Salient 21, 2013 - Victoria University

E I L NT A S 1938

E I L NT A S 1938

monday 23rd september 2013 VOL 76 ISSUE 21

Designer: Laura Burns designer@salient.org.nz News Editor: Chris McIntyre news@salient.org.nz News Interns: Sophie Boot

E I L N A T S 1938

An Organ of Student Opinion Since 1938

Arts Editor: Philip McSweeney arts@salient.org.nz Film Editor: Chloe Davies Books Editor: Alexandra Hollis Visual Arts Editor: Simon Gennard Music Editor: Elise Munden Theatre Editor: Gabrielle Beran Games Editor: Patrick Lindsay Feature Writers: Henry Cooke & Patrick Hunn Chief Sub-editor & Uploader: Nick Fargher Distribution Specialist: Jonathan Hobman

contributors: Jacob Brown, Caitlin Craigie, Denizen of the Deep, Matthew Ellison, Catherine Gaffaney, Amy Griffin-Browne, Freddie Hayek, Hector and Janet, Becca Hofmann, Ashleigh Hume, Emma Hurley, Russ Kale, Eve Kennedy, Lux Lisbon, Duncan McLachlan, Carla Marks, Cam Price, Carlo Salizzo, Steph Trengrove Contributors of the Week: FARGHALICIOUS

Last week, the University decided to increase your fees by four per cent. Last year, they did the same. And

advertising: Contact: Ali Allen Phone: 04 463 6982 Email: sales@vuwsa.org.nz

the year before that. And

contact: Level 2, Student Union Building Victoria University P.O. Box 600. Wellington Phone: 04 463 6766 Email: editor@salient.org.nz Website: salient.org.nz Twitter: @salientmagazine Facebook: facebook.com/salientmagazine

the year before that.

Fee Fi Fo Fumble - Page 22

about us: Salient is produced by independent student journalists, employed by, but editorially independent from, the Victoria University of Wellington Students' Association (VUWSA). Salient is a member of, syndicated and supported by the Aoteroa Student Press Association (ASPA).

Salient is funded by Victoria Univeristy of Wellington students, through the Student Services Levy. It is printed by APN Print of Hastings. Opinions expressed are not necessarily representative of ASPA, VUWSA, APN Print, Pete Hodkinson, University Council, but we of Salient are proud of our beliefs and take full responsibility for them.

This issue is dedicated to:

academia, it was the best of times www.salient.org.nz

@salientmagazine

facebook.com/salientmagazine



Editors: Stella Blake-Kelly & Molly McCarthy editor@salient.org.nz

? his ve om f t ha nd F o a o z t t f F PD .n an o e g w ay th r 't pl ad t.o n on is e D ic D d r lie bl an sa Pu d t a loa e a n su ow is D

SCHOLARS:

CONTENT

S

Weekly Content: VUWSA

4

News

6

Politics

14

Campus Digest

16

Features: WHAT's in a name?

18

seven and a half

22

inches of throbbing insecurity no laughing

26

matter "to boldly go": a

28

letter to the lost

With only four weeks left until it’s all over for the year, choosing and paying for your courses for next year (unless this is your final year, in which case: you’re on the home stretch!) is probably one of the last things on your mind. Along with ice cream, rain on Christmas day, and bad tan lines, being on hold to StudyLink is just another essential part of any Kiwi summer. But although signing yourself up for another year of this ol’ grind may seem like a distant reality to you right now, one thing’s for certain: thanks to a decision made last Monday, being a student will cost you 4 per cent more next year. Does that shock you? Anger you? Or are you completely indifferent—do you even know what your fees cost at the moment?

In 2010, the UK government drastically increased the cap on university fees—overnight, British students’ tuition fees jumped from £3,290 to £9000 per year.

The response was immediate and irate. Students turned out in tens of thousands to oppose the decision, culminating in an attack on Prince Charles and Camilla’s royal motorcade. In New Zealand, it’s hard to imagine anyone you know summoning the energy to post a status about fee rises, let alone marching in the streets about them. And that’s understandable—in the UK their fees rose by 174 per cent in one fell swoop—here Universities are only allowed to make a four percent increase every year. In the context of your ever-growing student loan balance that you prefer not to think about, that’s pretty insignificant, right?

The problem—because there’s always a problem—is that there’s no end to this system. Thanks to the way in which universities are funded, New Zealand’s universities are locked into an eternal rat race where the only option is to keep raising fees by the maximum every year. (Want to learn more? Check out pages 6-7, and 22-25)

But it can’t stay like this forever. We can’t continue to pay more and more for a degree that’s worth less and less because everyone has one. We can’t have entire generations believing that University is the only option when it comes to getting ahead. The current system is not sustainable, and eventually something’s gotta give. Within our lifetime it is likely that this ancient institution will undergo some radical changes. The Government may focus more funding on vocational initiatives, like apprenticeships and polytechnics, rather than pure academic pursuits. University may exist more online than on campus. You may be able to complete your final year from the comfort of your own home—whether that’s in the same city, or in a completely different country to your University.

In that sense, despite the rising fees, falling quality, and the sense you get sometimes of “What the fuck am I even doing here?”—consider yourself lucky. It ain’t going to be like this forever, and the way things are going, it’s only going to get worse. So in the meantime, let’s make the most of our time here—we owe it to ourselves, given how much we’re paying for it. Get involved, work hard, have fun… and when you eventually make it over the final hurdle, toss that mortarboard like you’ve never tossed before. You’ve earned it.

Finally, we’re delighted to announce that following a lengthy appointment process, the Publications Committee has appointed a new editorial team to take the reins of Salient 2014. Congratulations to next year’s editors, Cam Price and Duncan McLachlan—we’re sure you’ll do a fantastic job, and we’re excited to see where you take [ITALICS: Salient].

molly & stella

girls a cherry

30

disposition like a virgin

31

body languish

33

flickin' the bean

34

Columns: secret diary

37

weekly rant

38

hoopin' and

39

hollerin' laying down the law things that go

40

bump in the night Fixing your life

41

lifestyle

42

Arts: music

44

books

45

visual arts

46

film

47

music (continued)

48

what's on

Etc: Puzzles

50

Letters

52

Notices

54

VBC

55

Gig Guide

VUWSA 

YOUR STUDENTS’

ASSOCIATION

your students' association right on campus. The boxes are simply postal boxes that are secure, monitored and regularly collected by the Council.

I don’t buy the claim that students were given preference by having these boxes. Sure it made it easier to drop off your papers, but if proximity to a postal box is “privileged” as John Morrison has claimed, I hope they ban all the posties from voting. In fact, if you live within 100 meters of a postal box, you should be banned. That’s the logical conclusion of John’s argument.

Lols aside, I am disappointed in him. We engaged early on with John’s campaign. I was at his launch. We discussed healthier homes and fairer fares. I felt like we were getting somewhere with him. But I guess this whole event has shown how he regards democracy—VUWSA’s most sacred of ‘racies.

At the end of the day, it comes down to whether someone thinks more young people voting is good, or bad. John made the wrong call. Instead of making the effort to come up to campus and meet students, he intends to make it harder for us to access democracy. That’s pretty shitty.

John claims this was all just a big misunderstanding. That he meant for more boxes to be distributed, not less. If that’s true, which is highly unlikely given the actions of the WCC Elections Office on his complaint, then he should release any and all correspondence he has had with that office. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and John’s campaign could do with a shower of it right now.

THE McCOURT REPORT VUWSA President Rory McCourt

Democracy: the most sacred of ‘racies.

I am oft seen as gushing at democratic events. Whether it’s an Annual General Meeting or a sneaky SGM, in this role you grow to love seeing people getting involved and making their voices heard; each having an undeniable and equal say in how we should organise our collective lives.

For 12 short months, the VUWSA President adopts democracy, and loves it so.

So here’s a brief foray into upcoming democratic highlights, but first a low light: “Ballot Box-gate”: As you might have seen in the media, and here in Salient, the Wellington City Council has reversed their decision to allow ballot boxes on campus. They say it’s to be consistent with the principles of the Local Electoral Act, and to be fair to candidates, but we know the truth—certain candidates have complained.

We were absolutely gutted to think that anyone, let alone a contender for Mayor, would get grouchy at students expressing their democratic

4

Vic Mayoral Debate AND Special Voting!: Come along on Wednesday 25 September at 1pm to the Hub and delight in the revelry that is the first Vic Mayoral Debate—a chance to watch candidates do battle over public transport, housing, graduate opportunities and Wellington’s future. You’ll have a chance to ask your own questions and hear the responses of the six mayoral candidates.

But wait, there’s more! Then you can cast a special vote, no matter if you haven’t got your paper ballot with you, or whether you’re enrolled to vote. For example, I didn’t get a chance to update my details, so I’m registered in Gisborne at mum’s house. I can turn up on Wednesday and register and vote all at once, provided I front up with my photo ID and proof of address. It’s easy as! So give it a go, and make sure you vote your vision for Wellington. I know I’ll be voting for healthier homes and fairer fares— which are supported by many of the candidates!

Hey, why don’t you run for VUWSA? You know you want to! If you’ve been interested in what me and my team do to serve students, now is your chance to get involved. It’s quick and easy to complete a nomination form at our office, for any of these positions:  President  Academic Vice President  Welfare Vice President  Vice President

>>> salient.org.nz

 VUWSA

NGAI TAUIRA  Treasurer-Secretary

Kia ora mai tātou,

 Education Officer  Wellbeing and Sustainability Officer  Equity Officer  Clubs and Activities Officer  Campaigns Officer  Publications Committee Representative The VPs are paid 20 hour positions, and the officers all receive a $2000 honorarium. The President is a fulltime role (although I always work 55-60 hours a week).

I can honestly say that VUWSA has been one of the most fantastic experiences I’ve had. Make no mistake, it is hard. At times it is challenging, but it is also rewarding—and it is in student politics that you’ll meet friends for life. What better way to grow and develop as a person, an advocate and a leader than with your own students’ association?

Also: there is free printing.

I tērā mutunga wiki i tū tētahi momo hui ki Te Papa Tongarewa ki te whakanui i ngā tāngata i tuku kōrero atu ki a Piki Huia mō tētahi whakataetae ā tuhi nei. Nā ko ētahi o ō tātou nā hoa i tae atu ki taua na hui mō te tukunga o ā rātou mahi tuhinga auaha. Ko Tihema Baker rātou ko Rongmai Smith, ko Petera Hakiwai. Tau ke ā koutou nā mahi e hoa mā. Kia mōhio mai tātou ko Tihema te mea i toa mō taua nā whakataetae, nā ka pai ko e hoa, otirā ki koutou katoa i tuku kōrero atu.

Kia kaha rā whānau ki te pānui i ngā kōrero o ō tātou nā hoa, kāre e kore ka pai te kōrero, ā, ka whai hua hoki koutou ngā kaituhi o te whare wānanga nei.

I tua atu i taua pānui, kei te hiahia a Hine Parata-Walker, tō tātou nā Tumuaki o Ngāi Tauira, otirā tō tātou nei hoa, ki te tū ō roto mai i te rōpū o VUWSA. Ahakoa wehe atu ia i a Ngāi Tauira, e tika ana kia tautoko tātou i a ia kia tutuki i a ia tāna i wawata ai. Nō reira e hoa mā, tautokona tō tātou nei hoa, ā kanohi nei, ā pukamata nei, ā pōti nei hoki. Kia kaha rā e Hine.

Ngā mihi, Ngāi Tauira.

PASIFIKA STUDENTS' COUNCIL LOTO AHO STUDY SESSION Wednesday, 4–6 pm at Te Taratara a Kae, Māori and Pasifika Space, Kelburn Library Level 2.

HULA WITH TE KURA Wednesday, 7.30 am at Dance Room, VUW Rec Centre.

CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP Monday, 5–6.30 pm.

FHSS DROP-IN COURSE ADVICE Friday, 1 pm at Pasifika Haos.

TE PUTAHI ATAWHAI DROP-IN SESSIONS with Pasifika Support Co-ordinators: Jenny Taotua and Sera Tokakece.

Monday, Wednesday and Friday, 1 pm at Pasifika Haos.

“Prioritisation is crucial. If you want to get the most out of being a law student you have to know how to prioritise what comes first and what comes afterwards and so forth. Being able to balance both studies and social life is very important.”

Charles Dean

salient.org.nz <<<

5

NEWS





NEWs 

There's no silent 't' in the Salient news section! But there might be a 'u'! Email news@salient.org.nz with tips, goss, leads, stories, or just to say hi.

VICTORIA COOKING UP FEES Sure to rise Chris McIntyre

Fee rises for every student were approved at a highly guarded meeting of University Council last week, with the legal maximum rise of four per cent for domestic students approved for the fourth year in a row.

The decision was made at a meeting of University Council, held last Monday, to raise tuition fees for 2014 by four per cent for domestic students and five per cent for international students’ tuition fees, and to increase the compulsory Student Services Levy (SSL) by two per cent for all students. International Music students will face further increases of one per cent for postgraduates and two per cent for undergraduates. The rises will mean all students will pay between $192 and $324 extra next year, depending on their courses.

Last year, the University requested an eight per cent rise—twice the legal maximum—for Humanities, Education and Social Science fees, but was denied by the Tertiary Education Commission.

While fee rises each year have become the norm, this year’s meeting saw a number of non-student Council members raising concerns about the fee setting process. Public Service Association National Secretary Brenda Pilott voted against the rises—the only non-student to do so.

Pilott said the fee-rise document did not address whether the rise would be affordable for students, despite requests at the previous Council meeting for such information. Chief Operating Officer Andrew Simpson said requests had not come in early enough, and the University did not have capacity to undertake such research, though it would be considered in future. Also airing their concerns regarding information provided 6

to Council around fee rises were ministerial representatives Neil Paviour-Smith and Victoria Heine, both appointed by Minister of Tertiary Education Steven Joyce.

Student representative David Alsop, also voting against the rises, told Council he recognised the difficult financial environment the University operated in, but could not support tuitionfee rises as this would implicitly support the Government’s moves to make students pay more for their education.

The second student representative, VUWSA President Rory McCourt, said Victoria had failed to stand up to the Government—a point disputed by Chancellor Ian McKinnon—and that rises would affect students from disadvantaged backgrounds the most. McCourt told Council students were “paying more, but getting less”.

While “quality costs” was the excuse given by McKinnon and Vice-Chancellor Pat Walsh both at the meeting and at the Student Fees Forum held last week, Council did not address how quality is measured, or what specific measures would be taken to turn the extra $3 million of revenue from increased tuition fees into increased quality.

The meeting was surrounded by a baffling degree of security, with security personnel cutting off all but one of the access routes to the Hunter Building’s Council Chambers, accompanying students to the Chambers, and asking all students to leave bags and coats outside. A member of the security staff also sat behind the four students present at the meeting.

When asked why the University considered such security necessary, Director of Campus Services

Jenny Bentley said security was for “safety” and to provide “emergency support for unforeseen events such as [earthquakes].” Bentley described the number of staff as “small”, though Salient encountered over five security staff, some plainclothed—more than any other Council meeting this year.

Each year, two students speak to University Council on the effects of the proposed fee rises before discussion begins. Pasifika Students' Council President Kevin Fagalilo, one of the students chosen to speak by McCourt and Alsop, was unsure what he was supposed to be doing at the meeting and had failed to prepare a speech for Council.

Fagalilo told Salient McCourt had given him just one day’s notice ahead of the meeting, and that McCourt had not clearly articulated what was expected of him at the meeting. McCourt sent the briefing document to Fagalilo at 10 pm the night before the meeting.

McCourt told Salient it was not the student representatives' responsibility to brief speakers on what to say or on how to submit their thoughts to the Council. He refused to comment on Fagalilo’s contribution to the meeting.

“We organise and provide a platform, but we don’t screen what [the student speakers] say.”

Diana Osavyluk spoke on the financial issues faced by international students, saying fees were not a good indicator of quality as each year fees had risen “not much has changed”.

International students pay up to $25,000 a year for undergraduate courses, with maximum possible scholarships of $10,000.

>>> salient.org.nz

 NEWS

$3,035,040

4%

extra for the university in 2014

$ increase on $5000 annual course fees

DOMESTIC TUITION FEES WILL RISE

If fee rises keep going up at their current rate, this is how much extra you'll be paying in future 2400 2000 1600 1200

Where does the University get its money from?

800 400 0 2014

2016

8% 9% 21%

2024

is largely out of the University’s

International students' fees

control, meaning that if the University

Other fees, including the Student Services Levy

wants to increase revenue, it can only do so by raising tuition fees.

Research, commercial & other revenue sources

VOTING ON TUITION FEE RISES

VOTING ON sSL fee RISE

Voted against: Rory McCourt, student representative; David Alsop, student representative; Brenda Pilott, Public Service Association National Secretary

 Each member of University Council gets $320 per meeting, meaning the fee-setting meeting cost approximately $10,000 on its own—enough to pay for the fee rises of 50 domestic students.  The University is expected to have a 2.9-per-cent surplus in 2013. The Tertiary Education Commission requires a three-per-cent surplus.  Most of the surplus goes towards property maintenance and allowing for depreciation, with management describing the budget margins as “extremely tight”.  Fees for international students do not change to reflect foreign exchange rates. A Vietnamese student is effectively paying twice as much now as they were four years ago, due to currency fluctuations.  Total student loan debt currently sits at around $13 billion.

salient.org.nz <<<

2022

these parts of its income. The rest

Domestic students' fees 43.5%

2020

The University can directly affect

Government funding given per student 18.5%

2018

Council supported the rise unanimously

how much the Government WILL PAY towards your degree NEXT YEAR architecture

law

arts/social sciences

$6135

$6135

$11,282

statistics

teacher education

engineering

$6135

$8741

$11,282

maths

design, music

deaf studies

$6135

$9384

$11,282

medicine

$21,035

On average, that’s $10,750 for each student, each year: roughly two-thirds of the true cost of your education.

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NEWS

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MAYORAL CANDIDATES FORUM While they may-or may not get your vote, Wellington’s mayoral hopefuls will be trying their hardest to impress you at a forum this week. Ahead of the forum, Salient asked the four mayoral front-runners for their views on the issues affecting you. You’ll be able to ask your own questions of the mayoral candidates at the forum, in the Hub at 1 pm this Wednesday.

minimum standard of rental housing in Wellington. Would you support the Bill as Mayor?

Nicola Young Do you think tertiary students should have subsidised fares on public transport?

I’m looking at this issue closely, and working with VUWSA President, Rory McCourt, and the public-transport providers. Watch this space!

VUWSA has announced a local Bill in partnership with the WCC to introduce a

In principle, yes. Property owners need to invest in their properties; it’s just like ensuring rental cars have a Warrant of Fitness. It's clear some rental housing is below an acceptable standard— including the WCC’S own units in Newlands which have mould on the outside walls. Most landlords are responsible, but minimum standards would force all to comply. The devil lies in the detail, so that would need to be looked at carefully.

Proposed changes to the local alcohol policy would limit the opening hours of bars, pubs and clubs, and force off-licences to stop selling alcohol earlier. Are you in favour of

Yes. My housing policy takes a comprehensive approach to making affordable, warm, dry housing a top priority as a fundamental right for Wellington residents of all ages. Launching our Wellington rental WOF together signals zero tolerance of damp cold flats.

Celia Wade-Brown Do you think tertiary students should have subsidised fares on public transport?

Yes. Public transport must be a more affordable choice. I’ve initiated discussion with tertiary leaders on their role in subsidising student fares as Massey does in Palmerston North. Catching the bus or train as a student sets up a public-transport habit for life and reduces congestion and emissions.

VUWSA has announced a local Bill in partnership with the WCC to introduce a minimum standard of rental housing in Wellington. Would you support the Bill as Mayor?

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Proposed changes to the local alcohol policy would limit the opening hours of bars, pubs and clubs, and force offlicences to stop selling alcohol earlier. Are you in favour of the proposed changes?

Central government will impose national default hours for several months from midDecember, not recognising Wellington’s myriad of late-night music venues and quirky bars. I support our provisional Local Alcohol Policy— allowing well-run central city bars to open to a maximum of 5 am, and off-licences to 11 pm.

Individual applications will be assessed for risk and good management. Our strategy includes better lighting, food carts, late-night transport, and clear messages that excessive drinking is

the proposed changes?

I am against additional restrictions on the hours of sale for alcohol; bars etc generally act responsibly in this area.

What does the Wellington City Council need to be doing better for students?

The walkways leading from VUW down to The Terrace need better lighting; that’s an issue of student safety. The Snapper card needs to work for Cable Car tickets; after all, the Cable Car is owned by the WCC. What’s your favourite memory from your own time as a student?

Participating in rowdy debates in the Student Union!

unacceptable and outdated.

What does the Wellington City Council need to be doing better for students?

Students have a huge stake in Wellington’s future.

I welcome students to get involved in decisionmaking, disaster preparedness and voting in the local elections.

We can share better information on sports and arts facilities, low-cost events and transport choices. Better lighting and signposting paths between Kelburn campus and city. Better safe cycling routes. Let’s have a regular forum with VUWSA and other student associations to hear and respond to your issues.

What’s your favourite memory from your own time as a student?

Post-exam parties at the student flat I shared with three other redheads.

>>> salient.org.nz

 NEWS

understand it would fill the gaps in the acts governing rental now (Building Act, Health Act, and Residential Tenancies Act).

Proposed changes to the local alcohol policy would limit the opening hours of bars, pubs and clubs, and force off-licences to stop selling alcohol earlier. Are you in favour of the proposed changes?

Jack Yan Do you think tertiary students should have subsidised fares on public transport?

Yes: specifically, our campaign team has been looking at doing off-peak fares for students, and if elected, I’ll work with Regional Council to deliver them. Our priority was to make sure the subsidies were fair for all students.

VUWSA has announced a local Bill in partnership with the WCC to introduce a minimum standard of rental housing in Wellington. Would you support the Bill as Mayor?

Yes, because this codifies some of the acceptable standards in one piece of legislation. I

I’ve a feeling I was the only non-incumbent to send a submission. Council had discretion to restrict hours for irresponsible bars, but the proposals saw all bars punished. Secondly, off-licence purchase times would have had little effect: those who pre-load would buy earlier.

A lot of problems are tied to socioeconomic realities and inequalities. It’s why I’ve talked about apprenticeship programmes, and ensuring we involve young people in our institutions and the direction of our city.

What does the Wellington City Council need to be doing better for students?

We must understand where students’ interests lie, and actively bridge them with organisations.

We need to have a proper relationship with Vic. I know how much work goes into study: I know how peer review works, since I still contribute to journals. That sort of effort shouldn’t be ignored: it contributes to Wellington’s health and intellectual capability.

What’s your favourite memory from your own time as a student?

Call me a geek, but probably when the full version of LexisNexis was installed on campus in 1995. That year, we could tap into the whole database of legal journals as well as Reuter Textline (not Reuters Textline) for news articles.

Bear in mind that prior to that, the only similar tool was a single terminal inside the library linked to Reuter Textline, and you had to book ahead for half-hour slots.

Engagement. You should be able to reach your

Despite the Morrison campaign receiving Salient’s questions over a week ago, and repeated contact with the Morrison campaign throughout this time, Salient did not receive John Morrison’s answers by the time the magazine went to print.

While this may seem odd, given John Morrison employs a PR firm to presumably manage this sort of thing, Salient suspects the reluctance to contribute may have something to do with our

John Morrison

elected officials in social media as well as in real life.

recent efforts to uncover his attempts to stop students being able to vote on campus. Though, maybe it’s all just a big "misunderstanding".

:(

Salient asked candidates standing for the Greater Wellington Regional Council whether they supported subsidised fares on public transport for tertiary students. Here’s what they said: Yes: David Ogden Nigel Wilson Sue Kedgley John Terris Sandra Greig

salient.org.nz <<<

Paul Bruce Judith Aitken Chris Laidlaw Mike Fleming Jenny Brash Daran Ponter

Undecided: Gary McPhee John Dalziell Paul Swain Fran Wilde

No: ...

Did not respond to Ken Laban Salient’s question: Prue Lamason Ariana ParetutanganuiTamati Andrew Stewart

Barbara Donaldson Chris Turver

9

NEWS

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students actually care about representation Catherine Gaffaney

A majority of students want representation to go back to how it was before VSM and the Student Forum, with VUWSA taking centre stage and more accountable student representatives.

that two thirds of students wanted the student Council seat election to take place as part of the VUWSA Election, a process that was separated following VSM.

Last month’s student representation consultation, which garnered over 1100 responses, saw 55 per cent of respondents wanting the two student representative seats on University Council to return to being filled by the VUWSA President and a student elected at large. Following the implementation of Voluntary Student Membership in 2012, the University replaced the VUWSA President with the Chair of the newly established Student Forum.

A majority of students also wanted more than the currently non-existent levels of information about student representatives on the University’s various of boards and committees, as well as the students sitting on them. However the preferred level of information was minimal, with most respondents only seeing descriptions of roles, bios and contact details as necessary.

A third of students would prefer the seats to be filled by two students being elected at large. At the VUWSA AGM last week, members voted to change their constitution so that all students, regardless of membership, could vote in their Executive elections. This means VUWSA can claim the President was elected at large, however it remains unclear whether the University will see it that way. The consultation also showed

Support for VUWSA to take most of the responsibility for filling representative positions on boards and committees was clear with 73 per cent of respondents wanting the students’ association to have dedicated seats on the Academic Board, Academic Committee and other academic bodies, and 69.6 per cent wanting VUWSA on the Equity and Diversity Committee, Student Hardship Committee and other equity, welfare and pastoral care bodies.

All students were sent the survey, the results of which will be used to inform the review of student representation currently underway, which will be proposing what structure to replace the Student Forum with.

“I'm very pleased with the response. I know from being on the receiving-end of requests for surveys for a few years that it’s easy to brush them off." said University Council student representative David Alsop.

VUWSA President Rory McCourt, who has been critical of the Forum since early 2012, says the survey shows strong support for VUWSA “to return to the heart of student representation at Vic”.

“We know that an independent and accountable students’ association is the most effective way for students to have their say on the things that will affect them."

The next step of the review will see a proposal go to Academic Board, and then on to University Council for final approval later in October.

BRAWLS IN THE HALLS, CRACKDOWN FOLLOWS SMACKDOWN Two week ban on guests after fight at Te Puni Sophie Boot

A brawl involving Victoria students in the carpark outside Te Puni Village is under investigation by the University, and the hall has banned all visitors in response.

Salient understands that students from Te Puni Village and Vic House were involved in the incident, which took place on Saturday 14 September, and that a Te Puni resident was bottled. Three police cars were seen at the scene of the fight.

Te Puni Hall Manager Isaac Brosnan has banned residents from having guests to Te Puni until the beginning of October.

“Guest access has been suspended at Te Puni Village as a result of some residents not following the correct and well-understood guidelines for 10

guest visits,” Director of Campus Services Jenny Bentley told Salient.

Director for Student Academic Services Pam Thorburn said that the University was aware of the incident, and was looking into it.

“The University is gathering information about what happened. There will be no decision on any actions to be taken until we have a clearer picture.”

Rumours around the nature of the altercation continue, with some students attributing the incident to an inter-hall rugby game which had taken place earlier in the day. Salient is yet to understand why the inter-hall rivalry is a thing, but will have more information as it comes to light.

>>> salient.org.nz

 NEWS

railway station caught on tape COMMUTERS TAKE 4 DAYS TO FIND THE END OF ART PROJECT Steph Trengrove

Students passing through Wellington’s railway station last week were faced with a sticky situation, as tape was used to create a large-scale walkable labyrinth in the station’s foyer.

Erica Duthie and Struan Ashby, co-founders of Tape Art New Zealand, collaborated with sound artist Christine White to create Gyre and Gimble in the Wabe; a project that used tape and sound to “traverse the meditative and nonsensical”.

Duthie and Ashby use tape to transform urban spaces with temporary drawings. Their partnership with White, a Sonic Arts Composition (Honours) graduate from VUW, added to the experience aspect of their work as visual performance artists.

the labyrinth, and the artists encouraged people to walk the maze and fully engage with the project.

that the experience spoke for itself as a chance to stop and appreciate the present.

Although Ashby estimated that “90 per cent” of people who passed through the exhibition dismissed it, the people who did participate varied from children to “grandparents in wheelchairs”.

Moriah Payne participated in the exhibition, and thought it was a positive initiative. “If you don’t want to engage you don’t have to,” said Payne, “and it’s a good way to pass the time waiting for the train”.

Those who didn’t engage with the project were still confronted by a display of “playfulness and frivolity”, said Duthie; a rare thing to see in a public space. For those who did engage, she said

For more information about Tape Art and photos from the exhibition, head to the Tape Art NZ Facebook page.

Various sounds were recorded by White, and the subsequent compilations then played through directional speakers at different corners of the labyrinth. White also performed as part of the exhibition, using her voice as well as pre-recorded sounds to create music as she walked through the labyrinth.

White’s movement and the directional speaker meant that the sounds were best heard from inside

salient.org.nz <<<

11

NEWS



VICTORIA CELEBRATES UNI-DIVERSITY Salient recaps International Week

this week's

ions

iPredict is a prediction market run by Victoria University that has hundreds of stocks on economic, political and social outcomes. The following predictions are supplied by iPredict and may have changed since Salient went to print.

To try your luck go to ipredict.co.nz.

Emma Hurley

People came from all around the world for VUWSA’s International Week, which took place last week.

The week began with the launch of VUWSA’s International Rep Group on Monday. The group will organise events, provide peer support and act as a voice for international students at Victoria University. Around 50 people attended the event, deciding to elect an executive in the next few weeks. “[VUWSA is] really excited to be involved in creating a group that seeks to be an independent voice for international students, especially since they are an often vulnerable population at Victoria University,” said Clubs and Activities Officer Ramon Quitales.

A Facebook group, ‘International students at Victoria University of Wellington’, has been established for those who wish to attend future meetings.

A number of events were held throughout the week, with ‘The Amazing Race’ taking place in the Hub on Tuesday. It was facilitated by AISEC, a global exchange organisation for students.

Participants had to complete a challenge at each

stage of a four-stage circuit. The challenges included having a passport photo taken in a novelty hat and a geography quiz. Students seemed to enjoy the event, and those who took part are now in the draw to win a bus trip around the South Island, a prize valued at $800.

“It’s great to be able to get out and experience people from all over the place all connected through studying here. I’ve had a really good week so far,” said one student spoken to by Salient.

Wednesday’s event, the International Food Festival, was held in the Tim Beaglehole Courtyard.

Contrary to students’ expectations, there were limited stalls available at the event. However, the stalls present were of a high quality and included Vietnamese and South American cuisine, cupcakes and jewellery. While the event sparked the interest of many, students suggested it would benefit from a higher number of stallholders in the future.

Over 1500 international students are studying at Victoria in 2013, who pay around $25,000 a year for tuition.

Sonya Clark to be Next VUWSA President

89%

tommie maharaj to be Next VUWSA President

10%

YOUR STUDENTS’

ASSOCIATION

VUWSA to vote to leave NZUSA

97%

John Morrison to be elected Mayor of Wellington

52%

Celia Wade Brown to be elected Mayor of Wellington

42%

12

>>> salient.org.nz

 NEWS

stay classy, world Syria have agreed to give up the chemical weapons it doesn’t have, after pressure from Russia and the West. The weapons—which don’t exist according to the Assad regime— would be destroyed in the future under the terms of the agreement.

Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras has said Greece could return to living standards experienced before the financial crash within six years. The news is welcome respite for Greek citizens, who are reeling from the ravages of having to pay income tax and not being able to retire in their 40s.

The stricken cruise ship Costa Concordia has been set upright off the coast of Italy, in a massive feat of engineering thought to be the most exciting thing to happen on a cruise ship since the Titanic.

The mansion of Gianni Versace was sold for over NZ$50 million last week. Versace was shot dead on the front steps of the mansion 16 years ago, meaning he remains fashionably late.

GUESS WHO: THE MAYORAL CANDIDATE EDITION

LOL NEWS CHROFLIS MCLOLNTYRE

WHO COULD HAVE SEEN THIS COMING? A man was attacked, stabbed, and robbed of his newly bought copy of Grand Theft Auto V, on the night of the game’s release last week in London.

m–long arms, removed the plastic after surgical instruments failed when the dolphin’s stomach contracted.

While some plastic is still left in the stomachs of the dolphins, it’s expected they will be able to digest this. The news of dolphins eating plastic reinforces other news which also came out last week, reporting that researchers suspect dolphins may not be as smart as once thought.

IF YOU KANT BEAT ‘EM, SHOOT ‘EM

The game, in which the player assumes the roles of three different criminals and is tasked with completing missions, has been criticised as inciting players to commit violent crime in real life.

The assailant was not thought to have used any cheat codes in relation to the attack.

VET REQUIRED: MUST BE 7′ 9″ The world’s tallest man has saved a dolphin by reaching through its mouth and into its stomach to remove plastic shards.

Bao Xishun, who is 2.36 m tall and has 1.06 salient.org.nz <<<

An AUT Psychology student is conducting a yearlong book review into the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy.

While some academics focus on medicine or engineering, Emma Griffiths is conducting a study into heterosexual women’s thoughts on the trilogy.

The students’ Psychology lecturer, Panteá Farvid, came up with the idea, stating the thesis will “[help us] understand the Fifty Shades phenomena."

“The added bondage and kink made it appear titillating and exciting," Farvid added.

Honours study at AUT costs approximately $7000 per year.

Two people in the early stages of dating have both been playing it cool, recent reports suggest.

Despite both individuals wanting to make contact, neither was prepared to: “When you’re into someone, it’s very important to give the opposite impression for as long as possible. It just makes sense,” said one of the pair.

headlines that weren't Cunliffe pledges to repeal the National Party Drug-test laws “just taking the piss” Tony Abbott’s tough stance on boat people threatens America’s Cup Highway-widening leaves local residents with no shoulder to cry on Extended pause as bear reaches for something 13

POLITICS 

left Unity. Strength. Hope.

Together. Forward.

P O L I

By Carla Marks The Labour leadership competition has delivered a new leader for the Labour Party, and two stories are being told. Caucus members sing from a (socialist) rose-coloured songbook, claiming that waves of unabated unifying pleasure are washing over the caucus and party. Meanwhile, Patrick Gower and his gallery friends claim that unity is at an all-time low, the “ABCers” are already plotting revenge, and Cunliffe is finally taking his opportunity to exact revenge on those who have held him back in the past.

In truth, something in the middle of these stark opposites is surely true. The caucus is split along Robertson–Cunliffe lines, that is no secret; but they are unified in their values and the collective aim of replacing the government. Personal conflicts occur in any workplace, and don’t necessarily make them ineffective teams.

Regardless, the Labour Party has long claimed being a “broad church” as one of its strengths. Indeed, politics is the place for debate and differences of opinion, and I for one am glad that parties are not homogenous beasts. So, do we need unity?

Yes. Is it the be-all and end-all, and needed to the extent that parties never have internal disagreement or tension? No. Politics is the place for disagreement, and for journalists to distract attention away from policy in favour of exaggerated or imagined disagreement within a party is to fail in their job of reporting real issues that matter to New Zealanders.

TO S D I DAV FACE DE

Over the ditch.

New Zealand Labour has a new leader, and the Australian Labor Party is starting the hunt for its new leader after the resignation of Kevin Rudd (who became leader after the resignation of Julia Gillard) after resigning himself to losing the general election. Australians are now resigned to four long years of Liberal government led by Tony Abbott.

Prime Minister Abbott has appointed one woman to his cabinet, is axing the Ministries for Women, Tourism, Youth, Housing, Climate Change, Resources and Energy and the Ministry for Disability Reform. But, never fear, the man who said that women would never be equally represented in “many areas” because their “aptitudes, abilities and interests are different for physiological reasons” has appointed himself the Minister responsible for Women’s Issues.

Onya, Tony.

14

>>> salient.org.nz

 POLITICS

T I C S

right Who is David Cunliffe, Really?

By Freddie Hayek

Tweets and Twats @tauhenare Work starts at 2 o'clock bro @DavidCunliffeMP @KimDotcom The 2014 election will be dope ;-) #Gimme5Percent @JudithCollinsMP @secondzeit @mizjwilliams @stevenljoyce @TrevorMallard Have to say I'm quite fond of Cunners this week @laurenjwallis I swear to God, what I would do for a petal cupcake right now.

@PARFosterBell @laurenjwallis is that actually a thing? Rose petals? @laurenjwallis @PARFosterBell petalcupcakes.co.nz @PARFosterBell @laurenjwallis ah I see. Yum.

CAPTION CONTEST Email editor@salient.org. nz to submit your caption!

Best caption wins a free coffee at:

The Labour Party has a new David, err… Leader. A new King David rules over the broken Kingdom that is the Labour Party. Cunliffe won a huge amount of support from the wider Labour Party membership, and the majority of the trade-union vote. However, only a third of the parliamentary caucus, the MPs who work with Cunliffe day in, day out, voted for him. This is a damning indictment of Cunliffe’s character. When two-thirds of your caucus didn’t want you as leader, you can bet they will be “unified and behind the leader”. Yeah right.

Cunliffe, or, as he is affectionately known, Cunners, has a monumental task on his hands. Cunners’ predecessor, David Shearer, struggled for 20 months trying to get Labour’s poll ratings out of the doldrums. Labour got one of its worst ever hidings in 2011, gaining only 27.48 per cent of the vote and seeing National increase its share of the vote, an incredibly rare occurrence for a governing party trying to win a second term.

The Labour Party has taken a massive punt on someone who hasn’t got the support of his fellow MPs, but the support of the wider membership. Over time, however, the flaws that other Labour MPs are aware of, due to the increased scrutiny of Cunners as the alternative Prime Minister, will become clear to the general public. A very risky strategy.

Just who is David Cunliffe anyway? The second coming of the Labour Jesus, Michael Joseph Savage? A right-wing new model Rogernome in disguise poised to launch Cunnlinomics?

A South Seas socialist Hugo Chávez? The truth is, David Cunliffe is all of these things, at different times to different people. To the Labour faithful, he is the new Michael Joseph Savage. To the business community in the last Labour government, he was the rough, tough right-wing technocrat who gave the Clark cabinet business credibility. Cunliffe used to work for Boston Consulting Group, home of another political-leadership aspirant, Mitt Romney. To the trade unions who he wooed to get their votes in the leadership election, he promised to wind back the clock to the grim 1970s, when industrial arbitration and unions paralysed economic growth. None of this answers who David Cunliffe really is. Despite being an MP since 1999 and a former senior cabinet minister, he demonstrates the political flexibility of an ideological yoga guru.

You’ve been warned.

salient.org.nz <<<

15

CAMPUS DIGEST



CAMPUS DIGEST get amongst "the best" OVERHEARD @ VIC Amanda Louise Overheard, Library level 5.

Girl: "I wonder if people enjoy smelling me?"

Anna-Marie Green Overheard in psyc 335: "it's hard to hide a body in New Zealand, well you can do it but its harder to get away with"

VUW Cupid #788 Girl who walked into Anth 102 late today, with the thick rimmed glasses that sat opposite me with the pretty skirt thing on, you have no idea how ridiculously babing you are, dunno what your name is but jeze i melted when you first walked in! #787 Every day I see you sitting in the hub. You are the most gorgeous, most cutest wee maori I have ever seen. Im white...so don't hate...

If only I knew you and you knew me...I could really treat you for your birthday. p.s im talking about you, E l i j a h from your secret future fuckbuddy xx

PROBING THE PUNTERS Salient conducted an extensive study of the lunchtime rush at the Hub. (n= 20 margin of error: 21.9%) 1. Do you support the 4 per cent tuition fee rise for next year?

YES - 40% NO - 60% 2. Have you ever used Tinder?

 YES 0%

NO 100%

3. Are you going to vote in the VUWSA Election?

VUW Cupid II #168 To the Dan Carter look alike working at wishbone today. You can score between my posts anyway.

Jessica Edward Doesn't get much better than this.

OMG VUW CONFESSIONS #704 Anon please This is more of a rant, but could the ginga chick in Film101 quit watching the most horrendous Best Vines videos and furiously Facebook stalking everyone under the sun?

The constant clicking of your MacBook Pro's mouse is disturbing and annoying.

And no, slightly tilting your screen does not hide what you're doing. Ugh. #702 To the guy that thought it was a good idea to use chatter rings outside the MC lecture theatres today. Sure, we all like a bit of nostalgia. But, you can go fuck yourself.

Thanks for making a stressful day that much worse.

16

#164 Anon Tommy Tommy maharaj You are the president of my heart.

And my uterus.

Be mine xxo #157 To the boy in Film101 with The Beatles bag.

This is more a cupid for your bag really, I love it.

I'm going to assume based on the bag that you have great taste.

-From another avid Beatles fan. #156 The awkward moment when you see someone’s computer screen in the library and they are facebook stalking you.

On the other hand you are smoking hot, so why don’t you click add? ;)

YOUR STUDENTS’

ASSOCIATION

NO 60%

YES 40% 4. Do you listen to the VBC?

YES 50%

?

NO 10%

WHAT'S THAT? 40% 5. Would you rather:

Go back in time to meet your ancestors? 60%

Go into the future to meet your great grandchildren? 40%

>>> salient.org.nz

 CAMPUS DIGEST

BLANKET BAN-NER

Top Ten signs you've been at vuw too long 10. You're older than your tutor.

9. Your calves are sculpted, your stomach less so.

8. You've been to Karori campus.

7. You've had every colour course reader.

6. You're doing honours.

5. You've met the VUWSA president.

4. You've banged the VUWSA president.

3. You respect the zone a little too much.

2. There's interest on your student loan.

The Presidential Race is (s)heating up on campus.

1. This is the only part of Salient you read. carlo salizzo @louderthoughts

Perfect

Or essential

Hangover Cure?

Study Aid?

$5 UP TO

PER SURVEY!

What’s your opinion?

Take online surveys • Make a difference • Earn rewards

Join now

salient.org.nz <<<

www.valuedopinions.co.nz

17

FEATURES • ϟ

What is the VBC? The VBC, or the Victoria Broadcasting Club, is Victoria University’s very own student radio station. Tucked away in the Student Union Building, behind the Hunter Lounge and right next door to Salient, the VBC has been in operation since it was first established in 2007.

If you are lucky enough to live within the area that the VBC broadcasts to (pretty much just Kelburn, but sometimes Newtown if you’re lucky), you can tune in on 88.3FM—otherwise head to tunein.com/radio/VBC-883-s87209/ to stream online. Check out page 47 for the VBC show roster, plus details on how to get your very own radio show.

Who pays for it?

You do! Every year, when you pay the University exorbitant amounts of money (read: get StudyLink to pay for you), part of your fees is the Student Services Levy. This charge, which cost you $676 this year, is used by the University to fund things that make your time here (outside of lectures) better. Things like student health services, the rec centre, Salient, and—you guessed it—the VBC. Every year VUWSA negotiates with the University as to how much of this Levy will go towards funding student media; in 2013 the student media grant was $160,000. $130,000 went towards producing Salient; the rest was used to operate the VBC. This money pays for a part-time Station Manager, who is responsible for training new hosts and managing the show roster, and the station’s broadcasting fees.

What happens if we all vote to cease funding?

Under the VUWSA Constitution, the VUWSA Exec cannot be bound by a referendum that requires them to make financial decisions.

18

However, if an overwhelming majority of members vote in favour of cutting off funding to the VBC in this referendum, it would be savvy for VUWSA to at least investigate the issue— y’know, for the purposes of democracy and all that jazz.

It is possible that the VBC could be run much more economically—put volunteer students in charge instead of a paid manager; cut the radio broadcasting and only stream the station online.

However, without these broadcasting facilities, the VBC’s scope to grow is somewhat limited— its online stream only supports 250 individual connections at any one time. This may not be that great an issue, though—after all, the highest number of listeners the VBC has attracted at one time within the last year is a mere 33.

If you’ve ever been into the VBC, you’ll understand that the radio station is in a bit of a sad state: equipment is old or broken; the radio won’t stream on the University’s internet; a part-time Station Manager doesn’t have sufficient resources to fully train all new staff, and no one buys advertising time. Without a dedicated group of students who derive pleasure from broadcasting their own voice to ~0 listeners (results may vary), there would be absolutely nothing—and no one—to keep the radio station existing at all.

vuwsa refer

Should VUW to fund th Broadcastin current stu station) fr

Aside from the Station Manager, there is no one within the University who takes responsibility for the VBC. The University defers to VUWSA, who—until recently—have deferred to the VBC Trust. The Trust, which once ‘owned’ the VBC, was found earlier this year to have been deregistered; have more liabilities than assets to their name (shhh, don’t tell the IRD), and are notoriously difficult to get in touch with.

The reluctance of anyone to take responsibility for the management, or not as the case may be, of the VBC cannot go unconsidered in

>>> salient.org.nz

13 SA 20 W U V CTION ELE

rendum 2013

WSA cease he Victoria ng Club (the udent radio rom 2014?

looking at the success, or failure, of the student radio station’s ability to serve students. Without any committees or formal settings for the performance of the station to be discussed, it has flailed and wasted time and money it could have used adapting how it engaged with students.

However with the changes to the Publications Committee made at VUWSA’s AGM where this referendum motion was born, the VUWSA Executive can now theoretically delegate any forms of student media—whether it be radio, or a Tumblr of gifs—to fall under the control of the Committee. It is hoped that this will lead to a more collaborative strategic approach to student media as a whole, if both the VBC and Salient are addressed in the same meetings.

Ultimately any decision on the VBC’s future lies at the discretion of the Executive.

What is everyone else doing?

Looking to other student radio stations around the country, the VBC certainly sticks out as the poor cousin. Earlier this year, Radio Control, Massey University’s student radio station, received $60,000 in funding from the NZ On Air scheme, while Otago University’s Radio One received $45,000 from their students’ association as a birthday present.

In Auckland, the hugely popular bfm, borne from a University of Auckland capping stunt, is New Zealand’s longeststanding independent radio station.

Looking to other student radio stations around the country, the VBC certainly sticks out as the poor cousin.

Within VUWSA, feelings towards the VBC are mixed. At the beginning of the year President Rory McCourt toyed with the idea of canning the station completely, or seeking to hand the contract to operate the station over to someone else. Due to more pressing issues taking priority however, neither of these avenues were investigated this year. Looking ahead to 2014, its seems that (if elected), VUWSA Vice-President (Academic) and Presidential candidate Sonya Clark would more likely be pro-VBC than her predecessor, having been a host of the Breakfast Show in 2011. Her commitment to fixing VUWSA’s dire financial situation may affect this loyalty, however.

In terms of what this means for where your money’s going, the contracts for the services VUWSA provides are re-negotiated with the University every year, and it is unclear exactly how and when this process takes place, and

salient.org.nz <<<

whether the same funding will be allocated year after year. If VUWSA were to cease funding the VBC, this could mean that that money could be redirected to other media projects, such as Salient, or that the contract would simply be reduced in value to reflect the VBC’s absence.

Given the current state of the VBC, and the fact that it has never really “taken off ” like its counterparts, perhaps it is high time VUWSA cut its ties with the VBC, and begin to focus time and resources on other avenues of student media—such as TV and web—instead. On the other hand, perhaps focussing solely on the commercial viability and success of the radio station is a focus on the wrong thing. If a radio show takes place and nobody hears it, does it mean it was of no value to the students who broadcast it? After all, without the pressure of having to impress scores of listeners, the VBC is the perfect place to gain technical broadcasting skills; perfect your DJ set, or just something to feel a part of outside the daily grind of going and to-and-from your lectures.

19

FEATURES • ϟ

In the upcoming VUWSA General Election, you will be asked to decide whether VUWSA should stay in NZUSA or leave. What is NZUSA, you say? Well, settle down, and get yourself informed ahead of this year’s big vote.

NZUSA is the New Zealand Union of Students’ Associations, of which VUWSA, and most other universities’ and polytechs’ students’ associations are members. Each students’ association pays an annual fee to NZUSA which is based on the size and financial viability of the association. In 2013, VUWSA’s contribution was $45,000.

In an ideal world, NZUSA would allow New Zealand’s various students’ associations to speak as one united voice, on behalf of students nationwide.

The Union would act as a strong lobby, pushing for serious issues facing the tertiary sector, like cuts to student allowances and ever-rising fees. However, some feel that NZUSA, despite being resourced by students around the country, is doing far too little to speak on behalf of them. Following a request for a referendum on VUWSA’s membership, the Exec decided to put it out to their members—now let’s see what our options are…

vuwsa refer

yes, but only with reforms In the week following the request for a referendum on the topic, VUWSA President Rory McCourt released a joint press statement with University of Otago and Auckland’s student presidents stating that they would be requesting a series of reforms at the NZUSA Conference, to be held in early November.

These reforms are intended to tackle some of the concerns held by both students and the associations about NZUSA’s direction in recent years. At minimum, these changes would push for more student-relevant campaigns, a governance structure that was more inclusive of the association presidents, and a renewed focus on the core services that NZUSA should be focussing on—however any reforms suggested by any member is open for discussion.

In a statement to Salient, NZUSA Executive Director Dr Alistair Shaw emphasised that there was zero possibility of NZUSA not being reformed. The thing is, NZUSA already went through a whole series of reforms in 2011. It brought in all the polytechs and created more of a streamlined hierarchy for clearer direction, where a Board provided governance rather than a federation of association presidents. This also resulted in the establishment of the Executive Director position that Shaw filled.

There appears to be widespread dissatisfaction with NZUSA, with Waikato Student Union President Aaron Letcher politiking hard to undo all the aforementioned reforms, as in his eyes they haven’t delivered. However there was a reason such reforms happened—NZUSA needed

20

to improve. The question remains whether just simply going back to how it was will address the concerns with the current status quo.

Looking at NZUSA’s performance in 2013, there is great scope for improvement.

NZUSA President, Pete Hodkinson, should be a spokesperson for students but is virtually unknown; time and money has been invested in a number of nationwide tours and projects that have seemingly little relevance to students, such as discussing retirement; and although NZUSA does huge amounts of valuable research in the tertiary sector, it is seldom publicised.

THAT VUW IN NZ

It’s difficult to know whether this is the fault of the President himself, or the structures that steer the direction within NZUSA. At the VUWSA Executive meeting where NZUSA and the referendum requester faced-off, both Hodkinson and Shaw blamed VUWSA for not using internal processes to address their concerns— whereas VUWSA considered this the fault of those within NZUSA. Removing students’ associations guaranteed source of income—students—in order to create an incentive to improve was the reasoning behind Voluntary Student Membership. And while we have seen huge improvements in terms of accountability, transparency, and more responsible spending of student money in some regards, VSM has also severely weakened student representation and the quality of events such as O-Week. Reform is certainly a safer way to encourage change.

>>> salient.org.nz

13 SA 20 W U V CTION ELE

no The Cost of NZUSA

rendum 2013

WSA STAY ZUSA

The cost of paying the ongoing $45,000 NZUSA membership fee needs to be considered within the context of VUWSA’s financial position.

VUWSA's operating deficit is ~$200,000 and the association only has about $1m in the bank, set aside during the golden days of compulsory student fees. This means it is steering itself towards an early death, by propping up an organisation which is widely accepted amongst this executive and previous ones to not deliver the results VUWSA hope for. Pulling out of NZUSA would make it that much easier to get back to breaking even, or dare we say ~surplus~, as well as not compromising the services and sustainability of the association as a whole in what it gives to its members Victoria students.

Financial security is something that is in the forefront of this executive’s mind as they go into setting next year’s budget later this year. If they don’t cut NZUSA, it’s likely they will cut service and welfare spending on Victoria students instead. Or staff.

The Referendum Wording The referendum asks students whether VUWSA should continue to be a member of NZUSA and the options are 'Yes, with reforms' or 'No'.

As VUWSA, AUSA and OUSA haven’t yet sorted out the vision they hope to achieve in their aforementioned press release, it’s not clear what exactly the reforms would mean, and whether they will be good enough to drastically improve NZUSA. It’s also a gamble in the sense that the presidents who are ‘promising’ to do it won’t be around next year, so you can’t write them an angry email about broken promises, broken dreams.

NZUSA Performance and Reform Hodkinson has not met with Tertiary Education Minister Steven Joyce in over 18 months, which is shocking for the primary advocate from students, and he couldn’t point to any key achievements over his two years in the role when being questioned by the VUWSA Exec. Questions have to be asked about how he was elected two years

salient.org.nz <<<

in a row, though they can probably be answered by the fact that there are very few student leaders who actually want the job. However next year could look a bit more promising, with Labour and its typically more NZUSA-aligned policies than National looking more likely to return to Government.

Even with a better leader, there are inherent problems which could see the Association distracted from getting on the TV. The members want to pull the organisation in different directions, with the poor polytechs wanting it to provide core support services, whereas the university ones prefer a national representative voice.

The more inherent problem with NZUSA reforms is that the members want to pull the organization in different directions. While Polytech Students’ Associations would prefer an NZUSA which provides core support services to them, VUWSA and other university students’ associations want a national representative voice. NZUSA doesn't have the resources to sustainably do both under VSM, which is what has led to much of the dissatisfaction with NZUSA. VUWSA's short term goal appears to be to wrestle control of NZUSA back from the Polytechs, but this seems unsustainable in the long run.

The Future of National Student Representation The reality is that with the moves by Waikato Students’ Union to withdraw membership, NZUSA is already a sinking ship. More members are likely to withdraw as they face greater cost pressures due to VSM. A new student representative body will form to replace NZUSA and advocate for students.

It would have to run at substantially lower cost to be effective. There is no need for highly remunerated staff like the current Executive Director of NZUSA who earns a salary over $90,000, grass roots organizations like Generation Zero have shown that advocacy can occur on a voluntary basis.

21

FEATURES • ϟ

$

fee fi foE fumble 22

>>> salient.org.nz

ϟ • FEATURES

of four per cent. That maximum remains today. Nowadays, university management recommends the level at which fees should rise, with the University Council (which is made up of representatives from the Uni, the Government and the student body) having the final say.

Without fail, fees rise each year by the maximum amount. The ceiling has become a flaw.

Last week, the University Council voted—somewhat unsurprisingly—to increase your fees by four per cent.

Last year, they did the same.

And the year before that.

And the year before that.

The cost of your degree is forever rising. But how does it all work? Will fees always rise? Are students getting a raw deal? And what can we do about it? Duncan and Cam investigate.

By Duncan McLachlan and Cam Price

Q1: How do fees work?

In the early ‘90s, the government paid for the bulk of your education. They funded 90 per cent of your degree and set the fee level for the ten per cent that you paid. For your average student in 1990, fees were set at a flat rate of $2085 in today’s terms. In 1993, founded on a philosophy of cutting spending, the National Party began decreasing university funding levels and simultaneously transferred the responsibility for setting fees to university councils. As you can imagine, when the body in charge of setting fees was also the body receiving those fees, prices skyrocketed.

Then Labour took over and sought to halt astronomical fee rises. They froze student fees.

In the years following, they introduced the Fee Maxima, which allowed university councils to increase fees each year, but by a maximum

salient.org.nz <<<

TL;DR: Through a complex and confusing process which inevitably leads to students having to pay more.

Q2: Does the uni have to raise them all the time?

Some would say that they don’t. They will point to the fact that Massey a few years ago did not. Many students view the University Council as a group of greedy villains who don’t care about students and only care about profit.

But Ian McKinnon, Chancellor of Victoria University, thinks that is a mischaracterisation.

As a University Council member, McKinnon wonders: “Why would you enjoy disrupting your student body? Why would I want to kick the students in the guts?” When governing, “You are there for the betterment of that body.”

Sometimes, McKinnon believes, that means making decisions that are “not palatable for students… We have a responsibility to ensure the viability of the University.”

It would be unfair to say that the University could continue to operate without increasing its funding each year. There are a number of reasons for this: first, Labour’s across-the-board fee freezes had the effect of locking in disparities in fees between universities. Put simply, in the 1990s, Auckland and Otago had better law schools and therefore charged more for them.

Since then, Victoria’s Law School has risen to be the top Law faculty in the country. But the Fee Maxima has meant that we can’t increase our fees to Auckland or Otago levels (because theirs increase by four per cent each year as well), and therefore we have less money to spend on a better school.

Secondly, the University faces rising costs.

Inflation alone means fees must rise by about one per cent each year just to keep the same amount of stuff. Boring accounting stuff like the depreciation on assets means annual increases in costs. In order to compete in an international market for lecturers and equipment, the

University has to be prepared to pay top dollar.

The Tertiary Education Commission mandates that the Uni run at a three-per-cent surplus each year.

Interest-free student loans exacerbate this problem. As McKinnon notes, student loans are not interest-free. In fact, the Government pays the interest on your loan for you. But this money is taken out of the tertiary-education budget as a whole. The more the Government has to spend on your loan and its interest, the less it has to spend on your uni. The result is a bizarre moneygo-round: interest on student loans leads to less government funding, which leads to universities having to increase fees, which leads to increasing amounts of interest on student loans. Which is pretty shit.

What about just increasing the total tertiaryeducation budget to suit everyone? Fat chance.

Tertiary education isn't foremost in the wider voting public's mind when it comes time to make the three-yearly trip to the ballot box. Fee increases and the erosion of quality are slow and subtle changes. They happen over a long, drawnout period, which means students generally don't cause too much of a stink. Moreover, the current government has argued that universities provide largely a private benefit and so should be funded by the private individuals who are benefiting from study. That's why it has not increased the per-student grant to reflect cost increases. In fact, it has moved to reduce the burden it has to pay to 70 per cent, with students having to make up for the rest. Prospects of funding increases are grim.

Ultimately, the Government has offloaded responsibility for your fee rises, deflecting the responsibility of fee-setting to universities and leaving them to suffer the social and political flak.

David Alsop, one of two Student Representatives on the University Council, believes that, “there is a perception among students that fees are rising and quality is remaining static, or worse, falling… If this perception is maintained, there is a negative reputational effect on the University”. The Dominion Post was so eager for an anti-university spin on fees that last week, it misquoted VUWSA President Rory McCourt as saying that the Uni was increasing fees by $2500—ten times the actual fee increase. Perhaps this issue has come to a head most clearly at the University of Auckland, where students are locked out of their fee-setting meeting due to the

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intensity of their protests. There, the relationship seems broken. However, this is more a function of structural changes by successive governments than a fault of university management.

TL;DR: Not necessarily, but it’s inevitable largely because of successive governments’ policies.

Q3: Do we see an increase in quality relative to increase in cost?

Fee increases are not a bad thing per se. If fees went up four per cent, but the quality of the University went up ten per cent, there would be no problem. The larger issue is whether we actually do get four-per-cent extra value to match the fee increase. Anecdotal evidence suggests students don’t feel that we are. There are fewer tutorials. The Gender Studies department was axed. The Politics department suffered massive cuts. Of particular concern is a shift in focus away from hands-on time and toward less student-oriented endeavours, namely research.

Along with per-student funding, universities also get government funding through the Performance Based Research Fund. Basically, it incentivises good lecturers to spend more time researching, and less time in the classroom teaching. McCourt agrees:

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“There is such an emphasis on research at the moment that we have great lecturers who are being pushed into the back office to do more research. We have less contact time. You have international students at undergraduate level who are treated like cash cows. It’s because it’s not about teaching and learning anymore. It’s about research.”

The University disagrees. McKinnon argues that: “Universities are a dual motorway. Both carriageways matter: the research carriageway and the teaching-and-learning carriageway.”

This year, we were rated the best university for research in New Zealand. We are producing students who go on to do amazing things: whether that be being shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize or playing for the All Blacks.

So students and the Uni disagree on whether quality is increasing. What’s new? The real issue is that there is no way of breaching that divide.

There is a dearth of information available to students as to the University’s justification for fee rises. The document produced for students outlining the reason for fee increases spent only half a page giving vague reasons for spending increases, but failed to show exactly where the extra money was going. Apparently the money is partially needed to continue “...development of Victoria’s distinctiveness, engaging with New

Zealand, connecting with the world”. Whatever that means. It’s impossible to say whether the four per cent has improved quality if we aren’t even told specifically where that four per cent has gone.

Further, the Uni might say that quality has increased, but they fail to put their money where their mouth is by using student satisfaction as a metric for justifying fee rises. It is preposterous that a company would not take into account customer satisfaction when deciding its prices, but that’s what happens thanks to the current processes in place.

McKinnon disagrees with these criticisms. He argues that providing so much information would be “a macro exercise”. “If you tried to do the cost centres for the whole of the University…

I’d probably have to employ two more staff… It would be a bible… an exercise in detail which would require enormous analysis over a long period of time.”

On measuring student satisfaction, McKinnon believes that “that would be a very, very subjective way to determine the funding… Half the class are little nerds who breeze round the lecturers… the other half want to get through their degree… a third of them play snooker and go off to the pictures.”

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All this amounts to is the University sidestepping its obligation to us. It considers us too ignorant to know what we value in our education. It believes it’s too expensive to tell us why our fees are increasing: to let us genuinely engage in a conversation about fee rises.

TL;DR: It is unclear: students say one thing, the Chancellor says another. But the main thing is that the Uni makes it nigh on impossible to find out.

Q4: How do increased fees affect students?

For the students who are most sensitive to price (read: disadvantaged people from poor backgrounds), increases in fees mean that they simply can’t go to university. Full stop. People’s minds are being held to ransom by a system which is more interested in their wallets.

However, the University has actively tried to remedy that situation.

McKinnon is emphatic: “Victoria spends a lot of time putting in place measures to counter these things. We have scholarships. We look to benefactors to assist us… We actually put a lot of supports in place for Māori students, for Pasifika students. We really go out of our way to try and assist people coming in.”

extra dollars? We don’t actually feel the cost of the increase, so we are less likely to be engaged.

At the same time as degrees are becoming more expensive, their value as future earning tools is falling dramatically. ‘Degree inflation’ is the fancy term for saying that your Bachelor of Arts degree isn’t worth anything at the interview when all the other applicants have one too. When hardly anyone went to uni, graduates slipped straight into well-paying jobs, helping them to pay back their loan. This made the whole exercise worthwhile. Now, more and more graduates fall into shitty jobs at McDonald’s and Countdown with shitty pay and a massive shitty mountain of shitty debt that they’ll never be able to pay off.

TL;DR: Most of us will still study, but we will pay more for it and get less out of it.

engagement. We are trying. The Chancellor gives “...full marks to the student leaders and the students themselves… They were prepared to listen.” In fact we do have a model of cooperation, pioneered by Victoria and emulated around the country, which forces the University to take student satisfaction into account. The Student Services Levy, which is separate to fees and pays for services such as student health and student learning support, is also decided on by the University Council.

However, the recommendation must factor in consultation with students.

It’s impossible to say whether the fee rise has improved quality if we aren’t even told specifically where those fees have gone

For the overwhelming majority of students, though, the harm is far more pernicious. On the list of pros and cons guiding your decision to study at Vic, price of courses is somewhere at the bottom, if it’s even there. Other factors play a far more important role: do you like Wellington as a city? How far away is it from your hometown?

What uni are your friends going to? What value does your family place on education? What course of study are you planning on pursuing?

Moreover, we get interest-free student loans.

We don’t have to pay them off until some point in the future. We don’t know how much they will be, but know they will likely be in the tens of thousands. What the fuck do we care if our 40-year-old selves have to pay a couple hundred

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Q5: So what do we do?

Successive governments have attempted to change the culture surrounding universities to make them feel and act more like a business. The problem is that students aren’t able to act like your average consumer. McDonald’s don’t make Big Macs with shit ingredients and price them at $50 because if they did, we would go to BK and buy Whoppers.

But that expression of our opposition to a company’s business decision is not available within a university market. All universities increase their fees by four per cent, and students choose their universities based largely on factors that are not related to cost or quality.

Given our inability to disengage with the University in order to signal our dissatisfaction, we must be more open to constructive

$

Perhaps the future will provide an answer.

Universities, through the internet, are breaking down the costs of getting a degree. You can now get a degree from Princeton from anywhere in the world, using only the internet: watching lectures online, chatting with fellow students online, setting tests online; and all for a fraction of the price.

A shift to e-learning changes the market for tertiary education, forcing universities to compete. When you can study from anywhere, price and quality are now all that is important. Exciting.

TL;DR: Keep on voting for strong student advocates who cooperate with the Uni Council. Get excited about the internet and its implications for the future of learning. Resign yourself to the fact that fees will rise by four per cent every year you’re at uni, but realise that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Fees are rising. They will keep rising. Both Government and the University have used fees as a political plaything, entrenching a complex web of contradictory policies. The University thinks we are unable to decide what we need in our education. The Government believes fees will never become an election issue, and hides behind interest-free student loans to justify their cuts. The system is broken, but that doesn’t mean it has to stay that way. Systematic change is possible, but only with systematic engagement by students, Government and the University.

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Sounding Out the Student Voice: Let’s Start From the Very Beginning VSM, the Student Forum, and why everything went wrong.

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Much has been said about the Student Forum by the University, VUWSA, and

Salient. After an ongoing struggle between the University and VUWSA, the beginning of this year saw the Student Forum’s demise—but how did we get to this point?

By Stella Blake-Kelly The debate about Voluntary Student Membership (VSM), despite having been around since the 1990s, has never been an issue that that has captured the attention of most students. The back-and-forth has always been, and continues to be, a divisive issue framed in two ideologically opposite ways by two ideologically opposite (niche) groups that show completely different understandings of students’ associations and the university communities they reside within.

The arguments in favour of VSM have always been framed with one overarching goal in mind: the freedom to associate. ‘Compulsory membership’ as it was referred to, where every student was compelled to be a member of their respective students’ associations, was initially challenged in 1994 when Michael Laws’ private members’ bill pushing for VSM was introduced to Parliament. It lapsed in 1996 when it wasn’t renewed by the new government.

Then, in 1997, another bill was introduced by a National MP and passed in 1998 thanks to a compromise with New Zealand First.

This granted autonomy for students to decide how their respective students’ associations gathered membership—by way of holding a referendum between voluntary and universal if they collected signatures from 10 per cent of students. The Bill reset the clock on the

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associations straight away, making all of them hold a referendum between the two in 1999.

Compulsory membership soon became referred to as ‘universal’, as the Bill saw an opt-out clause added so students could leave their students’ association under ‘conscientious objection’. Vic’s referendum saw 47 per cent of students take part, and 75 per cent of those deciding to stick with universal membership.

Most of the polytechs, Auckland, and Waikato went voluntary.

Jump forward to 2006 and Roger Douglas’ Education (Freedom of Association) Amendment Bill is put in the ballot, which would make all associations nationwide voluntary. During this time there were repeated cases of students’ associations abusing the opt-out clause and not letting people leave.

VUWSA was amongst the most notorious abusers of the system, blowing money on psychic hotlines, overseas trips, and pimping out the VUWSA van, and has since copped a lot of blame for partly justifying VSM. In 2009, the Bill was drawn from the Ballot and became the property of ACT MP Heather Roy, subsequently beginning its slow trek through the various legislative stages. 5000 submissions were received, with 98 per cent against thanks to very ‘easy’ submission tactics funded by New Zealand Union of Students’ Associations (NZUSA) and students’ associations around the country. NZUSA’s ‘Save our Services’ campaign was considered a failure—or at least a miscommunication—by many, as it didn’t look at the one thing that only students’ associations could provide—an authentic student voice. It bought into the argument and language of VSM proponents that associations were predominantly service providers, which it was ultimately doomed to lose given the fact that services weren’t typically, or intended to be, used by all. Services give associations a connection to students, which makes their advocacy tangible. The strategy of those leading the campaign was to kill the Bill, rather

than explore a compromise as it would look weak. However this just made them come off arrogant and out of touch with the realities of students’ priorities and how students’ associations should reflect that.

Both students’ associations and institutions were united in their submissions against the Bill, challenging its framing of students’ associations as something you can simply ‘leave’ or ‘join’—as students’ associations, by their very nature, are intertwined with the University and many of its functions that are universal.

In 2010 the Bill returned to the House with amendments from Select Committee which saw the implementation date pushed out until 2012 in order to give associations and institutions time to prepare. Labour began filibustering, and the ideologically opposite arguments between opponents and proponents of VSM continued to be confined to university common rooms, shunned by the masses of students who didn’t engage with either side. 90 per cent of students continued not to vote in associations’ elections. The debate failed to understand the dynamics of the universities, which is an environment that is universal in nature.

2011 rolled around, five years after the Bill was first introduced. With an election on the way, and it looking like Roy was going to depart, she entered private negotiations with NZUSA, including then co-President and 2010 VUWSA President Max Hardy. It was hoped they could reach some compromised amendments and thus Labour would stop filibustering and she could have some achievement to her name before departing the House of Representatives.

The cost of such negotiations was that NZUSA had to remain silent, thus wasting a year’s opportunity to campaign against VSM. Whether it was a reasonable request, or clever politicking by Roy—it came as a huge shock to many when she outsmarted Labour and broke the filibuster, passing the legislation in late September.

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With the legislation still containing the original implementation date of 1 January 2012, VSM was suddenly a matter of months away, and it led the associations—who appeared to have made little or no effort to explore ways to adapt to a voluntary environment— to begin pleading for an extension. After months of personal attacks, and Labour’s ‘wasteful’ use of Parliamentary time, not even a meeting with Victoria Vice-Chancellor Pat Walsh and the Chief Operating Officer could persuade Roy to give them greater transition time. The main proponents of VSM could easily have been described as paranoid, as they thought another year would just give VSM negators an extra year to organise. The election came, and she went. So too did the main proponents of VSM, who perpetuated an expectation that

students’ associations would be better because students were free, and thus would be more efficient. ***

they’re throwing food at University Council members during Fee Setting—though that was four years ago, and if Salient has let it go then it’s about time the University did too.

Despite the lines spoken publicly by various student presidents in the lead up, and following VSM, a lot more was bubbling away below the surface. Hush-hush politics between VUWSA and the University, or more specifically, Vic’s management branch.

In establishing the Forum, the University essentially created a parliament and selected which voices should be present.

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It’s not exactly clear what happened in the three months between VSM passing and it coming into effect on 1 January the following year at Victoria University. Mind you, it’s never exactly clear what’s going on between the University and VUWSA. Unless of course

In 2010, Hardy began discussions with University management about how VUWSA would look in a non-universal environment, despite publicly deflecting by saying they were focussing on fighting the Bill. They agreed to a timeline, with a final decision supposed to be made by February

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2011, and then sent out to consultation/ referendum with students in March. But that all seemed to disappear come 2011, with the departure of Hardy and new President Seamus Brady coming in. Supposedly, management stonewalled Brady, making use of a change in President to reset the clock on relations with the VUWSA. Such an opportunistic tactic appears to have continued to happen since then, with 2012 and 2013’s Presidents repeatedly being played off against each other, or bound to things their predecessors—according to management—had said or done or committed to.

According to Brady, Victoria were dead set on ‘adapting for the new environment’, which for them meant VUWSA couldn’t carry on its representative function as it stood—such as appointing representatives to boards, committees and Council.

Vic’s interpretation of the legislation and its spirit was that VUWSA no longer had a right to hold the monopoly on a student voice. However throughout 2011, despite progress with Hardy the year prior, management didn’t want to engage in discussions on how to deal with VSM (solutions and contracts) until it was 100 per cent going to pass. There was nothing in the law stopping associations and institutions forging a partnership, so VUWSA thought it was best to try and work in partnership to create something that would satisfy both, instead of a risk that was in the forefront of their worries—being shut out completely.

many seats they’d get, how VUWSA would be represented and how it would be run.

University management took that and came back with their own version, which apparently ignored most of VUWSA’s reasoning that had been based on international evidence.

Such model proposed a new ‘place for student representation to occur, and thus voices to be heard’—the foundations for a Student Council, or Forum, as it came to be known.

The freedom that was promised to students with voluntary membership became freedom for the institution to restructure student representation and its capacity for power as it saw fit. Students’ associations have a history of

in motion. Brady seconded the motion of its implementation in order to show a willingness to partnership with the University, because again it was better to be with them than shut out. And with an association that hadn’t done anything for securing revenue sources apart from stash as much money in the VUWSA Trust as possible, being out in the cold would surely not see them last very long.

The processes of what actually happened are all a bit murky, with the tendencies of Presidents, until this year, to keep pretty much all information about relations with the University locked up in their oval office. VUWSA’s strategy to have $0 membership fee, in order to prioritise mandate, came out one Friday afternoon in late 2011 when the University opened its enrollments. This process included a tick-box allowing you to decide whether to join VUWSA—free of charge. This came as a shock to many, including those on the VUWSA Executive.

The following Monday an Executive meeting was called to retro-spectively pass motions that VUWSA have a $0 membership in 2012.

VUWSA thought it was best to try and work in partnership to create something that would satisfy both, instead of a risk that was in the forefront of their worriesbeing shut out completely.

After struggling to get senior management to engage in discussion throughout the year, VUWSA gave them a document that proposed a type of representation model that they believed took into account the different groups of students, size of those groups, how

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challenging universities, governments and the tolerance of the masses—but in the eyes of an increasingly management-focussed University, such freedom to challenge becomes a risk to not only reputation but strategic direction.

Divide and conquer has been how management’s strategy has been labelled.

And it’s pretty easy to see how student representatives, paranoid from years of scaremongering rhetoric in the lead up to VSM were concerned how the University would treat the students’ association with a somewhat blemished past, given the opportunity. At the end of 2012 the University Council passed a document in principle which enabled just that, and the wheels of undermining both VUWSA’s representation and financial viability began

The reality was they didn’t think anyone would pay to join them, because they didn’t think students would associate any value with the services they provided, and they prioritised having a mandate as a representative body.

The realities of this hit the following year in 2012, with Bridie Hood at the helm. Feeling bound by Brady’s seconding of the motion, and dependence on the contracts with the University to prop up an operating budget reduced from $2.25m pre-VSM to only $700,000, Hood continued to go along with the Forum despite privately conceding it was completely undemocratic and whose inception was wrong as students hadn’t mandated it to speak for them.

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A VUW From The Top 30

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Impending graduation makes fleeing from the reality of Adult Life a much trickier exercise. How are some recent or soonto-be Victoria graduates dealing with this, and how, in retrospect, do they feel about the whole thing?

By Patrick Hunn It’s tricky to talk about the mixed feelings people have about university without dragging out the same battered talking points that get rehashed so frequently. We are, apparently, a cohort of unemployable, debtridden cadavers rotting in the cellar of our parents’ houses, and we are fated to be disastrously unhappy and unsatisfied with absolutely everything ever. What is clear is that attending university in this country (and, by proxy, the world) isn’t the universal wellspring of pride, security and hope that it once was. That said, for at least three years, the colossus of the quarter-life crisis can be fended off, largely, by the triumvirate of a steady (borrowed) income, alcohol, and essays on the imperialist worldview found in Avatar.

school student. Three or four or five years later, you might find yourself harbouring the purest, most unadulterated of homicidal feelings for your teenaged self. Gabrielle, a fifth-year LLB/ BA student, warns that “18 is far too young to commit to a five-year double-degree relationship, and we're just not ready.” Conversely, the need to do something, whatever that is, has led some of us into investing time and money into areas of study that, by their very nature, don’t align all that well with what we actually might like to do. It’s a revolting admission, to be sure, but it’s one that is probably true of a large number of people, especially those toiling away in the humanities. In the case of Sam, a Theatre Honours student, “I didn’t know so much about… vocational training in my field of interest when I left high school.” Sam points out that students often wilfully have a slippery

Theatre student, Pippa, took to Facebook recently to tell university to “eat a bag of dicks” because she had found employment. Her friends were abundant in their digital approval (read: it got a buttload of likes). While the sentiment makes a certain amount of sense, taking employment as a sort of cause célèbre against the value of a university education is, on the face of it, bizarre. Pippa’s explanation is succinct: “I've started to really hate university.”

Ouch.

“In my first year, I realised uni wasn't for me, but my parents have always wanted me to go, and I have a fear of disappointing them, so I decided to stick it out for a few years to make them happy.” And by the time she’d reach her third year: “I had picked up professional work within the industry, so really I saw uni as a fucking expensive networking system... only I haven't made any useful contacts.”

There is a schism here between what the University teaches and what, in this case, the student wanted.

While you could make the claim that studying theatrical academia doesn’t promise anything in terms of working in its associated industry, Pippa says that “the reason I do so much [extramurally] is because my degree isn't satisfying enough to make me feel any sense of achievement.”

“We are smarter, more fortunate and more in

debt than we have ever been before.”

Unless, of course, you’re graduating. The effect of your imminently approaching life as a ‘real person’ isn’t, in that case, all that easily inoculable.

understanding of their course of study, and, as a result, are engaged in a sort of doublethink where they know that “you are engaged with the academic side of the field, [which] is what they are best equipped to provide us with,” while at the same time desiring a living based on more practical pursuits. After all, “...how many English majors secretly want to be writers or journalists, but aren’t taking anything [that involves those activities], like at the IIML?”

Reconciling years spent studying with a watery view of what the future might look like, and your own insecurities regarding the whole affair, can be hard for a number of reasons. One of these has to do with what brought you here in the first place. For many, what is actually a terribly important decision is made arbitrarily, in a feverish fugue where Criminology suddenly seems like a good idea for an 18-year-old high-

While this maudlin effect is more likely to stalk the lighting rig in the theatre than the halls of the Law School, where things are a little more plainly vocational, it has a certain kind of truth for a lot of graduates, I think. Sam says that a lecturer asked him one day why it was “that students approach the end of university with such an incredibly lacklustre, despondent attitude?”

Tangentially to this, another soon-to-graduate

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This brings us to another thing that, in the face of so much ill-will, isn’t really questioned as much as it should be: reconciling the cost of university with the quality of what you’re getting.

For many, apparently, Victoria hasn’t done all that well by them. Pippa says that while she is paying over $1000 for one course, she has “...no real access to rehearsal space.” Keegan, a thirdyear History, Political Science and International Relations student, says that when he asked why History tutorials last year would be conducted “online”, he was told that the “...department did not have enough money to [pay] tutors or put on a complete set of tutorials.” Online tutorials, for those who understandably have difficulty understanding the idea, consist of “responding to blog posts or answering online questions”.

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Keegan also says that “300-level tutorials [in Political Science and International Relations] have been scrapped to save money, which has been (in my opinion) to the detriment of the courses. Now lecturers have to try and facilitate discussion in a lecture theatre in a 200-person capacity room.”

Budget cuts are, of course, not within the realm of control for academic staff, but the whittling down of tertiary education to the bare minimum might go a long way to explaining why the whole thing can end up feeling so hollow for a lot of people.

As far as my own experience goes, my time has been divided between lecturers who plainly have no interest in teaching and structure courses around their as-yet unpublished papers and books, bored tutors who know they’re just as repulsively awful as we are, and the occasional lecturer who, you know, likes teaching.

for any one thing—rather, I should be a more intellectually rounded person better equipped to deal with whatever comes my way. University is about more than just vocational training. The Law Faculty, for instance, lists “sensitivity to gender, ethnic, cultural and other differences; awareness of the role of stereotypes and how they structure thought” on its rather succinct list of graduate attributes, and while that might make you a better lawyer, it will certainly make you a better person. In short, tertiary education is supposed to foster not only what you’re doing but how you’re doing it.

So, outside of job prospects, are students getting a sort of unquantifiable preparedness? Gabrielle’s

least, given Gabrielle a space in which to realise that some people are awful. That’s a lesson that everyone ought to learn, one way or another.

You can’t talk about university without talking without debt, and riddling young people with debt seems like a strange way to set them up for adult life. As Keegan says, “I think there are a lot of people… that are confused that they have to pay so much, and become so indebted before they have even started ‘adult life’. All respondents for this piece professed to have loans, and most were large. Some are more okay with this than others. Pippa, for instance, decried the whole thing as “a very expensive piece of paper that said an institution thinks I stuck it out long enough to get paid a decent salary.”

A forlorn Keegan says that “I speak to people who are worried about how they will… [get] a mortgage. I already have a mortgage, it’s called my student loan.” It has to be said, though, that nobody (or at least very few) people totally stumble into a mountain of borrowed money.

Obviously, we still think that:something about a university education makes it all worthwhile.

University has, at the very least, given Gabrielle a

space in which to realise

That aside, university attendance, especially the BA, is supposed to equip you with more than just technical proficiency in a certain area. It is intended to instil certain values, and that make you a more engaged, well-rounded person. As Sam says, “I don’t think [my degree] equips students for jobs, but I also don’t think they ever promise to.”

Well, then, what do they equip you with?

that some people are

awful. That’s a lesson that everyone ought to learn,

“They equip you… with those things they put in the course catalogue.” Ah. I see. What on earth does that mean? At the start of most courses, you are given a two- or three-page document that outlines “course learning objectives”. A glance at my most recent ones shows that, if I apply myself, I will have “an appreciation of the politics that led to the introduction of MMP,” be able to “ask provocative questions inspired by feminist thought,” and “understand better the human rights ‘project,’” all by the end of the year. Over the course of three years, this odd quilt of experience won’t necessarily prepare me

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one way or another. response is blunt: “Prepared?! Are you kidding?”

She grants that the non-uni-centric experiences of “...leaving home, flatting, managing life without Mum has been a great learning experience, and going on exchange has helped me become a more prepared adult,” but that “... the day-to-day running of uni has made me more cynical and, because I'm more educated about the world, more scared. I now know that there really are people my age who think that the ACT Party is a good idea and people who are racist [and] misogynistic. It's terrifying being exposed to that!” Her other grievances aside, I’d counter that perhaps both of these things engender the same sort of learning. University has, at the very

Or, as Gabrielle, who says her degree is “a necessary investment,” puts it, “We are smarter, more fortunate and more in debt than we have ever been before.”

The time when your time at university finally draws to a close is a time when the accumulated detritus of your burgeoning adulthood can’t really be ignored anymore.

Whether or not this is a good thing or not depends wholly on the how and why of why you are there in the first place. In the case of this limited sample, a degree seems to be viewed like a necessary evil—a ratification of your personhood, attained through education in the abstract and towering stacks of cash.

That probably won’t change anytime soon.

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salient.org.nz <<<

33

FEATURES • ϟ

want to change your degree?

This week, intrepid reporters Chloe Davies and Alexandra Hollis explored the murky depths of the Science department and the treacherous terrains of Pipitea, braving the mercies of that most dangerous of species; the 100-level course, in all its wondrous naivety. There were some babes, there was a lot of boredom, there was a scooter. Welcome to first year, bitches.

Grade: A–. The powerpoint was kinda annoying; sparse bullet points for one slide for ten mins, then longgg quotes he flicked through too quickly. There were some clips from the film of The Big Sleep (Bogart & Bacall <3) but also a smartarse dude who thought he knew more than the lecturer.

POLS 114: Introduction to Comparative Politics Style of babe: Had the raw babe material but lacked style. Guys, get some hair product, a nice shirt; you owe it to your cheekbones.

Male/female ratio: 55-per-cent male.

By Chloe Davies and Alexandra Hollis

Architecture and Design DSDN 144: Photographics Style of babe: Clean-cut, yet disappointingly not as #fashun as we would have thought.

They try harder than those at Kelburn and there’s significantly more colour.

Male/female ratio: 75-per-cent female.

Grade: B. Photographics seems like a pretty chill class, and creativity is certainly encouraged here at Salient. You’ll be more fulfilled creatively than intellectually. Not convinced to switch degrees, but we would totally take this as an interest paper. If you ain’t into pictures then this probably won’t be your thing—or maybe you’ll discover your thing and this will be it. Don’t dream it, be it.

Engineering COMP 102: Introduction to Computer Program

34

Design Style of babe: Dorky chic.

Male/female ratio: 90-per-cent male.

Grade: C. Point for having the highest number of mature students so far; minus 20 for making no sense/general bad-lecture vibes. The lecture seemed like more of a tutorial, really; people asked questions about the assignment and she explained using a whiteboard. Verryyy high school, verryyy boring if computers aren’t your thang. Don’t bring a Mac: you’ll stick out.

Humanities and Social Sciences ENGL 114: Introduction to Literary Form Style of babe: Girls: geek-chic (lotsa patterned shirts and heavy glasses). Guys: pretty academic types who probably only know how/want to talk to you about books.

Male/female ratio: 65-per-cent female.

Grade: A. This was the only lecture we really engaged with as outsiders, although it did feel a little like the course content was stuff you could easily pick up if you just hung out with POLS students/Labour hacks/the VUW Twitter community.

THEA 112: Cultural Encounters Style of babe: Hot, but a little too into being Theatre students.

Male/female ratio: Mostly female.

Grade: B. The lecture was great; the students were fucking annoying.

FILM 101: Introduction to Film Studies Style of babe: Everyone under the sun who has seen Inception.

Male/female ratio: Pretty even, possibly a little more male.

Grade: B. The course is fine for a first-year

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ϟ • FEATURES

introduction sort of thing, except a little too general. Lecturer is very engaging. Students clearly into him. There’s also the tutor that does the Christopher Walken dance from that movie we can’t remember the name of. He does it every year and people get really into it (so does Overheard @ Vic). A bunch of the students are very annoying. The types that think they know about cinema because they’ve just seen Pulp Fiction more than twice.

ARTH 112: Art History 2 Style of babe: Articulate.

(for the people who knew what was happening) the class had pretty good vibes; students felt comfortable enough to ask the lecturer to clarify stuff, which we’d never seen happen before, and she was cool about going back over things. She also had dope shoes.

GEOG 114: Environment and Resources Style of babe: Dudebros who watch loud things on their laptop and wear singlets in September, and a couple of ostracised hippies wearing grandma-knitted hats.

Male/female ratio: Few more dudes than ladies.

Male/female ratio: 78-per-cent female.

Grade: A–. Not sure what it is with Art History, but there are almost always like two people you will just hate in your tutorials. People are always raging to prove how smart and profound they are. Good on them for trying I guess, but FYI you sound like an arsehole. Better than the first trimester course, somewhat enlightening. Very broad.

Grade: B–. The lecturer has a sweet Peter Dunne haircut, but didn’t really make up for his... lacklustre lecturing. His powerpoints were

content was interesting enough, and everyone seemed pretty engaged; he cracked a couple of very niche sciency jokes, and while we didn’t get them we appreciated the sentiment.

PSYC 122: Introduction to Psychology 2 Style of babe: Fairly middling. Average Vic student/every single Vic student tbh (biggg class).

Male/female ratio: Mainly female.

Grade: B+. Too many people to wade through to find any worthwhile hotties, plus if you do find a good’un, they’ll always be armchair-psychoanalysing you. The course content seemed interesting enough, but the lecture dragged on a little.

MATH 177: Probability and Decision Modelling Style of babe: –

Lecturer started the with some

Law

Male/female ratio: –

awe-inspiring rhetoric: “Gonna be

Grade: –

talking about water today. Water is

It was at 9 am. We didn’t go. Ain’t nothing worth that.

essential to all life.”

Commerce

LAWS 122: Introduction to Case Law

MGMT 101: Introduction to Management

Style of babe: Weir House.

Male/female ratio: 60-per-cent female.

Grade: A–. The lecturer was a good speaker; his powerpoints had the Vic logo in one corner, which was pretty bada$$. Law requires a lot of hard work (LOL) but it might pay off.

Or if you get to third-year and you don't get accepted for an internship you can always just say you don't want to be a lawyer anyway. We hear that’s what’s fashionable.

Science CHEM 114: Principles of Chemistry Style of babe: Looked too focussed on atomic bonding to ever consider actual bonding.

Male/female ratio: 80-per-cent male.

Grade: A–. No clue what was going on; at one point the class had an interactive component and we got a clicker (!!!) and had to work out the equation. Cue traumatic NCEA Level 2 Chemistry/Level 3 Calculus flashbacks. But

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crazyyy; at one point had a list of terms in RAINBOW WORD ART. But apart from that, he just did not get us excited about Geography— never in our young (although not as young as the fresh-faced babes in this class) lives had we heard the words ‘per capita’ more. From the looks of it, the class was similarly unenthused; there were many phones/laptops out. Also, like two peoples with their hoods up. New thang?

BIOL 113: Biology of Plants Style of babe: Blue-eyed, blonde and intensely attractive (okay, that was one guy but he was really attractive). The rest were your usual crop of first-years. Less sciencey-looking than expected.

Style of babe: Conventional: jocks and the girls that love them.

Male/female ratio: 50/50.

Grade: C+. Was 20 minutes late and had to do the awkward leg lift over the back row. At least five people stared with judging eyes. The lecturer was Scottish and a bit monotonous.

There was lots of discussion about trade unions. Marketing is supposedly helpful for business, but doesn’t seem like something you do for the passion.

Courses we’d most likely take:

Male/female ratio: About even.

1. POLS 114

Grade: B. Lecturer started the with some aweinspiring rhetoric: “Gonna be talking about water today. Water is essential to all life.” But if you can get past his monotonous voice, the

2. LAWS 122 3. PSYC 122

35

FEATURES • ϟ

3

Eat, pray, love.

Take a corporate job ‘for two years’, wake up 14 years later in a position that’s somewhat closer to partner, cry on the walk to work.

‘Find yourself’ in Nepal.

English degree 2.0: come up with 50 synonyms for ‘unemployed’.

Move into your parents’ garage and spend a year making ceramic sculptures of cats with wings.

st u dy

Worry about Kiwisaver.

5

Start bitching about how the Government should put interest back on loans.

7 el av tr

6

rk o w

1

2

m ar r y

Postgrad— let’s be honest, you’re not ready to leave just yet.

8

Graduation fortune teller

4

cut it out

Pick a path, then flap the fortune teller open one way then the next, counting out the number of letters in the word Pick a number and then count it out, again flapping the fortune teller back and forth Pick your lucky number, lift that flap and reveal your life after uni fortune!

36

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YOUR STUDENTS’

ASSOCIATION

3

THURSDAY

6

THE HUB

3

FREE PIZZA salient.org.nz <<<

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 COLUMNS

mad science

bent

colour my world

identifying identities

By Caitlin Craigie

By Matthew Ellison

Hue knows what could currently be manipulating you right now.

Perhaps you have ‘friends’ that made you think that tights totally count as pants. Perhaps you’ve enrolled in postgrad after another 6/15 in the Stuff quiz made you feel intellectually inadequate.

Perhaps the prospect of the rare Briscoes sale motivated you to buy a new toaster. But there is one source of manipulation that is all around you, according to science. Orange you glad to soon learn about how colour influences your life?

If, like Split Enz, you see red, you’re bound to get a boost in cognitive performance. Researchers at the University of British Columbia tracked the performance of more than 600 participants in six cognitive tasks that required either detail-orientation or creativity on differently coloured screens. Red boosted performance on detail-orientated tasks such as memory retrieval and proofreading by as much as 31 per cent compared to blue.

Conversely, blue environmental cues prompted participants to produce twice as many creative outputs. A colour influences cognition and behaviour through learned associations. Basically, a life of seeing red on stop signs and scrawled all over our very best efforts at academic work has made us associate red with danger and caution, making us more vigilant and thus helping us to perform tasks where careful attention is needed. Through the benign associations with the sky, the ocean and water, we feel safe around blue and accordingly about being creative and exploratory.

For those fortunate souls lucky enough to have job interviews or parents of partners to meet—go with blue. According to Leslie Harrington, from the Color Association of the United States, blue is associated with trustworthiness, strength and dependability.

It’s also cyantifically proven that blues and greens are relaxing colours that help lower blood pressure.

For those of you who think you crave certain fast-food joints because of their colour, don’t worry: it’s not a pigment of your imagination. Warm colours like red and yellow stimulate the appetite. The same stimulating quality of yellow that revs up the appetite also causes diners to feel rushed, ensuring that tables are turned faster to make room for more hungry customers.

Finally, if your success at picking up boys, girls or whatever tickles your fancy at Hope Bros hasn’t been the greatest, try red. Researchers from the University of Rochester have found that men are more likely to find a woman attractive, are more likely to ask her out, and are also more prepared to spend more money on a date, if she is wearing red. They also found that women view men in red as higher in status, more likely to make money, and more likely to climb the social ladder.

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Here is your wildly simplified guide of the archetypes of the queer community in alphabetical order.

Bear: A larger man, with body hair. There are plenty of subtypes, with distinctions between muscular bears and fat bears, as well as uncomfortable distinctions on racial lines.

Butch: A queer woman with traditionally masculine traits.

Cub: A younger version of a bear. Can also refer to a sexual partner submissive to a bear.

Femme: A queer woman with traditionally feminine traits.

Manatee: Like a bear, but without the hair.

Otter: A lean/muscular guy, with body hair.

Twink: A younger guy, 18-22, stereotypically blonde, little body hair, slim, goes clubbing a lot, likes Lady Gaga.

Wolf: Definitions vary. Can be the queer male equivalent of a cougar, or a rough, outdoorsy bear type man.

Both of the label categories applicable to women are way over-simplified, and each comes with a whole set of subtleties and subcategories, like soft butch, lipstick lesbian, bois (often associated with non-normative gender expression), power dyke/ suit lesbian, etc.

Are these identities a good thing? A bad thing? It can certainly be empowering to discover an identity that fits you, and having a succinct way to describe yourself is convenient, but what happens if you don’t naturally fit one of these categories? When people ask “so which one am I?” the answer, more often than not, is “none of them”. These archetypes are exclusionary, which is doubly a problem as it’s happening in queer spaces, where people are already excluded to some extent because of their sexuality.

It also doesn’t seem at all fair that some people get to say “I’m an otter”, which doesn’t carry with it any negative stereotypes, while others have the twink label forced on them, along with all the baggage. Twink is sometimes used as a slur, and putting someone in a category like this erases other parts of their identity, and gives rise to a lot of assumptions.

There are also uncomfortable associations with race involved here too. Race-based subcategories for bears like ‘brown bear’, ‘black bear’, and ‘panda bear’, make whiteness the default for the bear identity by itself, so that white seems ‘normal’, and other races are deviating from that norm. A twink is likewise almost always thought of as being white. I deliberately left ‘gaysian’ out of the list above, because it is even more racist and carries even more negative stereotypes than the rest.

Hey queers. There is more to people than labels assigned to them because of the way they look. Jeez.

39

COLUMNS 

Things That Go Bump In The Night with Lux Lisbon & Seymour Butts

Everything I Learnt About Sex, I Learned From Cosmo

By Lux Lisbon Sadly, the title of this week’s column is true, and now I am trying desperately hard to unlearn all the things Cosmopolitan worked so hard to teach me.

Being a woman, unsurprisingly I learnt about sex-shame pretty early on in the game. I was infatuated with my first ‘boyfriend’, so much so that at a friend’s birthday party during which we all camped out in tents on the back lawn, I kissed his face for so long and with so much enthusiasm and vigour that the festivities resulted in pash-rash that hurt when exposed to direct sunlight for weeks.

He was beautiful, and 14-year-old me was sure he was ‘the one’. Late one night, I snuck out of home and climbed in his window.

Cuddled up in bed, we found ourselves in a state of undress, and I decided it was time to take hold of my very first dick. But what to do? Sex ed doesn’t teach you technique; what was 14-year-old Lux supposed to do?

Thank God, Cosmopolitan magazine had obviously prepared me adequately (detailing moves for my hand-job arsenal like the “Knob Polisher” and the “Twist and Shout”— no joke—and it all sounded like harmless fun). Ushered along by roaring teenage hormones, it was over quickly, painlessly, and it felt like a bit of a milestone.

Within 24 hours, I realised I had made a terrible mistake. I started to receive text messages about what a slut I was, and so it transpires, my first crush and subsequently first heartbreaker decided to cut his losses,

tell his boys, and talk shit about me for the rest of my time in high school. Unfortunately, my good friend Cosmopolitan had neglected to fill me in on how to deal with sex-negative, women-shaming comments after delivering “Hand Job Techniques He’ll Never Forget”—what bullshit. In Cosmo world, it seems sex is something which women do to men, and if you do it right, you will live happily ever after.

Cosmo had drawn me in, with the promise of scandalous and sexy things hidden away in her ‘sealed section’. I guess, luckily for me, I was one of the girls whose mothers weren’t terrified, threatened, or uncomfortable at the thought of me reading these intimate details and sexy suggestions.

Some of my friends’ parents would forbid opening these sections, or tear them out in their entirety. But not mine, and I was always filled with nervous excitement at the thought of ripping along that little perforated line the moment I had some privacy.

Although brimming with recommendations, I vow Cosmopolitan is responsible for providing me with the worst sex advice, ever. In my young and impressionable state, I once decided to put one of Cosmo’s handy tips into action and really surprise my then boyfriend. The humble hand job now seemed lacklustre; Cosmo recommended utilising a string of beads, wrapping my necklace around his shaft and then getting to work, dealing out the best wank he had ever had, failing to mention that results may vary. Unfortunately, I didn’t “blow his mind”; instead, it confused the fuck out of him and tied one god-awful knot in my favourite necklace… but boy did his dick look pretty.

Why did my girlfriend Cosmo never ask me what I wanted? Or tell me that wrapping a man’s junk in a Christmas ornament is just the ticket to make him fall in love with me and my ever-sensuous ways?

Instead, women who read this crap are bombarded with suggestions on how to do sex, as a woman, to a man. Some of these suggestions are just fucking hilarious and beyond stupid: for example, "dip your breasts in edible body paint, and use them to 'sponge paint' his entire body. Then lick it off"—seriously?! Or, "As you're eating dinner together, say something X-rated like, 'See how I'm devouring this piece of meat?

That's how I'm going to devour you.’”... ‘cos that’s not creepy and totally batshit.

Cosmo taught me that sex is a show, when really you should be concerned about what you and your partners are feeling and if it feels good. The most valuable sex lessons I have learnt have been from having sex where you’re able to communicate and are not expected to have a bag of dick-tricks and a routine to act out. Girls, it’s not true that in order to achieve sex-goddess status, you have to truly master his man bits. Have fun, do what feels right and what makes you happy—and if dipping your rack in some Hershey’s Chocolate Sauce does that, then game on. In fact, the only useful thing Cosmo taught me about sex is that a rolled-up magazine wedged down the back of your headboard will stop it banging against the wall and keeping your flatmates up at night.

Lux and Seymour are our in-house sexperts. If you've got any questions about all things

If you have issues or concerns that you wish to discuss privately and confidentially with

love and lust, or a topic you want them to cover, go right ahead and ask anonymously

a professional, rather than Lux and Seymour, or Hector and Janet, Student Counselling

at ask.fm/LuxandSeymour. For everything else, there's Hector and Janet—our resident

Service can provide a safe place to explore such aspects of your life. The service is free

advice columnists. Contact them anonymously at ask.fm/FixingYourLife

and confidential.

Phone: (04) 463 5310 Email: counselling-service@vuw.ac.nz.Visit: Mauri Ora, Level 1, Student Union Building.

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 COLUMNS

e f i L r u o Y g n i Fix

[BECAUSE OURS ARE WRITTEN OFF]

G’day, mates, I’m in a relationship. It’s great. Recently, however, my girlfriend has done pretty much nothing but work. She’s got this new job and she’s really into it, which is awesome, but I feel like we don’t even see each other any more! It’s starting to strain our relationship, because I get upset that I never see her, and then I get upset that she doesn’t seem to care, etc.

Also, she works with this person that I think wants to sleep with her. How do I manage this stuff gracefully?

Early-season-three Ross

HECTOR Hi. Look, I’ve been there. Many have. It’s kind of a common thing—that’s why Marta Kauffman and David Crane made bank in such a big way. When you’ve been with someone for a little while, the relationship can get into a pretty cosy default setting, which resists change. Why mess with a good thing, after all? But life isn’t about staying in one place at the university age, and we need to do stuff like get great jobs and pursue new interests.

That said, being an adult means committing to working at your relationships. Nothing worthwhile comes easy. Even if you enjoy working at your relationship, that work still has to be done. Finding ways to spend extra time with your paramour is key, whether it be giving them a ride to work in the mornings, or nightly froyo sessions. It sucks, because you probably haven’t had to

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do this kind of change-work for a while, but hey—it keeps things fresh!

much time with you. This isn’t even a gender issue, it’s about your love. Right?

As to the idea that she doesn’t seem to care, that’s the other edge of this horrible sword of self-doubt and misplaced anguish.

But I can assure you again that it’s probably not what’s really going on. You just see yourself a lot more than you see her, and don’t fully realise that she’s trying to put on a brave face so that you can enjoy your time together, and because society tells us that it’s wrong to feel bad about succeeding.

Give her a chance to show you that she cares, by showing that you care. That’s pretty sound practice for any relationship issue, to be honest.

Some couples spend more time together than others. The way in which you two used to operate has shifted. Because she was the one who more actively changed the dynamic, by taking a new job, you feel as though you’ve had no say in the matter.

That’s dumb. It sounds as though your relationship is important to her, though; she is, after all, still in it.

In terms of a workplace scoundrel, it sucks to hear about your partner being taken out on ‘coffee meetings’ by people you’ve never met with names like ‘Mark’. Before reaching for the fire axe, think about how much you trust them, and how they’re probably just talented enough to warrant special treatment. Or how nice it must be to find a friend in a new working environment. On the other hand, some people are just naturally seedy, and it sucks just as much to have someone like that as a co-worker (trust me, I write for Salient). Give her the benefit of the doubt.

Will put in some more jokes next week, Hector.

JANET Hi Ross, This is difficult. Of course you’re happy for her. But the bottom line is, she’s lucky to have you. She should really express gratitude on a daily basis, and furthermore, not take a job that doesn’t let her spend as

Sometimes you go through periods, in friendships or relationships or Sea-Monkey ownership, where you are the one making more effort. I know it’s a relief when someone wants to see you as much as you want to see them, and when you both have enough time to make that happen. Look, just do some communicating. Tell her that you value the relationship and figure out how to deal with her having less time and more work stories. (Work stories are better than weed stories, but that’s for another column.)

The balance will re-establish itself eventually. Or you’ll continue to resent her and eventually break up. As for the person that you think wants to sleep with her; well, you’ve got to consider the possibility that she’ll not respond to their advances because the two of you are in a worthwhile and exciting relationship.

This wasn’t helpful. Because circumstances change. People change. Priorities change. If you break up, there’s always the possibility that you’ll have a series of lacklustre relationships for the next seven or so years and then end up back together.

And so it ends: if the sitcom writers of your life are kind, she’ll get off the plane.

Janet.

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COLUMNS 

LIFESTYLES OF THE POOR & THE STUDIOUS a Nigell t den Lawstu

How to get more money$ for da honey$ My granddad is a very frugal man. Once, while visiting Australia, he found a style of sandals (that he naturally, to this day, pairs with socks) that he particularly appreciated, on sale for some ridiculously small amount. He bought ten pairs and lugged them back across the ditch, so he'd never have to spend money on sandals again. In my family, if someone finds a good bargain, we say “you did a Barrie” in honour of Granddad's economical ways. Penny-pinching ways somewhat run in the genes, so here are my top tips for saving money in your flat.

1. Save on power, have flat spoon sessions.

It's a great way to ensure flat bonding, and keep warm while minimising heating costs. Alternatively, if you have smelly flatmates or there's no super-king bed to house all your flatmates plus guests at your place, just heat one room in the house at the time.

This should still encourage your flat to hang out together in the lounge while retaining your personal space, as well as minimising resentment-potential for that selfish flatmate who always has a fan heater on in his/her bedroom.

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2. I've said it before, I'll say it again: buy in bulk.

If you can afford to put in the dollars, buying necessities like flour and other goods that won't spoil easily is a lot cheaper if you do it in bulk.

You can explore my favourite place in all of Wellington, Moore Wilson's, and spend hours LOL-ing at the giant tubs of mayonnaise and preserved artichokes, because everyone knows giant versions of things are hilarious. Similarly, buy your weekly vegetables from the market rather than the supermarket; it's between ⅓–½ the price, and buying it all at once will mean you spend less overall.

3. Try dumpster diving.

Someone with such refined taste as me, Nigella Lawstudent, hasn't actually tried this, but I've heard rumours of a friend in Dunedin furnishing an entire flat from the dumpster contents of Warehouse Stationery, and another who regularly gets enough food for a week from

a single dumpster-dive expedition. Be careful though, as you are ~technically~ stealing private property, even if it is abandoned, and if you get on the wrong side of a security guard you might get in trouble.

4. Grow a vege garden.

Needing heaps of money/tools/products to start a garden is a myth. You can (and should) make your own compost, and then all you have to do is dig. You can get seeds easily, either for cheap from gardening stores, or from local gardening collectives. Growing stuff is good for the soul too, supposedly, which is totes a bonus.

5. Make your own cleaning products.

Vinegar and baking soda are the only two ingredients you will ever need, according to every single greenie book on household cleaning I've read (more than I care to admit). Luckily for us poor souls, both of these are super-cheap (particularly when bought in bulk, hurrah!) You

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 COLUMNS

Health tip # 18

Caffeine— friend or foe?

AN APPLE A DAY

Caffeine can help make you feel alert. It can help you concentrate. It can improve your reaction speed. It can help keep you going when you need to, but the effects of too much caffeine can be much the same as those of anxiety. It can cause you to shake, and feel restless, irritable and nervous.

can even use vinegar and baking soda to clean your hair if you want, but again, my refined tastes see me investing a little more for something with slightly less stench. I buy an eco-friendly multi-purpose spray ‘n’ wipe for day-to-day cleaning, because I refuse to buy into that different-cleaner-for-each-room marketing ploy.

8. Steal toilet paper from campus.

Salient does not condone this, but has heard that you can often find whole rolls of toilet paper that aren't yet in the dispensers sometimes in the cubicles. Stock up; it may be one-ply, but at least it's something.

How much is too much? While some people can seem to tolerate vast amounts of caffeine, it is generally thought that more than 600 mcg will cause problems. That’s about three cups of coffee. People who are prone to anxiety will react to much smaller doses. Don’t forget that caffeine is also found in energy drinks, chocolate, tea and some pain remedies. Try to keep daily intake to a minimum.

Things Your

6. Get chickens.

This may be a bit far-fetched for some, but consider it as a possibility. If you're not planning on moving flats for a while, chickens will produce free eggs if you give them food and love and grass and shelter and stuff. You will feel like suburban royalty if you get chickens, and if you get a rooster too, you can really annoy your hungover flatmates/nemesis neighbours early on Sunday mornings.

7. Get free student healthcare.

Why pay for what you can for free, right here at uni? If you're really keen, you can just stop by Mauri Ora to pick up your free condoms from the bowls on the tables in the waiting area even when you're not waiting for an appointment.

salient.org.nz <<<

Grandmother Should

9. Shop around.

This is particularly useful for power— whatsmynumber.org.nz will tell you how much you could save just by switching power retailers. Be wary of signing contracts with power retailers; this poor writer learnt her lesson the hard way when her flat was slapped with a $700 bill after being wooed into a contract because the first four months were half-price (fuck you, Genesis).

10. If you get stuck, use Uni services.

There's always help available if you get really stuck with financial problems—see the “Financial Support & Advice” page at victoria.ac.nz; from giving you budgeting advice to helping you out with the Hardship Fund, make an appointment and they'll put you right.

Have Taught You

By Alexandra Hollis

Toast: After you’ve taken the slices from the toaster, balance them on their ends with the top edges touching for a li’l while to avoid the awkward condensation that builds up under the toast.

Pills: Tilting your head back when you swallow pills can cause your trachea to open and oesophagus to close; tilt your head forward when you swallow instead.

Getting those digits: When (when, not if; IT WILL HAPPEN) someone gives you their number, to check it’s legit (not that this will happen to u ur awesome xxxx) you can either a) repeat it back to them, but change one of the numbers—if they correct it they’re genuine, or b) text ‘em there and then with your name. If it vibrates, it’s legit, which is advice you should always take into account. This way, they have your number as well, so you’re avoiding the awkwardness of only one person having the other’s number.

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ARTS 

ARTS Salient Arts BRAting Guide: 5. Corset 4. Sports bra 3. Full cup bra 2. Soft cup bra 1. Bandeau 0. No bra

film 

Blue Jasmine review

Directed by Woody Allen Reviewed by Chloe Davies

Woody Allen’s latest venture, Blue Jasmine, has been hailed as one of his best (well of the last 20 years or so at least). I’m inclined to agree. Cate Blanchett is unsurprisingly brilliant in the role of Jasmine (née Jeanette). Allen benefits from one of the best casts he's put together in years. Sally Hawkins plays the role of Jasmine’s working-class sister, Ginger, and Alec Baldwin plays her wealthy fraudster ex-husband (in his third Allen film).

Peter Sarsgaard also does a stellar job, playing the creepy-rich-dude thing well (see An Education), and Bobby Cannavale impresses as Chili, Ginger’s blue-collar fiance.

A former New York socialite, Jasmine’s husband, Hal (Baldwin) is indicted for fraud and takes his own life in a jail cell (hung with a rope, as Jasmine so reverently points out). Turns out she had conveniently turned a blind eye to both his consistent cheating and funding of their lavish lifestyle. Jasmine is forced to live with her workingclass sister, Ginger, in San Francisco, who she wanted as little as possible to do with until now.

She arrives broke, yet flies first-class and fitted with Louis Vuitton bags; she’s post mental breakdown, yet still consistently chats away to herself in public.

Allen tackles class division for the first time since Match Point. Jasmine is unapologetically an utter

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snob. She looks down upon Ginger's blue-collar boyfriend, Chili, not shying away from labelling him a loser multiple times (although her alcohol/ prescription-drug dependency probably has something to do with her bluntness). The divide is abundantly obvious, and neither character gets away unscathed in their depiction—Ginger fights with her boyfriend in front of her children, and Jasmine has lived a shallow lifestyle, valuing luxury and social status over everything else.

At a party she attends with Ginger, Jasmine meets a wealthy diplomat, Dwight (Sarsgaard).

Dwight is in need of a wife, perfect for the photo opportunities that will go along with his burgeoning career as a politician. And Ginger meets Al (Louis C.K.), the non-loser love interest, playing his typically awkward self. Unfortunately, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be, for either party.

Jasmine is still recovering from a nervous breakdown and living in total denial.

The reasons for Jasmine’s mental demise become gradually clearer throughout the film, in a series of flashbacks cutting between present-day San Francisco and her previous lifestyle with Hal in Upper East Side New York. The rug was pulled out beneath her in a major way—the lavish apartment on Fifth Avenue, homes in the Hamptons, and many a luxury vacation have all taken by the government. Jasmine is left with practically nothing of her own. She never did finish her degree. Instead, she was swept off her

feet to the tune of ‘Blue Moon’. Hal gave her everything money could buy, as well as entry to the New York social set. Now she’s living in San Francisco; self-medicating with vodka and pills.

Finding it hard to accept the cold hard truth that she’ll be starting from the bottom to get back to the top. The meltdown was definitely warranted.

At first, there’s a certain resentment toward Jasmine, with her upper-class tone and obvious disdain toward anyone lower than her on the social ladder. The further the film delves into the causes of her downward mental spiral, the more sympathy we have.

Cultural critic Peter Biskind described the film as “the first Woody Allen film in a while that doesn’t feel like a promising draft that might have benefited from another run through the typewriter.” I certainly wouldn’t put Blue Jasmine on the top of my Woody Allen list, or even in the top ten. It will, however, undeniably feature in all the lists of the best films of 2013, and so it should.

There is a significant lack of Allen’s classic deadpan Jewish humour, but he makes up for it with Jasmine’s neurosis. The context is a little more grim than usual, yet that’s the way it should be. It’s among his most touching works, a film to admire. Entertaining, if a little bleak, the classic Allen humour is still abundant. It’s both hilarious and horrific. We’re able to celebrate the hilarity with some tragedy.]

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 ARTS

visual arts 

Three Machines

ARTICLE

Simon Gennard

Past Towards the end of his life, Guglielmo Marconi, one of the pioneers of longwave radio, began to believe that sound lived forever. He believed that sound waves, after their initial transmission, lingered on, and it would be possible to hear them if humans could build a radio receiver that was powerful enough. The idea was spawned in between a series of heart attacks—as such, it may have been the product of forced meditation on mortality or Marconi's fear of death, but it was not as ridiculous as it might seem.

Marconi, after facing obvious widespread scepticism, was responsible for the first transatlantic radio transmission. His equipment was on board the Titanic when it sank, and distress calls were picked up by nearby ships, who managed to rescue over 700 survivors. One particular Russian sailor picked up the sound more than an hour and a half after it was sent.

It was most likely an atmospheric anomaly.

reluctant tenderness the minutiae of living with sickness. In the five years since his death, she has become aware of her public role as a widow, a costume that seems fixed for now, for she is always introduced in articles about her work as his wife first, artist second. And since he is more famous than her and since we can’t help fetishising mental illness, she is aware, though she resents, his apotheosis to the realm of the troubled artist. He shall forever sit alongside Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf and Kurt Cobain, and he probably would have hated that.

Bough Down is less a belated entry to the Forgiveness Machine, than a document of resistance to the cult of her husband.

Future In 2012, painter Simon Ingram fulfilled Guglielmo Marconi’s prophecy, in a roundabout way. Or not at all (this is a very laboured connection, but I have a word count to meet).

For an exhibition at Adam Art Gallery, he constructed a machine that would interpret radio waves and instruct the machine to apply paint to particular part of a canvas. Not a permanent

record of what was heard, but a record that something was heard (or not heard) at some point. By the end of the exhibition, the artwork was a monochromatic square; every inch was covered in paint. The conclusion of Ingram’s piece touches on one of the impracticalities of Marconi’s theory, for to hear everything at once would render everything indecipherable.

It would be arrogant to attempt to draw an arbitrary connection between Green’s machine and Ingram’s, so I’ll do just that. Ian Cheng, in the June 2013 issue of frieze magazine, calls narrative a “technology for normalizing change, for cohering the experience of reality”. Neither machine attempts to draw a narrative as an attempt to negotiate experience; rather, they all seem to do the opposite, but in doing so they highlight the human necessity to invent ways of coming to terms with the world around us. Where Marconi’s hopes for a repetition of experience offer the chance to meditate on it, Green destroys as a means of reconciling. Ingram takes the creation of an object to the extreme, pushing the limitations of representation and interpretation, attempting to record so much that his work is lost in a profusion of experience. This is the future.

Present The first work Karen Green exhibited after her husband’s suicide was a forgiveness machine.

A seven-foot-long contraption of plastic and metal, viewers were encouraged to write down what they wished to forgive, or be forgiven for, and place it in the machine. Their words would be sucked in and appear at the other end, shredded. For all of its investment in release— first in providing transgression with a physicality, authenticating it by putting it into words, and then by allowing the viewer to witness their destruction—Green told The Guardian in 2011 that the machine made people anxious. “It was like: what if it works and I really have to forgive my terrible parent or whoever?”

Karen Green never used the machine.

In 2013, Siglio Press published Bough Down, a book of collages and prose poems by Green.

The poems are at times angry, at times confused, at times guilty, but in their sober treatment of the aftermath of her husband’s death, they refuse to acknowledge that the event wasn’t foreshadowed. She details with bluntness and

salient.org.nz <<<

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ARTS 

theatre 

High risk/high reward INTERVIEW

Amy Griffin-Browne

shows—you might go along and think, “This Shakespeare is boring, but I love that weird Chinese opera musical,” or vice versa.

Matt: And it's really worth your time because it's free.

VUW's THEA304 students are presenting a series of works titled Growing Pains. Young directors Emma Robinson, Maggie White, Cassandra Tse and Matt Loveranes sat down with Salient .

Maggie: Growing Pains, as in “we're by no means perfect at this”; because there's little at stake, in terms of the show being free, it's one of the very few chances—apart from the Fringe Festival— where people can take massive risks.

Matt: We can literally do whatever we want.

We're free to fail. It's about learning, making mistakes—discoveries! We're all working in different branches of theatre.

Cassandra: It will be quite interesting for people who don't have much experience with theatre, because there’s a big range of different types of

Kaitiaki review

Jacob Brown

One of the biggest regrets of my theatre-going adventures this year was to see Long Cloud’s Oneironaut—the idea of a show’s characters taking you through their world with promenade staging seemed so revolutionary and rare that I melodramatically thought I may never get the chance to experience it again. Fortunately, I was given a second chance recently with Hank of Thread’s wonderful Kaitiaki, an interactive exploration of the New Zealand bush, with its actors embodying the native critters we so often take for granted.

Emma: Uther [Dean, mentor] said, “Your show is going to be simultaneously a train wreck and fabulous.” It'll be awesome because you won't get bored; because every ten minutes a new play happens. I find, broadly, people have this idea of theatre as sitting and watching someone say a speech—and that's not what it is. It's about people being in the same space as you and affecting you. That's a powerful thing and a reason to be interested.

Cassandra: Working with actors, you're constantly amazed at what they bring to the performance, and you're working to coax that out of them—but it's interesting when we talk about 'focus' because every director is so different!

Growing Pains runs from 25–28 September. More information is available in our 'What's On' section.

How does using a smaller venue change the experience?

Maggie: Much more intimate. The emphasis is the proximity of the audience and the actor, which is the thing that theatre gives its audience which film never can. It's the essential element, bodies in space.

Sprites, or the constant musicianship of obscured actors playing birds and various instruments in the trees, it is the actors’ energy that makes the bush’s atmosphere authentic and vibrant. As we continue to interact with the characters and the space in different ways (literally becoming tree-huggers at one point), we have a renewed appreciation for all the links and relationships between species that makes up our ecosystem.

However, its ending did not build up enough momentum to leave any profoundly lasting effects about how I need to change my eco-unfriendly

habits. Reintroducing the evil bureaucrat Susan Plainview (Sherilee Kahui) who intends to tear down “this not-very-interesting forest” and build apartment complexes and a refuse in its place, does wake us up to our complacency, but we needed to have more of this ugly human presence among the vulnerable wildlife for this foil to feel like a serious threat.

Kaitiaki is a sumptuous journey that, while targeted at New Zealand’s younger generation, anyone can willingly get lost in.

Kaitiaki is satisfying because it successfully achieves its goal of helping us realise the potential we have in either protecting or destroying the environment, and immerses us in a sensuous experience as it does so. The impeccably complex lighting, set, and sound designs complimented the simplistic storytelling form that our forest friends led. Whether it be through their charming characterisations of creatures like the goofy Ponga (Simon Haren), the ‘too cool to move’ Patricia the Bat (Freya Sadgrove), and the various dancing

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 ARTS

music 

WHAT REALLY HAPPENS IN THAT CRAPPY YELLOW BUILDING NEXT TO TE PUNI VILLAGE

stupendous cost… while at jazz school, nine saxophonists are supposed to share the one school baritone sax between them.”

ARTICLE

Elise Munden

Music is taught at Victoria University by the New Zealand School of Music (NZSM). Because of this, a degree in music studies from Victoria (whether Performance, Composition, or Musicology) is technically also a degree from the nationwide NZSM. Furthermore, a large proportion of jazz courses are also taught at Massey University, making Victoria Music students also affiliated with Massey.

I’m not going to argue that the major purpose of tertiary education is inherently and objectively to gain a career. In fact, my own studies in Ethnomusicology are largely founded on an intense curiosity in the subject. But what about those students who do wish to craft a career in the creative arts, and have come to Victoria with the intention of doing so? Job security in this field is, well, not particularly secure. University staff are fully aware of this dilemma, so one would assume that there is a strong emphasis on finding work as a professional artist. Yet Music students still seem to accept their post-tertiary situation to be one of unemployment and near-poverty; the ‘starving artist’, as it were.

No matter whether the decision to allocate funding in such a way was justified by the NZSM, any perceived “bias” (as termed by Allan himself) inevitably diminishes students’ confidence in the management team that they are at least partly entrusting with their future careers.

Outside of formal education, though, networking and social media is becoming increasingly recognised as central to a career in any subject.

I speak from experience when I remark upon the particularly heart-warming effort made by musicians in forming a community that supports each other’s careers; just go to Puppies on a Saturday night to see this community in action.

However, the differences between classical and jazz musicians are again made clear when considering how specialised performers implement networking. Michael notes that “we [jazz musicians] probably wouldn’t call it networking, but jazz in particular is a very communally focussed art form. You simply won’t go anywhere, or learn anything, if you don’t spend time playing with other people.” Patrick says of his classical performance craft that, “technically, you don’t need to know a single person in order to nail an audition… [but] it’s

quite rare that you will actually land your dream job on the first go, so the only way to get gigs is by people knowing your name and knowing how well you can play.”

As suggested by Michael and Patrick’s experiences, social media seems to be secondary when it comes to exposing their particular talents. For instance, for the delicacy of an outstanding classical performance to be imparted through digital media, excellent and expensive recording gear is needed; you can’t simply record your best flute solo on Ableton in your bedroom if you want to perform with the NZSO. This leads me to believe that the NZSM is lacking in face-to-face networking opportunities for their students. Faculties such as Law and Commerce indulge their students with formal meet-and-greet interactions with potential employers, yet it is often left to the individual Music student to slyly approach an orchestra conductor or jazz-ensemble leader if they want to be noticed. Yes, the ability to confidently approach prospective employers is a lucrative skill that should be developed at a personal level, yet in the world of specialised performance art where literally only one person is needed to play trombone in an entire symphony orchestra, it seems our university should be doing more to aid our Music students to ‘Get Amongst the Best’.

Patrick Di Somma is a classical trombone player, with this being the focus of his specialised Performance degree. He justly points out that, “whatever institution you find yourself at… (it) can only take you so far, as studying an instrument is such an individual pursuit.”

However, it seems that his decision to study at the Victoria branch of NZSM was calculated, as he also argues that our institution “is by far the best in New Zealand, as most of the tutors and staff work with the NZ Symphony Orchestra also; a world-class orchestra.”

However, jazz saxophonist Michael Allan argues that while “in many ways the NZSM does an excellent job at supporting their jazz students,” there are some biases in the way that funding is allocated across the Music programme.

For instance, he has heard that “the classical school secured funding to purchase and import a new Steinway grand piano—similar to the three already owned by the NZSM—at a truly

salient.org.nz <<<

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ARTS 

music 

Fantastic Albums and Where to Find Them

ARTICLE

Denizen of the Deep

Us music-devotees have it pretty good in our day and age. Flashback two decades, and you’d be forgiven for believing the most outrageous theories spouted by those garbed in tin-foil hats; that the music industry, via record companies, had a stranglehold on what music you could and couldn’t consume. If you wanted a Miles Davis album that wasn’t Kind of Blue, for example, it would have to specially imported from Japan at the cost of 40 bucks plus. People who wanted to branch out musically had two options—either go to exceedingly pricey specialist stores, or join communities in which members would mail burnt CDs to one another (although some, such as The Dead C’s Bruce Russell, portray these days in a particularly halcyon light). Adorno would have wept.

Now? Thanks to the internet and the ubiquity and ease of file-sharing, any obscure musique concrète or krautrock release is just a click away (assuming you know where to find them). The quantity of the albums you can download, too, is unfettered, and with the aid of YouTube, Spotify and the odd illicit download you can expose yourself to basically anything you care to—from professional recordings of opera to home-made recordings of Japanese people using the bathroom (it exists). But, you might be asking, where do you come across these albums? For your benefit, I’ve compiled the following handy guide to finding any album you care to. That said, it comes with a couple of conditions and caveats attached—I expect you to delete the album from your computer within 48 hours (I’d prefer 24 but I’m feeling lenient) and support the artist in the form of $$$ if you are able (if an album is out of print, then, in my moral code, it’s free game). Musicians don’t make music for your personal gratification. NARCISSIST!

name] mediafire’ into Google and expect that to suffice. That said, it is possible to circumvent this impediment. Simply type in ‘[album name] blogspot’ and tap the wealth of file-sharing blogs at your disposal, or go to the /mu/ archive (rbt. asia/mu/) and type in [album name] and then your file host of choice—though you might get lucky with MediaFire, you’re more likely to get optimum results of you choose ‘mega’ or ‘zippyshare’. If none of these work, try shortening the album name in your Google search. For example, ‘Steve Reich Music for Eighteen Musicians’ becomes ‘SR - Mf18m mediafire’, or ‘Unwound Leaves Turn Inside You’ becomes ‘U-LTIY mediafire’.

Intermediate/N0RM13S Okay, so you know the ropes and you’re looking to find some pieces that might be a little bit more obscure or arcane. Here’s what you can do: join an online music community (Rate Your Music, Sputnik, ihatemusic, specific blogs) and ingratiate yourself with the well-listened. Pester these users to upload the album for you until they acquiesce out of sheer annoyance. $$$$. Alternately, you could make use of a YouTube–MP3 website for albums that are available on YouTube but nowhere else; finally, there is ru.tracker or The Pirate Bay. These torrent sites are not as simple to negotiate as direct-downloads, but if you familiarise yourself with torrents, it should be a cinch—just click, seed and leech. Ru.tracker especially has a vast collection, and you can get around the language barrier by accessing it on Google Chrome (it translates the Russian for you!

The wonders of modern technology eh).

Experts/TR00 L33TS So you consider yourself pretty net-savvy, but try as you might, you just cannot find that album you want for the life of you—you’ve tried every avenue, left no stone unturned, only to find links that present a ‘404: File not Found’ (or perhaps Error No. 320: File has been deleted) message when clicked. Or, most galling of all, it links you to the defunct Megaupload. Torrents, meanwhile, have either disappeared or have no seeders.

Things are bleak. Don’t despair though! There is help in the form of private torrent trackers (what. cd, waffles.fm). The chances of getting an invite are slim-to-none, so you might have to interview (go on the websites for more info). You will subject to an aptitude test, and then boom! You’re in.

Once there, you have to make sure to keep a upload/download seed/leech ratio otherwise the penalties are severe, even draconian, but the number of albums at your disposal will increase diabolically. Alternately, there’s Soulseek (like the private trackers but peer-to-peer, which means people can share their entire collections) and, if that fails you, try the Deep Web as a last resort.

And if you STILL can’t find the album you’re looking for? My condolences, but bite the bullet and buy it. Think of it as your good deed for the day. Also worth noting is that once you get to this stage of the game, you’ll likely be the one providing links, whether directly or indirectly, to the newbies. The circle of life continues, and it’s a beautiful thing :’).

Beginners/N00BS First things first: your entry into the seedy underbelly of file-downloading has been complicated enormously by FilesTube and MediaFire (moar liek mediafuhrer amiright) cracking down on material held on their servers.

Gone are the days when you could type ‘[album

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Fairer fares and warmer flats are worth voting for.

 ARTS

Come and vote this Wednesday in the Hub. It’s easy to cast a ‘Special Vote’ for Council, no matter where you’re enrolled.

Just bring your photo ID, and proof of address.

salient.org.nz <<<

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PUZZLES 

PUZZLES

va rie ty pu zz le s & CR OSSWO RD by pu ck — AN SW ERS NE XT ISSUE

'HIDDEN JEopardY' - DIFFICULTY: MEDIUM 46. Birthday event 48. ‘Warwick ___’ (Duffy hit) 50. Variable in a Punnett square 53. Sugary suffix 54. 11-Down, divided by two, and in Italian 55. Jubilee, Dazzler and Shadowcat, perhaps 61. The Daily Planet’s Clark 63. Affectionate 64. Hardy’s character in ‘Inception’ 66. ‘___ Rising’ (Daniel Ware sci-fi novel) 67. Sea eagle 68. See 65-Down 69. Valid question at this point (or a Caesar shift of 71-Across) 70. What a startled horse might do 71. “I’ll take ‘Things with Your Name In Them’ for 200, ___”

ACROSS 1. Prefix for –pod or –Mom 5. Prefix for –Pad or –mum 9. Balls (up) 13. Hanger-on 15. Priestly vestments 16. ‘____ Rhythm’ 17. Winchester, for one 18. In need of welfare 19. Minnelli of 'Cabaret' 20. Purchases some pricy wheels, perhaps 23. Catcher at a circus class

24. Many a poem by Keats 25. Stoops (to) 27. Poe poem originally called ‘A Paean’ 31. Erupts 33. Its capital is Muscat 34. High point at the opera 36. Down for the winter?

40. Skill required to solve this puzzle, perhaps 43. Heep in ‘David Copperfield’ 44. Have top billing 45. Gripe

DOWN 1. Font with types A and B 2. ___ notes (cheat sheets) 3. Vegan’s protein source 4. ‘For Your Eyes ___’ 5. Source of Canadian sap 6. Ingredient in some moisturisers 7. ‘Live’ console 8. Talks with a full mouth or interrupts 9. Wheaton who appeared in 'The Guild' and 'Stand By Me' 10. What you’ve been doing for twenty-eight years 11. Square root of a gross 12. D&D attributes, for short 14. “____ no?” (frustrated question) 21. “It’s ____” (words said while

shaking, maybe) 22. Home of the TMNTs 26. Question that might be asked during a breakup 27. Ex-rugby star Jonah 28. Retired, like some profs.

29. 69-Across, in Japanese 30. Recorded, in a way 31. Cicero wrote it as LX 32. Hemingway’s nickname 35. Take five 37. ‘The Reason’ singer Celine 38. Jacob’s twin, in the Bible 39. Artist Magritte 41. ‘Two and ____ Men’ 42. Wipe clean 47. ‘_____ Madness’ (Alan Cumming musical) 49. Frustrated, in a way 50. Off to one side, maybe 51. Bloodsucker 52. European Planeteer 53. What you got on July 8th 56. What Oliver Twist asks for 57. ‘I’ in ‘The King and I’ 58. Skywalker’s wife, ___ Jade 59. Mathematician Post 60. 47-Down actress Campbell 62. Add (up) 65. With 68-Across, libido

LAST WEEK'S SOLUTION

QUIZ 1. Which Labour leadership contender had the backing of the majority of Labour MPs?

7. Which of Fiji’s islands is the most populated?

2. What has been declared the world’s ugliest animal?

8. Which famous 19th-century novel is a major plot point in the 2006 New Zealand novel Mister Pip?

3. Which major film franchise announced it will be producing a spin-off film last week?

4. True or false: the Hare Krishna movement was founded in ancient India.

5. What are the names of the new iPhones?

9. When are the next local-body elections?

10. Which Wellington theatre is closing down?

6. Who is the coach of the Counties Manukau Steelers?

Answers: 1. Grant Robertson. 2. The Blobfish. 3. Harry Potter 4. False—it was founded in New York City in 1966. 5. iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C. 6. Tana Umaga. 7. Viti Levu. 8. Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens. 9. Saturday 12 October 2013. 10. Downstage Theatre.

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>>> salient.org.nz

ve u' me z yo ga g.n w r r no you t.o do et ien o G l a t t e? ha g t s w pa e a d s le hi lin zz d t on Pu e y ish pla fin nd a on

?

 PUZZLES

TARGET

n t o

c d i a u e

Target rating guide: 0-15 words: do you even go here?

16-25 words: alright 26-35 words: decent 36-50 words: PRO 80+ words: free drink

tertiary education

Difficulty: Medium

Each of the pairs listed below has a missing third member that together make up a well-known phrase. When you’ve identified the third member, take the numbered letter from that word. For example, the missing third word from ‘1) Ready, Steady’ would be ‘Go’, and the first letter would be ‘G’. When you’ve got all fifteen letters, they’ll spell out two members of a final group. The missing word from that is the answer to the puzzle.

1) Frankincense, Myrrh, _____________ 2) Navy, Air Force, _____________ 3) Bird, Superman, _____________ 4) Harry, Ron, _____________ 5) Length, Area, _____________ 6) Animal, Mineral, _____________ 7) Rock, Paper, _____________ 8) Nina, Pinta, _____________ 7) Doric, Ionic, _____________ 6) Tall, Venti, _____________ 5) Camera, Action, _____________ 4) Lettuce, Tomato, _____________ 3) Inferno, Purgatorio, _____________ 2) Witch, Wardrobe, _____________ 1) Friends, Romans, _____________

SUDOKU difficulty: easy

salient.org.nz <<<

difficulty: medium

difficulty: hard

51

LETTERS ď&#x20AC;Ş

letters win a $10 voucher for the hunter lounge

letter of the week

just what we were thinking!

provide you inspiration mate, or a swift kick

suggestion that, in cases of sexual assault

box to the head

or rape, the number one victim is not the

and finally:

women. HOW CAN YOU EVEN THINK THAT

- I dare you to try and find Chuck Norris -

HER RIGHTS SHOULD NOT BE PUT FIRST

Google him, you won't find him

AFTER HAVING TO GO THROUGH WHAT

Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamate

SHE DID??!!?? SO. MUCH. ANGER.

apokaiwhenuakitanatahu

It's sickening. Your organisation is sickening.

This is hardly trying to start a discussion, it's forcing your views onto those that don't need it. If you don't like abortion, don't ever

good one, tommie

Dear Essaylient, China will soon be New Zealandâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most

get one. Simple. If these pamphlets appear on campus again, who'd be keen to join me

important economic partner, while security

Dear Salient,

in roasting marshmallows over them in a

ties with the

A vote for Sonya is a vote for Satan.

bonfire?

United States are the closest they have been

Cheers,

Yours angrily, Opinionated me.

for 30 years. What challenges does that

Quixotic

situation present for New Zealand?

won in our hearts

Regards,

preach

IR student.

To the delightfully naive students of Victoria Dear Salient.

University it's associated institutions,

I have only a couple more weeks of lectures

Functionaries and hangers-on.

left before I finish my degree! I am super

Sinister Incorporated must inform you, with

I was thinking it is strange that Salient has a

excited and I can't wait to start drinking at

a heavy heart, that none of it's members

'what's on:film' column and an empty box for

approximately 12.31pm on day my last exam

are able to run for a position within your

Tuesdays gig guide at puppies but never any

finishes. (I should probs double check it's a

Student Association. Though one Professor

mention of the free film club 'Pineal Glands

morning exam...) Love from the R.A who is

Mavolence did express interest in running for

Schlock Theatre' which is held there every

counting down the days.

a role, recent events in Syria have diverted

woof.

Tuesday night?

funds that would have otherwise been used

Just a thought,

to rig the election in the Professor's favor,

(It's a lot of fun!)

Chemical Weapons before useful idiots

de-foetus-t

they say. Sinister Incorporated is dedicated to fighting the National Government, as

Hey Babelient,

it's actions threaten our existence in New

I believe that every person has the right to

Zealand, stricter internet piracy laws have

hold an opinion and believe whatever they

hindered our seal clubbing operations (don't

Hi saliente

choose. Heck, I'm a queer, science loving,

ask), the recent GCSB bill has all but stopped

Here's a few things for you to consider:

enviromental, highly politicised student from

our infiltration of Al-Qaeda elements into

- Gareth Bale is a tosser - no one gives a shit

a religious background, so I'm damn well full

New Zealand (with training camps in the

because Man Utd will win anyway

of opinions and beliefs myself.

Urewera national park) and steps towards Oil

- Uther Dean and Elle Hunt were awesome -

But how dare anyone pollute our lecture

Drilling threaten to remove the New Zealand

bring them back

theatres and university campus with the

government away from depending so totally

- Tripe H likes giving it up the bum to his wife

narrowminded and potentially triggering

on loans from SIN-Bank.

Stephanie - that is awesome

brochures like "JustThink" did this week. So

Sinister Incorporated wishes, once again, to

- If McCourt gives the order for VUWSA to

you don't like abortion, and you'd like to have

thank the students of Victoria University for

leave NZUSA - he will have a statue made out

a "discussion" on it. What, exactly, would

their continuing efforts to help our cause,

of lego made for him, finally someone makes

you like to discuss? Surely you're thrilled that

together we can bring the world under

something happen

abortion is still a crime under NZ's Crimes

the domination of our lord and saviour Dr

- An increasing in counseling is urgently

Act 1961, which means it is inaccessible for

Sinister, one fucked up Leftist policy at a

required - too many females are playing

many women around the country, especially

time.

Wrecking Ball on repeat

those not living in the main centres? What

Professor Mavolence

- The Burger Place near Kirk has no hygiene

more from here do you want to do, attempt

Wellington Branch

standards - demolish it and turn it into a

to shame or belittle those who seek

Sinister Incorporated

bakery

abortions?

www.sinisterincorporated.uk

- Stoners listen to Guido Hatzis - He will

And don't even get me started on your

cheers, m8

52

>>> salient.org.nz

ď&#x20AC;Ş

nt k! me ? z in s th om .n g c er u tt yo an or . c Le at u nt h w yo lie ow ow sa kn kn at s u yo icle t id D n ar o

letters walk, put the kettle on, and suddenly things

nowhere to be seen. So, Laura, wherever you

are much better! It's the closest thing to

are: what's happening? Is the campaign still

Dear the Hunger Lounge,

magic I've ever seen.

on? (I'll have to cancel my order for 1000

Why don't you ever play music that people

Kettle Chips.

Laura4Prez T-shirts if not., which would be

try hope bros

want to listen to? Your indifferent elevator

QUITE a hassle.) As far as I'm concerned,

music doesn't entice people.

you are the ONLY candidate with the competence, the experience, the vision,

Sometime you should just playing things like

seems legit.

Wrecking Ball.

and the dedication to Vic that the VUWSA presidency has been crying out for for years.

Regards, Second Year Alcoholic x

Dear Salient

SORT IT OUT!

Just look at the STATE OF THINGS. It's

Yours,

about bloody time the PEOPLE IN CHARGE

Concerned Citizen.

did something about an issue I have cared

oracle

passionately about since THREE MINUTES AGO. Here is a blog that SAYS WHAT WE'RE

draaaaaama

Fuck the America's Cup. It can suck my

ALL THINKING: www.nothingbuthetruth.

America's Cock. If I see one more "live cross

org.nz. I'm sure it's fact checked. I actually

to San Fransico" I am going to go on ahead

haven't fact checked that it's fact checked,

Hair-lient,

and declare journalistic integrity dead. Not

it's besides the point really.

I'm afraid I have a problem which I need help

even Mike McRoberts soothing native tone

Yours sincerely,

with. You see, I aim to get my hair cut every

can ease my anger.

NeedAHobby

6 weeks (even though it probably would

Yours truthfully,

look better/remain shorter if I did so every

Sir Paul Holmes.

5 weeks), but at the moment, 6 weeks and 2 days have passed since my last haircut.

solid study aid

The problem, you see, is that my hairdresser of choice lives reasonably far away from

Hail Jah-lient once mo',

my usual dwelling, such that unless I have a

I an' I no dat me a blabba mout cos me rite

particular reason to head out that way at the

kwait oftahn nowadehs, an' me hope dat me

6-week point, my hair ends up being cut at

The other day I saw Savage and Tiki Taane on

prezahnce nah bekom an irritehshan to ahl de

inconsistent intervals, which could have an

t.v and I worried about the size of Savage in

natty dread rastaman an' woman reedahs out

effect on the continuity of my personal brand

comparison to Tiki Taane. Savage reminded

dere. Bot neva de less me wana seh dat me

based on my particular haircut. On the other

me of something that Sir Edmund Hillary

cyaan do no ting for yah as de end of de year

hand, my hair has now gotten reasonably long

would try to conquer but Tiki Taane looks like

an' ahl de exam approach, sep to seh dat wat

(by my standards) such that hair gel, which

a World Vision ad

work for I an' I is me nait nurse, me spot o

I would usually apply every morning, would

Should we set up a bank accountant to start

kali 'erb, me slabba-slabba spliff of sinsemilla.

make my temporarily longer hairstyle look

a fund for the Tiki relief program?

It don tek me rait bak to Trench Town an' de

shit - as a result, I save an unknown amount of

One day he will grow to be as big and strong

dehs of me yout wen me inheyal de sehkrad

money on hair gel, which is good. Also good

as Savage.

smok of Jah Rastafari.

is the fact that my hair is now a bit softer, and

Much love, Simon Cowell.

Onwahd, fo'wahd, don' step bakwahd, step

I can enjoy the pleasure of running my hands

outta Babylon,

through it without worrying about messing

Buffalo Souljah.

up a carefully gel-crafted hairstyle. So, on

what aboue dei hamo, tho?

reflection, this isn't really a problem at all.

Thanks for reading anyway,

better than prozac Dear Salient,

James.

our only hope

In you I keep reading articles in which a perfectly nice person outlines some perfectly

Yo Election-lient,

good reasons why they feel a bit sad and

Two weeks ago, Salient, your letters section

lonely only to go and say something to the

gave me hope. Hope that the upcoming

effect of "But I'm white and cis so I'm not

VUWSA election would finally bring real,

Dear Tommy Maharaj

allowed to."

lasting change. Change that can only be

Youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re pretty good looking and all that, but I

Jesus bloody christ, of course you're allowed

delivered by a Laura presidency in 2014.

am concerned:

to feel sad! People get sad, you're a person,

However, when I eagerly sidled up to the

The flavour saver.

so stop beating yourself up over it. Let

sheet opposite the VUWSA reception to see

Why?

yourself feel what you feel, notice it, go for a

the candidates recently, Laura's name was

Help.

salient.org.nz <<<

bet he's cli-tickled pink

53



ar ed nd tic le z? no ca u us g.n yo p or m t. e av ca H w ien e l r n sa ou at

notices 

NOTICES CAREERS AND JOBS

monster himself. in this diabolically twisted game of cat and

www.careerhub.victoria.ac.nz

mouse. I Saw The Devil transcends the police

Applications closing soon: Organisations

procedural and serial killer genres in thrilling Closing

MetService

Sep 25

Aviat Networks

Sep 27

McKesson New Zealand NZX

facebook.com/events/123316977838718/

The lines between good and evil fall away

Details on CareerHub:

new ways.  Where: Memorial Theatre, Student Union Building  When: 6:30pm, Thursday 26th September Gold Coin Entry.

Sep 30

Wynard Group

Popcorn and Fizzy Drinks provided!  facebook.com/groups/vicunifilmsociety/

Crowe Horwath

Islam Awareness Week 2013 :Islam Contribution to Civilization Come and join our 3-day-event (25th27th Sept) in Kelburn Campus. On 25th Sept, there will be an exhibition on 'Islam Contribution to Civilization' and a talk from our special guest speaker Sheikh Khalid. We also have lots of interesting activities such as quizzes, Muslims games, Calligraphy. Free

Skope Industries

Vic OE Exchange Exhibition 2013 – On Now!

Endace Technology MiMOMax Wireless Victoria University (FHSS, Science,

Oct 1

sausage roll. On 26th Sept will be open day of Students Islamic Centre (SIC) for anyone who wants to have a look. There

Where would you go? Explore your student

Engineering, Architecture & Design)

will be henna drawing, Muslim attire photo

exchange possibilities!

shoot, calligraphy, prayer demo and short

DataTorque

 Pipitea Rutherford House 16-20 Sept

video screening. On 27th Sept we will have

Augview

 Kelburn Hub Level 2, 23 Sept–4 Oct

Palestine Talk and movie screening. Dinner

Milmeq

 Te Aro Atrium 30 Sept-4 Oct

will be provided.

 Petcha Kutcha Night – Exchange

For more info

Custard Square

Experiences in 20 photos

 www.facebook.com/

Quest Integrity NZL

Free food & prizes – Oct 2, 5pm Hunter

VicMuslimsClub?fref=ts

Lounge

 vicmuslimsclub@gmail.com

rewardjunkie

Oct 5 Oct 10

RML Automation

Oct 11

Also check out the online exhibition: www. wherecouldyougo.weebly.com

Employer Presentation Ministry of Foreign Affairs & Trade

Sep 23

 Website: victoria.ac.nz/exchange  Visit us: Level 2, Easterfield Building

Employer Presentation SANZA Teaching Agency

 Email: VicOE@vuw.ac.nz

Sep 23

 Drop-in hours: Mon- Wed 1-3pm. Thurs & Fri 10-12am

VicIDS Hosts: Live Below the Line Bakesale Tuesday 24 September, 11am-2pm, The Hub (tbc) Come along and buy something yum for good! VicIDS will be selling delicious baking for $2.25 (one large or two small items) - the

HumanFM presents: a "Do Something Event."

Come meet the Finance minister Bill English - TONIGHT!

15% of our population are Maori, 50% of our

The Business and Investment Club (BIC)

buddies too! Please check our FB for the

prisoners are Maori.

invites you to VIP guest speaker event

final location. If you'd like to contribute some

Why is this? What are people doing about it?

"Managing $250 billion portfolio" with the

baking (yay!), please drop it off to the stall

What more can be done?

Finance Minister Bill English. Bill has found

between 10.45-11.30am :)

Come along to hear from our discussion

one evening in his very busy schedule

panel of speakers from Rethinking Crime

to come talk to us about his daily job of

and Punishment, JustSpeak, Arohata and

managing the state assets, businesses and

the Department of Corrections. There will be

investments worth of $250 billion NZ dollars.

music, art, poetry and food.

Come and find out what is it like to run the

Wednesday 25th September from 7pm at

finance for the country, what prior business/

Ramsey House, 8 Kelburn Parade. Listen,

finance experience has he had, how can

learn, engage.

students and graduates follow his success,

extreme poverty line. Funds raised will go to the Live Below the Line Campaign. There will be treats for our gluten-free and vegan

what is important to study in finance, where

Vic Uni Film Society In I Saw The Devil (South Korea, 2010), a serial killer takes the life of the fiance of elite special agent Soo-hyun. Obsessed with revenge, Soo-hyun decides to track down the murderer, even if doing so means becoming a

54

can students get their first finance experience and so much more. This is the one guest speaker event you must not miss! CareerHub RSVP link careerhub.vuw.ac.nz/ViewEvent. chpx?id=147874. The event takes place on Monday 23rd September at 4.30pm @ SU218 (Student union building, Kelburn campus).

Are you fit for success?

Are you looking for a simple, affordable and safe, diet and exercise plan you can do at home with little or no equipment and easily incorporate into your daily routine?

Then try www.fit4success.co.nz which is both a blog and a motivational website that you can use for free to help get you into shape for YOUR future SUCCESS! Our university lives are very busy and the Plan, exercise, recipes and tips are easy but will keep energy levels up, brain functioning and still be budget friendly!

Have a look today, all feedback welcome!!

>>> salient.org.nz



t en r .nz ud o g st FM r ur .3 t.o yo 88 ien to n! l in atio sa ne st at Tu dio line ra on am re st

VBC

Missed out on getting a show? Spaces ARE NOW AVALIABLE; get in touch with MUSICDIRECTOR.vbc@GMAIL.COM

7–10am

mon

tues

w/

10–noon 12–2pm

Fill Me!

2–4pm

Dead Man Mondays Casey &Joss

4–7pm

Fill Me!

Parallels w/ Cookie

7–9pm

Tbodega he Mixtape w/ Sam & guests

GURL TALK w/ Chloe, Sophie and Elise

Chloe

Dead Boys' Pirate Radio w/ Will

Dead Air George Armstrong

Fill Me!

w/

Fill Me!

INFIDEL CASTRO w/ Philip McSweeney

241 Hugo

Grace Ace fills the Space

Fill Me!

fri

sat

sun

Fill Me!

Fill Me!

Raw Politik Emanuel & Neas

Fill Me!

Wake N' Bake w/ Pearce

Domo Arigato Mr Robato

Fill Me!

Fill Me!

Children's Corner

Space Jams w/ Kosmo Naut & Te Art of Fire

Northbound Alex, Michael & Nick

CATS w/ Keszia Tyler

DC Current w/ Duncan & Cam

Jiving James & Grooving Greg

Fill Me!

thurs

Amber, Scott & Matt, Keegan & Rohan music, news, interviews & giveaways

9–late

The Flight Coffee VBC Breakfast Show

weds

Fill Me!

w/

w/

onramp

Droogs Maddie

Thursday Drive with A.D.D.

gang

Fill Me!

Fill Me!

Superfluous Superheroes tim & alex

The B-Side Revolution w/ Richard

The Sunday Roast w/ Ray & Jim

PRE-LOAD w/ Matt &

Fill Me!

Fill Me!

sat 28

w/

Signal Sounds w/ Holly, Stumble, Goosehead & Vic Seratonin 7pm - Late

Sunday Fly Lorenzo &

w/

friends

GIG GUIDE mon 23

tues 24

weds 25

thurs 26

fri 27

Happy Monday!

2 for 1 Pizzas/ Wgtn Poker Hall Night

Pool Comp $50 Prize

2 4 1 Cocktails

Beat Mob DJing/ VUWSA'a Faculty Games

The Jerks & Bad Edison

Doprah & Love You Too

Lost Rockets & Zaf

Hollywoodfun Downstairs

Femme

Mighty Quiz 6:30pm

mighty mighty

Wednesday night free show!

san francisco bathhouse

bodega meow cafe

Horizon 9

Clap Clap Riot

Beach Fossils (USA)

The Duke Wgtn Big Band

single release tour

Latin Club 8:30pm (free!)

The JAM (free!)

concert

salient.org.nz <<<

The Wgtn City Shake-'Em-On Downers

Good Shit 2013

Mark McGuire/ Orchestra of Spheres/more

puppies the southern cross

Martin Curtis in

Jam City (Night Slugs)

Lisa Crawley All in my Head Album release tour

55

VIC MAYORAL DEBATE

1PM •WEDNESDAY 25th SEP • THE HUB

Come watch the Mayoral hopefuls battle it out on housing, transport, and grad opportunities.

ASK•HEAR•VOTE