the front of the magazine (it starts on p8) – then hear from the candidates themselves at the back from p56. Wedged in between it all is some awesome art. Check it out. Plaster your walls with it. And don't forget to vote

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t is Art Week so I, your Critic Art Editor, have been enlisted to discus that. I spent my holidays in Sydney visiting the Biennale festival. I was blown away by the whole package - the stunning galleries, the everything... Half of the people on the free ferry over to the exhibition island were regular Sydney residents and tourists doing something out of the norm.

Dunedin Public Art Gallery is good. My beef is with the lack of public events dedicated to contemporary art and lack of contemporary public sculpture. While the Fringe festival does bring a small extra yearly dose of contemporary art to the city, there are few works that occupy the public space.

Auckland just had the triennial - a major international event.

Wellington, ‘the cultural capital’, has a much larger visual arts division in their fringe festival and hosts the NZ international festival of the arts. Coming up in Christchurch is the Scape Biennial of Art in Public space. These events throw art in your face whether you like it or not.

Now it’s not as easy as demanding more public sculptures around the city, art in public spaces comes with its own moving truck full of baggage. And sure, it’s easy to put up a giant sprig of wheat made from lampposts and a tyre in Christchurch’s centre city, its ugly already. Some would argue such contemporary public sculpture would essentially clash with Dunedin architectural heritage. But surely here the answer is temporary public art, like the sculptures dotted around Sydney’s Hyde Park every second year, Wellington’s ongoing The 4 Plinths Sculpture Project by Te Papa, or the seven new public works to be unveiled in September at the Scape Biennial.

It’s great that OUSA seem to get it. By placing temporary installations around campus. It’s also encouraging to see a Mayoral candidate, Aaron Hawkins, making the need for more art in Dunedin a feature of his campaign.

PO Box 1436, Dunedin (03) 479 5335 critic@critic.co.nz www.critic.co.nz Editor in Chief:

Ben Thomson Designer in Chief:

Gala Hesson Features Writers:

Susan Smirk Caitlyn O’ Fallon Thomas Redford Sub Editor:

Marie Hodgkinson Creative Director:

Dreke Verkuylen News Editor:

Gregor Whyte News Reporters:

Rory MacDonald Julia Hollingsworth Feature ILLUSTRATOR:

Tom Garden Music Editor:

Sam Valentine Film Editor:

Max Segal Books Editor:

Jonathan Jong TELEVISION EDITOR

Paul McMillan FOOD EDITOR

Tien-Yi Toh ART EDITOR

April Dell Performance Editor:

Jen Aitken And a substantial army of volunteers xoxo Advertising:

Kate Kidson Tim Couch Dave Eley Logan Valentine Ad. Designer:

Daniel Alexander PH: (03)4795361 kate@planetmedia.co.nz WWW. planetmedia.co.nz

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The Renaissance is a period in art history, roughly spanning from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century. Classical influences and a more linear perspective are identifying characteristics and developments that emerged during this period. The Renaissance is generally regarded as the link between the Middle Ages and the Modern era. Major proponents of the movement were, of course, Leonardo da Vinci and Michaelangelo.

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Dadaism began in Zurich during World War One, primarily as a protest against bourgeois capitalist interests, and as a rejection of the current standards of art and cultural intellectualism, as they tended to correspond with the war. Dadaists often believed that the capitalistic logic of the bourgeois lead people to war, and in an artistic rejection of logic, Dada work embraced chaos and irrationality.

The ‘anti-art’ movement spread throughout the world, and is recognised as a major influence in both art and music, particularly pop art and punk rock.

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Cubism is a revolutionary experimental art movement that began in France in the early twentieth century. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque are recognised as the pioneers of the period, which is characterised by objects being broken up and reassembled in an abstract form. This abstraction helped to reflect a multitude of viewpoints within the artwork. Cubism can be separated into two major branches, analytical cubism and synthetic cubism, contrasting basic geometrical shapes and colours with collages and more object inclusion.

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Impressionism is a term given to a nineteenthcentury movement, with the term derived from the title of a work by Claude Monet. Originally, impressionists were a Paris-based collection of artists unsatisfied with the standards being enforced by the Académie des Beaux-Arts, which exhibited only paintings depicting traditional religious and historical subjects in a style limiting artists’ originality. Impressionism eventually spread beyond France, and also gave rise to the younger post-impressionists such as Vincent van Gogh.

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Neoclassicism is an art period generally recognised as lasting from the mid-eighteenth century until the late nineteenth century. Classic Western art and culture characterised much of the arts, theatre, and literature of the time. The major classic influences of the movement stemmed from Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome. While the ‘official’ neoclassical movement ended many years ago, there are still examples today of artists, and in particular architects, being influenced and inspired by the period.

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Beginning in the 1920s, Surrealism is characterised by strange juxtapositions and non sequitur. Proponents of the movement consider it to be a philosophical development, with new artwork emerging as a result. Surrealism developed out of Dada, and was centered in Paris but spread throughout the world in the 1920s. Surrealism’s reach beyond the arts has led the movement to be known as liberating imagination.

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Abstract expressionism was the first American art movement to gain worldwide influence, and did so post-World War Two. This signalled a movement of the centre of the Western art world from Paris to New York. Surrealism is regarded as an important predecessor to abstract expressionism, characterised by spontaneity and the subconscious creation of art. A famous painter of the period is Robert De Niro, Sr., late father of actor Robert De Niro, Jr. De Niro Jr.’s directorial debut film, A Bronx Tale, was dedicated to De Niro Sr. after his death.

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Postmodernism is recognised as far more than just an art movement: it is known as the propensity to reject objective truths and is characterised by difference, plurality, and scepticism. Postmodernism (obviously) followed modernism, and moved away from modernist ideas such as authority and unity. Postmodern art attempted to react to trends in modern art, in particular the theme of paradox. Several movements are central to postmodernism, including lowbrow art, intermedia, and multimedia, highlighting the usage of technology in art.

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Modernism is a movement beyond the arts that harks back to the early nineteenth century, and Romanticism.

Social disorder – wars and revolts – during this period led to a self-conscious emphasis on the worth of the individual, questioning the seemingly crumbling social and political institutions of the time. The aforementioned self-consciousness characterises the movement, which encompasses many major art periods of the modern era. Of particular importance and interest is Pop Art. A reaction and rejection to the then-popular abstract expressionism, pop art celebrated the mass-consumerism of a post-World War Two society through artists such as Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol.

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design and artistic movement has its roots in France in the early twentieth century. During the 1920s and 1930s, the style was led by the major proponents of the decorative arts, such as fashion and interior designers. In comparison to many other design movements with political intentions, Art Deco was purely visual. Perhaps the most famous example of Art Deco design can be witnessed in New York City, in particular the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building. The lavishness evident in these two buildings, notably the opulence of the spires, characterises them as Art Deco work.

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The University of Otago was subjected to the bitchiest, and most dramatic, student election campaigns in recent memory last week. Four (or possibly five) candidates are after the top job. Mitch Edwards, Harriet Geoghegan, Matt McKillop, and Dan Stride all actively campaigned while Nathanial Hatch-Stevens was more elusive.

Things kicked off with the now-infamous ‘orange smear campaign’, which dismissed current President Geoghegan as being all boobs and no brains. The fluoro poster brigade, consisting of Geoghegan and her Exec hopeful minions, promptly plastered over the offending posters. There is no love lost between Geoghegan and Stride, who is the current Clubs and Socs Rep and at first Stride was rumoured to be behind the ‘boobs or brains’ campaign, although he was quick to distance himself from it, calling the posters “offensive” and later publicly ripping them down.

Then, on Thursday last week, an email from Geoghegan to student presidents around the country in which Geoghegan appeared to support the 90-day employment bill was leaked to Critic. Shocked at the stunning leak, Geoghegan claimed that she was “playing Devil’s Advocate” in a confidential discussion, despite appearing to represent the view compellingly as her own with the use of personal pronouns. OUSA has policy against the 90-day bill. Exec members John Phillipson and Claire Jackson both attempted, fairly unsuccessfully, to construe the debacle as a fault with the national union of students’ associations, NZUSA. Watching the chaos unfold from Wellington, NZUSA Co-President David Do quickly released a statement to Critic and assured Geoghegan that NZUSA had not leaked the email in question.

Referendum scandal is still rife, with Presidential hopefuls Stride and McKillop raising questions about whether the constitution has been changed at all. They say that as the referendum question never specifically referenced the constitution, it may not have been changed. McKillop insists that another referendum is vital to secure OUSA from risk of judicial review.

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Geoghegan, by contrast, continues to maintain that the legal advice OUSA sought was sound, and that the constitution has been changed.

Another source of debate is the Postgraduate position. Kate Amore is the sole contender for the Postgraduate position and, interestingly, she is based on Otago’s Wellington campus. Despite this, she claims she can do the job from Wellington by utilising video conference facilities and Facebook. She notes that a third of postgraduate students study off the Dunedin campus, and much of the communication amongst Dunedin postgraduate students is email based. Amore urges her constituents to have confidence in her, as she is passionate about postgraduates.

During the week, a number of candidates withdrew from various races, including Genevieve Rutherford-Hawkins, Chipo Zimba, and current postgraduate rep Travis Monk. By far the most bizarre of the withdrawals was that of Hatch-Stevens.

Despite telling Critic he was withdrawing from the Presidential race on Tuesday, Hatch-Stevens had still failed to formally withdraw when the magazine went to print Thursday. On Thursday, he said he was “technically still running” but did not appear in the Presidential Debate and would not be interviewed. He said the reasons behind this were “complex” but would not elaborate when asked. “This is turning into an interview already, you’re good.”

The OUSA Presidential Debate Despite the nastiness on the campaign trail, the Presidential Debate turned out to be a relatively civil affair, with the candidates keeping the personal attacks to a disappointing minimum. The four Presidential hopefuls addressed their five minute opening statements to the capacity crowd of around 80 in Quad 1, before answering general questions from the MC, Critic Editor Ben Thomson.

Most of the debate centred around the expected election topics of the Executive

restructuring, online Student General Meetings (SGMs) and Voluntary Student Membership (VSM). However the most interesting point of the evening came when OUSA’s membership of the New Zealand University Students Association (NZUSA) was discussed.

All four candidates were in agreement that NZUSA in its current format is an ineffectual money-sink. However none were quite ready to say that OUSA should withdraw from the association given the spectre of VSM, Stride commenting, “Yes they are a bunch of fucktards, but they are the only fucktards we’ve got.” McKillop made a sly reference to the email controversy of earlier in the day, saying “I’ll give them a 90-day trial period.”

In his opening speech McKillop also made a dig at Geoghegan, commenting that “experience is no substitute for competence.”

However the quote of the night belonged to Edwards. When asked how he would deal with the negative media feedback that accompanies the President’s job, Edwards answered “I’ve worked as a telemarketer.”

Otago Polytechnic Students Association President Meegan Cloughley gate-crashed the event, clomping down the aisle in the middle of the debate before launching into a tirade against NZUSA poorly disguised as a question.

The real fun, however, was happening in the audience. The crowd was divided along pro- and anti-Harriet lines, with several comments from the incumbent President being met with boos and jeers. Someone in the crowd circulated a piece of paper with a picture purporting to show Financial Service Officer candidate Brendan Asplin doing a Nazi salute, allegedly sourced from his Facebook page. Asplin is a member of Geoghegan’s ‘Team Fluoro’.

Also doing the rounds was a copy of the ‘Boobs or Brains’ poster that was posted around campus earlier in the week.

Hear from the candidates themselves, from p56.

It’s all on Facebook these days, kids. Here we looked at who was ‘attending’ and ‘not attending’ the candidates’ Facebook events (ie. Plzzz vote for me!) this week. In the wee hours of Friday morning, this is how it was looking:

447 people voted in our scientific online poll last week. It was essentially a study in who’s supporters were bored/sad/obsessive/ lonely enough to sit at home and vote over and over.

Did that debate change anyone’s mind? We asked the audience to vote before and after last week’s Presidential Debate and tell us who they were voting for.

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Before the debates last week, Critic sat down with the four presidential candidates who agreed to be interviewed. Due to space contraints this is a heavily edited version of what they said (they all like to talk). The full version can be found on our website at critic.co.nz.

Mitch Edwards Hometown: New Plymouth.

Hall: Unicol.

Political hero: Barack Obama.

How did you vote? National.

Referendum vote? Yes for both.

Who is the Tertiary Education Minister?

Uh … I’m not quite sure.

Biggest weakness? Um, I’d say probably in a sense I don’t take things too seriously sometimes, I like to have a good joke. That could be seen as a weakness.

What do you think the role of the President is?

Basically, the President’s role is at the top, it’s to oversee everything that goes on. They need to be out and about and doing the hard yards as well.

What do you think you can offer in terms of being President?

I’ve pretty strong leadership skills, and I’ve been lucky enough to work for a large organisation, in an oil company.

Why do you want to be President?

It started off because I was talking to my mates … about what OUSA could do better.

I’m the kind of person that likes to talk about things but I’d rather do things. So I put myself out there, I’d like to promote students and stuff like that.

Is it a problem that you haven’t been in Exec before?

Um, I wouldn’t say it’s a problem, I’d say it’s a learning curve that I’d have to overcome.

Do you think Harriet has done a good job?

I think she’s had good ideas that she’s implemented … But I think the way she’s run that, it looked rushed and it looked ill thought-out.

How will you deal with the challenge of implementing the new Executive structure?

It’s going to be a big issue facing the President 10

in 2011. The key point is the minority groups feel the most concerned about how the Exec is set up. As the President, you need to be seen to be the one out there listening to them, getting their opinion and then bringing that back to the Exec meeting.

What are you thoughts on VSM? How will you deal with the challenge of it if it passes?

Obviously I’m against the bill. Should it pass OUSA’s going to have to be prepared to move forward with the times.

What are your feelings about limiting entry to university?

Everyone should at least have the right to have a crack in the first entry and if they’re good enough to move on and further their education, yeah I think that’s a fundamental right of New Zealanders really.

Scarfies: discuss.

Otago student culture is so unique and I think that’s its great selling point. The University itself would be losing a point of sale if they were to further clamp down on the student drinking culture… Oh, I’m not promoting binge drinking by any means, if anything quite the opposite. I don’t think student culture is all about drinking, I believe it’s like the community and creating friendships.

Who is your main competition in the election?

Uh, personally I’d say it’s always going to be a difficult task overcoming the incumbent.

Harriet Geoghegan Hometown: Wellington.

Hall: Cumberland.

Political hero: John Key. [Later changed to Nikki Kaye].

Who did you vote for in the last national election? Do I have to answer that one?

You don’t even have to be here. Okay that’s true. I did a split vote between Labour and Greens.

Referendum vote? I actually didn’t because

I’m not doing papers. But if I could, I would have voted yes.

Who is the Tertiary Minister? Steven Joyce, and I met him, and he chuckled at the size of the OUSA Exec!

Biggest weakness? I tend to rely on building trust with people. I guess the weakness of that is that it can easily be taken advantage of.

What’s the President’s role?

The President has many, many, roles. There’s being the face of the organisation and the University, both externally in the media and to the University. But also there’s a lot of the figurehead role in that if OUSA does something it’s often pinned directly on the President. The President also has a role as a liaison, and that’s one of my strong points.

Are you planning any further changes?

The flow-on ones supporting it need to come in. Pretty much every area of OUSA will have a review done, and all of them will have recommended changes.

What would be the first thing you’d stop funding if VSM were passed?

Probably be Unipol, um, because the University is going to fund it anyway and they’re going to build their $20m gym.

On the flip side, what would you keep?

It’s the political advocacy and the student type advocacy as well that is the number one thing that couldn’t be taken on by the University.

Do you think the referendum was run well?

Um, I think there was a lot of unanticipated problems that we didn’t think would come up, and some of those were driven by people looking for ways to create more problems.

Do you think you could work with Dan? Um, to be honest I’m not too sure, I mean he’s been quite, um, fickle throughout the process.

What if you are forced to work with him?

Well I’d suck it up and work with him; I could work with anyone really. I just haven’t got much confidence that he’s the best

person for the job.

What do you think about limited entry to university?

I think the University has been very fair about the process.

What can you offer as President?

I think I have a huge amount to offer in that I’ve already built so many relationships.

Who is your main competition?

Um, I would say probably Matt.

Have you done a good job?

I think so, I think I’ve done my best.

Matt McKillop Hometown: Timaru.

Hall: St Margaret’s.

Political hero: Barack Obama. [Oh no wait], Metiria Turei.

How did you vote? Green Party [Later wanted it clarified that he does not care for the legalise marijuana debate].

Referendum vote? Yes for both.

Who is the Tertiary Education Minister?

Uh, Steven … no. Um, Steven Joyce?

Biggest weakness? Um … I got a huge nose.

What do you think the role of the President is?

Being the approachable public face of OUSA, being the driving force for OUSA’s core functions, which I view as being welfare, representation, yeah.

What do you think you can offer in terms of being President?

Competency. Obviously, if we are going to talk about experience on the OUSA Executive I can’t compete with Harriet. But I think Harriet’s demonstrated that she’s not really up to doing major constitutional overhaul as she set out to do. I don’t think it’s much of an achievement at all if she can’t do it right.

What are you thoughts on VSM?

How will you deal with the challenge of it if it passes?

I am against VSM, which is a pretty good start I guess for an OUSA President. The key thing is to preserve as many functions as possible of OUSA.

Would you undo the constitutional changes?

I would certainly try to undo or at least amend online SGM policy. In terms of the constitutional structure, I would give it a chance.

What are your thoughts on the Executive structure?

I do support the idea of a smaller Exec. I’m worried that people in the current Exec might not be as willing to make changes if it doesn’t work, if they get back in.

What would you keep and what would you get rid of if VSM passed?

It very much depends on the nature of the VSM bill. I believe that student support is the one we absolutely have to die in a ditch for because without [it] we are not a students association.

What do you think of limited entry to university?

If I was the government of NZ I wouldn’t want to limit entry. But if I was a President of a student association I would want best outcome for members I have, not members I could have.

Who is your main competition?

Harriet. She is the competition and all of the issues. It’s a shame, but I think she did all of this to herself.

Dan Stride Hometown(s): Greymouth then Palmerston North.

Hall: I flatted.

Political hero: Franklin D Roosevelt.

How did you vote? Labour.

Referendum vote? No for both.

Who is the tertiary education minister?

Steven Joyce, a.k.a. the Penguin.

Biggest weakness? A certain obsessiveness with getting details right.

What do you think the role of the President is?

It is not your job to micromanage everyone on the Exec, the supreme ruling body is not the President, it is the Executive.

What do you think you can offer in terms of being President?

Sanity. I can also offer a great deal of political savvy.

What do you think of limited entry to university?

I don’t blame the University for what they are doing. It’s the fault of the Government.

If you had to cut another department, which would it be?

Tourism.

Are you happy about how Harriet has been as President?

For the first five months she was a breath of fresh air. Now it feels like she is so determined to get what she wants that she doesn’t care about the consequences. I still have deep respect for her as a person. I would work very gladly with her, after all we are both adults, we can both get along.

If Harriet wasn’t running would you still run?

Good question, I think I would probably have investigated who was running and whether I’d have confidence in them.

Do you think Harriet will work with you?

I’d like to think so. I’m not overly amused that a President who’s running on experience is basically handpicking two of her friends to run.

Who is your main competition?

Incumbents in student politics are very tough, so yes I would say that Harriet would be my main competition.

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EDWARD GREIG

RICHARD CHEESE

CONSERVATORY COLUMNIST

TOP 5 COLUMNIST

The election could have been a Dan Stride vs. Harriet Geoghegan face-off, each with somewhat clear, and strongly opposed, factions of student support, but competition from outside the current Executive is promising. Despite Matt’s boldness being limited to flat ratings and criticism of the referendum, he may have said enough to convince enough. To his credit, Matt has set out his ideas in depth, rather than limiting himself to platitudes and wideranging promises. The big issue is going to be the recent referendum and changes to the Executive, but while the constitutional issues will be of interest to policy nerds, most students will probably vote based whether they support the broad changes made, coming down to a vote for or against Harriet.

The constitution has also been used to launch attacks based which qualification makes someone suitable (a sort of Law vs.

Commerce vs. What-Michael-Cullen-did (Dan)) is a little petty and really irrelevant to whether someone actually has the practical skills to run OUSA. Mitch Edwards seems to be riding on the outsider label as well, though hasn’t made much of a stand other than for student culture and listening. As most students themselves outsiders to OUSA, he and Matt may be most representative of the student population.

The officers’ forum provided a small sideshow. With around 30 people attending at any one time, it underlined how much most students care, but what was most interesting was that of the six candidates who attended, four endorsed Harriet.

The chalking has been a little sparse on the ground, but the candidates have embraced the more uncertain campaign ground of Facebook, which has allowed those who engaged in the debate to get really nasty.

However, with threats of complaints over Executive neutrality, the election aftermath may drag on much longer than desirable, and push more students into the apathetic pile.

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Overall, this campaign has been dirty, with more mudslinging than a Gossip Girl omnibus – most directed against Harriet.

I’ve read the Facebook shit and been to the debate, which was worse than watching backto-back episodes ofThe Hills. For what it’s worth, here are my overall impressions.

Harriet: Capable. Despite being attacked consistently by fear-mongers, she’s done a good job at keeping her cool. Unlike the others, she can actually say she’s done shit.

The key for her is getting her support base to actually vote since the people who dislike her are far more likely to vote (i.e. the minorities).

Dan: Clever. He knows OUSA extremely well, is an excellent bureaucrat, and is experienced. He was also the standout in the debate. However, being President is far more than that. He comes across as very socially awkward, which could pose problems when making key relationships. Could you see him as the face of OUSA? Is he capable of seeing the big picture?

Matt: Arrogant. He essentially based his entire campaign on sledging Harriet.

Normally I’m all for this but he did it in the most boring way possible. Also, he speaks in a slow, droning manner. That said, he might be right about that technical constitutional crap. But with zero Executive experience it’s a massive stretch to say he’d do better than some of the other candidates.

Mitch: Confident. He’s a good speaker and would have been great in a lesser position. Unfortunately, his grasp on what’s going on seems rudimentary. Could potentially be a dark horse though.

Even if you don’t care, just vote. If you can spend countless hours Facebook stalking your ex, surely you can spend three minutes voting online.

AMY JOSEPH

Sarah Robson

FORMER CRITIC EDITOR

Editor of Salient, Victoria University student magazine

Despite a serious lack of competition for the top job, there were about 30 separate candidates running for positions on the 2010 Executive. For 2011 there are only 21. While I can understand a reluctance to run in the inaugural ‘guinea pig’ year of the new structure, it doesn’t reflect well on one stated goal of Exec reform: encouraging more participation. Perhaps there are a host of students waiting to put their hands up for the much less well-compensated committee positions.

The poster and online campaigning has been intense – we saw negative postering, Facebook profile trawling, leaked emails, and even a “Candidate Caught In Nazi Salute?” moment usually reserved for royalty like Prince Harry or Paris Hilton. A lot of this animosity was motivated by referendum resentment, and having the election run so soon afterwards inevitably makes it seem to some as an opportunity to relitigate the whole thing.

The Presidential Debate was comparatively civil. Harriet showed a politician’s knack for talking at length without answering the question, but didn’t demonstrate much vision beyond overseeing the structural changes ahead – she didn’t give a sense of what she thinks OUSA should be. Matt says he wants to focus on welfare, but beyond his goal of making the flat rating system compulsory, he didn’t really indicate what he would do for student welfare, and comes across as Harriet-lite.

Dan is the constitution/policy Nerd King, and is a passionate student politician very much of the ‘old school’ 1990s breed, while Mitch seems to be the candidate for all those scarfies who are too busy being OTP to vote. I suppose it could be a good thing that as I write this shortly after the debate, I really don’t know who I’m going to vote for, and not in a 2008 “Oh God, none of them!” way.

VUWSA has historically been the students’ association where all the action happens—the scandal, the mainstream media attention, the justification for VSM. The looming threat of Roger Douglas’ bill has whipped this year’s exec into shape, and they seem to be keeping themselves out of trouble—for the most part. Good for them.

But seriously, the minimal VUWSA action makes life a tad boring for the Editor of Salient. VUWSA’s recent by-election was a snore. Nothing happened. Five of the nine candidates standing didn’t show up to the candidates’ forum. No one said anything outrageous. There were hardly any posters.

And no one really cared. Most of the students sitting at the bar where the forum was held were there to eat their lunch and drink their beer. “What by-election?” they asked.

Which brings me to OUSA—what the fuck is going on? The mud-slinging on the Critic Facebook page, the insults, the leaks, the dirty campaign tactics—this is something you expect of VUWSA, not OUSA. The impression from afar is that this is petty student politics at its finest: it’s personal and candidates seem to be on their own quests for fame and glory. This is what turns people off student politics, this is why students don’t care about their students’ associations, and this is why people have come to question why students are forced to be part of them.

Then there’s the who-can-spin-the-mostshit-about-Harriet game. While I understand that people may not agree with some of what Harriet has done, launching a vindictive campaign that targets the superficial is not the way to go about it. This isn’t high school.

What you say on Facebook is in the public domain. It can be used to discredit not just your own reputation, but also the reputation of OUSA. Remember VSM? Just sayin’.

Monday Voting opens for the 2011 OUSA Executive “Chitosan Hydrogels for Surgery and Drug Release” 1pm, Room 713 Adams Building

Tuesday “Nuclear Receptors in Cardiac Disease: at the Crossroads of Metabolism and Inflammation” 1pm, Colquhoun Lecture Theatre, Dunedin Hospital

Wednesday “Tourism and Seismic Risk in the Zone of the Alpine Fault: Perceptions, Preparedness and Resilience” 1pm, Geology Benson Common Room

Thursday Voting closes for the 2011 OUSA Executive at 4pm “Thorough Evaluation of Tests by Exact Approximate Bayesian Computation” 11am, Room241, Science III

Friday “Clean Technology is the Solution to Climate Change – Or is it People?”

2pm, Archway 1

- ASPA

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Usually if you want to get a quality consultancy team it’s all about the benjamins.

However, a new consultancy group started up by students at the University of Otago aims to provide quality consultancy services to not-for-profit agencies, at a fraction of the normal cost.

Ignite Consultants is a student group that pools the available talent of the University’s students, and links them up with not-for-profit community groups to help organise and reenergise projects that may be failing or might have lost direction.

The programme was created a few months ago by a group of students who were concerned with the lack of resources available in the not-for-profit sector, and were aware of the wealth of human resources the University had in the form of students.

Founding Director Aga Nazaruk is excited about the creation of the group.

“We are really passionate about social

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entrepreneurship and what’s is going on in the not-for-profit sector. There is very often a lack of human and financial resources, and so many organisations that are doing really cool stuff out there that need a little bit more help. So we thought we could channel some help from the University.”

Recently Ignite Consultants have completed work with not-for-profit group Professional Pathways, a mentoring group for struggling students, by recommending a complete overhaul of their current management structure in order to maximise results. The project was a success, with Professional Pathways describing Ignite Consultants as a “phenomenal team with energy and brainpower to burn.”

Currently, Ignite Consultants are working on three different not-for-profit projects, in the areas of marketing and communication, mental health, and technology.

Ignite Consultants are expecting to

expand their workload in the future, depending on the response they get from the student body. There are plans to open up consultancy groups in Wellington, Auckland, and Christchurch, all based around the university student model.

Ignite Consultants is looking to recruit third-year, fourth-year, and post-graduate students, from any discipline, who are interested in making a difference in their community, having access to the social leaders of their community, and gaining experience in preparation for entering the workforce.

If you are interested or want more information, you can access their website at igniteconsultants.org.nz, or go along to their information meeting, midday Tuesday 17 August, Commerce Building Room 207.

Applications for entry will close 5pm that day.

Weatherston appeal delayed

Mental Illness Study

Clayton Weatherston’s appeal against his conviction for murder has been delayed. Weatherston, 34, will challenge his conviction for murdering his former girlfriend, 22-year-old Sophie Elliot, by stabbing and cutting her 216 times in her Dunedin home in January 2008.

Currently serving a jail term of at least 18 years, Weatherston was originally scheduled to have a Court of Appeal hearing this week, but it has been put on hold until a new date is set. “Goodness knows how long it could go on for,” Elliott’s father Gil told the New Zealand Herald. “We just wish he would accept his fate and shut up.”

A University of Otago study has found that those who suffer from mental illness between the ages of 18 and 25 are less likely to have a full-time job by the time they turn 30.

Led by Dr. Sheree Gib, the study involved 950 participants and compared factors such as income level, mental health history, and educational qualifications. It was also found that at least half of the study participants had experienced some form of mental illness during early adulthood. The study was published in the British Journal of Psychiatry.

School of Business Cuts Confirmed

Russian Relationship

The amalgamation of the University of Otago Accountancy and Business Law department and the Finance and Quantitative Analysis department will result in the loss of almost ten jobs, the Otago Daily Times reported last week.

9.8 Full-Time Equivalent Positions (FTE) in teaching and administration will be cut in the merger. All employees will be invited to reapply for positions in the new department. The ODT reported that the mood among staff in the departments was described as “pretty negative” by an unnamed staff member.

University of Otago students could soon face the prospect of sharing lectures with students at St Petersburg State University in Russia, after a visit by St Petersburg Vice-Rector Professor Konstantin Khudoley last week.

The possibility of sharing lectures via video-casting was discussed, as was the issue of student and lecturer exchanges. The University of Otago and St Petersburg State University’s Business Schools are both members of the Partnership in International Management group, which links top Business Schools around the world.

Groundbreaking Study

Undie 500’s Liquor License gets Road-Blocked. Now what?

Researchers at the University of Otago, Wellington have carried out the first ever study into the reasons why pregnant women are admitted to intensive care in New Zealand.

These women suffer what is termed Severe Acute Maternal Morbidity (SAMM). This occurs when a pregnant or recentlydelivered woman becomes ill to the extent that she is likely to die if not admitted to intensive care. The study found that the cause of SAMM in 35 percent of the women studied was preventable, highlighting the need for better obstetric services in New Zealand.

The Marlborough Disctrict Council last week declined an application for a liquor license made by Undie 500 organisers for their event in the Marlborough town of Seddon. Marlborough District councillor Andrew Barker argued that the Marlborough District Council had made the decision out of an emotional response rather than on the facts. The reasoning behind the rejection is yet to be released. The council say it will be included in a full report of the hearing, due this week. The police have been firm opponents to the Undie 500 tradition and made a submission against the organisers’ application for a liquor license. Senior Sergeant Ciaran Sloan of Blenheim says that the event is focused purely on alcohol consumption. “It doesn’t contribute anything to the province and would have been a cost to the province through emergency services and health services.”

Ensoc President Michael Cook says that Ensoc were committed to successfully hosting an official Undie 500 this year but the liquor license decision will mean that they will need to start over again.

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The goal my Editor gave me for this interview was to discover if the former Critic Columnist plans to run with Winston Peters and the NZ First party at the next general election, as recent rumours have suggested. Circling around the issue, I also pressed the retiring Whanganui Mayor on matters of local councils, his dual roles as a Politician and pseudo-political commentator, and single-ply toilet paper. The results are as follows.

I understand you wrote for Critic while completing a BA (Hons) in History here at Otago. What was your column about?

It was basically a pisstake really on pretty much everything. It was at the height of the Springbok tour so Otago was a very exciting place to be and I was on one side. On the other side was Chris Trotter, who is now probably one of the country’s leading political commentators, he was the Editor of Critic. It was a column penned under the name “Dragonfly” and he took a lot of stick for publishing it; but of course, it ended up being the most-read column in Critic every week because it was so provocative. It was a lot of fun writing it, I really enjoyed offending people. Hell of a lot of fun.

The local body elections are coming up in October of this year; poor turnouts have long hindered local councils, but not Whanganui. What’s your secret for motivating voters to participate?

I think being provocative, at the end of the day, but the other is that when I became Mayor we introduced something that is absolutely unique to Whanganui and I have proven that it works over the last six years, and that is direct democracy.

Every year, we hold a district-wide referendum on issues that relate to how our community works. They are on issues as diverse as should we have a gang patch ban to what rates you should pay this year.

Do you think the Supercity is changing the situation as well?

No. I would bet you anything you like that the turnout for the local body elections in Auckland will still be roughly 35-40 percent. The problem is that in the Supercity you have 1.4 million people living in it over such a vast area it is difficult to associate what they do with how you live your life.

Probably longer actually, twenty-five years actually. I’m pretty sure I wrote a few speeches for him on just that theme when I first became a parliamentary researcher so that’s twenty-five years ago.

How do you think Peters and NZ First will fare at the next election?

There is a lot of – they have a very, very good chance actually – there is a lot of room in both the National and the Labour votes. You have to remember that the guy got four percent, over four percent at the last election. He was under a campaign of media vilification, he was done like a dog’s dinner every day by the national media in the Owen Glenn affair. You would have to say that he only needs one more percent to get into Parliament and that isn’t much of a challenge.

Having announced your retirement from the Whanganui mayoralty, are you considering running alongside Peters as you have done in the past?

Whatever my future political ambitions, the Media will definitely be the last to know.

John Key has hinted that if you were the leader of NZ First he would be willing to work with the party, do you have any comment on that?

So has Phil Goff. Phil Goff said the same to me yesterday. Who knows what the future may hold?

What is your view on single-ply toilet paper?

It is the product of the devil.

For the full interview go to critic.co.nz where Laws calls David Cunliffe a technocrat and labels Goff “the Bill English of the Labour party.”.

Georgie Fenwicke

Going back to your position as Mayor, how have you found balancing your local government responsibilities with your position as a Radio Live talkback host and Sunday Star Times columnist?

None of those jobs are hard. I wouldn’t work as, frankly, as the cleaner of the University Union.

What do you think of Chris Carter’s recent shenanigans in the Labour Party?

I think Chris is disturbed. It seems pretty obvious to me that he is mentally fragile. Strangely enough, it is the first time I have ever seen anyone go off the deep end in politics. Most politicians, believe it or not, are quite level headed.

What do you think of Winston Peters’ recent, but not wholly new, concerns about overseas investment?

Winston has been banging on about that for about twenty years.

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Schmack OPINIONS AND STUFF...

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32 left / right 33 DEBATABLE 34 top 5 / APOCALYPSE HOW? 35 THIS WEEK.. / Sport 36 odt 37 OUSA / TE ROOPU

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Dear OUSA Executive and members of the Wannabe political tribe, Stop taking yourselves and the job you do so seriously. Having been a student at Otago University (barring a seven-year gap when I actually worked in the pharmaceutical industry, using my PhD and BSc (Hons) for 13 years, I have quite a few changes of administration inside of OUSA. Many join thinking they will change the world, some join as a joke and end up getting elected, and others – well, I have no idea how they think and I would like to keep it that way.

When you one day walk into the real world (rather than that yellowing ivory tower in which you currently stand– or is that a house of cards?) you will notice that you don’t get to act this way. You are expected to know what you are doing, and get along with co-workers. You will not make a lasting impact on the world; you will not have stopped a dreadful inequity to Homo sapiens. You are not a special unique snowflake! Indeed, you most likely did not make a lasting impact upon the students of Otago University.

How many of us remember the names of the members of the Executive the year we joined OUSA? Let’s look at the OUSA Archives (ousa.org.nz/archives/ousa-executivemembers/) and look at the pictures. My first year was 1991. What I remember from 1991 was one Felix Geiringer getting himself wedged under the then-Finance Minister Bill Birch’s limousine as he made a slow speed escape from campus after telling students we were about to get a serious cut to our allowances. I think Mr. Geiringer later went onto be an Executive member, but honestly I can’t remember. But that year he was a fellow first-year, not an Exec member.

What I do remember from my time as a Postgraduate (before we were part of OUSA) in the mid- to late-1990s is that we got shafted by OUSA a lot, and on one memorable occasion, an OUSA-sponsored sit in at the Registry involved an unplugging of all

the computers as scholarships (and staff pay) were going through to the banks. The net result was that students who might have been sympathetic (our fees were skyrocketing too) and staff who definitely were sympathetic, got screwed over. Thanks guys, you really impacted me, negatively. I actually saw the whole thing go down from my lab window (Chemistry faces the Registry).

But what lasting effect does an OUSA Exec member have? Well, thankfully some people who have wanted to stand on somewhat radical platforms (VSM comes to mind) don’t get elected.

Indeed, check out this link (ousa.org.nz/history/ ousa-life-members/) and you will see where some Exec members end up. Thankfully very few of them actually end up in politics, and most seem to be able to act like civil Homo sapiens.

Every Executive will tell you that the subject at hand is the worst threat to student kind since the black plague. Every election season, thousands of reams of paper, quarries of chalk, and whatever unit you use to measure bandwidth on the net, get wasted on hopeful candidates telling you how they will solve every problem you have, as long as you vote for them, and only them.

But once they get elected, what do they do? Do they carry through in their promises? Do they actually do anything? What does (say) that divisional rep really do for you? I will give you a hint.

Look at meeting minutes of their weekly meetings (or better still, attend one). Look at the angst; see various Exec members stare at each other warily, waiting for that dagger in the kidneys. See the general lack of co-operation. This is what you get with student politics. I say again, the Earth did not end when something happened; there are thousands students on campus, more worried how to pay bills, finish that assignment, or even what to do on Friday night.

So if you want to help your fellow students just do your damned job, quietly, and leave the drama to your blogs.

Don’t let the door hit your rears on the way out.

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ceans are awesome, in both senses of the word. They are incredibly enormous. Their depths will crush you faster than Judith Collins crushes boy racer cars (but without wasting tax dollars). Waves lapping at the shores will change landscapes more tirelessly and repetitively than Bill English’s lies about Labour mismanaging the economy. Oceans not only incubated early life on Earth for billions of years but also made the atmosphere hospitable as ancient oceanic cells converted carbon dioxide, water, and sunlight into oxygen one blob at a time. Life in our oceans plays an integral role in biochemical cycles, and in the diets and the economies of developed and developing nations.

After millions of years, the oceans have biology down. Watch the fluid pulse of a jellyfish. Some are deadly to touch, others just strange. You’ll find social creatures form interspecies relationships or you can watch the anti-social behaviour of an orca ravaging a seal or a shark. Schools of fish swim around in such mathematical conformity it’s as if they are programmed by a simple algorithm.

Other creatures are amazingly intelligent: you would be hard pressed to find a dolphin stupid enough to vote for National solely for the reason that it was “about time for a change.” Translucent, neon, glowing, camouflaged, complex, boring, giant, graceful, stealthy, clumsy, vegetarian, carnivorous, docile, A.D.D. You name it, the ocean’s got it.

Ten years ago the Census of Marine Life set out to do exactly that. They concluded there are about 230 000 species of any kind of life in our oceans. But that “most ocean organisms still remain nameless and their numbers unknown ... the ocean is simply so vast that after 10 years of hard work, we still have only snapshots ... of what the sea contains.” What a happy coincidence that this report was released in 2010, the United Nations International Year of Biodiversity, a “celebration of life on Earth and the value of biodiversity for our lives.”

Well, there’s good news for our taxonomist friends, they will achieve their goal in the future, simply because there will be fewer denizens of the deep to encounter. This is also the bad news. Due to over-fishing, bottom trawling, and pollution, things are about to look more and more biblical. Existing dead zones will merge into bigger dead zones. Oceans will become corrosive and mass extinctions will ruin millions of years of evolution. Plagues of jellyfish ... Old Testament shit.

Some scientists attribute this nightmare to human greed. I prefer this explanation: human indifference is the greatest threat to the world’s oceans. First, because it’s not wrong not to care about something if you don’t know it’s happening. For most of us oceans are a totally different world from ours, even though the two affect each other so much. Second, because indifference entails a lack of empathy once you are aware of a problem or suffering. And it’s clear that there is simply not enough empathy to go around.

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n increase in regulations promoting warmer houses may be populist, but it isn’t necessarily good for everyone, nor is government support actually needed for good housing. In student areas in particular, there is a demand for the slightly run-down, cheap flats. Some people want rubbish flats that they can do what they like to. And if that option isn’t there, then they are losing out. It’s a choice that people should be able to make, and a choice that landlords should be able to make as well.

Many of the so-called slum lords of Dunedin actually provide very good properties, at a price that is still well below that of the main cities. They insulate, they provide heat-pumps, and they ensure that the furnishings are nice. And many students, often later on, are happy to pay for the benefits. However, there is still a demand for cheap accommodation, and it’s going to be either very small, or not very nice. It’s a choice, and people can choose a warm house.

But you get what you pay for; you can’t demand cheap and all the best quality. Like anything. And landlords respond to demand – heaps of flats in Dunedin now boast heat pumps. Warm flats exist, and if people are willing to pay to offset the landlord’s costs, they are available.

While there are some good arguments that our houses could do with a minimum standard, the problems start to arise when we ask: who sets that minimum? And why is that a minimum? Is it really that far between legislating that houses must be insulated, for occupant health, and then that all houses must be kept at 18 degrees Celsius, for occupant health – whatever the costs?

Demanding the government pay for this is a solution, but not really sustainable or realistic, given they have other priorities and limited funds.

If people don’t have the money to move to a warmer house, do they really have the money to pay for improvements to their current accommodation?

The government also needs to take a look at the state of state housing. As they are state-supplied, these should be nice and warm, and they should meet the needs of those people who struggle to pay for a place to live. But they are not cheap accommodation for everyone, and they can’t be considered a long-term solution for their tenants. Unfortunately, state housing is not a bonus of living in New Zealand. They should be a last resort, but they are not a place to call one’s own. They should be seen as temporary accommodation.

The option to purchase state houses is important; people do become attached to a place, but with 2700 state houses currently with empty bedrooms, they cannot continue to be leased to tenants who do not need the space. Especially while 10 000 people remain on waiting lists. While it may be nice to let people stay, state houses are about subsistence rather than the perfect life.

Tenants should get what they need, and once they can stand on their own feet, state support should cease.

Will: It’s difficult to think of a more pejorative term in intellectual circles than censorship: the mere mention of it is usually enough to encourage someone to self-righteously quote Voltaire: “I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Yet strangely enough, these same people never seem so desperate to defend child pornography, or advocate the repeal of the laws that censor it. Sure, child porn is an extreme example, but it demonstrates that, whether willing to acknowledge it or not, we are all censors – so the right to free expression is a question of degree, not principle.

I will acknowledge that, theoretically at least, censorship has the potential to prevent the dissemination of work of artistic merit, but in Western liberal countries the pendulum has swung so far in the direction of free expression that this isn’t a danger we need to be concerned about. Censorship of Lady Chatterley’s Lover was lifted in the UK in 1960, so Alec is relitigating cultural wars fought two generations ago. And in the case of both A Clockwork Orange and Nigger there was no censorship at all: Kubrick himself withdrew the movie from British circulation, and Nas’ album title was censored by the long arm of his record label, not the state.

The question about censorship should thus be the line at which we decide that works of cultural garbage are also actively harmful. As Alec rightly points out, art plays a crucial role in our lives: it shapes the way we see the world. But in his view, this shaping can only be for the better: even if we have an obviously harmful activity, such as the violent sexual domination of women, depicted in a positive light, then this is an opportunity to have a fuller and more constructive discussion about sexuality.

To me, such portrayals are more likely an opportunity to normalise such behaviours, and whet the viewer’s appetite for more. This is borne out by the direction in which pornography has developed as laws around it have been liberalised: it has been depraved misogyny, not tasteful erotica, that has flourished. This in turn shapes viewers’ perspectives on the world, something psychologists have demonstrated in controlled experiments, where those exposed to pornography over a prolonged period report dramatically more accepting attitudes to rape. Similar relationships hold for depictions of sadistic violence. These harms may be diffuse, but they are very real, and provide strong grounds for censorship of the arts.

Should W Free fro e Make All A rt m Censo rship?

Alec: The arts are where the opinions and views of our society are born and shaped.

Art, theatre, film, and all forms of writing are what challenge people and their ideals and often cause important changes in societal perceptions, from the exploration of sexuality in D. H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover to the questioning of how to deal with incurable psychopaths in the film A Clockwork Orange. The other crucial thing about these two works is that they suffered from censorship, and they are classic examples of why censorship is an unjustified way of preventing discussion and reflection of our society and lives.

Censorship is necessarily an imposition of the moral views of the state over individuals, and in the case of art it is intruding into an area that exists as an important critic of those moral views. A key example of censorship occurs in music, where radio stations are made to censor swearing, simply because the state considers it offensive, even though often swearing in music is used explicitly to question whether or not the use of a simple word really should be considered morally wrong. There will always be people who claim this ‘offensive material’ is merely for ‘shock value,’ but shock can be exactly what promotes discussion in the first place, and the same can be said to obscenity claims around Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl,” a classic critique of American culture.

Crucially, art never necessarily causes harm to anyone. If people are offended by material in artwork, they don’t have to pay any attention to it. Trying to protect people from being offended is not only unnecessary, but also harmful. Conceding that some things shouldn’t be depicted or discussed in art places a further stigma around them, and allows the offended group to simply cut discussion of that issue away. This can be particularly harmful when art has to adjust to fit into censorship criteria, which often happens when films have to change their content to please the censors. This also happened recently when the rapper Nas was forced to change the title of an album from Nigger, when the intention of the title and the album was to question racist issues in America and the use of that term most often associated with racism.

We should always be open to our moral views being questioned, and by censoring art, we are preventing the best medium through which they are questioned.

Debatable is a column written by the Otago University Debating Society. They meet every Tuesday at 7pm in Commerce 2.20.

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Artists Who Would Could Out-Scarfie Any Scarfie Some people are such loose units that they deserve to be called honorary Scarfies.

Here is a handful of them.

5. Caravaggio: This Italian Renaissance artist murdered a

young man named Ranuccio Tomassoni in 1606 over a “row over a tennis match.” It turns out that there is historical evidence to suggest that it was actually a “botched attempt to castrate him.”

Now you might be thinking that this isn’t Scarfie. But it’s the principle that counts. You know, like when you drunkenly say, “I’m going to get that street sign,” and end up with five stitches and a badly sprained ankle. We’ve all done something that didn’t turn out the way it was intended!

4. Brent Case: To be fair, I’m stretching the definition of ‘artist’ a bit far. But I’m going to call Brent an escape artist. Of death. He happening to be chilling out in a forest in Canada when suddenly a grizzly bear came up to him, asking for a pot of honey and where the nearest ski range was. Actually, the bear ferociously attacked him. Rather than being a pussy like you, Brent played dead as the bear started devouring his head more savagely than a Scarfie drunkenly eating a kebab at 3am. Since bears don’t tend to eat an already-dead victim, rather than screaming like a sissy, Brent managed to get to his car and drove another 15 miles covered in blood and bear love nibbles. Massive tough nuts.

3. Gene Simmons: The front-man for Kiss. He claims to have slept with around 4600 women. Enough said.

2. Johnny Cash: Other than the fact that his songs are awesome, Johnny Cash was renowned for just being a badass. In 1965, his truck accidentally caught fire and triggered the incineration of several hundred acres of Californian forest. When asked by the Judge why he did it, he replied “I didn’t do it, my truck did, and it’s dead, so you can’t question it.” Perhaps some of you couch burners should take notes. Now you know what to say to a Judge rather than singing the lyrics to ‘Ring of Fire’.

1. Jaco Pastorius: Known as one of the greatest bassists ever, Jaco excelled at what many jazz musicians did in the seventies and eighties: consuming copious amounts of drugs and alcohol.

However, it’s not this that made him quirky. It was his antics.

Like the time he was so wasted that he drove into a hotel lobby in Japan, fell off the motorcycle, and passed out. He was then found to have a dead squid under his t-shirt. Or the time in Hawaii, where he disappeared for a day and was found by police in the mountains. Naked. With axle grease smeared all over his body. I bet if he was asked why he did it, he’d probably say something like “Oh, I thought it would be a funny story to tell the boys!”

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Erosion of Family Values

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hen we think of apocalyptic scenarios we often imagine huge, unstoppable disasters that are completely out of our control, like fiery death raining down from above or the release of Big Momma’s House 3. But there is another apocalyptic possibility that comes not from any outside source, but from within humanity itself. I’m referring, of course, to the erosion of family values, a slow but serious process that will inevitably lead to the end of all mankind.

Back in the 1950s, it seemed unthinkable that the world could come to an end in this way. Men were men, women were women, and many other things were also the same thing as themselves.

Every house had two parents, 2.5 adorable children (probably due to some kind of gardening accident) and two cars parked snugly in the garage. Everything was as it should be and no one really had to worry about anything at all. Contrast that to today’s situation, where the traditional family unit has been replaced by all sorts of different configurations: solo parents, no children, lots of children … the list goes on. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you what dire news this is for our species.

These days it’s even possible for a man and a man to live together, or a woman and a woman. Clearly this will destroy society in ways that are so obvious that it’s not even worth mentioning. And, in further confusion of the family unit, some of these people even want to adopt children of their own. It’s plain to see that we are only a hair’s breadth away from the complete implosion of humanity itself. Of course, family values are being worn away in more subtle ways as well: parents being told by the government that they’re not allowed to hit their own children; high-school students being taught about the importance of safe sex; ethnic foods becoming a more common part of our diet. I don’t need to spell it out for you: the end of the human race is almost upon us.

Imagine our children growing up in a world where all the value-eroding things mentioned above are commonplace. Imagine what the acceptance of these things will do to future generations.

Yep, I’m sure you’ve got a pretty clear idea of exactly how things are going to pan out from here. I don’t need to waste valuable column inches explaining why mankind is destined for an early extinction if these sorts of things keep up. Soon there won’t be a future to imagine at all, because it’ll all be gone, our world torn apart by a society that didn’t take family values seriously enough.

If we want humanity to survive, we all have to work to restore traditional family values to their rightful place as the cornerstone of our lives. I’m sure you don’t need me to explain why this is so important. You fill in the blanks.

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A bogan

ave you ever got tired of the life you lead? Are you sick of wearing clean clothes, maintaining your hair, and refraining from listening to AC/DC? You don’t have to admit it; I know you are. So let’s change that. This week, Matthew, I’m going to be a bogan.

The life of a bogan revolves around bourbon, cars, and rock/ metal music; and since you can’t really wear either of the first two, wearing a t-shirt that has AC/DC written in big letters is going to be your best choice to start your bogan ensemble. Especially if it’s at least four years old – that makes it vintage. Next, throw on a pair of jeans, preferably with a chain attached to one side. Not only does that prevent your wallet from being stolen, but it makes you look really cool. Having the remnants of the previous night’s dinner rubbed into your jeans is also a popular idea, and comes with the benefit of givingyou something to snack on if the AC/DC concert goes on longer than expected. The topic of footwear is up for debate but a pair of DC skate shoes (ideally, black with black trim) seems to be the hot item. Make sure to wear out the bottoms of your jeans so that you can show off your shoes to best effect.

It’s cold in Dunedin so you will need warmth ,too: get yourself a big black hoody, and make sure it has some sort of car branding on it. (Mazda/Ford/Holden = good. Ssangyong = not so good.) If the hoody doesn’t keep you warm enough, then you’re obviously not drinking enough bourbon.

The most important aspect of the bogan ensemble is the hairstyle. It doesn’t just identify you as a bogan; it also identifies which strain of bogan you belong to. First off you have the classic buzz cut and rat tail combo: the entry-level bogan haircut. Then you have the iconic mullet: the vintage bogan haircut. Then you have the long ‘n’ greasy, the haircut that’s so oily that it’s giving the Gulf of Mexico a run for its money. But the ultimate bogan haircut isn’t really a haircut at all. You just let your hair do its own thing, growing wild and free. A common misconception is that this haircut is a result of laziness. Actually it’s a nihilistic passive protest about the nature of life and society, and the strictures we place upon ourselves. But that’s easy to miss.

Once you’ve got the look, you’re pretty much sorted.

Bogans don’t really need much in the way of a personality. They communicate through a series of rhythmic bangs on the roof of their Holden HQ as they do laps. You can’t really speak when ‘Thunderstruck’ is playing at 140 decibels anyway. Not that you’d want to – you can’t say anything more profound than what AC/ DC has already said, so there’s no point trying. I told you that you didn’t need a personality.

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e all know that the hard sports like rugby are played by jocks, and that those who wish they were jocks play football. What do those at the bottom of the food chain, the nerds, play?

A quick internet search comes up with a plethora of different games and activities, but it was hard to come to the conclusion that they were truly sports.

The results were surprising. The obvious games one would associate with nerdiness were there – fantasy role-playing for example. Chess Boxing, which involves the competitors alternating rounds of boxing and chess, also came up. Obviously hilarity ensures, as the chess gets worse and worse as the athletes suffer blows to the head; what’s even better is that the bouts are almost always mis-matched so that in one corner there is a screaming meathead while in the other is Kevin from Accounts.

Chess Boxing’s stroke of genius in taking two sports from different sides of the track and then combining them in such an explosion of entertainment is one that only geeks could come up with.

It’s not just chess-playing pugilist geeks that have all the fun; geeks have everything covered, even jousting. The sport that was once confined to interbred blue bloods is now the arena of spectacle-wearing, smelly-underarmed kids.

Speaking of computers, this column would not be complete without the holy grail of all geek sports: competitive video gaming.

I know what all you jocks out there will be thinking: “How can video games be that hard, I could beat any nerd at FIFA 2010.”

Well, think again.

It takes a lot of effort to become so good at video games that you could make your living off it; think of all those hours subjecting your eyes and brain to the torturous sounds and flashes of light. For so many it is worth every day spent without sleep to be crowned a video game champion.

In no other place in the video game universe are these modern day gladiators more revered than the Korean Republic, where whole television channels are dedicated to these masters of gaming. They even have their own teams and dedicated arenas where the teams compete, with thousands of Koreans screaming for their virtual reality gods. Players can even make a good living off competitive gaming – gaming organisations may ‘buy’ players for up to half a million US dollars.

So, next time you walk past an internet cafe at 3am, and look in and see it still packed, don’t look down on those who are in there; they could quite possibly the sporting superstars of the future.

At least there won’t be girls lining after a video game match to get into the pants of the sporting stars. That’s the one thing those damn jocks will always have.

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PUPILS ON PROWL FOR PARTIES screamed the front page of the ODT last week. “High school pupils are the new scourge of North Dunedin.” Wow ODT, you’ve outdone yourself this time.

Nice. Work. They’ve found a new villain! Students are no longer the bad guys, but pupils. Subtle shift. But very effective.

Obviously, the ODT has finally figured out that about 20 percent of the city’s population are students. They by-and-large do not buy the ODT and, well, why would they? Every week there is an article about the latest atrocity they have, as a group, committed. A student reading the ODT would be like a student doing their required readings. It just doesn’t happen.

The rest of Dunedin, of course, does read the ODT as it is always important to be informed about what the evil enemy is up to. That’s why God gave conservatives Fox News.

But students could buy the ODT. Pupils never would – that’s what mum and dad do. ‘But how could we possibly get them to buy our newspaper; without giving up our very reason for exsisting?’ was the big question at the brainstorming session at Allied Press HQ. ‘Hating on pesky students is what we do best.

It’s why Dunedin buys us.’

‘I KNOW! We can find a common enemy! But who!? Old people wouldn’t work… Hmmm. Young people! Perfect!!!’

Start with scary words. ““It’s becoming a bit more of an alarming trend,” Senior Sergeant Gavin Briggs, of North Dunedin, said.” Brilliant.

Follow up with “reports of intimidation”. Nice, nice.

Build on it a bit: “And when they found a party, the pupils would send text messages to their friends and soon a crowd of other high school-aged people would join the party, too.” That’ll do.

Now back it all up with fears of vigilante action. ““We want to stop this before students start taking matters into their own hands and there are assaults or similar.”” Good. (Got to keep it down the base (ie. Non-students) after all).

And to top it all off, finish off with just how uncool pupils are. “[They were] standing in the middle of the street trying to get involved, [like, seriously, it was, like, so bad].” Key. Okay, now get some quotes. “Otago Secondary Principals’ Association president Julie Anderson last night said she was unaware of the issue, so could not comment.” Rats. Okay. Maybe don’t do the quotes.

Whatevs. That’ll be good enough. Sweeet! Good story! The students will love it! You will be totally rich! Woooooooo!

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Acting President James Meager was meant to do the column this week. He didn’t.

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TE TAI TUARA Maori Commerce Students.

Firstly, a few updates: • The inaugural Roopu Sports Day was held 25 July at Logan Park High School, where TTT managed to snatch the coveted shield out of the reaches of PEMA and Te Roopu Whai Putake. After a slow start in the Netball we pulled back in the Volleyball to come out on top. Congrats to PEMA for taking out Netball and to TRWP who showed true team spirit and fully committed to the kaupapa, to tatou reo rangatira. All in all an awesome day and hopefully we can maintain the winning form for years to come.

• TTT now has an office space/study area/ place we can call home. It is located on the second floor, Room 216a (formerly occupied by Ron-Kaiawhina Maori). So if you need a quiet place to study with wireless access minus the talkers, sniffers, and coughers, feel free to chill out there. We will slowly build up the shelves with notes and textbooks - if you can add to these, please do. No extreme rules, just clean up after you and leave notes and textbooks there so everyone can take advantage of them.

Upcoming events: • The National Maori Accountants conference will be held at Massey University, Palmerston North on 27 & 28 August. I think it is definitely an awesome opportunity for those who are studying Accounting, so if you are interested email us at tetaituara@gmail.com for more details.

• We are looking at holding a hui/kai/catch up to see where everyone is at with studies, and just as another chance for you guys to meet and network. Emails will be sent out with dates and venues. It may be incorporated with an Office Warming.

• For those who played in the Sports Day: we will be holding a celebratory session at The Cook at some stage, so please look out for texts.

Finally, I hope results went well last semester and everything is going well so far. I personally know how much of a struggle it is getting those core papers done so if you need any help give us a yell on Facebook or email.

Kia pai to koutou wiki!

Panui from Te Roopu Whai Putake: Te Wiki o Te Ture (Maori Law Week) will run 16-20 August.

TUESDAY 17: Quiz night (Te Tumu) (Open to all students and staff).

WEDNESDAY 18: Moana Jackson (Te Tumu: open for all).

THURSDAY 19: Te Roopu Whakaata Maori i Te Wairoa Inc. presents: a short Film Festival (Burns: open for all).

FRIDAY 20-SATURDAY 21: Noho marae / Marae stay at Otakou marae (Open to all Law students).

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Manaia by R. Tapiata

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MATARIKI FILM FESTIVAL

Te Roopu Whai Putake, supported by the Dunedin City Council, proudly presents the Matariki Film Festival, 6pm Thursday August 19, Burns 2, Arts Building.

Gold coin donation.

Letter of the Week wins a $30 book voucher A MARRIAGE PROPOSAL IN CRITIC!

Dear Ham Lorgelly, I fecking LOVE you.

Marry me now!

For years I have thought that I was the ONLY ONE who hated to see all the depressing black that swamps my beautiful Dunedin / the whole fecking country of New Zealand!

I wear colour. Oh, YEAH!! Fecking BRIGHT colour.

Put THAT in a black cape and fangs you black-clothed freaks!

Yours ever so faithfully, Zara, Theatre Extraordinaire!

P.S: So, Ham, can I book a date for the reception?

SHOES!

Critic, I bought some shoes recently and as well as being all slippery material inside (difficult with socks on) they also possess zero tread on the bottoms.

Coincidentally I live on a hill. Every time I wear these shoes (boots, actually) I manage to do a wild-arm-flailing dance as I fight to keep my balance. I half fell down those concrete steps on Chambers Street and I was being so careful! It wasn’t even icy!

I just thought you might like to know … And potentially broadcast to the makers of my $140 boots that they should finish making the bloody things before selling them to me. I mean, boots … tread … winter … hills …

I thought I was being so sensible! <3 from broken neck waiting to happen.

WHOOPS!

Dear Critic Dame Silvia Cartwright, while being completely awesome, was not the first female Governor-General as said in “Taking Their Place in the World”. That was Dame Catherine Tizard, who got the role in 1990. I remember her because she once gave my

home town a day off school, so was obviously top notch Vice-Regal Representative.

A little use of Wikipedia goes a long way!

Hugs and Kisses Pedantic SORRY, BUT YOU’RE JUST WRONG

Dear Critic In regards to the University advertisement “take you place in the world” , people need to embrace it. If you don’t want to take your place in the world , then why the hell are you at university!! If you don’t want to be somebody and go somewhere , don’t be hating on those that do.

The goth girl in the ad, symbolises someone who has found themselves, once coming to Otago. This place didn’t change her , she found her way and discovered the real person she was . You can’t tell me that, you’ve never secretly sung the song to yourself.

I’m proud to be here , Otago is OUR place right now.

Embrace what this place is all about, song and all.

Go on I dare you, take your place in the world !

Or be a hater and go home soldier !!

I don’t mind . love MX

LETTERS POLICY Letters should be 200 words or less.

The deadline is Tuesday at 5pm. Get them to us by putting them in the mailbox under the Union stairs, emailing us at critic@critic.co.nz, or posting them to us at PO Box 1436, Dunedin.

All letters must include full contact details (name, street address and phone number), even if you don’t want these details printed.

Letters of a serious nature addressing a specific group or individual will not be published under a pseudonym, except in extraordinary circumstances as negotiated with the Editor.

Critic reserves the right to edit, abridge, or decline letters without explanation.

We don’t fix the spelling or grammar in letters. If the letter writer looks stupid, it’s because they are.

STUDENTSOUL

Cafe church for students.

Service Sunday 22 August 7pm George Street School Hall. Speaker: Andrew Harrex.

Service Theme: Grace – Living Differently in a Dark Place.

Contact Rev Helen Harray on 027 473 0042.

WRITERS GROUP

A new writers group has started on campus. Email Alec Dawson at thelonelyowl@gmail.com for more information.

SEMAPHORE MAGAZINE This award-nominated e-zine is now seeking diverse short stories, poetry, and art for upcoming issues. See semaphoremagazine.com for more details, or email Marie at semaphoremagazine@gmail.com.

NOTICES POLICY Notices must be fewer than 50 words in length and must be submitted to Critic by 5pm on Tuesday before you want it to run. You can get notices to us by emailing critic@critic.co.nz or bringing them to the Critic office. We accept up to five notices a week from non-profit organisations and other student-related groups that aren’t looking to make a bit of dosh.

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Critique Analyse this...

43 food

44 books

45 games

47 music

48 tv

50 film

52 PERFORMANCE

53 art 42

T

he reality is that fantastic food places are rare and far in between, particularly in a small(ish) city like Dunedin. We are lucky enough to have a few restaurants that serve exceptionally good – sometimes even outstanding – food, but the rest mostly just fall in the ‘not bad’, ‘okay’, or ‘sometimes some things are good’ categories. These in-betweens are essential to our gastronomic happiness. We need to be familiar with the ‘not bads’ and ‘okays’ of the world to preserve an un-jaded palate and to be able to identify the ‘fantastics’ when we encounter them.

This week’s column is a tribute to the in-between. These are the dishes that I order most frequently when I dine at various establishments, and I think they’re pretty good. At Thai Over (388 George St), I always order the Vietnamese fried fish steak, which is battered fish fillets with stir-fried tomatoes, red onion, and mushrooms in a mild garlic, chilli, and black pepper sauce, served on a hot plate. It is the tasty, mildly peppery sauce that coats the fish and mushrooms that does it for me, and I wish there was more of it so I wouldn’t have to rub my fish pieces on the bottom of the plate to soak up more sauce, but it’s still good. I also like the tom yum and green curry at Thai Over and the excellent, efficient service provided by a petite staff member who has now memorised my approximately fortnightly Vietnamese fried fish steak order.

At Korea House (450 George St), my favourites are the bibimbap or kimchi pork. I really enjoy the spiciness and the variety of textures and flavours that you get from the nine or ten different toppings that go on the bibimbap.

The kimchi pork is just stir-fried pork and kimchi, which doesn’t sound very fancy but is nice and tasty (and slightly spicy), if you like kimchi. As a general rule, the barbecue meat dishes are also good choices. Most of their mains come with nice little side dishes of kimchi, mung beans, and cubed potatoes (I think). Instead of the cubed potatoes, they used to include a type of seaweed, which I quite liked, but not anymore.

And finally, whenever I have a hankering for kimchi fried rice, I go to Tokyo House (367 George St), where the dish is not overly dry and the kimchi and beef pieces are juicy and succulent. Tokyo House also serves relatively cheap, fresh sushi and decent teriyaki and curry dishes. The biggest (no pun intended) plus point for Tokyo House is that the meal portions are quite large and the prices are reasonable, which enhances its appeal for those of us with healthy appetites and limited budgets.

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Inherent Vice

Thomas Pynchon

A Life on Gorge River – New Zealand’s Remotest Family

Robert Long Random House

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When you are famous for writing difficult books, there will always be a handful of people who are going to be put off when you write a noir detective thriller, set in seventies surf-hippie Los Angeles (where, incidentally, Pynchon – age 79 – still lives, writes, and presumably smokes a lot of weed on some beach). It’s an unbecoming project for a Nobel Prize for Literature contender, they might say. But who cares about them anyway?

The first 50 pages of Inherent Vice aren’t great, unfortunately. But if you can make it through the set up and the lists of things that Thomas Pynchon seems to feel duty bound to go on and on about – including psychotic acid trips, the texture of L.A. fog, and a lot of other present-tense nostalgia – this is a great book. About four chapters in, the plot really kicks into high gear: a rich guy with connections goes missing, a biker is killed, and a cult hovers behind everything. This is ultimate noir territory, done in Thomas Pynchon’s characteristic impossibly surreal and yet matter-of-fact brogue.

As always, the storyline is involute and sprawling, taking in half-finished sixties dream cities, a surf band called The Boards, and a regular suggestion of incredible acts happening just off stage. That’s the thing with Pynchon, of course: he never gives the game away completely. Always just ahead is the unmissable revelation that explains the entire plot. Of course, Pynchon is too much of a faded sixties hopeful to ever believe that a single idea, a single piece of information, can save us. His brand of detective thriller is the ever-unsolved mystery. The reader is deliberately denied cognitive closure. And as with all of Pynchon’s novels, this can feel unsatisfying. This book never quite comes together, as it were. But it is this unfinishedness, this incompleteness, this vague desire, this unspeakable something that always leaves the reader wondering ... and that’s what he’s writing about.

It’s not for everyone, but then no books are. Fans of Pynchon’s other works should not worry too much; he’s not lost his mind yet. Indeed, this might serve as a good place to start reading Pynchon. It’s lighter than his other novels (and is therefore not quite representative of his work), so if you enjoy Inherent Vice, it’ll probably be worth tackling Pynchon’s denser, more complex novels.

This book tweaked my interest ever since the author, Robert Long, was given a rock star’s welcome at the Dunedin Public Library, where he launched this début book. It’s the sort of story that brings hope to all hard-core environmentalists and organic farming enthusiasts. If you’re keen to experiment on whether it is possible to live off cabbage and crayfish for a year and keep your sanity, this is the book for you!

Robert Long has been living in a hut in South Westland for 30 years in almost complete isolation. His book is a narrative of how he grew disdainful of the material world in Australia, and came to New Zealand to begin a resilient lifestyle living off the land. Long deserves respect for the resilience and ingenuity he showed in a wild environment; he deserves admiration for building a family and fulfilling lifestyle in the wop-wops. However, the admiration for his achievements only takes the reader so far. The story is not compelling and reads like an extended entry in a Department of Conservation (DOC) hut visitor book. Long does not extrapolate themes of isolation, frustration, or resilience, which I was expecting in a book of this kind. Instead, the reader is left reading a very lengthy yarn that often diverges off in tangents, just like a GEOG101 lecture on a Friday afternoon.

However, despite his penchant for tangents, Long misses the opportunity to explore Gorge River as a motif in the book. It is meant to symbolise both restriction and freedom, but this dichotomy was unfortunately never elaborated. The narrative is uncrafted and much is left to the reader’s own imagination. The book lacks coherence, structure, and direction, but somehow the reader gains an appreciation of the ideas Long is trying to convey: sustainable living, respect for the land, and community involvement bring satisfaction.

There were, of course, interesting bits in the book. It is interesting to see Long’s relationship with DOC, Forest and Bird, fishermen, and rural yokels in action on a daily basis. Not surprisingly, when DOC discovered Long squatting at the Gorge River caretaker hut, they simply said “You can stay here, as long as you tidy the place up a bit.”

This book will appeal to all those with an interest in tramping, wilderness exploration, and sustainable living.

Just don’t expect Pulitzer Prize-winning literature.

How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog

Chad Orzel Oneworld

Mirror

Jeannie Baker Walker Books

Particle-wave duality is not the doctrine that photons and elections (etc.) are simultaneously waves and particles.

Neither are they really particles with wave-like properties or really waves with particle-like properties. Rather, they are neither waves nor particles; they are quantum particles (yes, it’s unfortunate that they’ve kept the word ‘particle’ in the name of this third category), which manifest some wave-like and some particle-like properties.

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is not the doctrine that the act of measuring some variable in a system changes the system. Neither is it the doctrine that there is practical problem with measuring both the (say) position and velocity of a quantum particle precisely. Rather, it is a statement to the effect that these quantities just don’t exist in an absolute sense.

Okay, I’ll stop. How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog is a great introduction to (obviously) quantum physics.

It is, however, not the most helpful dog-training manual. But never mind that. Just as I have done (but better), Orzel discusses the key concepts in quantum physics, helpfully pointing out the major pitfalls along the way. By pointing out what particle-wave duality (and Heisenberg Uncertainty and the Copenhagen Interpretation and Schrödinger’s Cat and the Many Worlds Interpretation and Quantum Entanglement, etc.) aren’t, the reader gets a much better, more accurate picture of this idea. None of this is to say, of course, that our bafflement over quantum physics is all a function of common misconceptions of it. Quantum physics is as odd, if not odder, than it seems to be.

However, it’s not spooky magic, as Orzel helpfully explains in the final chapter. As you might know, ‘quantum physics’ has recently been invoked a lot to justify kooky claims about healing at a distance and the production of free energy and asking the Universe for stuff, and now I know exactly why these attempts are so much snake oil.

Thanks, Chad.

How to Teach Your Dog Quantum Physics is an extremely well written, purposefully light-hearted, and informative (though very basic) introduction to quantum physics. It provides enough information, I think, to enable the reader to spot popular nonsense dressed up in quantum physical terms. That’s a useful skill these days.

There is something unspeakably happy-making about illustrated children’s books that are unapologetically forthright in their social messages. Jeannie Baker’s latest – Mirror – tells what is decidedly one story in two languages, in two places, with two sets of characters who never meet. The book begins in the middle; the text on the left page is in English, and the text on the right page is in Arabic. The reader then turns both pages simultaneously (as she might open a set of French doors) to reveal glimpses into the everyday lives of two families living halfway around the world from each other. On the left, a family in Sydney: they live in the suburbs and shop in the sprawling metropolis (and endure congested traffic to get from the former to the latter), they surf the Web and buy Moroccan rugs. On the right, a family in Morocco: they live in the desert and trade in the market (and endure the heat and bumpy donkey ride to get there), they surf the Web and make Moroccan rugs. It is, of course, the same story; the story of a family living together, loving each other, buying and selling goods, cooking and eating and chatting over the dinner table, and going to bed and waking up the next morning to do it all over again.

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Game: Turok

Platform: PS3, XBox 360, PC

T

urok was one of the earlier games released for the PS3 and XBox 360. It was greatly anticipated due to its earlier fame on the Nintendo 64 but after its release was generally viewed as a great disappointment. The graphics weren’t great, the story line was a bit weak, and it was brutally difficult.

I believe this game is under-appreciated. While there is no doubt Turok is a challenging game – the steep difficulty level was its main downfall – much of this difficulty was due to gamers’ unwillingness to adapt.

The earlier Turok games were designed more as First-Person Shooters (FPS), with a run-and-gun feel. To play the new Turok this way makes the already challenging game nearly impossible. This version of Turok gives the player many options in confronting enemies. The baddies can be shot with a variety of guns, and some of the guns could be silenced, allowing for stealthier kills with a loss of firepower. The player was also given the traditional Turok weapons: a big knife and a bow. The bow could one-shot kill almost any human, and the knife has the potential to one-hit kill almost anything in the game, the only exception being the large dinosaurs.

This allows the player to choose to blast away with guns, silently assassinate enemies from a distance, or get up close with the knife for a silent kill. People who found the game far too difficult chose to lay into enemies with full automatic fire, which, while acceptable for some scenarios, could not be maintained throughout the game due to low ammo drops by enemies.

Turok is not an incredible game; however, it can be fun and poses an interesting challenge for gamers who have become used to games that only require unloading entire magazines at single enemies.

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43 47

Avenged Sevenfold

Nightmare Warner Brothers

Pixies

CBS Canterbury Arena, Christchurch 3 August 2010

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In 2005, Avenged Sevenfold took the world by storm with their album City of Evil. Critics raved, girls screamed, and emo kids found another band to add to their death list. The band’s self-titled album, released in 2007, did not have the same effect. The fans felt let down and while many people admired their experimentation, those same people agreed that it went a bit overboard.

To put it nicely, Avenged Sevenfold have something to prove with the recent release of Nightmare.

Nightmare is their heaviest album to date; it incorporates elements of eighties hair metal and you can clearly hear the influences of Metallica and Alice Cooper running through their music. Avenged Sevenfold stay true to themselves while breaking the mould of what they used to be. Their music seems to lack originality: during the title track, ‘Nightmare’, there are parts of the song that are reminiscent of ‘The Beast and the Harlot’ from City of Evil. ‘Buried Alive’ has a breakdown which sounds strangely like Metallica’s ‘One’ and ‘So Far Away’ has a Metallica moment where an instrumental part flows into a ripping solo.

I should mention that in December 2009, Avenged Sevenfold’s drummer James “Rev” Sullivan died. This tragedy has obviously affected the band and the loss of Rev can be heard throughout the album especially in the chorus of ‘So Far Away’, where, singer Shadows sings “How can I live without the ones I love,” and in the outro of ‘Save Me’ where he sings the lyrics “Tonight we all die young.” The final song of the album, ‘Save Me’, is an explosive, expressive ending and possibly one of the best Avenged Sevenfold has produced.

Nightmare is a good album, not the best Avenged Sevenfold could do, but far from the worst.

T

he Pixies are, unashamedly, my favourite band of all time. My formative musical experiences are intricately tied to their mixture of alternating screams and breathy grunts. But this is some twenty years later, and a band that once had the vitality of youth (and relevance to the times that birthed them) could not, surely, be any more than a poor facsimile of their younger selves.

Their only previous New Zealand show was on the Doolittle tour, which was a good show, but really came to life during the second encore when they cut loose from the all-too-rigid set list and blew through some absolutely searing versions of songs, mainly from Come on Pilgrim and Surfer Rosa. Given that this latest show in Christchurch was purportedly going to be a special one-off, it shouldn’t have been a surprise that, freed from the shackles of the Doolittle straitjacket, the four silhouetted figures launched into the instrumental ‘Cecilia Ann’, from their penultimate album Bossanova.

But it was a little bit of a surprise, and pretty much the guts of the rest of the set was too. Bossanova featured relatively heavily in the set list, and the reputation the Pixies had for churning out song after shit-kicking song with little movement or otherwise proved to be as accurate now as it was in the late eighties. Of course concessions have been made to time, and the fact that they are playing songs that are pretty much twenty years old means they could not possibly have the fire they once had. Given that, they were still able to bash these nuggets of songs out with gusto, concentrating on what might be considered an unusual set to anyone who has followed their set lists since the reformation in 2004. Surely it is unusual for the set to be centred around ‘Winterlong’, their Neil Young cover which graced the B side of one of the Bossanova singles?

There is no way to recapture your youth, and this concert reinforces that. The only way to get away with performing twenty-year-old songs to people not able to catch you the first time around is to do it with heart-felt conviction, and hope that on occasion you will transcend that. That sums up this concert pretty well: ‘Velouria’, ‘Gigantic’, ‘Tame’, and ‘The Sad Punk’ soared tonight, and the rest of the set was quite adequate. The Pixies may be milking it (they are milking it), but as far as reunion shows by way-past-middle-age-rock-bands-purely-for-money go, it was really, really good.

Glee

Fridays, 9.30pm TV3

I

t’s a presumptuous title, really – Glee – but for many of the show’s weekly viewers it amounts to exactly that.

Why? The answer is at once both obvious and unfathomable, depending on where you stand. The show is immediately engaging, to those so inclined, because of its setting (an American high school), its cast (a singing, dancing ensemble of young people and the TV version of older people, i.e. slightly less obviously young people), and its storylines (the rollercoaster rides of young love, popularity, searches for identity and so on). It is immediately repugnant, to those not so inclined, for the very same reasons. So right away, in the eyes and minds (and ears?) of many viewers it becomes not so much a question of what Glee is about (insofar as it is discernibly about anything) so much as it has become about what Glee represents to we snobbish and opinionated Dunedinites. Am I for cheesy, pop-culture inundation set to a soundtrack consisting of classic rock yawners and show tunes? Or would I rather ingest sulfuric acid in mass quantities than endure one minute more?

There is no middle ground, which is a key factor when considering the show. By polarising audiences so effectively it ensures its continued popularity. There are certain segments of their target demographic that were never going to watch a weekly musical (for this is indeed what Glee is) no matter how cleverly you dressed it up in hip, relatable glitz. The writers and executives understand this and instead go for the other ones with determined, almost predatory, gusto. (The ones who will watch any musical, at any time, any place. No matter how campy and cheese-drenched it is.) They are very shrewd, those writers and executives, and even determined anti-Gleeks should give these particular devils their due. By zeroing in on the ‘common’ television viewer’s need for escapism and frivolity, they bypass any need for media street cred or ‘substance’. In this case substance is the enemy – it’s exactly what the audience doesn’t want.

What the audience does want, evidently, are the songs. The bright and bubbly peak of the happy clappy pop realm. True to the time-tested musical aesthetic, Glee works the various covers into the plot-lines (most commonly as “performances” in the context of the episode) as devices to further whichever dreamy, misty-eyed narrative is being worked through at any given time. They often involve the endlessly fascinating boy-girl dynamic or, failing that ... something where personal virtue/conviction takes on an establishment/a clique/the ‘Man,’ and wins out to the boisterous sounds of earnest young people singing and emoting with their subtlety starved hearts on their fashionable sleeves. Not really, my nor many of my friends and family’s, cup of tea, needless to say.

Having said that though, and bearing all the glittering, glaring flaws in our collective critical mind, even this decidedly snobbish reviewer can’t deny the appeal of the show sometimes. Every dark television cloud has its brief and precious silver lining. When they’re on, they’re really on, as they say. The female antagonist coach Sue Sylvester (Jane Lynch) has some truly inspiring rants, whatever the context might be. Also, I’ve rarely enjoyed stupidity more than I do in the blonde cheerleader character. Did you know dolphins are really just gay sharks? Intriguing, blonde cheerleader character. Intriguing.

One point for the coach and one for dolphin girl. Call me Mother Teresa.

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The Girl Who Played With Fire

Directed by Daniel Alfredson Rialto

The Girl Who Played with Fire is a Swedish crime thriller and sequel to the highly acclaimedThe Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

The film picks up where the original left off, with Lisbeth Salandar living luxuriously in an apartment, haunted by visions of her dark past. For those who haven’t seen the first one, Lisbeth is a ruthless, enigmatic genius computer hacker who, despite her cold gothic exterior, is eerily attractive. Framed for three murders she did not commit, Lisbeth is forced to go on the run and call upon her journalist friend, Mikael Blomkvist, to help clear her name. Now, The Girl Who Played with Fire is by no means a bad film, especially if you’re into crime thrillers. The final 30 minutes are particularly suspenseful and exciting – even more so if you’re already familiar with the characters. However, the elements that made The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo a step above are sadly lacking here. Whereas its predecessor played out almost like a dark Agatha Christie novel, The Girl Who Played with Fire is a lot more action-oriented – almost to the point where it feels like a Bourne Identity rip-off. This isn’t really a good thing, as the subtle creepiness that gave the first film its originality is almost completely lacking.

Although The Girl Who Played with Fire is a decent suspense film and worth a rent, it is unable to measure up to the quality of its predecessor and is a disappointingly average thriller.

Skin

Directed by Anthony Fabian Rialto

Skin is a biographical film about the life of Sandra Laing, a ‘coloured’ child born to white parents during the apartheid era in South Africa. Despite her skin being distinctly darker than her parents, an unusual phenomenon, Sandra (Sophie Okenedo) has been brought up as a white child. She has no idea that she is different to others until she is sent to boarding school, where she is bullied and ostracised because of her colour.

Although Sandra has papers that classify her as white, complaints from parents lead to Sandra’s reclassification as coloured, and her expulsion from the school. Her father (Sam Neill), a proud Afrikaaner, adamant that his daughter is indeed white, fights the decision all the way to the Supreme Court.

Somewhat identity-less, Sandra struggles through her teenage years. She is not white, and does not feel white, yet she is not a ‘native’ African either. Sandra’s skin colour and her predicament, floating around in racial limbo, tears her family apart. A South African accent is not the easiest to pull off, and unfortunately Sam Neill does not quite get it. However, Sophie Okenedo gives an outstanding performance, conveying Laing’s immense strength, grace, and dignity through her pain and suffering.

A tragic, heartbreaking story, Skin is a bleak portrayal of a society plagued with embedded racism. It is by no means a feel-good film, but apartheid is a part of world history that we cannot forget. No one can say that they felt good after watching Hotel Rwanda or Blood Diamond, but they are stories we need to know.

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Step Up 3D

Directed by John Chu Hoyts

The opening sequence of this third installment of the Step Up series is one of those candid camera interview montages, with the characters talking about what dance means to them.

They’re speaking from the heart: there’s no doubt the people behind this film have a passion for dance. The myriad dance scenes in Step Up 3D are, accordingly, fantastic. It’s a shame about the rest of it, though.

It feels like you’re watching a hyperactive teenage daydream – it looks great, everyone’s sexy and everything’s exciting, but the makers obviously have no idea how to come up with a plot or script: it’s cliché after painful cliché. A lot of it is so implausible it’s ridiculous: parts of the film have evidently been included just, y’know, because it’ll look good (an example: within the first ten minutes one of the characters jumps through a hot-dog stand mid-conversation and continues talking). The story: on his first day at uni, first-year Moose (Adam Sevani) reveals talent in an impromptu dance-off with a forbidding stranger. He then encounters the mysteriously sage Luke (Rick Malambri), who wants him to join his elite dance troupe, the Pirates. It turns out the forbidding stranger was in fact a member of the Samurai, the Pirates’ main competition in an upcoming dance contest. Luke reckons Moose has got the ‘spark’ that will help the underdog Pirates finally beat the Samurai. You find yourself longing for the dance scenes; wishing, in fact, that the makers had stretched them to the length of the running time.

Soul Kitchen

Directed by Fatih Akin Rialto

Okay, I know. The title alone might make Soul Kitchen sound like a cross between a lame Snoop Dogg flick and Hell’s Kitchen, but don’t let that ruin your appetite for Fatih Akin’s latest lighthearted comedy. Besides, where else can you find a healthy dose of soul music, random sex, drugs, a crusty sea captain, aphrodisiac desserts, and a bone-crunching naturopathic Turkish doctor all rolled into one film? Greek-German chef Zinos (Adam Bousdoukos), owner of Soul Kitchen – a cheap eats restaurant in Hamburg – has been handed an extra serving of life’s lemons. When his girlfriend Nadine (Pheline Roggan) leaves for Shanghai, his thief brother Illias (Moritz Bleibtreu) starts mooching cash, and the tax collectors start liquidating his assets, things are looking down. But when Zinos hires out-of-work chef Shayn Weiss (Birol Ünel), his crummy restaurant is transformed into a fine, soul-music-bumpin’ eatery.

Life is finally looking groovy. Unfortunately, devious property developer Thomas Neumann (Wotan Wilke Mohring) hatches a plot to steal the restaurant and oust Zinos. And, once again, life is taking a giant shat on the hapless Greek, as things go from crazy to ridiculous. This modern-day Job story is simple, goofy, and unsurprising. Indeed, the film doesn’t deviate too far from the tried and true recipe. But the actors are believable and entertaining, the cinematography is vibrant and thoughtful, and the music delicious. All in all, it’s a satisfying little film – not exactly gourmet quality, but certainly better than the sort of fatty slop clogging the arteries of most theatres nowadays.

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LTT Review: A Gaggle of Saints

Written by Neil Labute Directed by Katie King Starring William TaitJamieson and Emere Leitch-Munro

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Gaggle of Saints, taken from Neil Labute’s Bash trilogy, is a confronting piece about homophobia. What is so wonderful about this piece is that it provides a director with a perfect blank canvas, presenting this fourth-year student with an excellent choice of play with which to display her abilities. Labute produced this canvas and he invites directors to colour it and smother it in anything they desire. What we saw from King was not so much ‘colour and smother’ but instead a simple framing of the canvas that Labute had created.

When directing a piece you need to make sure you and your actors know a number of things. Where is the action taking place? There was an office chair and a bar stool in King’s stage; they were aesthetically pleasing, but why were they there? Where were these characters? Who are the characters talking to? What are the characters saying and how do they feel about it? I would suggest the actors, if not the director as well, could not answer any of these questions. There was no substance, no investment in the drama and tragedy of the narrative.

It is hard to decide whether it was through a lack of ability on the part of the actors or the director but the actors struggled, visually and audibly. The actors sat eagerly awaiting their next line – this was obvious. TaitJamieson’s tackled his debut to the Lunchtime Theatre stage with much gusto but a certain naiveté as he was denied the support and encouragement to feel secure in his knowledge of the script. The crux of the narrative relied on him and his ability to audibly evoke a scene in the minds of the audience and do so in a way that allowed us to feel some emotion and judgment of the actions undertaken by his character. Where Tait-Jamieson struggled, LeithMunro (in a stunning ball gown) managed to hold the piece together. Her ability to remain in character while sitting still and staring at the audience was commendable as she provided the piece with some foundation.

The actors sat still, until the very end when they got up, hugged, and danced in the dark and posed for a photo together, only to be lit momentarily by the flash of a camera. This final moment, the ‘click’ and ‘flash’ of the camera, was my favourite. It displayed the innovative use of light and staging that I was expecting to see from King.

Knowing King as a stickler for breaking routine I was incredibly surprised to see that she did not do so throughout this piece. At one point her actor stood up and then sat back down and at another the lighting went down on her actress. This was all the audience was offered by way of a break from the paralyzed verbal onslaught her actors presented. She needed to take care to ‘sign-post’ the key changes in the narrative; such as when the stories of the two characters diverged from one another. I missed this moment.

Having seen King’s work on two prior occasions I cannot help but think that this time she has let herself down slightly. I would suggest that she stage-managed this piece expertly but I feel a distinct lack of engagement with the action of the narrative and the characters within that narrative let this production down.

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Tucked away behind Mou Very bar on George Street is {lanyop} lagniappe small art gallery, an offbeat and unique art space that is only open when the sun goes down. Gallery-goers view works by candlelight while being serenaded by live piano. Critic talks to owner Larry Matthews.

Larry Matthews

Owner of {lanyop} lagniappe small art gallery.

What was the inspiration behind using only candlelight?

The concept of using candles developed from a desire to replicate a sense of searching or what it might be like to have a mystical experience. The notion of the Inner Light (that I believe everyone carries within them) is expressed outwardly by the candle and the artwork itself becomes a tangible representation of the Inner Light of the artist.

This ‘mystical experience’ is then a direct communication of the viewer and the art through that Light. At a very primal level I was imagining the very beginnings of art and visual communication; what it might have been like to be a cave painter.

You only show smaller works. Why? I did originally seek to show only ‘miniature’ art, which at the time I had visualised to be no larger than two playing cards. After a few discussions with artists who didn’t have any miniature art, I changed my mind and named the place ‘small art gallery,’ more because of the size of the space, not the art within it. I actually think a large piece of work would be interesting to see using only the candle. Like the cave painting idea.

The word ‘lagniappe’ means ‘a little extra something for nothing’. As a not-for-profit gallery, do you have a personal mission statement concerning the kind of work you aim to show?

I personally aim to respect ‘The Light’ from whatever source it may come, and this extends to the notion of having beginner artists right alongside professional or established artists. Another aim is simply to regain my passion for the arts after losing it.

How do you feel about the state of Dunedin’s current art scene?

Personally I want to see more. I’d like to see more funding for emerging, experimental arts throughout the year, not just in certain festivals. I believe there are many vibrant, creative individuals here in Dunedin and many go unnoticed.

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Why me? believe in the new Executive structure. I know that I can make the changes work, and ensure that all students benefit. My studies in finance have set me up perfectly for this position, and I know I am the most qualified candidate for this role.

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What I want to do: s your Administrative Vice President I will run efficient and effective training for the Executive that will ensure smooth implementation of the new structure and prepare for the unfortunate but real possibility of VSM. The new position will allow me to assist the President so they can achieve more within their role.

Why me? am a Management and Marketing student and have worked for an International Business in administrative role (managing international distributers), giving me good admin experience.

I have volunteered for OUSA, been on the OCOM exec and worked closely on projects with the 2010 OUSA President. Brad for AVP!

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Chipo Zimba did not submit a blurb or come for a photo.

What I want to do: n 2011 the OUSA budget needs to be reviewed and tailored to the new exec structure. I will work with the exec and staff to evaluate resourcing needs, and ensure all areas are running efficiently.I will ensure that if VSM comes in, no services are diminished or lost and OUSA remains financially sustainable.

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What I want to do: s FSO, I will maintain a healthy balance between OUSA’s levy and commercial revenue: OUSA needs to be simultaneously accountable to students and fiscally secure.

I will also investigate alternative revenue steams, provide greater support for our satellite campuses, and continue the great support OUSA gives to Clubs on campus.

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Why me? ith my extensive Executive experience and understanding of OUSA’s institutional workings, I’m the best person to manage OUSA’s purse-strings through 2011’s challenges. FSO is about knowing how things tick: two years in the Clubs and Societies’ role, which straddles both finance and administration, has well-prepared me for the step up.

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What I want to do: y aim as Education Officer is to ensure that your degrees are worth the paper they’re written on. In order to do this I will ensure that both educational standards, and the

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reputation of Otago as an academic institution, are maintained. I will also endeavor to listen to all students.

Why me? would be the ideal candidate for Education Officer because I am passionate about education and the University of Otago. I have spent time with the current officer and so am aware of the challenges the role presents, and what I lack in experience I make up for in enthusiasm!

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the psychological side of things as I believe these unconsciously and deeply affect us. I would like to make the campus a safer place at night and houses we live in healthier.

Why me? believe our welfare plays a very important part in achieving our best at University. I will represent you to the best of my ability and you can trust me, for I am trustworthy. I eagerly look forward to the excitement, responsibilities and hard work this position will bring.

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What I want to do: want to protect minority group support from OUSA, establish free sex-ed for both straight and queer students, initiatives for warmer flats – e.g. a blankets and heaters amnesty at the end of each semester – and a Know Your Rights campaign with free trained advocates for work, uni, and Studylink problems.

Why me? ot only am I passionate about your welfare and rights, I am also hard-working, friendly, approachable, and honest. I’ve been involved with various groups on campus, including UniQ, and I want to be on the Exec to maintain minority representation and help introduce new plans and initiatives that will help keep OUSA on a fair and democratic track.

who study off campus, and the few hundred more at the Wellington and Christchurch campuses.

I stand for proactive communication using the wonders of modern technology, and quality social events for our amazing, far-flung post-grad community.

Why me? ext year will be my 11th (and hopefully last) year at the University of Otago. I’ve studied in Dunedin, Wellington, and by distance; fulltime and part-time. Check out my campaign page on Facebook: Kate Amore for OUSA Postgrad Portfolio. And put your tick in the love box: Vote Kate Amore.

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I What I want to do: nsure that the new Executive structure is implemented efficiently and effectively.

Work with the Welfare Committee to ensure the wellbeing of students. Make sure the projects started this year are carried over. As chair of the Welfare Committee, I will work with students for students.

Why me? have the institutional knowledge required to lead the Welfare Committee. I have the experience of a Welfare Portfolio in this years Exec. Don’t underestimate the benefit of experience! I know how things work and I can do them well! Vote Shonelle for someone who is committed to student welfare.

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What I want to do: want to establish a student support system that is free and anonymous. I want to work on

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What I want to do: reater autonomy in the decision making in International Student health care provider, insurance provider and on campus visa application process. End course work discrimination. Equal ratio work opportunities within the University. Promote International Student Alumni involvement and participation.

Prepare and promote Otago University international graduates to be more marketable internationally.

Why me? ore than 20 years of corporate background in event management, marketing and public relations. Born and raised in a multicultural society Singapore, converse in more than 5 languages and understand and appreciate the cultural uniqueness of different race and religion. An all rounder and visionary with ability to execute the plans too.

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What I want to do: better service for post-grads is possible – including better representation of the third 59

recognize the issues and benefits international students encounter having experienced them myself and would work diligently to enhance the international experience.Â

What I want to do: s your International representative I will work to speak the mind of each group in all meetings and events. I will also ensure all International groups/organizations have the opportunity to show an aspect of their own cultures. I plan to work toward building a stronger connection between international students and non-international students so all may learn from each otherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cultures.

Why me? have a very diverse background with ties reaching from Puerto Rico to Europe. I experience organizing events and bringing people together to accomplish a common goal.

This experience will be vital in this position as to ensure each international group/organization has an opportunity to share their culture with the community.

an atmosphere of fun and community through organizing events that will appeal to most groups on campus.

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What I want to do: s International Rep I would I would work with international students to increase cross-cultural engagement and would seek direct input about what they would like to gain at Otago. I would work with campus organizations on issues impacting international students and use campus media to promote internationally focused events.

Why me? would make an excellent international rep as I am involved in local and international culture and believe that diversity on campus is essential to the university community. I

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What I want to do: f I were elected I would reinvent the campaign aspect of the current OUSA and bring all executive campaigns and initiatives into the 21st century and beyond. I would transform the new executive team into an efficient, space age machine, using my superior campaigning skills.

Why me? currently work at OUSA as a promotions assistant and maintain good working relationships with the events team, I have long hair, I understand the life of the average student, aesthetically I loosely resemble Jesus and I have two jobs and a pretty good work ethic.

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What I want to do: have two main objectives for the campaigns portfolio; firstly to raise awareness of the OUSA executives and what they are working on, thus ensuring accountability. Secondly I would guarantee that all OUSA events are well known and accessible to all students by providing adequate publicity and notice.

Why me? think I would be perfect for this role because I see university as having a responsibility to produce well-rounded students. I would love the opportunity to help provide that by creating

What I want to do: would be an approachable person for the members of clubs and societies on campus to address any suggestions or concerns with. I would like to set up a national website with the contact details of every universityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s clubs and societies, thus allowing students to link up with clubs and use their facilities when they are in other parts of the country.

Why me? am efficient, experienced and enthusiastic!

I have had a busy year running the Students of Physical Education Executive as President, as well as being a kaimahi for Te Roopu Whai Putake (our Maori Law Students Law society).

A vote for me is a vote for an experienced team player.

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What I want to do: f elected I will ensure that the needs of freshers and students are met and that OUSA continues to enhance the Otago experience by organising successful events like Toga Party. 2011 is an election year and I promise to ensure that the concerns of Otago students are heard above

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and beyond the anticipated Winston Peters comeback.

Why me? am the number one choice because I have excellent communication skills and believe in the importance of the student voice. I strongly believe in fostering OUSA’s relationship with the Colleges. For many, Colleges are the beginning of the Otago experience and therefore vital for getting off to the best possible start. TICK IT FOR KISSICK!

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a BA in Education and Maori. I am running for the position of Te Roopu Maori Tumuaki.

I am currently the OUSA Maori Students Rep, through which I have been an ex-officio member of Te Rito. Being on Te Rito I have gotten to know many of the Maori students, and have been a part of the work that Te Rito has done this year.

As Tumuaki I would like to move Te Roopu Maori forward and build on what is currently in place. I believe that the relationship between OUSA and Te Roopu Maori is in a very good position at the moment, and with their current re-structuring of the exec, I believe that my existing understanding of OUSA and the relationships I personally have with OUSA will help me in this position of Tumuaki and as the ex-officio member of the OUSA Executive.

What I want to do: mprove the overall communication of OUSA with the philosophy that communication must be two way. I would use OUSA’s underutilized class reps to canvass classes. Hold monthly student forums to get student opinion.

Implement a system of “Hall Reps” to give Colleges a voice inOUSA. Why me? ’m running to give something back to OUSA. I’m a third year student and I’ve enjoyed being a student. I think I’ve got the experience, passion and commitment to help OUSA communicate to colleges and to the all students. I’ve got some experience in serving OUSA as a class rep for various classes. It’s also really important to me that communicaton is two way. I want an OUSA that listens pro-actively.

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Te Roopu Maori Tumuaki/President

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ia ora koutou, my name is Ariana Te Wake, I am from Waihi and I am currently studying 61

MITCH EDWARDS

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y main ambition is to significantly improve the current lack of communication between OUSA and its members. During my four years at Otago it has become evident that there is a severe lack of communication between OUSA and its members.

How has OUSA represented your personal views and feelings about the University itself and student lifestyle during your time at Otago?

If your answer to that question is ‘it hasn’t adequately done so’, or the more probable answer of ‘I have no idea’, then that’s what I want to change. OUSA is your association and is there to represent you!

Currently it seems a large portion of the student population doesn’t know what OUSA does for them, therefore they don’t vote on matters affecting them. This has to be rectified.

Another goal of mine is to enhance the student culture in Dunedin. Otago’s reputation is built on this, yet it seems the University is currently trying to undermine it. The simple ability to go to a student bar and have a quiet handle or jug is heavily under threat, losing this would be disastrous. However drinking with mates is only a small part of what I consider student culture. Creating memories and forging life-long friendships is a fundamental part of the Otago student lifestyle which should be cherished, developed and protected by your students’ association.

So, why am I the person to do this? I’m currently a 4th year BCom/LLB student and have had the experience of working in the business management team of an oil company over the past two years, giving me a solid understanding of how large organisations operate and succeed. The most important factors are that I’m honest, hardworking, prepared to stand up for student rights but more essentially I’m ready to listen to you.

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HARRIET GEOGHEGAN

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010 has been a year of challenges big and small, I have worked hard to tackle all of them: the threat of voluntary student membership (VSM) to OUSA’s services and assets; limited entry; attacks on student loans by the Tertiary Education Minister; iconic aspects of the student culture being lost; and a relationship with the University in need of serious repair.

I have driven important changes including moving Student General Meetings to online votes and restructuring the executive to be able to advocate for all students efficiently.

VSM is an issue that will continue into 2011.

I have been working with the current executive, staff, external advisors and the University to ensure OUSA’s survival and sustainability whatever the future may bring. All the while continuing to lobby against the bill.

I have been lobbying the DCC and local MPs to sponsor a local bill in Parliament to make the STARS (housing rating scheme) mandatory. I will continue to work to allow students to have more input and control so landlords have more compulsion to use it.

I have bought structure to OUSA through the strategic plan 2010-2011: by the end of the year every part of OUSA (exec, student support, communications, recreation, events, income and assets) will have been formally reviewed to ensure they are: inclusive, relevant, engaging and responsible. The new OUSA exec structure chosen by students is far more than reducing the core exec, there is a whole raft of policies that I will implement in 2011 to support it, as with the recommendations of the operational reviews.

Seeing OUSA into the future is no small task and will require a President who is experienced, has relationships with key stakeholders, understands how the association works. I won’t require any time to learn the ropes.

Vote Harriet Geoghegan for continuity, leadership, action and experience.

MATT MCKILLOP

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am running for OUSA president with the goal of making OUSA more open and as relevant as possible to student life. I have been a huge consumer of OUSA’s events and services over the last five years – things like Unipol, Orientation gigs, facilities at Clubs & Socs – and I can’t imagine university life without them. I’m concerned that the threat of voluntary membership, combined with stagnant OUSA leadership, could result in these services being lost. I’m not promising more parties (I wish I could). What I want to do, despite the axe hanging over students’ associations, is to preserve the great events and services that we already have.

Poor quality flats are an everlasting problem that OUSA tries to tackle every few years, but fails. I want to make a concerted push to raise the standards of student flats in several ways. Compulsory ratings for flats on the Accommodation Office flat list would encourage landlords to either renovate or risk being ignored by student flat-hunters. Ratings also allow students to get an idea of the relative quality of flats.

Also, OUSA need to be the drivers of a concerted campaign to convince local government to institute minimum standards for rented accommodation. This has to involve lobbying, demonstrations, and whatever else it takes to get the DCC to pay attention.

I support the new slimmed-down OUSA executive structure. However, I’m not convinced that the current president will be willing to make changes if the structure doesn’t work, due to her close involvement in the governance review and referendum. Next year’s executive must review the new structure and be willing to make changes. The sloppy sledgehammer approach taken so far may yet require some sort of retrospective validation.

I’m looking out for your students’ association. So be bold, and vote Matt!

DANIEL STRIDE

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i, I’m Dan Stride, your Clubs and Socs Rep for the past two years. I’m now standing for President, because, as the most experienced member of the Executive, I have the skills to see OUSA through a challenging 2011. Why will 2011 be so challenging? There are two major issues at stake. The first is dealing with the aftermath of July’s referendum: whatever you think about the new Executive structure, there are some serious procedural and legal implications of the referendum. Having a detailed knowledge of OUSA’s policy, Constitution, and internal workings, I’m the person best equipped to grab a mop and deal with any damage.

The other major challenge of 2011 is VSM. If the Government ends up backing Roger Douglas’ Bill to kill students associations, OUSA will have one year to deal with the crisis. It is important that any operational changes are made as gradually as possible, so as to minimize the hurt to the real people who would be affected. 2011 is also election year, so OUSA must also grasp this last opportunity: if the Government does not listen to students, perhaps the voting public will. As it is vital that the student voice be strong and united on this issue, I promise to mend our rather strained relationships with other students associations.

Finally, I believe that empathy is important in a President. I was the first member of my family to go to University, and I understand what it is like to come from a less-than-privileged background. In an era of limited University entry, it is important that OUSA continue to look out for the little guy (or girl). OUSA is not a business: we are a large, messy, *democratic* organisation, and if we don’t look out for the marginalized among our members, no-one will.

NATHANIEL HATCH-STEVENS

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ear Scarfies My name is Nathaniel Hatch-Stevens and I am no longer running for president of OUSA. Over the last couple of days I have given a lot of serious thought to whether I am the right person for the job, the conclusion I came to was that I currently lack the tact and discipline for politics.

I’ve been close to a number of the executive and have seen the blood, sweat and tears they’ve put into their jobs over the last eight months.

They have shown determination in advocating for students against overwhelming odds. Their work is crucial to keeping to the university a vibrant and exciting place with concerts and events, but for the big issues you need to be more active. Go to protests, sign petitions and most importantly educate yourself about and vote on the issues, it’s not hard to do.

To anyone who says they don’t care about politics, you should. OUSA has a budget of two million of your dollars and how you vote will determine how that gets spent, yet voter turnout is in the order of a few percent. So if it’s not too much to ask, pay attention, vote in the election a week from now, and unfuck your shit.

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