Honi Soit - Week 10, Semester 1, 2012

HONISOIT

20 12

Week Ten May 16

Staff Cuts: Shit. Just. Got. Real.

CAMPUS

4

Scott Dooley talks radio, comedy and Charlie Sheen

Smash the rich: the Cultural Revolution 46 years on

PROFILE

FEATURE

13

14

Contents THIS WEEK

12 Taboo 13 Profile

Ludwig Schmidt watches a bunch of porn

Scott Dooley is still hip with kids, writes Jack Gow

3 Spam

13

Honi learns to never bring up religion at the dinner table

4 Campus News

The Vice-Chancellor Dr Michael Spence responds to the staff cuts protest, and Michael Koziol reports on NUS drama

8 9 News Review

Campus Politics

The University’s warring political factions Game of Thrones style!

From Nazis in Europe to gays in Newcastle, Lucia Osborne-Crowley, Matt Endacott, and Patrick Morrow report

14 Feature

Ain’t no party like a Chinese Communist Party! On the 46th anniversary of China’s Cultural Revolution, Flynn Murphy hands our hacks a cheat sheet

16 Third Drawer

Ben Brooks names his Top 5 inappropriate military operation code names

18 Culture Vulture 20 Tech & Online

Justin Pen and Andrew Passarello look on as Google gets taken to court

Action-Reaction Felicity Nelson outs the biggest hoaxes in scientific history

Winter is coming...

QRReader App is free

10 Op-Shop

for iPhone

Love H at i t? e i t? hon isoi t20 12 @gm

Attacks on religious methodology draw the ire of William Haines

Planner WED Screening: An American in Paris 6pm, EVENT Cinemas, Bondi Junction, $28

Inspired by George Gershwin’s composition of the same name, this 1951 classic features Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron. A must for musical fans and film buffs.

O P i cukr

SUDS Presents: Proof.

7pm, The Cellar Theatre, $5, $4, $3, $2

Come along to the opening night of Proof; a close examination of human vulnerability; that which we find seemingly imposed upon us, and that which manifests itself when we choose to open and share ourselves with others.

Onegin 1:30pm or 7:30pm, Sydney Opera House, $33-$164

With soaring music by Tchaikovsky, sumptuous costumes by Jürgen Rose (including Tatiana’s much-coveted red ball dress), and two famous pas de deux, this ballet classic will linger with you long after the curtain falls. (Honi Soit Wk8 Profile)

Braindance 2012 8pm-Late, Marrickville, $10 Best in underground electronic music. Email michaelberkley@live. com for more info.

2

a il . c

om

honi soit

Lecture Notes Sandstone Report

Editor in Chief: Jack Gow Editors: James Alexander, Hannah Bruce, Bebe D’Souza, Paul Ellis, Michael Koziol, James O’Doherty, Rosie MarksSmith, Kira Spucys-Tahar, Richard Withers, Connie Ye Reporters: Gareth Austin, Ben Brooks, Adam Chalmers, Fabian Di Lizia, Felix Donovan, William Haines, Cale Hubble, Joseph Istiphan, Madeleine King, Josh Krook, Patrick Morrow, Felicity Nelson, Rob North, Sean O’Grady, Justin Pen, Angus Reoch, Hannah Ryan, Miranda Smith

Crossword: Eric Shi and Dom Campbell Cover: Jack Gow Advertising: Amanda LeMay and Rebecca Murr publications.manager@src.usyd.edu.au Disclaimer: Honi Soit is published by the Students’ Representative Council, University of Sydney, Level 1 Wentworth Building, City Road, University of Sydney, NSW, 2006. The SRC’s operation costs, space and administrative support are financed by the University of Sydney. The editors of Honi Soit and the SRC acknowledge the traditional owners of this land, the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. Honi Soit is written, printed, and distributed on Aboriginal land. Honi Soit is printed under the auspices of the SRC’s directors of student publications: Rafi Alam, Peta Borella, Michael de Waal, Eleanor Gordon-Smith, Jeremy Leith, Leo Nelson, Astha Rajvanshi and Max Schintler. All expressions are published on the basis that they are not to be regarded as the opinions of the SRC unless specifically stated. The Council accepts no responsibility for the accuracy of any of the opinions or information contained within this newspaper, nor does it endorse any of the advertisements and insertions. Printed by MPD, Unit E1 46-62 Maddox St. Alexandria NSW 2015.

Honi’s Guide to what’s on THU

FRI

Commerce Revue Auditions 2pm, Manning Meeting Room 1

Scandinavian Appreciation Society Launch

The auditions will not be too stressful, you might need to sing a tune, dance around and give a skit or two a go, depending on what you can do. Check out the Facebook page for audition dates and email comrevue@gmail.com to make a booking.

May 18 will see the Scandinavian Appreciation Society Launch, including general elections and completing all the official stuff, as well as enjoying fine Scandinavian treats (there may be Redkorderlig...)!

Law Revue Auditions 6pm, Law School Annex Every spot in the cast, crew and band is up for grabs. In the audition, you’ll be expected to do a short sketch and whatever else you like, and you’ll also be expected to do a short group dance that you’ll be taught. We encourage everyone to come.

Seriously we don’t have high standards - you should see our girlfriends and boyfriends. They have no alibis.

SU N

SAT

SRC Pages

Contributors: James Colley, Matt Endacott, Tom HarrisBrassil, Dominic McNeil, Flynn Murphy, Lucia OsborneCrowley, Andrew Passarello, Andrew Potter, Ludwig Schmidt, Rebecca Simpson, Dr. Michael Spence

Bebe D’Souza investigates the intriguing world of Boylesque

21

22 25 26

5:30pm, Badham Room, Holme Building, $2

Building Bridges Festival feat. The Herd 6pm, The Standard, $20 + bf The Refugee Action Coalition presents an evening of music to support refugee rights and end mandatory detention. Featured throughout the night will be some of Australia’s top musical acts including The Herd, Watussi, Dog Trumpet and ROSiE.

MO

Inaugural Toxteth Burger Challenge Lunch, Toxteth Hotel, $20 A 1KG beef burger and fries - If you finish it within 30 minutes, you also get: Respect! Your polaroid on the Wall o’ Fame. A terrible T-shirt.

A $30 bar voucher. Do it!

Sydney Writers’ Festival Various, Various, FREE - $85 Today is the very last day of the Sydney Writers’ Festival, so make sure you don’t miss out. With a range of events to suit any budget or taste there is no excuse.

@honi_soit

N

Sydney Ideas- Recent Developments in China’s Civil Society Mon, 2:30pm, Law School Foyer, FREE Prof. Yu details the categorisation, characteristics, progress and limitations as well as implications of civil society in China.

Sydney Ideas - Should the Government Decriminalise Drugs?

Mon, 6pm, Law School Foyer, FREE A public forum that considers the very complex question, should the government decriminalise drugs? Feat. David Marr, Senior Writer at SMH and Sydney Uni’s own Vivienne Moxham-Hall

Spam LETTERS

Moral cowardice among the misfits

Adam Foda Intl & Global Studies Secretary, Sydney University Conservative Club Dear Honi, It absolutely disgusting that students who attend this university think that it is acceptable to partake in violent protesting.

The mainstream student body of this university have had enough of the revolting tactics of extreme radical left who resemble nothing more than a brigade of misfits out of a bygone Soviet era.

I understand that the majority of protesters did not act in a violent manner, but this does not excuse their offensive and rowdy behavior that was highly disruptive for students in class. For those of the ‘fuck the police’ mentality who could not control their animalistic urges to lash out in fury, a female police officer now has a fractured arm. Happy now? You’re [sic] actions represent nothing short of moral cowardice.

I praise the actions of the NSW Police Force for doing their job and keeping order as best they could to make our wonderful university a safe environment. Any student who partakes in protests that are inheritantly [sic] violent should be immediately expelled from the University of Sydney.

The way the cookie crumbles...

Daniel Nour MECO IV Dear Honi, Last week, Muslims and Christians and two Jews came together to shout “cookie?” from a stall outside Manning and to continue in a noble tradition: religious people pissing everyone off. Chancellor Marie Bashir baked the cookies.

Yes, this event brought people together, however, the cookies sucked.

The taste, a delightful combination of salt and evil, were complimented by the subtle and delicate texture: crappy.

These biscuits for the homeless made for a ‘tasty’ start to the interfaith event calendar.

Though entitled to cookies, and even though the cookies complied with kosher and halal standards, most students graciously turned down the offer, placing their spare change in the collection plate. “Mmm tasty”, said some, then, they conspicuously spat into a tissue.

You have many talents Mrs Bashir, you received the Grand Cordon of the National Order of the Cedar from the Lebanese President. You have a Medicine degree. You’re erudite and you’re still pretty hot. You have ‘cooking talents’ too. The same way there is ‘peace’ in the Middle East.

God Bless you. Support interfaith week, the first week of September.

ANZAC Day antics gone awry Jeff Lee MA Hons (UNSW 1987) Dear Honi, As a former student myself, indeed organiser of O-Week and Foundation Day at UNSW back in the mid 1970s, I am not averse to the odd student ‘prank’. But there was nothing ‘Ginger Mick’ or ‘Rocks Push’ about the low antics of certain St Paul’s College boys on Anzac Day. As they emerged in their tweed jackets en masse from the Hilton Hotel after a hard day’s pub crawl around The Rocks, four of them jumped in my taxi and yelled “Nags Head Hotel” as they verbally sexually abused women out the window as the cab went down George Street.

Three of the four did ‘a runner’ on arrival. Fortunately the remaining student had enough maturity to pay the $10 fare. Twenty minutes later I get a phone call from one of the other three saying he left his phone in the back seat.

He offered me $50 to return it. Then he said “how much do you want?”. Two of the culprits were there when I returned in the taxi to the pub at considerable downtime to myself. One grabbed his phone then reneged on payment, grabbing the $20 in his hand back and bolting up a dark laneway behind the pub.

These animals show total disrespect for the meaning of Anzac Day! Just another pub crawl indeed! My father was a veteran of the war against the Japanese and fought in Papua! For financial reasons I have to work on Anzac Day. I don’t expect the privileged brats of Paul’s College to trample on the memory of my father. What course are these juvenile worms enrolled in? Law? Medicine? Heaven help us if robbing taxi drivers demonstrates the ethical values they are taking into their careers?

In defence of rational religion William Allington Arts III

Whilst reading Felicity Nelson’s article on why religion and reason don’t mix (“Only the truth will set you free”, May 2), I was quite disappointed by the enormous generalisations she made about the role of religion in education.

Monotheistic religion has been one of the most important innovators in education in human history. The very nature of monotheism provides fertile ground for reasonable scholarship, as it views the world being created by a God of order, and hence follows similar laws of order.

The rise and spread of Islam turned the Middle East into the cultural, scientific and education powerhouse of the world. This was when a still largely pagan Europe was trudging through the ‘Dark Ages’.

However, once the Christianisation of Europe came about in 1000AD,

EDITORIAL universities started popping up everywhere, and the region soon exploded into the Renaissance. The boom in European literacy following the invention of the printing press was due to a desire to read the Bible. Jewish civilisation, which is my major, has always had a reputation of high standards of literacy and education. This would have been impossible without it’s strong basis in religious texts.

Nelson also makes errors regarding religious responses to scientific advances. The Church had no problem with Galileo until he acted like a colossal dickhead to anyone who didn’t completely agree with him, even publicly calling the Pope a simpleton because the Pope wanted his own view treated respectfully. The Church’s geo-centricism wasn’t even based off the Bible, but rather off Aristotle. The Catholic Church never officially denounced evolution, but has repeatedly denounced creationism as ridiculous.

I agreed with Nelson’s points about the problems with religion in America, but she should refrain from condemning the whole institution before properly examining the historical record.

You gotta have faith?

Andrew Irwin Master of Teaching I

B

y the time this edition of Honi Soit goes to print, the Union Board elections will be in full swing.

For those of you experiencing this for the first time, or simply unlucky enough to have been caught unawares, prepare yourselves for the onslaught.

They are coming for you and they are super-keen. No amount of apathy, no amount of indifference, nothing short of actual violence will stop them. If you thought a zombie apocalypse would be unrelenting, try adding meaningless buzz words, technicolour t-shirts, and competitive spirit!

Impending doom aside, the Union is the life-blood of this university and the USU elections are important. It’s easy to regard them as vacuous popularity contests based on false promises and hidden resources, because in many ways they are. Which is why it’s all the more important to take an active interest in the campaign so as to ensure that when it comes time to choose, you will be well informed and choose the right candidate from the field of hopefuls.

As Jonathan Swift said: “when a true genius appears… you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” Ignoring Swift’s iconoclastic sexism, the point is still valid. This is why Honi Soit has striven, and will continue to strive, to provide you with the most comprehensive election analysis possible, so that come Election Day you can make the right choice for you.

Jack Gow

Dear Christians on campus, Get your religion out of my face.

Please. I don’t care what you believe in and I don’t want to see your beliefs arrogantly plastered all over a campus in which we share.

You believe you’re trying to save me and I believe you’re fools, trying to cage me and trying to use me, but I don’t tell you that. I leave you alone.

I don’t regularly goad you with free treats and then attempt to push my own personal beliefs or dogma onto you.

Like taking candy from strangers, I refuse. I don’t disrespect the multitude of other, equally valid religions that are present in our wonderfully multicultural community.

I don’t hate you for having unproven beliefs which to me, make about as much sense as the gingerbread man, but I also don’t wish for your eternal damnation in a fictitious realm of suffering. The Lord Lives on Campus.

Yeah, right. He’s your Lord, not mine, and I believe he lives in your head. I believe in freewill and independent thought, free of dogma. I believe in asking questions, and in the thrill of searching for answers unknown. And I believe, that if I engaged regularly in the cheap, in-your-face tactics you do, to push my own beliefs or dogma, that you’d be, if you’ll excuse the expression, mad as hell.

I’ve heard all of your arguments before and I’ve made my decision. Come back to me when you have something new and if your Lord does rise from the dead like a ghost in the night, and if he proclaims himself as mine, then sure, let me know. I’d be interested to see if you got the drawings right.

facebook.com/honisoitsydney

A Manichean Murdoch defence Eric Blair Arts I

Someone issue a fatwa on Michael Koziol, for, to him, it would be the ultimate vindication.

In a pronounced but not particularly well-placed mimicry of Christopher Hitchens, Koziol appropriates the polemicists’ famous ‘everything I love versus everything I hate’ dichotomy.

Hitchens often used it to describe the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa on Salman Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses – a strike against literature and free expression by the forces of medieval, brutish Islamic fundamentalism – which was a catalyst for the writer in his shift from British Trotskyism to American neo-conservatism.

Koziol uses those same Manichean terms to defend Murdoch (whose papers couldn’t be more different to Rushdie’s books) against the Leveson Inquiry (which, let’s face it, is not Iran’s Supreme Ruler). That smacked not only of reverence gone too far, but also of mendacious warnings of the Orwellian dangers of media regulation bodies.

Hitchens’ fetish for controversy and his anarchic love of free expression – whatever the form – was always balanced by a recognition that the state was often a force for good, and that being right was more important than being audacious. Koziol would do well to read Hitch more closely.

honi soit

3

Campus News SPOTLIGHT: STAFF CUTS PROTESTS

The University responds

Vice Chancellor Dr Michael Spence and Director of Corporate Media Relations Andrew Potter justify the necessity of budget cuts Response to the Rally No one in the University objects to student activism and a willingness to get involved in the important decisions of University life. Rallies have long been an accepted part of the campus experience, and spirited debate and well reasoned arguments are to be applauded.

But as in all areas of society, there are accepted standards of behavior. Encouraging others to “siege” and “harass management” does nothing to foster sensible discussion. In recent weeks a small number of students have overstepped the line - deliberately disrupting University business and causing injury to staff and damage to property. Would any Honi reader put up with a bunch of people bursting into their house, biting and punching as they did so? This behaviour by a small group is simply unacceptable.

Many have questioned the police presence at last week’s rally. It is incorrect to say they were ‘invited’ by the University; the police decision to attend was entirely theirs. The EAG (Education Action Group) and others applied to the police for a Form 1 protest license to march on City Road and other public thoroughfares, saying they expected between 1500 and 3000 people to attend. This turned out an overestimation, but the police judged it necessary to attend. When a number of protesters jumped barricades and forced entry into the Darlington Centre, despite being told well in advance that the Senate was meeting elsewhere, the police saw this as deliberately provocative behavior and decided to remove them from the building. AP Background to the budget cuts There has been a lot of misinformation around the cuts, with the rhetoric of the protests often far from reality.

The facts are that we have had to make some serious budget decisions.

In the last three years we have experienced a slight increase in overall student numbers but a significant drop in international students. Over the same period, numbers of full time and casual academic staff have increased.

The serious shortfall in income from international student fees is likely to continue for the next few years, and the effects will linger beyond that. We can’t make it up by increasing places for local students because we get far less funding from Canberra for each local equivalent full-time student (EFTSL). Cuts simply have to be made and we are trimming all areas, salary and non-salary.

One myth is that Sydney is a rich University with a surplus in 2011. This is nonsense. The figure of $113m in our 2011 financial statements consists of research funds unspent at the end of the year, held for future research spending,

4

honi soit

Commonwealth grants for infrastructure, and tied donations from philanthropists. This was not profit to be used at our discretion or prop up salaries, but to be spent on specific purposes.

In all, we were left with $35 million as discretionary funds. We have to spend that amount maintaining and repairing our buildings just to meet our minimum occupational health and safety obligations.

The second myth is that these cuts are “arbitrary and retrospective”, based solely on research output. Nothing could be less true. Research output was the first, and most clearly metrics-based, input into the process. Because students do not formally evaluate individual teachers, we have no objective measure of teaching performance. Our researchintensive university is justified in expecting its academic staff, unless they have a teaching-focused role, to produce research publications, and the measure used was very close to the one agreed to by the Academic Board in 2005. Faculty and Central Assessment Panels spent hours discussing each case to ensure no one was identified for redundancy who had good reasons – from burdensome teaching or administrative loads to individual personal circumstances – for not having published enough.

The third myth is that we have placed buildings before people. If the building program was stopped or delayed for a few years, it would be a major disaster.

The buildings improve the working, researching and learning conditions of staff and students. The NTEU say we need only delay for 12 months, on the unlikely assumption that international student numbers return to their former level in that time. Additionally, we have accepted roughly $150 million from the Federal government to assist in completing these buildings. These major projects, in particular the Charles Perkins Centre and the Australian Institute for Nanoscience, are desperately needed because having not built modern lab facilities for nearly 40 years means we are falling behind other Go8 universities.

For decades we have put people before buildings, making our research facilities poor. We lack office space for our academic staff in faculties like Arts and Social Sciences, we lack decent and sufficient student accommodation, and our teaching facilities, as students keep telling us, are not always up to scratch.

If facilities are poor, good researchers will not want to come here. Local students will prefer other universities.

Students requiring accommodation, especially international ones, will choose universities that do provide housing.

We are already seeing evidence of these trends. Investment now is essential to reverse them, to provide better facilities for students and save future jobs. MS

Spence faces ‘crisis Cuts must be made Dominic McNeil sits on the right of legitimacy’ side of the Spence The Vice-Chancellor should cancel the cuts or step down, writes David Pink Photo credit: David Pink

SRC Vice-President Tom Raue is arrested outside the Darlington Centre.

This is our campus. Students and staff rely on this university for education and employment. We are the largest stakeholders of the university – we have a right to peacefully protest and have our voices heard here. There is nothing unreasonable about a sit-in. We do not deserve to be pushed around on our own campus. This is why the coercive actions of Sydney University management last Monday were so appalling.

No student engaged in violence - we know this because the whole thing was filmed and no-one has been charged with any offence. Police never tolerate violence against police - if there was any evidence of violence, charges would have been laid.

Violence against protestors could have been averted if (Vice-Chancellor) Michael Spence had not allowed cops on to campus - and had instead chosen to prioritise the safety of students and staff over preventing a group of students sitting in a building for a few hours.

The Vice-Chancellor is facing a crisis of legitimacy. Over five thousand students have signed a petition against the staff cuts. Four thousand students voted in the referendum two weeks ago, and only three per cent supported the cuts.

Thousands of students have marched and rallied, and hundreds have occupied. It is clear that mainstream student and staff opinion on this campus is aligned against the cuts.

It is a testament to the Vice-Chancellor’s struggles with legitimacy that he feels it is necessary to control his own students, on their own campus, using riot police. The Students’ Representative Council supports free expression through civil disobedience and direct action. We do not think this goes against the values of our university, but rather supports them.

The campaign against the University of Sydney staff cuts has taken on the all too familiar mire of party political tactics. It has sought to base its legitimacy on popular support rather than economically rationalised arguments. A popularity contest is not the appropriate method to determine how the University of Sydney finances should be orchestrated. The fact that campaigners have had to resort to a popular grassroots movement illuminates the logical vacuity of the protest.

‘Stop the Cuts’ disturbingly parallels Tony Abbott’s ‘Stop the Boats’. These three word slogans dangerously oversimplify the issue, and turn what is and should solely be a matter of bureaucracy into ideological drivel. They are short and mono-syllablic so people can chant them at protests. They are simplistic so people can fancifully join a cause without understanding the issue. They fit in a tweet and look good in capitals.

Economic realities are such that budget cuts have to be made. Dr Spence is simply doing that. Now there may be valid debate over the metric used to determine which staff will be cut, and maybe even debate over whether staff should be cut while building projects go ahead. But I have more faith in Spence, a prolific technocrat, than in the kind of people who show up at protests; the politically active (invariably extreme) students who have the arrogance to think that they know best how to run this university. That is not democracy, nor is it good administration.

Leaders should not bend to the transient whim of the masses, let alone the few. And indeed the protestors are the minority. While the protests are going on, the libraries are just as crowded, the class-sizes just as large, the coffee line just as long; because for every one protestor there are ten students getting on with their studies, and either passively or actively deferring such decisions to Dr Spence.

If protestors only realised that these are the people who will effect change in this world, by working hard to succeed within the system, they would put down their placards and pick up their textbooks. Maybe if they spent more time occupying their classrooms, they would understand this.

Photo: Michael Koziol

The National Tertiary Education Union has called for the VC to resign.

I agree: Spence should reverse the cuts or stand aside.

David Pink is one of the SRC Education Officers. He is a member of the Education Action Group, which organised last Monday’s rally.

@honi_soit

While staff and students march up City Road, inside Wentworth barely an eyebrow is raised

Campus News This is not police brutality

PERFORMANCE REVIEW

adam

chalmers

byline

Tom Harris-Brassil knows it when he sees it Sibella Matthews

Photo credit: David Pink

As disappointing as it is to hear about University of Sydney students being arrested during a protest against staff cuts, I am dismayed to see some of those involved invoking the spectre of ‘police brutality’ in the wake of police intervention at the student sit-in.

I should give full disclosure. I am against the staff cuts, I think the ViceChancellor should be hounded every day by a throng of angry staff and students until he resigns, and I think that the protests generated much needed nationwide publicity for the cause. SRC Education Officer David Pink deserves our thanks and congratulations for organising the Students’ Representative Council contingent within these protests; I am proud of his achievements.

However, video appearing on social media with titles such as ‘Shocking Police Brutality at USYD’ detract from the value of these protests. Privileged white kids being dragged off to a paddy wagon, where most spent 15 minutes sin-binned before being released without charge a few blocks away, is not brutality.

Police brutality occurs in Redfern every other night, but I suppose most University of Sydney students are well and truly on the train home by then. It happens in Glebe too, but you can’t see Derwent St from Badde Manors, so it’s probably hard to work out a meaningful baseline.

I organised high school contingents to anti-war protests in the early 2000s, was involved in protests against Voluntary Student Unionism in 2005/06, and observed similarly heated protests during APEC in 2007. At all of these protests, police handled protesters in ways much worse than at Usyd recently.

At the S11 Protests against meetings of the World Economic Forum in Melbourne in September 2000, pepper spray was used illegally, name tags were removed from uniforms so that identification of violent officers was impossible, sly punches were delivered to school kids’ abdomens, women were dragged by their hair, and video shows police striking protesters with batons and stomping on people who had already fallen to the ground. These are examples of police brutality.

T.J. Hickey was a victim of police brutality. The lawful removal of uncooperative students from the Senate meeting was not – regardless of what we might feel about the righteousness and value of their protest.

Adam Chalmers chased President (June 2010-June 2012) up your Union board 1. New food outlets; being directors to grill them the “strong negotiator” while on their election camhandling proposed takeover paign promises and how last year. they’ve fared since being 2. A free USU recreation library was too expensive; free elected on to board.

WiFi already provided.

The questions:

3. Laid aside many campaign promises - “sacrificing the 1. Which campaign promises pursuit of an election promise have you helped achieve? for bigger and more significant 2. What promises or plans have priorities”.

fallen through, and why?

3. What are you working on?

How are you going to do it?

4. “Watching Soul Express go crazy in Manning at the Welcome to Sydney Party. “

Zachary Thompson

Rhys Pogonoski

(June 2011-June 2013)

(June 2011-June 2013)

1. Improved food for Taste and Little Asia; renewed college agreement (collective achievements).

1. More spaces for performing arts, eg. new Studio B dance centre; kosher, halal and vegan food on campus; more transparent Board Blog.

Vice-President

2. Borrow-a-Bike plan fell through because finances and negotiation with the Uni made it “inappropriate.”

3. Redeveloping the USU’s buildings.

Honorary Treasurer

2. “Campus culture committee hasn’t gotten legs yet. But it’s a really viable idea.”

4. “Playing a role in the negotiations between the University and USU over the future of our commercial outlets.”

3. New transparent communications policy; need for “a better metric for ensuring each food venue we [control] on campus is better meeting needs of students”.

5. When the Uni emailed all students with their side of the story during last year - “it was like a slap in the face with a cold fish”.

4. Defending the USU during negotiations.

5. Lost opportunities for cooperation with the University, eg. Universal Access.

5. What are your most disappointing moments?

5. “Losing Ben (Tang) and Al(stair Stephenson) as fellow Board Directors. They were really inspiring to work with.”

Jacqui Munro Honorary Secretary

Mina Nada Board Director

Astha Rajvanshi Board Director

Brigid Dixon Board Director

(June 2011-June 2013)

(June 2011-June 2013)

(June 2011-June 2013)

(June 2011-June 2013)

1. “The International Student Magazine (Globe) has been a resounding success”; tweaking how inter-faculty clubs work.

1. Started the USU interfaith council.

1. Getting the USU a charity officer; helping to get Globe up and running.

1. (no response)

2. Social sport should have gone “through a grassroots initiative (like C&S) or through existing SUSF structure”.

3. Starting a student innovation competition, where students think of business initiatives for the USU and are rewarded for them.

4. What are your proudest moments?

3. Progress with the iPhone/ Android app - the USU will have its own tab in the official USYD app, to be out in semester two.

2. Nothing fell through, things have been “delayed”.

4. Convincing the Uni to back down on plans to take over the USU’s bars and cafes.

2. Wanted student-run volunteer study sessions, but faculties and their societies already ran something similar.

3. Redeveloping the USU’s buildings through student consultation.

4. Programs like Interfaith/ Charity/Orientation weeks.

2. The USU was already putting info screens in its buildings; and had already made Orion to streamline C&S before she started.

3. The C&S department’s working on a new online system already; constantly working on improving its food and catering options.

4. Watching this year’s International Women’s Day and Indigenous Festival.

5. Prudently avoided taking certain risky investments, which in hindsight would have paid off.

5. When a student told her they “weren’t enjoying their time at university, they didn’t know what the USU does and they didn’t feel confident to go to any events.”

James Flynn Board Director

Vivienne Moxham-Hall Board Director

Nai Brooks Board Director

Shane Treeves Board Director

(June 2010-June 2012)

(June 2010-June 2012)

(August 2011-June 2012)

(August 2011-June 2012)

1. Increased and protected C&S funding; set more rooms aside for C&S; got an interfaith council.

1. Improved organisation of faculty and associate sites; tweaked funding for social justice societies; pushed for healthier catering like Taste.

1. Had less time on board than the other directors, so most of her work is still in-progress.

1. Tweaks to the college contracts.

4. “A highlight was getting to host the USU’s Annual Dinner in 2011.”

5. “I don’t have as much time to attend all my favourite C&S events”.

2. Student choice in catering is an issue for Operations; supermarkets and chain stores uninterested in Access.

3. Restructure the way the Board’s governed – “it’s possible we’ll change how the exec is elected.”

2. Disappointed the Board didn’t choose to use Fair Trade coffee; a pay-by-installation Access program too difficult to run.

3. Moving the women’s room, which should be this month.

4. “Watching the interfaith program come to fruition.”

4. “Getting Union barbecues at the Conservatorium of Music.”

5. Loved chairing C&S - “disappointed when we moved that responsibility to the Honorary Secretary’s portfolio.”

5. Can’t say – it would break confidentiality agreements.

facebook.com/honisoitsydney

2. Late student nights at our bars – “some thought Beat the System Thursdays covered it.”

3. Redeveloping the USU’s buildings with student consultation; “helping restructure governance with Mina & Zac.” 4. “I’ve got momentum behind changes I want to make.”

5. Copping flack for running with clear political affiliations - “took a long time for some people to see me on my own merits. I think that some still haven’t.”

5. (no response)

2. International student travel concession turned out to be more a job for the SRC than the USU. 3. Working on the student innovation program with Mina.

4. “When the Uni backed down on their takeover of catering and beverages.”

5. “When we couldn’t use SSAF money to give all students Access cards.”

honi soit

5

Campus News HONILEAKS All your university gossip, rumours, allegations and revelations with Bebe D’Souza, Paul Ellis and Kira Spucys-Tahar

John offline An USU election talking point has been Board candidate John Harding-Easson’s four day suspension from social media campaigning. Mr Harding-Easson wrote an article which we published in the opinion section of our Week Seven edition. The article investigated universal access membership, a policy Mr Harding-Easson is running on.

While the article disclosed his status as a Board candidate, it constituted early physical campaigning and thus a breach of regulations. His social media hiatus ended last Sunday.

Tom Raue a P.O.W? USU candidate and SRC VicePresident Tom Raue was arrested last Monday after he was involved in protests against staff cuts. Mr Raue spent less than three hours at Newtown police station before being released without charge.

Campus culture conflict

not yet held a campaign launch party.

She did admit to having friends over to “another friend’s house… for the purposes of her campaign” and that alcohol was consumed there, but insisted it was in no way supplied. USU Returning Officer Penelope Crossley has been advising candidates to have their campaign launch parties at bars, so campaigners are forced to buy their own drinks.

Liberal with a capital ‘L’ USU candidate Nick Coffman has revealed that he has joined the Liberal Party of Australia in the “past few weeks” in the lead up to board elections. Mr Coffman’s decision to join was made following official endorsement from the University of Sydney Liberal Club. “The advice I was given was if you identify as a Liberal become a member... I do so I did,” Mr Coffman said.

“The Coff” first cab off the rank

Union Board candidate Hannah Morris has officially resigned from her position as Campus Culture Director for the USU in 2012. When Honi asked Ms Morris what informed her decision, she cited the conflict that would exist if she were elected Board Director as Campus Culture Director is appointed by the Union. Ms Morris believed that she had “more to offer” as a potential Board Director. ‘Campus Culture Director 2012’ has not been removed from Morris’ CV at the time of print.

There has been much speculation over the specificity of the Coffman campaign’s time-keeping devices. In the chalking wars that began amidst campaigning on Sunday evening, representatives from Honi watched as Nick Coffman and key campaigner Zac Thompson proceeded in plain sight of all other campaign teams by beginning to chalk ten minutes early at 11.50pm.

Why Coffman bothered in the first place, given the potential ramifications of such a regulation breach, is unclear.

So-supplied?

NLS divided by 3

Rumours have been circulating that Board candidate Sophie Stanton held an official campaign party at which she supplied free alcohol, potentially constituting a breach of campaign regulations. When asked by Honi, Ms Stanton explicitly stated she has

A major development in the Union Board elections has been the decision of the Labor left faction NLS to split their support three ways. A representative from the faction has been appointed to assist the campaigns of Sophie Stanton, John Harding-Easson, and Tom Raue.

These representatives are - respectively Annabel Osborn, SRC Women’s Officer; Max Kiefel, NLS State Convener; and David Pink, SRC Education Officer.

Many see these moves as an attempt

by NLS to gain support from the Greens and Labor Right groups when it comes to their position at the SRC elections.

Further speculation suggests the move is a test for certain members of the faction to decide a Presidential candidate for the elections. It is most unusual for the NLS caucus to back more than one candidate and means their support base is spread thin.

SUBSKI piste off Sydney Uni Sport and Fitness (SUSF) disaffiliated from Subski at their Annual General Meeting last Monday. Union Board candidate Sophie Stanton was involved in the negotiations in her capacity as President of SUBSKI. SUSF raised seven major points in relation to the disaffiliation including; “inappropriate photos on [the SUBSKI] website and Facebook page”, “not paying enough fees to SUSF”, “breakdown of communication channels with the university after SUBSKI students made a mess at one of the hotels on their trips” and “being more of a social club than a sporting club”. When asked whether or not Ms Stanton thought the decision was “fair” to SUBSKI she responded firmly that it was not. Ms Stanton said SUSF rejected an ammendment to “work with” Subski with a neutral mediator to come to “a more beneficial outcome for both parties”. Ms Stanton further believes that SUSF did not have the power to dissasfiliate an entire club as they only “implied” this in their constitution.

There is no explicit clause pertaining to the power to disaffiliate, however the organisation invoked a clause that the board can do “anything necessary to further the interests of SUSF”.

How ‘The Coff ’ went viral

Paul Ellis thinks he’s spotted one very tall poppy After two weeks of social media campaigning, Liberal and College candidate Nick Coffman is firm favourite to poll first in the 2012 USU elections. His campaign’s Facebook page has amassed an unprecedented 625 ‘Likes’ at the time of writing. His closest Facebook competitor, Hannah Morris, has 257.

To give this some context; the winning ticket in last year’s Honi election managed just over 400 ‘Likes’ at the end of a three-week campaign. This humble total was achieved with no less than ten individuals directly affected by the election’s outcome pestering everyone they knew to give the ultimate online endorsement, a ‘Like’.

So how did COFY2012 happen?

There are a few components at play.

Firstly, branding. ‘The Coff’ has used Baywatch superstar and cult figure David Hasslehoff as the centrepoint in his campaign. Hasslehoff’s broad likeability is demonstrated in numerous cameo appearances such as his shortlived stint on Celebrity Apprentice: Aus-

6

honi soit

tralia and in everything from Spongebob Squarepants to Dodgeball.

As a campaign brand it borders on self-deprecation. It distances Coffman from the many candidates past and present that have alienated students with their overt seriousness and less-thancharismatic personalities. In a university election not known for intense policy analysis (though Cameron Caccamo and Adam Chalmers have made inroads on this front), it’s a winning formula.

Secondly, memes. At the time of writing, ‘The Coff’ has released six memes (including one involving an edited version of the Week 7 Honi cover).

While seemingly an inconsequential number, their release aligns with the Golden Era of USYDMemeage, made by the ever-popular, moderately racist behemoth that is Sydney Uni Memes.

As such, CoffMemes™ has received heightened exposure. It is also worth noting that six memes is significantly more than all other candidates combined. Expect memes to be a staple

come the SRC and Honi elections next semester.

The final and arguably most important factor contributing to ‘The Coff’s social media success is his college backing. While they’re notoriously hard to mobilise, the amazing and dangerous thing about college students is that, with a few exceptions, they do what they’re told (on your knees fResher!).

The key is convincing them you’re legit about college and not just a hack in Formal Dinner clothing. For buff, attractive, white males like Coffman, that’s a piece of cake. The reward: free reign over 200 personal laptops and Facebook accounts, complete with individual contact lists and that crucial “invite all” button.

But Coffman has not confined himself to his peers at St Paul’s College, something abundantly clear to any college kid who stumbles across ‘The Coff’s Facebook page. It reads “proudly supported by Zac Thompson, India Edwards, Hugo Rourke, Clare Scnelle,

@honi_soit

Executive Director of Sydney Uni Sport and Fitness Robert Smithies said; “The SUSF General Committee, which is comprised of 2 representatives from every sports club within SUSF plus Management Committee reps, voted 3310 in favour of the disaffiliation of the Subski Club.” The vote took place after approximately 90 minutes of debate and questions from SUSF, Subski and other club reps. “The central arguments in favour of disaffiliation surrounded serious risk management, reputational and financial issues,” Mr Smithies said.

“The decision by the SUSF Management Committee to recommend disaffiliation took place after an internal SUSF review of Subski, the suspension of Subski by the SUSF Management Committee, meetings with Subski and written submissions from both parties.”

Missing: Debaterbase The Sydney University Debating community’s “weekly” newsletter Debaterbase has not been seen for almost three weeks. Members of the Debating Society have been dissatisfied with the lack of communication from Director of Debates Ed Miller. Trials for the Australasian Intervarsity Debating Championship take place this weekend.

Trial times, locations and the selection panel are alerted to members via Debaterbase. When we spoke to him, Ed Miller accounted for the absence of Debaterbase citing a lack of relevant information and conflict with his other job, where he had worked at least one “12-hour day” in the week prior. He told Honi to rest assured the newsletter would definitely be making a comeback soon. Debaters were frustrated by a lack of information in regards to the weekly regional seminars.

On Monday morning, after Honi’s questioning the previous evening, a copy of Debaterbase hit inboxes with an apology for the hiatus.

The meme generator has been a gift for amateur comedians everywhere. Honi does not endorse the use of its artwork as campaign material.

Faf Driscoll, Alice Bowman...” The list includes the Senior Students of Paul’s, Wesley, Women’s, and Sancta, as well as the Honorary Secretary of St Andrew’s and John’s boy-cum-USU-VicePresident Zac Thompson. A veritable ‘who’s who’ of college.

In short, every college base is covered, and by people who matter. For good measure ‘The Coff’ makes one non-college listing: Bull Editor Bronte Lambourne. With such a lead in the Facebook stakes, there’s every chance he will break 2009 USU Honorary Treasurer Doug Thompson’s record of 1.7 quotas come election day.

Paul Ellis is an Honi Soit Editor, and a member of the Australian Sex Party and The Greens. He is not supporting any candidate in the current USU elections.

Campus News A degree by any other name...

Students in several Arts degrees are being denied accreditation for their psychology major, reports Madeleine King

“Dear Cate, APAC [Australian Psychology Accreditation Council] sought legal advice on this matter.

APAC does not accredit a sequence of study (set of units) separately from the degree title in which the sequence is embedded. The Bachelor of Arts (Media and Communications) is not an APAC accredited degree.

Regards, Helena Gillies Manager, Accreditation Services The Australian Psychology Accreditation Council Ltd”

In less than 50 words, third year University of Sydney student Cate Knightly* found herself with a redundant psychology major and an early appraisal of her future: continue with her Media and Communications (MECO) degree, or switch to the APAC accredited Bachelor of Arts.

“I was led to believe that I could progress through a major within Media and Communications, as it was essentially an arts program, in order to obtain an accredited undergraduate psych major,” says Cate. “This could lead to an honours year [in psychology] and subsequent masters degree to reach full qualifications.”

Having been through open days and course advisers across her arts subjects, there’d been no mention of the incompatibility of the media degree with psychology. The idea of tacking on a graduate course in psychology, essentially a repeat of the undergraduate units already completed, is less than appealing to most students.

MECO students, and students in a number of other Arts degrees, are being denied the opportunity to obtain accredited undergraduate psychology majors. According to Professor David Livesey, Deputy Head of School in Psychology, it is a question of nomenclature, the terms or names applied to someone or something.

The Australian Psychology Accreditation Council (APAC) believes Bachelor of Arts (Media and Communications), Bachelor of Arts (Languages), or Bachelor of International Global Studies, just have far too many words or parentheses in their names to be accredited as degrees in which students can eventually become practicing psychologists.

Students undertaking these degree programmes find it hard to meet APAC’s rather vague guidelines: “undergraduate studies should lead to a generic degree

in psychology. Acceptable titles are: Bachelor of Science, Bachelor of Social Science, Bachelor of Psychological Science and Bachelor of Arts.”

all the accredited degrees in Australia, they really are sticking to these quite generic degree labels. So it could boil down to something as silly as the label.”

Professor Livesey does not agree with the process. “But that’s the way it is,” he says. The Psychology Department has taken the issue up with APAC in the past, when students enrolled in a Bachelor of Agricultural Economics and a Bachelor of International and Global Studies (BIGS) realised their misfortune towards the end of their degrees. According to APAC, the onus is on the university to apply for degree accreditation, and it is not the responsibility of the Council.

Despite Prof Livesey believing “we’ve done everything we can … in order to get the students to where they want to be”, too many students seem far from the imagined finishing points of their degrees. Sources within the Arts and Social Sciences faculty are aware of up to fifteen other students (not all of them in media) who have since encountered the problem.

An application for BIGS was formally submitted – for $1000.00 – and rejected. The name of the degree did not meet the Council’s requirements.

The Psychology Department has been unwilling to try its hand again with the insurmountable bureaucracy at APAC. Prof Livesey says they’ll try with MECO, and a number of other degrees, next year when the Council has their five-yearly re-accreditation. But he’s making no promises.

“I’m not confident that it’s going to be accredited, because of the nomenclature. Going through the list of

Steph Casey*, another media student, found herself in a similar position as she reached third year, having never been told certain degrees won’t cut it when pursuing a psychology major. “It’s very, very stupid,” she says.

“MECO has a higher entry ATAR than psychology…and I do the same subjects as people doing a psychology degree.”

For students like Cate and Steph, the only options are to continue with their current degree programme, or switch degrees, which may change their years of study. Whether they will find themselves with a viable career path in psychology will remain uncertain until at least next year. *Names have been changed

An unhappy union

The red carpet wasn’t rolled out in Queensland, reports Michael Koziol The National Union of Students (NUS) has been accused of displaying “complete antagonism and aggressive, intimidating behaviour” at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) campus earlier this month.

The President of the QUT Student Guild, Tasmin Trezise, says the NUS representatives visited the campus without seeking permission and when challenged, responded with rudeness, raised voices, and swearing.

When asked to leave by campus security, the NUS representatives – including its President, Donherra Walmsley, and Education Officer, Rosa Sottile – set up at a different QUT campus and were subsequently moved on again.

“It doesn’t matter who you are or who you think you are, there are procedures you have to go through,” Mr Trezise told Honi Soit. “I have multiple emails from student organisations all around saying [that] this has happened to them as well.”

The purpose of the NUS visit was to conduct a survey on educational quality, which asked students about their class sizes, the availability of their teachers, and their overall learning experience.

Ms Walmsley said it was essential NUS be present on campus to conduct such campaigns, even without the consent of that campus’ student reps.

“Where an organisation doesn’t participate in a campaign…it is NUS’ duty to conduct that campaign in accordance with the decisions of our deligates,” she said. The only exception would be if that campaign directly contradicted a

policy of the student organisation.

Mr Trezise said he would have been fine with NUS’ presence on campus if they had spoken with him beforehand.

But he also suspects there is a political motive behind their antagonism.

Queensland campuses are thought to be more conservative than their southern counterparts, and NUS is presently Labor-dominated.

“They make the assumption and that assumption breeds their arrogance and ignorance,” Mr Trezise said. “For them to say: we don’t care about this university because we think they’re part of the LNP – that’s disgusting.”

Mr Trezise is a member of the Liberal Party but said the Guild’s leadership team is apolitical. “Politics is what broke the organisation two or three years ago,” he said.

He believes NUS works more toward the personal and ideological goals of its office bearers than student welfare.

“Less than five per cent of their affiliation fees are spent on student campaigns,” he said. “Where’s this other money going? Feathering their own nests with travel expenses.”

The NUS annual budget collects $700,000 from its affiliated student organisations at universities around the country. Of that it spends roughly $33,000 – or just over five per cent – on campaigns, and approximately $330,000 on wages. QUT historically contributes $60,000 a year, and the University of Sydney $72,000.

Ms Walmsley said it was important for NUS to travel to campuses and en-

Phoebe Drake, David Pink, Donherra Walmsley, and Sam Farrell

sure campaigns were run successfully.

“Without a national office bearer traveling to campuses to provide support, those campaigns would not be being run,” she said. “We would just have posters and flyers and material sitting in student organisations’ offices around the country.”

Ms Walmsley admitted an argument ensued between her officers and Mr Trezise, but said the Guild did not have the authority to remove them from the campus. She said she tried to make amends with Mr Trezise on the day and offered to discuss possible avenues for future co-operation, but that those offers were refused.

Ms Walmsley also alleges that staff at the university bar were then instructed to refuse service to any person wearing an NUS t-shirt. The QUT Guild did not respond to this claim when questioned by Honi Soit.

Mr Trezise expressed dissatisfaction at the way NUS is being run, and said he would discuss with his colleagues the possibility of disaffiliating from the union.

“I think [Ms Walmsley] especially just treats it as a game, some kind of experiment and fame generator,” he said.

facebook.com/honisoitsydney

“NUS should work with the students they represent, not for their own political clout.”

Debate over NUS resurged at the University of Sydney’s SRC meeting on May 2, when General Secretary Tim Matthews proposed a motion which would require the Council, not just the Executive, to approve NUS accreditation fees. Mr Matthews said he and other independents held deep concerns over the financial mismanagement perceived to be taking place at the national organisational level of NUS. The move was defeated by Labor, who firmly support NUS affiliation and executive control. They felt it was an attempt by some councillors to move toward disaffiliation from the union.

Rhys Pognoski, a leader of the independents and an NUS National Executive, said there was a diversity of views within the independent councillors.

“Our councilors…didn’t like the budget, hadn’t seen a budget [and] some of them are really unsure about NUS and the value of [it] still,” he said.

Mr Pognoski said there was no need to ram through the accreditation fees, but remains committed to affiliation and a possible fee increase in the future.

honi soit

7

Campus Politics

There is a battle raging if you look close enough. Since the beginning of time forces have attempted to control the most important of political stepping stones - the University of Sydney. Welcome to the Game of Cronies.

Aka Solidarity Aka Left Action Aka Socialist Alliance • Protect the entire university by providing troops for initiatives such as the Education Action Group, who are behind the constant stream of Staff-Cuts rallies and protests • Not particulary interested in the contest for the throne • Left out in the cold by basically all of the groups below

Aka Grassroots • Realise there is an opportunity to profit upon current USyd political upheaval • Seeking a return to days when uni was run almost exclusively by progressive candidates (the nineties)

Aka The Liberals

Aka who is writing this

•Think they’ve got a winner (see page 7 re. ‘The Coff’)

• • • •

•There’s not much more to say... “Stop The Boats...of the Iron Isles!”?

Chatty Collectors of information Unclear endgame Run brothels

Aka NLS (Labor Left) • The force in USyd politics for over a decade • Power is declining • Signs of infighting (soft left vs. hard left)

Aka actual independents • RIP

Aka ‘Capital i’ Independents • Believe they have a valid claim to the throne • Duped by the SRC Open-Campus Policy which allowed ‘StandUp!’ to march in an army of non-USyd campaigners in the 2011 SRC elections •Positioning themselves for another attempted take-over

Aka Unity (Labor Right) • Former powerhouse • Hasn’t had representation on Union Board since 2009 • Desperately want to make a comeback

8

honi soit

@honi_soit

The editors of Honi Soit feel obliged to disclose that they too have played the Game of Cronies - aquiring their position through general election and preference deals with the following groups; ‘StandUp!’, ‘Shout!’ and the not pictured Liberal Warlord James McClean. This piece would not have otherwise been possible. We hope the groups and individuals portrayed receive this as it was meant to be; a bit of fun. With love, B.D. and P.E.

News Review WORLD NEWS

Success of Golden Dawn casts a dark shadow over Greek elections A record-breaking vote for the extreme-right Golden Dawn party marks a grave shift in the politics of Europe, writes Lucia Osborne-Crowley The results of Greece’s federal election last Sunday have given rise to grave concerns about the turbulent political future that awaits both Greece and the rest of the Eurozone. Seemingly torn between several extremes, the Greek people have found themselves facing a hung parliament, with centre right party New Democracy winning 18.9 per cent of the vote and 16.7 per cent going to radical left party Syrizia.

While this is a clear sign of desperate indecision within Greece in the face of continued economic uncertainty, more worrying still is the rise of Greece’s own neo-Nazi party, Golden Dawn. The party won seven per cent of the vote on Sunday’s election where in the previous election they had managed only 0.23 per cent. The party’s campaign focused on militant nationalism and extreme anti-immigration sentiment and was symbolised by a logo closely resembling the swastika. With policy proposals that include forcing immigrants into work camps and placing landmines along the Greek/Turkish border, the party will enter the Greek parliament with a total of twenty-one seats.

Golden Dawn’s leader, Nikoloas Michaloliakos, has promised to continue the struggle “for a Greece that will not be a social jungle because of the millions of illegal immigrants they brought into our homeland without asking us”.

The leader subsequently adopted a more sinister tone. “For those who betray this homeland, the time has come to fear… we are coming”, he threatened. He went on to warn press that “Greece is only the beginning”.

The unexpected success of such an extreme nationalist party, in a nation where no party of similar political persuasion has won seats in federal parliament since 1974, confirms the dangerously unstable political climate in which Greece now finds itself. Possibly, it signals the beginning of a qualitatively different political crisis altogether.

In the wake of unprecedented government debt and fierce ongoing debates surrounding austerity measures, it seems the Greek population have turned their backs on the major parties New Democracy and PASOK in an adamant expression of disillusionment, and consequently votes have bled to the extremes

Obama comes out in support of gay marriage Obama’s statement is more an alteration than an evolution, but it is welcome, writes Patrick Morrow 52 per cent approve, 48 per cent against. The most recent figures indicated that the opinion is finally held by the majority of Americans. It is accompanied by a long overdue announcement from the White House that the President approves of same-sex marriage; not domestic partnerships, nor civil unions, nor any other euphemism which perpetuates unequal treatment of a prominent and growing minority, but marriage.

On Thursday last, in an interview with ABC News, the leader of the free world declared that his evolving stance on same-sex marriage had settled, and in favour. It's about time. After a series of non-committal comments which have always implied approval, a certain response is welcome; that it is in the right direction is a rainbow-coloured blessing.

But it is not all good news. On the same day that the President gave his unprecedented endorsement of equal marriage, North Carolina, in a statewide referendum against equal marriage rights, decided – 61 to 39 - that their Constitution would be amended to only recognise heterosexual relationships.

It is worth noting that the few counties that voted against the amendment had populations of whom at least thirty percent bore tertiary qualifications.

While correlation does not equal causation, it seems that the last bastion for this brand of bigotry is not in reason, but in faith and tradition. Conservative sentiment was articulated by Fox News, which, in a typically understated and

subtle headline, accused the President of "waging a war against marriage".

Popular radio talk show host, Rush Limbaugh was similarly unimpressed with this perceived perversion of the sanctity of a sacred institution - his four ex-wives were unavailable for comment.

So, against all odds, a black, Christian President of the US, facing an imminent election at the hands of a population which is religiously predisposed to be hostile towards what he is advocating, has said what for so long was begging to be said. Meanwhile, in Australia: our atheist, female, Labor Prime Minister, in a religiously indifferent state, facing no such election, has said that she is steadfast in her position against it. Top effort, Julia. I am more than disappointed and know that I am not alone.

While Obama’s gesture is chiefly symbolic, it is an important one. He has finally officiated what a lot of his supporters have always presumed. For a long time, I feared that his various compromises and shortcomings had confined him to a single-term presidency.

But watching him roar whilst reading Where The Wild Things Are, slowjamming the news with Jimmy Fallon, and finally demonstrating some of the conviction which a campaign of hope and change promised, has rekindled confidence.

It is too easy to dismiss this move with cynicism. It may prove to be politically advantageous, and the majority of his voters may approve, but it is progress of a kind. Love prevails.

Leader of the far-right Golden Dawn party, Nikolaos Michaloliakos

that lie to either side of these parties.

This shift away from major parties and towards more extreme political parties that are normally marginalised by the two-party system may have unpredictable consequences for the future of Greece’s economy, the survival of which perpetually hangs in the balance.

This may certainly be seen as a defensive reaction against Greece’s austerity measures, and perhaps Europe’s other nations would be ill advised to pursue this same agenda considering the dis-

turbing consequences that have presented themselves in Greece. Or perhaps this is simply a case of an uncertain economic and political climate encouraging polarised political opinions. It remains to be seen whether Golden Dawn will manage to foster more support among the Greek population or gain any influence in Greek parliament, but it is suddenly all too certain that very grave and fundamental shifts are occurring in the political climates of Greece and the rest of the Eurozone.

Regional NSW just got gayer

Finally the queens of the desert have some reading material, writes Matt Endacott Regional New South Wales isn’t really the bastion of LGBTIQ rights and activism. There is a preconception that the closest it gets to tolerance is Mal and Delma from Brewarrina not changing the station when an episode of Will & Grace comes on after Dad’s Army (Mal uncomfortably returning to rubbing Goanna Oil into his joints, Delma to her paperback with one eye trained on the sitcom).

What’s okay in Darlinghurst remains in stark contrast to what is tolerated in other parts of the state. There’s no ‘Lick Her’ bottle shop in Cowra. You probably can’t buy a rainbow coloured flag in Muswellbrook. A quiff will get looks at a pub in Moree. It’s not necessarily homophobic, it’s just indicative of the slow changing ‘way of the land’.

For this reason, I have no doubt that the new regional ‘gay press’ have rustled a few feathers in recent months after setting up camp outside the Sydney basin. The winds of change have finally made it across the Hawkesbury and for the first time ever there is a healthy circulation of LGBTIQ news outside the Sydney metro area. At the forefront of this is The Den, Australia’s only independent queer regional magazine.

Although based in the Newcastle suburb of Cooks Hill, The Den celebrates being “queer in the country” by showcasing writers, designers, and musicians from towns and cities north of Sydney.

Flicking through the first two issues, it seems that there is a bit of overlap with the crowd from Renew Newcastle (an urban renewal project that connects artists with the owners of empty real estate in Newcastle’s East End).

facebook.com/honisoitsydney

Some of the city’s new quirky boutiques like The Woods are featured and are no doubt providing relevant points of purchase for the magazine. The Den’s editorial team has put together a very worthy publication and have garnered significant support within Newcastle and beyond. The Den encourages reader submissions on anything and everything to do with masculinity/femininity and has succeeded in producing a publication that is well and truly on par with what we have on offer here in the state capital.

In addition to The Den, a new website called GENoz (Gay Events Newcastle) is providing a new platform for the growth of LGBTIQ communities in the Hunter & the Central Coast. The site is very polished and has received an unprecedented amount of support from the Newcastle City Council. A community-led push to rebuild Newcastle’s reputation seems to be at the heart of both projects, representing a newfound determination to catch-up with the state capital.

As successful projects that benefit LGBTIQ communities in NSW, The Den and GENoz should be a cause for celebration in Sydney as well as Newcastle.

That we have a regional NSW council actively encouraging the growth of the LGBTIQ community is a good sign that change will continue to move across the state.

In the long run it is hoped that this proliferation of publications and websites will help LGBTIQ teenagers connect with each other outside Sydney and to feel like valued members of their communities back home.

honi soit

9

Op-Shop FEDERAL POLITICS

RELIGION

Science doesn’t have all the answers

The media has already decided the outcome of Australia’s next federal election, writes Angus Reoch in Bristol

In the May 2 edition of Honi Soit, reporter Felicity Nelson wrote that religion and reason don’t mix. This week, William Haines offers his thoughts in response

At the heart of Ms Nelson’s thesis that religion “oversteps its authority” lies the claim that if only religion presented a “simple hypothesis”, it would be “impossible to prove wrong”.

So, in other words, if religion were like science, it wouldn’t be good science.

The idea that a hypothesis ought to be falsifiable comes from Karl Popper, and it applies only to scientific thought.

Given her knowledge of this argument it is perhaps unfortunate for Ms Nelson’s case that she chose Marx as one of her “beacons of reason”, as he was Popper’s principle example of bad science.

So far as religion is concerned however, not being a science, these standards do not apply to it. Indeed religion would be overstepping its boundaries if it claimed they did, and anyone who claims they should is overstepping science’s boundaries.

That argument treats religion as if it claims to be a science of the soul; while such a thing would be wonderful indeed, religion ain’t it.

To discredit religion because it is not scientific does not, to me, show a broad or perceptive intellect. Rather it shows the same need to put complete confidence in a single mode of thought that atheists so disdain when that mode of thought happens to be a religious one.

Bertrand Russell was another one of Ms Nelson’s “beacons of reason”. One comment from the protégé who rendered Russell “unable to ever do serious philosophy again” may be helpful to hint at ways in which religious thought can be useful despite not being scientific.

The protégé I refer to is Ludwig Wittgenstein, and his words are these: “Christianity is not… a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For ‘consciousness of sin’ is a real event and so are despair and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things are simply describing what has happened to them, whatever

10

honi soit

gloss anybody may want to put on it.”

Religious language, most accurately conceived, is emotive not rational. To say that claiming the divine to be divine on account of it being divine is a circular and therefore invalid argument is like saying pain is painful on account of it being painful is also invalid. How else are we to talk of something as personal as pain? These comments are tautologies; in themselves not very useful but insightful into how religious language actually works. Divinity, love, vision: these should be conceived as emotivespiritual descriptive terms.

Of course, it would be an awful injustice to say that only flag-waving, pseudo-intellectual atheists misunderstand this; many religious persons do as well.

Organised religion tends to demand that we do certain things and think certain things, rather than inviting us to do them, no matter how bizarre they seem (crucially leaving room for faith).

It is this unfortunate trend that opens religion up to attack, but those attacks can only impact specific religions and specific religious practises, not religion per se. So long as they are misdirected, we start to discredit faith for the wrong reasons, and potentially cut ourselves off from the finest attempts mankind has made to communicate about our emotive-spiritual life.

Atheism is one thing, but Ms Nelson’s particular brand of it - The God Delusion brand - really ought not to be viewed as “the inevitable consequence of our freedom to choose”, because that implies that lazy thinking, imprecise argument, self-righteousness, and pugilism are consequences of free thought.

These traits are the consequences of jumping on ideological bandwagons, however, particularly the type which talk about “progress” towards “ultimate goals” of being “truly free”.

Given the tone of these sentiments I suspect that of Ms Nelson’s “beacons of reason”, the only one she took seriously, or perhaps the only one she understood, was Marx.

It’s the most common observation in Australia this year: Tony Abbott will be Prime Minister. I would like to repeat this: Australians are now convinced that Tony Abbott – Howard protégé, gaffeprone Health Minister, notable social conservative, and Australia’s leading public Catholic; yes Tony Abbott – is going to win the 2013 election and play a large role in determining our country’s future for what is likely to be at least half a decade.

with Abbott’s continual support for the compensation in Labor’s policies without the associated tax revenues, his fiscal credibility should surely be questionable. His boasts that he can reasonably cut $70 billion in the federal budget (20 per cent of the 2010-11 budget) are difficult to believe, at least without radically changing the nature of the Australian economy and civil service, not to mention undoubtedly decreasing GDP growth.

So how is it that most Australians are expecting an Abbott government? It’s consistently sold to us by the media, and not just by the usual Murdoch suspects. The Sydney Morning Herald runs daily stories on Gillard’s woes and its respectable commentators consistently refer to the looming Abbott Prime Ministership. Even premier programs such as 7.30 and Lateline sell this status quo. It is easy to see how the idea is fed, affirmed, and perpetuated within the public consciousness.

The highly erratic and contradictory nature of Abbott’s policies as a whole should throw the spanner in the works; surely this is the material with which a discerning media would run rampant - the fact that the leader of the Liberal Party, founded on the principle of non-interventionist government, is actually very enthusiastic when it comes to taxing and spending, just simply for causes that entrench the interests of the wealthy. Moreover, while it was reported at the time, the unaccounted for $11 billion within the Coalition’s 2010 budget is rarely mentioned in more than a footnote in most political stories. But the campaign of Australia’s anti-bignew-tax-on-everything man and his allegations of Labor’s fiscal incompetence has had extraordinary political success.

After all, in the media world, news is not just news, it has to be interesting, entertaining news; interviews are less about actually extracting information than catching a politician off-guard and getting that sound-bite which is going to have tomorrow’s newspapers talking.

The ABC, suspect to constant spurious claims of left-wing bias by conservative commentators, is particularly keen to play the ‘gotcha’ game. Unfortunately, this does not necessarily mean keeping politicians accountable; mostly it consists of repeating partisan party lines, touting them as actual questions rather than the empty rhetoric and straw men that define modern political debate.

The suspect nature of Abbott’s predicted ascendancy is quite evident when one actually takes an impartial view of the Labor government’s achievements and agenda, and compares it with the Coalition agenda, to the extent that one exists. Labor’s achievements have almost perfectly met the lite-Keynesian criteria: successful management of the Australian economy, imposition of a market-based climate change bill, attempting to balance a patchwork economy through a mining tax. Sure, many of Labor’s reforms, never particularly bold in the first place, have been heavily watered down by lobbyists and conservative pressure (here’s a hint guys: conservatives aren’t going to vote for you). But my point is to compare a comprehensible and internally logical set of policies with the messy, ad-hoc janitor’s closet of Coalition policy.

There are many offenders, but they each deserve a sentence. The abolition of the carbon tax, the ‘blood pledge’ of which is creating considerable business uncertainty. The repealing of the mining tax, when BHP recorded $31 billion in yearly profits and the mining sector is generating inflationary pressures. The paid parental leave scheme, which ironically imposes a new tax on business and pays richer parents better than poorer parents. The ‘direct action’ plan, which simply subsidises polluters in the hope they will become greener. Combined

@honi_soit

Understandably, Labor’s political ineptitude and continual scandals are a legitimate basis for its unpopularity and the corresponding public sense of scepticism. Under Rudd there was growing resentment and disappointment within the electorate, snowballing into the complete farce that is May 2012: Slippergate, Craig Thomson, leadership speculation, the ‘real Julia’, party room leaks: everything that culminated from Rudd’s deposition. Labor’s rock-bottom approval ratings are well deserved.

However, when compared with the rampant policy-on-the-run approach offered by the Coalition, it is easy to see that one party, while internally fractured, has a clear logical agenda and a successful legislative history, while the other is simply opportunistic and either deceitful or wildly optimistic. The endless repetition of the notion of Julia Gillard’s ‘broken promise’, almost two years on, could at least be tolerable if every time Tony Abbott, Joe Hockey, and Andrew Robb gave an interview they were repeatedly asked how they can possibly afford to implement their radically conservative agenda.

Unfortunately for the state of democracy in this country – at least the kind based on facts and reasoned debate – the degradation of impartial, evidencebased political reporting, replaced by horse-race sports commentary and commercial imperatives, which dumb down political discourse as much as is humanly possible, has led to a circumstance in which the majority of voters are expecting or are even happy with the prospect of electing an unendingly hypocritical Liberal party which would do little except repeal all legislative successes over the last several years and is more concerned about BHP’s profits than dealing with climate change. As far as con jobs go, it’s damn impressive.

Op-Shop FIGHT CLUB: OBAMA When Roosevelt won re-election in 1936, unemployment was at 16.9 per cent, in 1938 it was 19, and it wasn’t until WWII that it, or the Great Depression, improved.

Barack Obama lost 41 per cent of the vote in the West Virginia Democratic primary, to a federal inmate, who is gaoled in Texas. You didn’t know that did you? Alongside the noisy and capricious Republican primary contest is a quieter and more consensus-based nominating process. The media rises to attention whenever the standard bearers of the American right vote for someone promising to ‘make government so small it can fit in your bedroom’.

Yet the Democratic primaries are also in full swing, and no one has noticed.

Obama is the presumptive nominee, but should he be?

Felix Donovan argues for something he doesn’t actually believe Mario Como once said: “You campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose.” Obama’s campaign poetry was inspiring, but the deftness and ambiguity of it should have been a warning to the left, much of the centre, and a Nobel Prize Committee – a warning that perhaps he couldn’t fix Washington, Wall St, the environment, and war all at once. And he couldn’t.

His campaign staffers tell us that he should not bear the blame; that he has faced a recalcitrant congress and an inchoate Tea Party insurgency. While that’s true, it doesn’t excuse Obama’s strategy of staying above the fray, it makes it worse. Democratic lions of the past - Franklin Delano Roosevelt or Lyndon Johnson – used the Oval Office to influence, order, and castigate congress into passing legislation. Even so, Obama’s executive decrees – the decisions congress doesn’t get to obstruct - betray an unwillingness to be the transformative President his candidacy promised he would be.

Obama has been a ‘Warrior-in-Chief’,

Obama: best man for the job? waging covert wars in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, and authorising a threefold increase in American troops fighting in Afghanistan. His executive decrees are also notable for what is missing: creating a robust regulator of Wall St, aggressive efforts to reduce climate change, and a proper investigation of the brazen and perhaps criminal abuses of power that occurred in the lead-up to the Iraq War, and during the subsequent occupation of that country.

up on politics altogether. Those people exist in America – the overwhelmingly sympathetic response to the Occupy movement demonstrated that – they are just too often cast aside in favour of the shrill religious right, or the wealthy special interest groups. They need a candidate, and it is not Obama. They need change they can believe in, even after the poetry of the campaign has finished and the prose of governing begins.

A common refrain among Democrats is that Ronald Reagan would not be welcome in today’s Republican Party – it has moved too far to the right. Let’s be frank: Barack Obama would not be welcome in the Democratic Party of the 1950s, 60s and 70s – the party of Adlai Stevenson, the Kennedys, Johnson, George McGovern and Jimmy Carter; of bold legislation such as the Civil Rights Act, and daring social democratic projects like the Great Society. Obama is just not left enough.

Sean O’Grady begs that we assert common sense

Today’s peaceniks vote for Ron Paul, and this generation’s social democrats stay home on election day. Those who want reform on the environment, on Wall St, on guns and prisons, on drugs, on a bloated military – they’ve given

On the road to nowhere?

The Chinese miracle can’t last forever, writes Josh Krook

China is, by far, the most fascinating economy of the modern world. Not only has the Chinese government managed to wrestle more than 600 million people out of poverty over the past thirty years, but it has also managed to maintain an annual GDP growth of more than 7 per cent. Such figures are impressive when compared to the Western world.

But they are also founded on unsustainable principles. China is obsessed with growth: growth destroys poverty, growth increases the income of indi-

viduals, growth increases quality of life. Yet growth cannot be sustained indefinitely. And in China, the growth of real estate and property is starting to look like one of the biggest bubbles of all time.

Ten new cities are built every year in China. In the best case scenario the story goes as follows: the government goes into overdrive building new factories and housing, impoverished people from the country move in to work in the factories, and a new ‘city

It’s insane to challenge an incumbent president in a primary. It diverges from reality if the party nominates one. But that’s beside the point.

It’s telling that Felix cites democratic luminaries, of whom the most recent left office in 1969 (when the Cold War was still a thing), but makes no attempt to address the vast changes in foreign and domestic policy that have occurred since. There are, however, some interesting parallels. Obama’s administration was hamstrung at the outset by the Global Financial Crisis, the worst recession since the Great Depression. life’ eventuates. Capitalism comes alive, with clothes and food stores opening to accommodate the demand of factory workers. Factory workers attend night schools that increase their skills, effectively increasing their individual wealth and the country’s GDP by getting better jobs. Some of the money received by the workers gets sent back to their families in the countryside, who are slowly brought out of poverty and into a modicum of wealth. This is effectively what happened in Lishui, a city judged to be a ‘success story’ in China’s development.

However, such a perfect set of events is a rarity in China, where more often than not these promising new cities are left empty and deserted, hungry for new inhabitants who never arrive. Chenggong, Zheng Zhou, Ordos: all cities with millions of apartments between them, left abandoned and hauntingly silent.

There are enough empty apartments in China to house the entire homeless population, yet tragically they are all too expensive for such a result to eventuate. Eventually, the cost of apartments will plummet, for the supply will begin to far exceed demand. With prices so low, construction companies will make

facebook.com/honisoitsydney

As of April, unemployment in the US was at 8.1 per cent and the economy had grown by 3 and 2.2 per cent across the last two quarters respectively. First and foremost, Obama had to end a huge recession; that was his job, and he has done so. It would also be unwise to forget that while Johnson was building his great society, we were going “all the way with LBJ”, fighting a war that was more poorly justified than Iraq or Afghanistan, more expensive, and more inhumane. And Johnson started that one, he didn’t inherit it.

In 2008 America couldn’t vote out George W. Bush, so they did the next best thing, they voted against John McCain. They elected a Democrat who was probably a little too left-wing for them, so they gave congress to the Republicans two years later. Obama became a creature of the centre out of necessity.

There is a reason Executive powers are limited; you can’t rule by executive decree, you have to govern. The more he pisses off the right, the more it undermines his ability to do the things that matter. He repealed ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’, passed Universal Health Care, and now he’s the first American President to openly support gay marriage. The troops are out of Iraq, Afghanistan is winding down, and big cuts are being made in military expenditure.

He has had to pick his fights, but when he wins, he wins big. If Felix wants any progressive policies, nominate the only candidate that can win.

If not, prepare for Republican justices that might overturn Roe v Wade. The prose of change is slow, but it’s worth the wait.

Oh, and he slow-jammed the news. incredible losses selling their development projects; many will go bankrupt.

This obsession with growth is not a new phenomenon; countries have long valued the boost that infrastructure development gives to their GDP. The problem is that building cities is not a sustainable venture. Eventually space will run out, and the hundreds of thousands of people employed in construction industries will lose their jobs and livelihoods, and most likely, empty out even more apartments.

The matter is made worse in Beijing, where slum areas are being gentrified into skyscrapers. In the nation’s capital, prices are kept artificially high, meaning that people in slums are essentially tossed out on to the street.

Despite China’s obsessive compulsive yearning for growth and prosperity, construction seems to only bring destruction and inequity. If and when the property bubble bursts, and the dragon’s growth spurt ends, there are real dangers of a new protest movement, and an uprising of unparalleled proportions.

The Cultural Revolution, 46 years on

FEATURE: P14 honi soit

11

Taboo RELIGION

On Sunnis and Shi’ites

It’s always Sunni in Baghdad, except for when it’s Shi’ite, writes Cale Hubble the word sunnah – literally meaning a well-trodden road – referring to the commonly accepted practices of Islam as derived from the behaviour and teachings of the Prophet.

There are numerous theological differences between the sects today. For example, Sunnis believe that imams are merely human, and thus they continue to lead Sunni Muslims in prayer worldwide; while Shi’ites believe the line of imams, as infallible spiritual exemplars, paused in the ninth century when the current imam – the Mahdi – disappeared. For all Muslims, the Mahdi is a messianic figure who will return (Shi’a) or come for the first time (Sunni) with Christ at the end of time.

If there is anything we can learn from the history of religions, it is the truth behind Freud’s notion of the ‘narcissism of small differences.’

From Arius being exiled and (perhaps) poisoned in the fourth century for suggesting that the Son of God did not exist before Jesus’ birth, to the ‘Great Schism’ between the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches over such things as a single word in the Nicene Creed and the use of leavened versus unleavened bread, we see this dogmatic obsession with small differences playing out in the Christian tradition all the time. In Islam, meanwhile, it is most clearly evident in the SunniShi’a divide.

I do not mean to belittle the importance that this has in the lives of individuals, communities and countries worldwide. Obviously, what seem like petty quibbles to outsiders are in fact deeply meaningful issues, the conclusions of which having broad and significant ramifications. And once separated, communities continue to evolve and develop in their own ways, with many more differences coming to join the original one over time.

The root of the Sunni-Shi’ite problem is basically a leadership challenge. The Prophet Muhammad was more than just a prophet: he was also a political and military leader, and when he died in 632 CE, he left behind a fledgling Islamic state. Although he was pretty

clear on the fact that he was the last prophet (although the Baha’is still put this to one side), there obviously needed to be a political successor, and unfortunately Muhammad was not 100 per cent clear on that point. Most people in the community saw the question as entirely political, and advocated for Abu Bakr, a close companion to the Prophet and father of his favourite wife Aisha, to take the lead. Others thought that the Prophet had appointed his son-in-law and cousin, Ali, as sole interpreter of Islam, and thus political leader as well. Both sides had evidence for these claims, however it came down (as ever in these matters) to a numbers game, and Abu Bakr became the ruler or Caliph.

Ali did eventually go on to become the fourth Caliph, however he was later assassinated while praying – by members of a third group opposing all potential Caliphs on the basis of a Qur’anic verse stating that only Allah can be the decider – and leadership returned to the followers of Abu Bakr.

Discontent among the Shi’at Ali (the Party of Ali) continued in subsequent centuries, and as the regions of the Middle East, Asia and Europe under Islamic rule grew and eventually fragmented, certain areas came to be ruled by these ‘Shi’ites.’ The vast majority of Muslims continued to be followers of Abu Bakr, and came to be known as ‘Sunnis.’ The name is derived from

Geographically, Shi’ite majorities exist in Iran, Iraq, Azerbaijan, and Bahrain, however significant populations also reside in Pakistan, India and Turkey. Sunnis form the majority in all other Muslim countries and constitute approximately 80-90 per cent of the world’s Muslim population. Tensions between Sunnis and Shi’ites, along with other sects and religions, have taken on political meanings across the Islamic world, interacting with local demographics and politics in various ways. Bashar al-Assad, for example, is a Shi’ite, ruling a Syrian populace that is 74 per cent Sunni, and explicitly religious Sunni organisations have been among those involved in the opposition to his regime.

If you want more information on Sunnis and Shi’ites in the modern world, the relevant campus society is the Sydney University Muslim Students Association (http://www.sumsa.org.au/).

Cale Hubble is on Twitter:

@calehubble

ROAD TEST: porn sites Ludwig Schmidt is rubbing one out right now

5/10 If you’re going to get your fix online, you could do worse than YouPorn. Unlike the two sites below, it’s essentially democratic: i.e. it features uploads from the everyman, including many that fall under the blanket term ‘amateur’, which are of course inherently sexier than the many big budget offerings. That said, YouPorn can hardly be called progressive. Packaging-wise it’s grossly heteronormative and there’s really very little that will hit the switch for the more open-minded and/or sex-positive types.

2/10 PornHub is really shit. It’s dominated by a genre of porn that is cliched and over-produced. However, if your thing is women being demeaned on camera then you’re going to love it. But lets be honest, those people don’t need to be introduced to this site. The reason it gets any points at all is because its slogan, above, makes the positive step of recognising that some women also look at porn.

0/10 There is nothing here that you can’t find on the above two sites. Furthermore, the image thumbnails are in high resolution, as are most of RedTube’s actual clips, meaning the misogyny they portray is even more visible. Given that RedTube has no positive slogan ala PornHub, it scores zero.

One should not come to the conclusion from this analysis that there is no porn worth viewing. There is. So-called “female friendly” porn represents

HORNI SOIT Lesley was a female-identifying Arts student at Sydney University. She sure was horny, by which is meant that she was desirous of intercourse. And not just conversation intercourse, sexual intercourse. She’d just downed a burger at Manning, and they always made her feel a little nauseous but also moist.

Luckily, she knew just the male-identifying student to ‘scratch her itch’ (it’s a euphemism for sex). His name was Robbo. Very carefully not discriminating against Engineering students by claiming they all share certain idiosyn-

12

honi soit

crasies, the author will note that he was hairy, oafish, and his breath always smelt of VB, and also that he studied Engineering. He definitely didn’t know what oafish meant. For complicated reasons relating to an inferiority complex and an experience with a charmingly tipsy department store Santa early in her youth, she liked these things about him.

She cornered him in the Isabel Fidler Room. Although she was vertically challenged, she was horizontally welldeveloped (she consumed Manning

burgers every other day), and even if he’d wanted to, he wouldn’t have been able to escape. Just to be clear, though, the sex that follows is entirely consensual and not at all rapey. Consent is important.

a barren old maid, but he knew better than to say that to her face. He was scared she’d punch him, or talk about Foucault again.

He pressed himself against her, heteronormatively (as usual in Horni Soit).

“Wait,” she whispered, her breath reeking of eroticism and onion. “Before we commence proceedings, I’d like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land.” This was the kind of bullshit that made Robbo think she’d end up

Their cries of passion formed an erotic counterpoint with the groans of Lesley’s stomach struggling to cope with the burger she’d just gulped down.

They finished, satisfied but slightly ashamed, and so did this week’s edition of Horni Soit.

@honi_soit

Importantly, they used protection.

Always use protection.

Profile The Man Behind the Microphone Scott Dooley talks Kanye West, FBi and dropping out of Sydney Uni with Jack Gow “I’d taken my girlfriend out for a romantic lunch and we got home at about nine, so we’d had a couple. We set up our stereo on our balcony and aimed the speakers at their house and played ‘N-bombs in Paris’, I think it was 27 times in a row”. Welcome to Valentine’s Day with Scott Dooley. Or, perhaps more truthfully, ‘neighbourly-relations’.

“We have neighbours that are very loud and I live in a very built up area and there are these teenagers, twentysomethings, who play this awful music, and when I had a job that required me to get up early they’d play music at bad times”. This is how Dooley justifies his ingenious act of sonic warfare. The job in question was his brief stint as breakfast radio host on NovaFM, alongside fellow comedian Merrick Watts and washed-up Australian Idol ‘star’ RickiLee Coulter. Before leaving to pursue his love of stand-up comedy, Dooley enjoyed a short golden age headlining the Nova stable. But the ways Dooley approached his rise to radio supremacy, or his stand-up career henceforth, haven’t been all that traditional.

Defying the traditional path of toiling away in community radio obscurity, Dooley, or ‘Dools’ as he had been immortalised over the airwaves, started his radio career at public youth station Triple J. “I was pretty lucky, I mean I did some stuff with FBi when they were starting up, so I went to a few of the trainings and met the guys there, and I thought I was going to end up at FBi but it just never panned out”. Instead, he hit the ground running hosting overnights and doing guest spots on Breakfast and Drive for the national broadcaster. Contrary to radio folklore, Dools’ story is not that of the work experience kid who hung around so long they eventually started paying him for it. “No, that was just a character for one of the shows, I was never a work experience guy, actually it was around that time they were trying to stop people from asking to do work experience because it was getting too unwieldy”.

Having dropped this truth-bomb on this writer, a lifelong Triple J work experience aspirant, Dools explains that Triple J hated the influx of applicants so much that station management suggested that “when you mention him just say that we don’t actually do real work experi-

ence”. Dools is right that it would have taken away from the fantasy, I can’t help but feel it would have saved me a lot of adolescent disappointment.

Having risen rapidly through the ranks of Triple J, including two years as host of the Drive slot, Dools controversially defected to Nova in late 2009.

Despite claims that he ‘sold out’, Dools didn’t want to deny young up and comers their shot at glory.

“I turned 30, I had an agreement with myself and some other Triple J people over the years that you don’t stay there past 30.” So ‘Old Man Dooley’ packed his bags and headed off into the cut-throat world of commercial radio.

“I think it’s really easy to paint commercial radio as this wholly unpleasant experience and it’s not, it’s just different”, Dooley says. Which is how you would describe a job that led to you becoming friends with Charlie Sheen. “I interviewed him, he and I became buddies, and he was doing the live tour so I went and did one of the dates”, Dooley says. He caught up with the bi-winning star recently whilst in the States, visiting him on the set of his new show Anger Management. “Seeing him on the set, he’s really good”, Dooley says, “you watch and you’re like, oh, that’s why you got paid all those millions of dollars.” Dooley also disagrees with the media’s portrayal of Sheen as a crazy, drug-fucked fiend, “I’ve spent enough time with him to know he’s in a good place and he’s healthy”.

When I ask what Dools’ favourite Sheen role is he shouts, “Topper Harley, man! Hot Shots!” When I reveal I’ve never heard of Hot Shots or Topper Harley, he exclaims jokingly, “that’s it, I’m going to hit you with a cushion again!”

For all the excitement of the highpaying, high-octane world of commercial radio though, Dooley’s days were numbered. After just over a year and a half in the job, disappointing ratings led to Nova axing the show. “It was something I did and I’m glad I did it”, he explains, “it was a really interesting experience”.

Life after radio has lead to a renewed passion for stand-up comedy. Dooley was the opening act for friend Steve

Philp’s Sydney Comedy Festival run and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. “Except for the last night when I had to run off stage to vomit because I was feeling sick”, Dooley says. Having started the day just fine, he got progressively sicker until it got to the point where the apex

“

I ask Dools how things are with his neighbours post Kanye-warfare and he tells me how the next night his girlfriend asked them to turn their music down. “I was in another room but could still hear them and one of them goes ‘that arsehole played ‘Niggas in

I had to literally run out of the auditorium and then vomit on the street

of his nausea coincided with going on stage: “I had to say ‘kids I’m going to have to go now, I’ve done three and a half minutes but I’m about to vomit, that’s not going to be good’, and I had to literally run out of the auditorium and then vomit on the street.”

Vomit aside, Dooley says he always wanted to be a comedian, “I just couldn’t imagine doing anything else, it was a foregone conclusion, so as a result I had a terrible attitude to towards things that weren’t going to help me”, like university. A Sydney University drop-out cum radio extraordinaire, Dools’ advice for aspiring hosts is: “Drop out! Actually no, don’t drop out. Stay there, I’m lucky, it worked out alright for me, but had I not been lucky, I wouldn’t have a job, I’d probably be homeless, no, I wouldn’t even be homeless, I’m too pooncey for that, I probably would have died.”

”

Paris’ twenty-seven times last night, I saw it on his Twitter!’ So I wrote a really angry tweet and the music stopped.

I think they do it just to fuck with me now, I’m like the old guy who shouts ‘get off my lawn’!”

As the interview comes to a close Dools swigs the last of his San Pellegrino – “don’t tell them I’m drinking that” – and as we get ready to leave the trendy North Bondi café – “don’t tell them we met here” – I ask him what he does want me to tell you. “I’m a supporter of FBi, put that in your article, that gives me the street cred, that gets the kids back doesn’t it? I’m still from the streets. I’m still hip with it, right?”

It’s a good thing he got that job at Triple J, then.

Jack Gow is an Honi Soit Editor and was not harmed in the making of this interview.

OMG! Besties!

facebook.com/honisoitsydney

honi soit

13

Smash the Rich, Save the Base?

On the forty-sixth anniversary of the Cultural Revolution, Flynn Murphy surveys the wreckage.

A

few years ago, I was walking down Eastern Avenue with a senior journalist from a major Chinese news organisation when we were approached by a couple of Socialist Alternative (SA) leafleteers.

the base” according to The Australian’s May 9 front page splash.

The SA was fighting on two fronts that day: a command team approached us to profess global proletarian revolution while the rest stayed put, locked in a heated Marx-war with the socialist group Resistance, who were camped nearby.

Take Kevin Rudd. Add some weight, make him a little more Chinese, ignore his politics. He could be Australia’s Mao Zedong. Both men won bitter factional struggles to take power with a popular mandate, both led to victory parties that had been lost in the wilderness for more than a decade, both were able to capitalise on progressive political undercurrents, and they both relied on the support of the youth.

The journalist, who we’ll call Wang Peng, smiled and took a raggedy-edged black and white flier. He declined a copy of the Green Left Weekly. As we walked away, he turned to me and asked, “Now imagine – what would it be like if they had guns?”

That, he said, was what it had been like to live through the Chinese Cultural Revolution – a crippling period in China’s modern history which has its 46th anniversary this week.

At the time I thought Wang’s comment was a bit unfair, but as I followed media coverage of the Australian federal budget this past week I couldn’t get his words out of my head. Prime Minister Gillard is engaged in a fearsome pseudoMaoist campaign of wealth redistribution. She wants to “Smash the rich, save

14

honi soit

While the history of Chinese communism is complex, a little polishing makes the parallels with contemporary Australian political life shine through.

Before the rise of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Rudd Labor Party (RLP), an ugly brand of nationalism dominated the political landscapes of both our nations. And we both paid kickbacks to regimes we were supposed to be at war with. The powerful forces of parochialism and xenophobia were overcome in the early stages of the leadership transition, but emerged again to be adroitly subsumed into the policies of the ruling parties.

Before the Chinese communist leadership, China was ruled by the Kuomintang (KMT). They fought waves of Japanese forces seeking to conquer

their homeland and enslave their people, before reaching a compromise deal that destabilised the party politically. All the while, they were under intense domestic pressure from increasingly organised guerrilla attacks by the Mao-led Red Army as it tried to install a communist leadership.

Meanwhile, in the future, the Howard Liberal Party (HLP) fought a war of attrition against the Afghani Hazaras colonising our shores in deadly terrorboats, while struggling to neutralise the

allowed the CCP to regroup, and to later overthrow the nationalists. A cult of personality developed around General Mao – one which would ignite the Cultural Revolution when he was dethroned three decades later.

Similarly, the Australian Labor Party had to survive the extraordinary hardship of being led by Simon Crean, Mark Latham and Kim Beazley. Out of the quagmire popped Kevin Rudd in a clever factional deal. By jump-starting the battery in the light on the hill, Rudd became

Take Kevin Rudd. Add some weight, make him a little more Chinese, ignore his politics. He could be Australia’s Mao Zedong. increasingly effective guerrilla tactics of GetUp! – part of a global network that shared intelligence and resources with activist organisations around the world.

more than just the ALP’s leader – for many not familiar with its internal workings, he was the figurehead of a party reinvigorated.

Mao Zedong came to power after assuming leadership of the Red Army in 1934. That year, he beat an extraordinary year-long military retreat that circled the Chinese countryside and saved his troops from annihilation by the KMT army, commanded by General Chiang Kai-shek. The success of this twelve-anda-half thousand kilometre “Long March”

Skip forward a few years through a Chinese civil war fought with only marginally more intensity than the 2007 federal election, and the Red Army, with the support of China’s rural poor, had overthrown the Kuomintang. Chiang fled with the lion’s share of China’s gold reserves to go and colonise Taiwan: establishing an independent, democratic

@honi_soit

Chinese state, or a rebel provincial colony, depending which side of the Strait you’re standing on.

Howard retired to play golf and go on a speaking tour, fleeing politics with a large superannuation payout. Both he and Chiang owe their continued existence to the United States of America.

Also, there was a guy named Li Zongren who was a bit like the KMT’s Peter Costello. He played second fiddle to Chiang most of the time, and then nobody listened to him when he tried to take power, so he had a cry and went to live in America where he spent his days spreading rumours he was planning a comeback.

In 1949, the Chinese Communist Party took the reins and founded the People’s Republic of China (PRC), in keeping with a time-honoured tradition of mislabelling military dictatorships.

Mao ushered in a new era of peace and harmony which lasted all of several weeks. Opium, child marriage and foot binding were all banned, along with religion, so it wasn’t all bad. Shortly after this came “land reform”, a euphemism for the public beating, humiliation, torture and murder of wealthy peasants and landowners, and the redistribution of their wealth. Which I guess is kind of like the Carbon Tax. The Red Army was rebranded the People’s Liberation Army to give Chinese Communism a consistent corporate identity. They climbed the Tibetan plateau to smash the tyranny of Tibet’s feudal system and replace it with the tyranny of China’s communist system. Many Tibetans were unimpressed.

Then it came time to implement “socialism with Chinese characteristics”.

China faced severe rural-urban inequality (and still does), so the “Chinese characteristics” part was about making the rural poor feel a bit better about themselves and their inherent revolutionary wisdom by painting them riding on tractors in the sun, while at the same time using them as the actual fuel that powered China’s growth. This included implementing a hukou, or residence visa, system that stopped them all from moving to the cities and clogging up the streets with cabbage and sadness.

In Australia, Rudd began to shore up his own base by rolling back WorkChoices, and acknowledge the importance of the union movement which, total membership having declined two thirds since Gough Whitlam was around, had about as much clout as a Chinese tractor-driver. Like any ALP leader, Rudd’s position lay in the hands of the Movement, but he

failed to actually roll back many of the things that had gutted Australia’s unions during the Howard years: the ban on secondary boycotts, restrictions on workplace lock-outs and union officials right of entry onto worksites, and prohibitive fines for ‘illegal’ workplace striking.

Back to Mao; in the 1950s now, which means it’s time for the first experiments in agricultural collectivisation.

After ever-larger co-operative farms yielded mixed results, 1956 hit China with a significant famine. Enter China’s first Premier, a popular intellectual and moderate named Zhou Enlai. Picture a Chinese Lindsay Tanner. Then add the “this is just a hobby” air of Malcolm Turnbull, the political savvy of Bill Shorten; the charm of both, and the smugness of neither.

Zhou suggested to Mao that collectivisation may not have been the best move in a country plagued by the tyranny of distance and its associated communicative and logistical issues.

Mao responded by launching the “Hundred Flowers” campaign, which was, at first, as lovely as it sounds.

Scholars, intellectuals and apparatchiks were encouraged to voice new ideas about how to transition to a modern communist society, and were even invited to criticise the leadership. “A hundred flowers bloom, a hundred schools of thought contend” was the catchcry, and the fragrance wafted across the land.

There were a lot of slogans like that actually. Maoism is in many ways the Tony Abbott of Marxism. Unreconstructed, slightly unhinged, and based almost exclusively on pithy maxims – “serve the people”, “to rebel is justified”, “smash the four olds”.

The hundred flowers period would have been China’s 2020 Summit, if Kevin Rudd had waited until shortly after the summit ended to murder more than half a million people who had disagreed with him. That was what Mao did. It was the political equivalent of telling your friends that hide and seek is over and they can come out now, and then when they do, putting them up against a wall and shooting them in the head.

So that’s a point against.

It was now 1958, and with the non-believers and “capitalist roaders” purged, Mao, at the sprightly age of 64, launched China’s second Five Year Plan: the Great Leap Forward. This was supposed to be the masterstroke that would turn an agrarian society into a modern communist one. The Chinese communist equivalent of the baby bonus.

Tragically this turned out as not so

much a “leap forward” as a “series of catastrophic central planning failures and policy disasters which led to the starving deaths of thirty million people”.

The equivalent of one and a half Australias died between 1958 and 1961. To put that in News Limited terms, it equates to roughly one Rudd economic stimulus package. Maybe throw in the Emissions Trading Scheme as well.

One of the main causes of the Great Leap Forward disaster was botched and shonky bookkeeping – since everyone was too scared to report they had not met agricultural quotas, the central government had no grasp of how bad the numbers really were. Fearful co-op leaders would send their quotas of grain to the cities without leaving any for their own flocks. China’s grain exports actually increased by around 50 per cent during the period, while the countryside starved.

Both leaders were weakened; Rudd fatally, Mao temporarily.

In 1959, Mao’s main detractor, the moderate Liu Shaoqi, was named Chairman of the PRC. Mao remained President but his role was largely ceremonial, just like when Rudd joined the ALP’s 2010 election campaign. Mao took a back seat for a few years to plot the Chinese Cultural Revolution: history’s most violent and destructive comeback tour.

This is where the narrative splits.

In 1966, Mao went rogue. He launched a decade-long class war that used his cult of personality to target the people he held responsible for deposing him. When Rudd was deposed in June 2010, he spent a few years crying down the phone at political journalists. If Rudd had been Mao Zedong, he’d have rallied the bases whose hard work had installed him in the first place; used the 2007 defeat of Howard to claim there was no ALP without him; called on GetUp!, on Young Labor groups, on every youth activist organisation regardless of colour or creed to unite, pick up whatever they could find – clubs, spears, rifles, grenades and improvised explosives and wage war on the anti-democratic forces within the government, the faceless men who had removed their head of state and were threatening to derail the country.

So, a missed opportunity for Kevin.

Which brings us back to Wang Peng, and to that nice bit of shade under the tree outside Fisher Library. Take your average Socialist Alternative agitator.

Take that same intensity, that rigid determination, but give them clubs, spears, rifles, grenades and improvised explosives. Imagine they, and everyone else in every other University of Sydney collective, group or club, had an educational history that consisted solely of reading over and over again a far more militant version of the Green Left Weekly. Take them and tell them everything in their world is corrupt, and that they need to smash all of the things so that they can be rebuilt. Would they march all the way to Canberra and storm Parliament House? Or would they start taking potshots at Resistance, or the Evangelical Union, all similarly armed?

Sadly, we may never know the answer. But it’s certainly what happened in China. Student groups spent as much

Photo courtesy of The Australian (May 9)

facebook.com/honisoitsydney

time fighting each other as they did actual revolutionary enemies, in a Lord of the Flies style violence-orgy.

Now imagine Rudd-in-exile took certain ideas about our national character and warped, changed and altered them in order to create the kind of chaos that would see him back in power.

We’re an egalitarian society. We’re “true blue”.

You are walking past Manning wearing a brand new crimson hoodie you just picked up at General Pants. ‘Swag’, you think to yourself immediately before being beaten to death by a splinter group from the EU Blue Faction, who yesterday decided that anyone wearing crimson is an enemy of the True Blue Revolution.

Before you black out you see three of your lecturers on the grassy knoll, surrounded. They are getting dirt shoved into their mouths as they, too, are savagely beaten. A chant rings out around the campus: “Build the Education Revolution! Build the Education Revolution!”

Say you somehow survive the wrath of the EU Blues, as they’re now called.

You are told that bourgeois intellectuals like yourself need to be re-educated through gruelling physical labour, or, worse, by taking a job as a union organiser in the Pilbara.

The idea of forcing that spoilt idiot who wants to work “in fashion”, despite being enrolled in a full-fee paying Media and Communications degree, to go to Western Australia and dig holes in the ground with their hands might sound appealing at first, but on a large scale it was a disaster, logistically and socially.

And that was before the chaos even spread to the workers, and the army.

The Cultural Revolution did immeasurable damage. For ten years, China was a nation at war with itself: with its history and culture and its very identity.

The boundaries between revolutionary martyr and evil revisionist were so porous that there were barely even really “sides” to the conflict, just anarchy and bloodshed. The Tibetans and other ethnic minorities had most of their shit wrecked, and anyone who thought it wasn’t a great idea to destroy scrolls and temples millennia-old were themselves beaten, tortured and killed. And that’s without even going into the “struggle sessions” and the summary execution of elders and community leaders. Or the suicides. And all the while with slogans ringing out across China. “Smash the four olds.” “To rebel is justified.”

The Cultural Revolution was ended

by Mao’s death, of natural causes, on September 9, 1976. By then, much of China’s five thousand-year-history lay in ruins. Estimates of the death toll vary widely – conservatively it is pegged between one and two million, though some estimates put it as high as 20 million people.

So the lesson, I guess, is next time you hear someone equate a health care program, or a failure to deliver a one per cent company tax break, with some of the twentieth century’s most intense experiments in the bounds of human misery, they’re full of shit.

Flynn Murphy is on Twitter: @camuscamel

honi soit

15

The Third Drawer Where Inappropriate military operation code names aren’t

By Ben Brooks they now?

TOP FIVE...

Gareth Austin tracks down ‘the guy who played Walter Reilly in M*A*S*H’ The level of indifference, and at times outright hatred, directed toward the television show M*A*S*H has perplexed me throughout most of my lifetime. The painful realisation that the show was not the all-time favourite of everybody everywhere came as a shock.

Whilst donning a new pair of khaki boxers with a big, bold M*A*S*H running down the thigh, I was subjected to ridicule and laughed at by my significant other at the time (which is not something that bolsters a fellas confidence in the boudoir). Turns out M*A*S*H fans have a hard time getting laid. But I wore those comfy bad boys till the elastic went and the khaki faded. Why? Walter ‘Radar’ Motherfuckin’ O’Reilly is why.

For those of you unfortunate enough to not know who that is, ‘Radar’ was a loveable scamp who pretty much ran the 4077 M*A*S*H medical unit.

Played by Gary Burghoff, ‘Radar’s’ list of achievements reads like something straight out of a long-running television show about the Korean War. He could telepathically sense incoming helicopters, he mailed a jeep home piece by piece, unashamedly slept with a teddy bear and rolled with other notable ballers Hawkeye and Trapper.

Gary Burghoff has subsequently not done anything of any note since M*A*S*H, probably because he knows ‘Radar’ was probably the best fictional character ever conceived and that everything he will ever do from now on will just be a pale imitation of his former glory.

However, Burghoff is a professional jazz drummer, which is pretty badass considering he is afflicted by a defect known as dysmelia in his left hand, meaning his fingers are incredibly short.

He’s also written an auto-biography comprised of songs and poems, so it’s safe to assume he might be a bit of wanker. In 2010 he came out of retirement to star in the Christian movie Daniel’s Lot. It was not critically acclaimed in the slightest, but it was good to learn that ‘Christian movies’ are a thing.

It is alleged that Burghoff now collects stamps.

16

honi soit

Contrary to popular belief, military operations are named by people and not by a random word generator. This is how we end up with such gems as Operations Overlord, Rolling Thunder, Wrath of God and Enduring Freedom. PR-savvy with an ear for martial poetry, a clever clerk can make any indiscriminate carpet bombing or extrajudicial assassination sound like a right royal romp. Tally-ho, back home in time for tea and medals.

In US circles, this is a relatively simple affair. Organising officers are given a set of letters from a central database, like ST or GH, half of which

they then incorporate into the beginning of a mildly witty, completely irrelevant epithet. Say, Strawberry Hammer or Ghastly Boomerang. And the more absurd, the less predictable.

Who would have guessed that cuddly Operation Rainbow was the 2004 Israeli incursion into the Gaza Strip, Super Gymnast a planned invasion of North Africa, or the beneficent Smiling Buddha India’s first nuclear blast?

But with thousands of such operations, many running concurrently, it can be difficult to give each one the requisite artistic attention, and choices are often fraught with implications for

political correctness. Churchill personally intervened to give Soapsuds – an extremely costly US air attack – the gravitas it deserved, with Tidal Wave.

The killing of Osama bin Laden was named after the hunt for Native American leader Geronimo, and roundly lambasted for such insensitivity.

And while Santa Strike was a humanitarian supply mission in Iraq, Stocking Stuffer was a counterinsurgency attack shortly thereafter.

Others are plain embarrassing, if not disconcerting, for all involved.

Operation Suicide Kings A 2004 ‘knock and search’ operation. For some Iraqi soldiers, it was their first day on the beat. Principally disturbing for the lack of faith it implies in participating troops and the sense of foreboding it attaches to the mission. More appropriate for the Somme.

Operation Squeeze Play A sweep of western Baghdad capturing over 400 insurgents. No inappropriate touching was reported, though in the context of Tangerine Pinch and Tangerine Squeeze, perhaps someone needs some help.

Operation Dirty Harry An explosives search in Iraq. Depending on who you talk to, Dirty Harry can either refer to Clint Eastwood or to a highly explicit, unhygienic sexual manoeuvre involving two people and three to four types of bodily fluid.

Operation Tapeworm The killing of Uday and Qusay Hussein, sons of Saddam. Of course, at a metaphorical level the code name makes sense in a really demeaning, macabre way.

It just seems odd to conceive of the hunt for Iraq’s second and third most wanted men as an intestinal parasite with a proclivity for unannounced extra-rectal excursions.

Operation Grizzly Forced Entry Continuing a theme begun in 2003 with Devil’s Thrust, this euphemism for aggravated rape merely refers to a search for highly value targets. But the construction of this name suggests some premeditation, by a psychopathic, sexually deprived bureaucrat no less.

In short, whilst the humble code name offers near unlimited scope for the imagination, one should approach the task with care. Eager Glacier (US espionage against Iran) is beautifully constructed around a most apt oxymoron; Frequent Wind (US helicopter evacuation from Saigon) was a mistake at best, deliberate PR sabotage at worst.

MR SQUIGGLE

Found graffiti?

Snapped a great iPhone picture on campus?

Got an idea for a story? honisoit2012@gmail.com We happily take pictures, pitches, ideas, suggestions, and contributions.

@honi_soit

The Third Drawer CHALLENGE ACCEPTED: RUNNING FOR UNION Honi Soit threw down the gauntlet to our reporters to run for election in this year’s Union Board race.

We asked them to put as much, or as little, effort in as they desired. Joseph Istiphan obliged Hello, my name is Joseph Istiphan and I am running as a candidate in the 2012 University of Sydney Union Board Election. As a gay man at this university, it was almost unavoidable. Indeed, so strong has the association become between a predilection for showtunes and the desire to turn one’s name into an awkward pun that many scientists have suggested it might be an issue of causation rather than simple correlation.

To test this theory, they have embarked upon several longitudinal studies where hundreds of pre-school aged children are forced to spend several hours a day chalking their names on concrete surfaces while wearing lanyards containing their meal cards.

Regardless of the science behind it though, know that I am here to represent YOU the STUDENTS by giving you a VOICE that speaks to your NEEDS. The decades I have spent in the Clubs and Societies program while complet-

ing my Bachelor of Arts degree have equipped me with the experience and passion to violently beat our USU into shape and as a USU Board candidate, I would fight for: Increased Transparency: while sandstone is aesthetically appealing, it is one of the more opaque building materials.

If elected, I would insist that all of the union’s activities took place in buildings that either had large windows or were made entirely of glass.

USU Short Courses in Witchcraft and Wizardry: many of the buildings at this university closely resemble those of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry from the popular Harry Potter franchise. It therefore stands to reason that similar courses could and should be offered here.

Universal Access: to treasure. For centuries, pirates and dragons have maintained a monopoly over access

to gold and jewels and I feel it is high time that these valuable resources were distributed more equitably across the community.

However, I refuse to be implicated in the fascist orthodoxy of the bureaucratic process so you are unlikely to see my name on any ‘official’ ballots and certain pen-pushers in plush offices may claim that I do not ‘qualify’ to be a ‘legitimate’ candidate. What they do not understand though, is that as with Princess Diana before me, I have no need of a crown of thorns pulled from the rose of hypocrisy, for I am the people’s candidate.

Join with me as I throw off the shackles of oppression and thaw out the frozen heart of the student community.

I say to you, my good people, now is the winter of our discontent and the time has come to stand up and sing out: Let it Joe, let it Joe, LET IT JOE!

Joseph Ist: a man of dignity

N.B. - Joseph Istiphan is not actually running for election. Do not Vote 1, do not collect $200

Soundtrack to: chalking

Hannah Bruce put her head down and headphones on to ignore the madness

“Y’all Ready For This” – Space Jam Theme You’ll need this, believe me. Crank at high volume for motivation, preferably from a boom-box, with a goon sack in hand and all the friends/political allies you have managed to convince to assist you with this horrendous, soul-destroying task.

“Get Down On It” – Kool and the Gang The pavement, that is. Not the funky R&B beats. Get down on the cold, hard, merciless pavement. Don’t try and bend over from the standing position: you’ll put your back out faster than the rain can wash away all your hard work and student politician dreams. Use Kool’s catchy lyrics to lull you into the belief you are a chalking artiste extraordinaire, the Banksy of the horizontal, election canvas.

“Hands and Knees” – Sammy Hagar Just like Sammy’s devotion and submission to the rock gods, this epic anthem encapsulates the unwavering dedication one must have to the task at hand. The lyric “this may seem way out of line” takes on an entirely new meaning when all of your colouring-in-the-lines training from preschool has left you.

“Bleeding Love” – Leona Lewis You know when they say you have to put ‘blood, sweat and tears’ into your campaign, well whilst chalking you can achieve all three of these things. If you do not master the art of smooth application, your digits and knuckles will resemble a direwolf-gnawed claw before too long. Add the biting winter wind, gravel and nails embedded in the concrete by your opponents, and you can be guaranteed no one will want to shake your hand all campaign.

“Can’t Touch This” – MC Hammer Embrace the fact that you won’t be able to touch anything until you have scraped the plaster of Paris, food dye and regret off your encrusted fingers and palms. The dye won’t come out for days so depending on the colour chosen by yourself or your comrade, you could be channeling Lady Macbeth, the Blue Man Group, Gumby or Sookie for days to come.

FOLLOW US ON TWITTER: @HONI_SOIT OR FACEBOOK.COM/HONISOITSYDNEY facebook.com/honisoitsydney

honi soit

17

ee

l

e-

w.

Culture Vulture PREVIEWS: THEATRE

PERFORMER PROFILE

SUDS presents: Proof

William Haines reviews SUDS’ latest offering

Bebe D’Souza subverts gender

subversion

Proof provides for a very pleasant evening at the theatre. Written in 2000

by David Auburn, the play won the Pulitzer Prize For Drama, and sitting in the Cellar seeing the cast bring the words to stage one can see why. Director, Bennett Sheldon, has seen fit to move the action of the play to Australia; instead of Chicago, we find ourselves in Adelaide.

Despite a few inconsistencies that this choice brings to the play (term dates, temperatures, etc) it is delightful not to have to sit through the American accents and to be able to relate to the environment of the play. In suburban Adelaide then, we find ourselves introduced to Catherine (Eliza Owen), the daughter of a prolific, recently deceased, mathematician, and get to observe her struggle to come to terms with her own genius and depression.

HS: How did you begin working in the burlesque industry?

R: Unfortunately, I don’t have an amazing story like being chased by Mafia Bosses or something. I come from a contemporary dance background and have always loved the pin-up revival of Betty Page and Pepper Stallman. When I was 18, I went to see a show at burlesque bar in Melbourne. There were no boys in the show, they were only behind that bar and I thought well let’s give this a go.

From there I did two classes in fan dancing and spent a lot of time in front of the mirror learning to look seductive.

About two months later, I was performing at venues. I guess it was quite a natural progression.

HS: Did you find it hard entering such a female-dominated industry?

R: Not at all. I’m from a classical dance background so I’m used to there being a five-to-one ratio of girls to boys.

When I first started performing burlesque professionally, though I’m not a hundred percent sure, there was about seven or eight boys in the whole of Australia.

That number has probably jumped up to about 30 to 40 boys now. It’s crazy.

HS: Was it hard to book agents at first when there were so few males performing?

R: No, not at all. A lot of the female burlesque venues were like “bring it on”, they loved the fact that they could say that they had one of Melbourne’s only male burlesque performers. There were more issues with audience members.

I mean, while four-fifths of the audience love it, you’ve got those closeminded homophobic wankers that feel the need to voice their opinion. Yes, I am stripping. And yes, I’m a strip tease artist. And yes, it can be confronting - but it’s also artistic.

There is always a real mix of people in the audience. I guess it’s because while there are regulars who love it, there are some who go in to the shows unsure of what they’re going to see and are shocked when they are presented with a man in front of them, stripping.

HS: Are people very vocal about their opinions?

R: I’ve been called a “faggot”, a “whore”, a “bitch”. I’ve been told to “take it off you slut”. Some guy even tried to push me off the stage. That incident was actually quite entertaining though because I pushed him right back!

He fell off the stage and was escorted out. That’s another thing I guess, their behaviour is always handled so well by the MCs and security guards. There are also a lot of people who think they’re coming to King street (Melbourne’s Kings Cross equivalent - Eds) to see ‘regular’ stripping. It’s all part of the package.

HS: What do you see as the main difference between ‘stripping’ and

18

honi soit

Photo: Visual Distortion Photography

‘burlesque’?

R: I respect strippers and don’t want to say anything ill of them but burlesque has a distinct focus on the art of tease and the art of stripping. Whereas I find with stripping it’s more vulgar.

For me, stripping is not so much about how you take your clothes off, it’s just simply about getting the clothes off. In burlesque you have to constantly ask yourself - how can I remove this item creatively and still look glamorous and attractive?

HS: How do you go about creating your acts?

R: I start with a concept or a costume concept then I find music to suit and a costume and go from there.

HS: Which part of the country has the best burlesque ‘scene’?

R: It’s really interesting. Melbourne has the most venues that dedicate themselves to burlesque; there are four venues that specialise purely in burlesque entertainment. So for the Victorian standard of performing, you really have to be quite well trained and have a really good, solid routine. I guess I’d like to say that Melbourne is the home to the highest standard of burlesque in the country.

By comparison, in Sydney there are less opportunities to book venues because there is so few specialising in burlesque. To get booked at a non-burlesque venue in Sydney, the girls and boys really have to spend a lot of money on costuming to even get noticed.

So yeah, performance wise, Victoria is the best. In Sydney it’s more of a visual spectacle of costumes and props.

HS: I hear congratulations are in order, tell us about your recent win in the Mr Boylesque Australia competition.

R: This year was the first year that the popular ‘Ms Burlesque Australia’ competition introduced a category for male performers, ‘Mr Boylesque’. I was lucky enough to win. One of the most exciting

things was that I was being judged and awarded my prize from Mark Windmill, the current King of Boylesque in the world. He’s actually from Queensland originally. Aussies really are making it in boylesque I guess! I’m looking forward though; I’m actually just about to perform in my first international show at the Berlin Burlesque Festival.

HS: Do you think Dita Von Teese holds an unfair monopoly over the industry’s portrayal of burlesque in mainstream media?

R: Not at all. Dita has worked so hard; it has taken her 13 to 14 years to get to where she is now. She didn’t get anything on a silver platter. She completely deserves the coverage she gets. We’re all just a bit jealous of her to be honest, you always hear “damn it that Dita von Teese again”.

The issue with commercialisation of the art is actually the Cher and Christina Aguilera movie Burlesque. While it calls itself ‘burlesque’, there is no burlesque in that movie.

HS: What effect did the movie Burlesque actually have?

The movie created a lot of issues for the industry. In Australia it caused a surge in the number of people wanting to go to burlesque shows, but of those people many only wanted to see what was in the movie; singing, dancing, and amazing shining glittering short dresses.

When the performer started the strip tease they freaked. One lady berated me after a show claiming she’d “seen the movie four times” so she knew what burlesque was, “this isn’t burlesque…it’s stripping”. I told her “Darling, burlesque started in the 1800s, it is and always will be the art of tease”.

See Raven performing in: Harry Potter and the Curse of the Tassle Twirl July 22, 7pm, $25 The Standard, Surry Hills

@honi_soit

The play modulates between two registers, Catherine’s relationship with her absentee sister, Claire (Maddie Miller), and her relationship with Hal, an old student of her father’s (Nathaniel Pemberton). Eliza Owen provides a strong locus around which the rest of the cast can move, and by which the rest of the relationships are defined. She shows great flexibility, switching between time periods, moods and settings to show a full human being.

Nathaniel Pemberton, the deceased father’s protégé, is convincingly mathematician-ish (i.e. jeans and joggers). His experience shines through as his gravitas consistently steals the watchers gaze.

Maddie Miller’s performance is hard to gauge, the character is representative of the mediocrity of bourgeois life, and that she did. Bit of a Pyrrhic victory, but did what she had to do. Charlie Mitchell is hilarious, delivering his one-liners with the disregard for propriety we all expect from great minds.

There is a sense that at times the show rests on the laurels of the script, much of the tension is implied through the situation but not realised. Playing genius is a tall order of course. It doesn’t help their cause that the actors find themselves on an enormous stage that is largely unnecessary for the small number of bodies. There are moments when the acting breaks through and one forgets all the empty space, but during silences and moments of tension one can’t help but see it again.

Bennett Sheldon has produced a thoughtful and calm production, full of implied depths and uncetainties. A simple setting allows the characters to provide the momentum of the piece, proving once again that student actors are up to the challenge of naturalism. For a play devoid of cheap gags or audio-visual colouring I never found myself bored, or in disbelief. I heartily recommend this show.

The Cellar Theatre 16th-19th, 23rd-26th May 7pm : $2-$5

Culture Vulture REVIEWS: COMEDY

Jew Revue: Curb Your Judaism Miranda Smith stays kosher

The show opened strongly; the first skit played on pretty much every porcine edible, so, like, heretical and delicious!

Between scenes, while stagehands hastily swept bacon pieces from the stage, audiences were met with the old grey thoughts of Eeyore (of Winnie-the-Pooh fame); the donkey motif was incorporated into the show due to is resemblance, using a sort of round-about logic, to the famously unenthusiastic Jewish comedy god, Larry David.

Other jokes which made the soundtrack to furious floor sweeping and furniture shifting included a running gag about the questionable safety of flying Tiger Airways and a series of knockknock jokes – one of which ill bears repeating, except to note the annoyance of the stage-crew, who afterwards found themselves sweeping up two-hundred or more dropped jaws.

The friend sitting next to me, who’d seen the show before, informed me that the second half contained “absolutely the funniest thing” he had “ever seen in a revue” (probably a lesser compliment than he intended). A sharp pain, the jabbing of his elbow into my side, alerted me

James Colley enjoys ham

that we’d reached the fabled skit when lights came up on the set of Seinfeld – Ant and Cliff Sandler as either Jerry or George, irrespectively. Whichever Sandler was doing George hit the mark spot on, the Seinfeld Sandler sounded a little more like Liz Lemon doing her Seinfeld impression (Google it). Regardless, the brothers did a terrific job.

The Socialist Alternative skit, albeit brief, was a highlight; punchy and well-acted, its tacit reference to the BDS movement not lost on the audience. Honourable mention goes to Vlad the Unorthodox Jewish Vampire (“Ve cannot eat garlic; two-thousand years ago, the Egyptians mercilessly beat my people … viz cloves of garlic”) who was good for a laugh, if not so good for a dinner date. The Python-esque gathering of elderly Jews who one-upped each other in terms failing health and familial neglect was absolutely made by the (dare I say) strangely attractive, gravel-voiced Grandma with a wacky-tobacky habit.

Mazel Tov, cast and creators of Curb Your Judaism, Hanukah Matata to you all.

I honestly can’t say what I was expecting walking into Sydney University’s first ever Jew Revue. Suffice to say, bacon raining from the sky in the very first scene wasn’t what I expected but was exactly what I secretly wanted.

show up after the funniest sketches just to remind the audience that life is an inherently sad thing. However, to their credit, the final appearance of this character featured a joke that was brilliant enough to redeem the whole thing.

Curb Your Judaism is a rollicking good time from start to finish. Highlights include a sketch presumably written entirely around a tiger onesie, the first ever EU Revue, and absolutely spot on Seinfeld and Mad Men parodies.

The cast of Curb Your Judaism should be incredibly proud of what they’ve built. They can hold their heads high knowing their show was just as good as any of the ‘mainstream’ revues. When it comes down to it, if I had the choice to spend every night of my life watching the writer’s room video sketches and that incredible ending I would die a very, very happy man.

The show contained everything you would expect from the most experienced of revues. This included an incredible band (including a pianist who wasn’t afraid to rock the melodica like only a badass could), elaborate costumes, and keeping to the dearest of revue traditions, the voiceovers were the worst fucking things to ever happen.

It wasn’t all amazing, of course. Too often it seemed that sketches didn’t so much have an ending as a thing happened. These things were sometimes phenomenal (God damn, that high five) but sometimes they were just downright confusing. The Eeyore head that forms the centrepiece of the show seems to

FASHISM

Australian Fashion Week: Cynthia Thai and Yuliy Gershinsky Rebecca Simpson looks at the designs of some of the up and coming designers Earlier this month, the Mercedes Benz Fashion Week Australia showcased the latest trendsetting designs from labels new and old.

Australian Fashion Week is not just about women’s fashion. This year’s Innovators Show also featured work from men’s designer Yuliy Gershinsky.

Cynthia Thai is one name you may not recognise, but her innovative techniques are earning her a place in fashion’s echelon of designers whose work may one day grace streets around the globe.

Mr Gershinsky showcased his collection, ‘AlephBet’. He described it as “sharp and clean with a futuristic and sporty feel”. But the designer, originally from the Ukraine, doesn’t want to be pigeonholed; he hopes to go on to explore new ideas.

The twenty-year-old, who completed an Advanced Diploma of Fashion Design Studio at Ultimo TAFE last year, was one of the youngest in Australian Fashion Week’s history to showcase her designs.

The women’s designer had her work featured in the Innovators Show – an opportunity for up and coming student designers from the Fashion Design Studio to promote their work to an audience that includes established designers, collectors, stockists and bloggers.

Each year, four students are selected

“I don’t really want to place myself into that niche. My inspirations are always changing as well as my attitude towards design and you will probably see that in my future design work,” he said. for the Innovators Show at fashion week.

With a strong cohort this year, six were chosen.

“My head teacher called me the morning after our end of year show last year to tell me I was in. It was a surreal. I really did not expect it at all,” Ms Thai said.

Mr Gershinsky, like Ms Thai, has developed unorthodox fabrications. He bonded neoprene, a synthetic material used in wetsuits, with upholstery fabrics to create some of his jackets.

Her signature is beaded knitting. To create the clothes, she threads beads onto string which she then knits together, making the fabric from the beads themselves.

“The beads are impossible to get off unless you cut them off with pliers, which is great because it’s super strong and durable. But it also means that the clothes are all super heavy,” she said.

Most designers usually outsource the grunt work of their creations, but Ms Thai makes all her pieces herself, either sewn or knitted by hand.

facebook.com/honisoitsydney

The future could be a bright one for both Cynthia Thai and Yuliy Gershinsky, following the footsteps of top designers, Alex Perry, Nicky Zimmerman and Dion Lee, who are all alumni of the Fashion Design Studio.

Ms Thai hopes to move overseas in the future and study a Masters in Knitwear in England or the USA and Mr Gershinsky hopes to collaborate with other designers and one day own his own label.

Fashion Photographer?

Honi thinks USyd deserves its own satorialist.

Interested?

Email us: honisoit2012@gmail.com

honi soit

19

TECH NEWS

‘Misleading’ and ‘Deceptive’: Google Under Fire

Justin Pen and Andrew Passarello investigate the under-reported outcome of Google’s mammoth legal battle in Australia accountable for the input of any misrepresentative terms.

Couching it in the slightly sexier jargon of a crime noir; while the bullets belonged to numerous corporate players, Google’s AdWords algorithm was the triggerman that shot and wounded consumer sovereignty.

Google’s Sydney office entrance

The ostensibly benevolent, internet giant Google has evaded Australian headlines recently despite losing a mammoth legal battle against the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) early last April. The case against Sergey Brin and Larry Page’s searchengine-turned-internet-colossus appeared before the Federal Court, targeting the company’s enormous coffers.

AdWords, the goose whose golden eggs accounted for 96% of Google’s $39 billion revenue in 2011, was found to have facilitated the dissemination of a multiplicity of ‘misleading’ and ‘deceptive’ sponsored advertisements. Affected firms included Harvey World Travel, Honda and Alpha Dog Training among others. Those searching for the aforementioned companies were presented with links to competitor’s websites due to the submission of misrepresentative search terms. While it was the responsibility of individual businesses to submit their own key words and phrases, the Federal Court made it clear that Google was not merely an innocent channel of output, but could and should be held

Whether or not Google ‘would’ pay up, however, is contestable given the infamous difficulty countries have had in exacting punitive damages against multinational corporations. Indeed, despite closing almost $1 billion of its annual earnings within our shores, Google delivered less than 0.1% back to the Australian Taxation Office.

Between its 350 million Gmail users, 800 million YouTube accounts, and 250 million Android smartphones in circulation, chances are you’re using a Google service before even considering the ubiquitous search engine. Up until recently, Google has been the only company to successfully infiltrate every aspect of the online experience. Even though social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter are beginning to challenge Google’s autocracy, as the web transforms from a space of searching into a space of sharing, it’s important to note what Mark Zuckerberg (CEO Facebook) and Biz Stone (Co-Founder Twitter) aren’t doing. These rising tigers may as well be sleeping; they aren’t launching satellites to Google Map the earth, they’re not investing billions in renewable energy

for Google Green, nor are they designing space elevators or driverless cars for Google X, a secret experimental research laboratory within Google.

Google’s mission statement ‘Don’t Be Evil’ has not only informed but fuelled this innovative, dynamic and seemingly chaotic engagement with the rest of the world. However, for a company so steeped in philanthropy and held in such high regard worldwide, Google is facing

Google’s AdWords: found to have facilitated misleading and deceptive behaviour

a myriad of threats both corporate and governmental. Anti-trust officials from the European Union, flanked by unlikely ally, Microsoft, have criticised Google’s online practices – in particular, purported claims that its search engine prioritises Google products and software over its competitors distorting market freedom.

Europe’s competition commissioner has initiated further investigations scrutinising this multi-platform empire.

Brin fired back in an interview with The Guardian. While his description of recent events may have resembled the unhinged chatter of a conspiracy

theorist warning about the “very powerful forces that have lined up against the open internet on all sides and around the world”, his dogged and hopeful vision for the future of the internet painted him as a digital messiah. He reserved his harshest criticism for gated communities like Facebook, and the American entertainment industry’s recent sojourn into Washington. Brin asserted that Facebook’s insular and possessive approach to information “stifled innovation,” and coupled with the recent attempts to push through the Stop Online Piracy Act and PROTECT IP Act legislation in the US, flew in the face of the ‘ethos of openness’ that the internet had originally promulgated. It’s this dedication to freedom that exemplifies Brin and Page’s vow, ‘Don’t Be Evil’.

Fatalists and fan-boys need not lose too much sleep, despite the recent tumult, domestic and abroad. Last month, Google revealed that profits had surged to 61%, totalling a turnover of $3 billion over its first quarter. Indeed, the total value of Google’s tradeable shares ($198 billion) is sitting comfortably alongside Finland and Denmark’s Gross Domestic Product, $195 billion and $206 billion, respectively. If the contentment of the Danes and the Fins balance between economic sustainability and social progressivism are anything to go by, Brin and Page must be pretty pleased with themselves given the company’s harmony between soaring profits and lofty altruism.

BlackBerry Blues: New CEO, new phone, renewed popularity?

Rob North wonders whether the struggling Smartphone company can find its feet in the Apple & Android dominated market

Research in Motion, maker of BlackBerry mobiles, CEO Thorsten Heins unveiling the latest BlackBerry mobile at the BlackBerry World Conference 2012

BlackBerry (otherwise affectionately referred to as ‘CrapBerry’ by my technophobic father) is fighting a losing battle in the ever-burgeoning Smartphone market. Over the last few years Research in Motion (RIM), the company behind the BlackBerry range of smartphones, has failed both critically and commercially to maintain pace with the mobile industry. Share values have significantly dropped, and CEOs have changed, but RIM refuses to give up the fight.

10 – at the annual BlackBerry World conference, with an expected release towards the end of this year.

Earlier this month the company unveiled the latest version of its mobile operating system – dubbed BlackBerry

While the majority of BlackBerry devices have featured physical QWERTY keyboards, RIM seems to have finally acknowledged the popularity of touch

20

honi soit

Features of BlackBerry 10 By the looks of things, the new operating system has given the BlackBerry user interface a huge overhaul, now utilising a ‘time saving’ flowing interface which allows users to quickly cycle between applications and open windows with simple finger swipes.

screens; the demonstration device featured a touchscreen QWERTY keyboard aesthetically similar to competitor designs like the iPhone. Variously referred to as ‘intelligent’ or ‘adaptive’ by industry pundits, the keyboard assigns commonly used phrases to particular letters. For example, the word ‘the’ may be assigned to the letter ‘T’. The user can simply swipe upwards on the letter ‘T’ to instantly insert the word ‘the’. Similarly, mistakes can quickly be erased by swiping the keypad to the left. It might not be a game-changer, but nevertheless it’s pretty cool.

increase productivity and connectivity and thereby create personal success, the same can be said of Apple iOS and Google Android devices; there’s nothing to significantly differentiate BlackBerry’s product.

Perhaps the most exciting feature of BlackBerry 10 is the ‘rewind’ camera technology. With BlackBerry 10 shutterbugs will be able to cycle back through frames captured before the actual photo was taken, and replace individual elements of the photo, such as faces, allowing for the ‘perfect’ photo.

Already RIM has lost support of several developers, including YouMail, the developers of a popular voicemail app of the same name. In a blog post last month YouMail developers suspended any further work on the BlackBerry version of their product: “we’ve seen our BlackBerry audience steadily shrink, with a steady exodus of those users moving to the iPhone and to Android.”

Is it enough to save RIM? While it was once the smartphone of choice for the corporate sector and leading edge techno junkies, BlackBerry has lost considerable ground to Apple iOS and Google Android devices. At the BlackBerry World conference, RIM CEO Thorsten Heins told attendees that the BlackBerry platform’s unique value is “creating personal success.” While there’s no doubt that the BlackBerry can

#honitech

Moreover, the BlackBerry is starved for apps. According to a 2011 report by Developer Economics, market penetration is the biggest motivation for application developers in choosing a platform, meaning that the now struggling BlackBerry is often passed over for the now considerably more popular iOS and Android platforms.

The BlackBerry’s saving grace may be industry adoption of HTML5. Apps created in HTML5 will be able to run in almost all mobile browsers, regardless of platform. RIM are obviously putting a lot of support behind HTML5, but have they put too many eggs in one basket?

After all, you can’t save a company if it’s already dead.

Action-Reaction SCIENCE FEATURE

Conspirators in good company

Felicity Nelson spruiks the best science pranks in history

Do psychiatrists know a sane person when they see one? To find out David Rosenhan sent eight perfectly healthy undercover agents to psychiatric wards around America in 1973. The experiment proved a success. Even though the participants were instructed to behave normally throughout the experiment, not a single one was exposed as a fraud. All were diagnosed with schizophrenia in remission on their release and given medication for their condition. One hospital later requested that a number of pseudopatients be sent to their institution so they could prove their competency. Onetenth of the patients were suspected sane over the course of a month even though Rosenhan had in fact sent no patients.

Society’s most trusted institutions and individuals are fooled by these sorts of pranks all the time. To paraphrase Henry Higgins, it seems a lot of silly people don’t know their own silly business. Hoaxes go way back... meet Mary Toft, a top 18th century British prankster. This crafty lady managed to convince a number of doctors, including the King’s surgeon, that she had given birth to rabbits (needless to say, several careers were ruined when the truth was revealed). Fast-forward to 1912 when

Charles Dawson became the ultimate fraud artist by presenting the much-sought-after ‘missing link’ between the great apes and homo sapiens in the form of a carefully hand-crafted skull (apparently, he got the idea for this ‘Piltdown man’ after a brief encounter with the famous crime novelist, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle). Dawson was considered a hero of archaeology in his time and given several honorary university degrees. It was only in the 1950s that the skull, along with as many as 38 of his other important findings, were found to be forgeries.

of Physics and Classical and Quantum Gravity. This isn’t the sort of thing that happens every day but when it does it damages the credibility of the science community.

Science has its weaknesses but I think it’s fair to say that it’s more exacting than the humanities. At least this is what Alan Sokal thought in the 1990s when he submitted a joke physics paper to The Social Text, an academic journal on postmodernism. The paper was titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” and pretended to earnestly consider the implications of postmodernist revelations on the laws of physics. The essence of the paper was the proposition that quantum gravity is actually a cultural construct. It was littered with cryptic jokes and filled with enough intimidating jargon to convince editors that the writer was a genuine expert.

The editors did not bother to consult a physicist before sending this paper to

org/pomo/ is definitely worth a look.)

Recently, a bunch of bored graduates at the University of Massachusetts invented a program, SCIgen, that creates computer science reports. Their results are so good that a randomly generated paper called “Toward the stimulation of Ecommerce” was actually accepted by The International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering.

Compared to other human pursuits, such as the creative arts, science is pretty good at filtering out poor quality work; hoaxes are the exception to the rule. Scientists stick to formal procedures like spaghetti to a wall, but artists spend most of their time breaking down Modern science is not immune to these conventions. Sometimes the definition of sorts of scandals. In 2001, Jan Hendrik art itself is completely lost. In the 1960s Schön published his groundbreaking a couple of artists decided to demonwork on semi-conductors in the promistrate the absurd decline in standards by nent science journal, Nature, and was opening an exhibition of chimpanzee art awarded three prizes, including the under the name Pierre Brassau. The exOutstanding Young Investigator Award. hibition received the highest praise from His findings, if they were true, would art critics. One critic wrote that Brassau have revolutionised electronics but “is an artist who performs with his data was completely fabricated the delicacy of a ballet dancer...

“It shakes your faith in the system to and neither his co-authors, the Brassau paints with powerful hear that professionals can be so easily editors of Nature nor the scienstrokes, but also with clear detertists who peer-reviewed his work mination. His brush strokes twist deceived. Peer-review is much less relinoticed. with furious fastidiousness.”

able than we would like to believe.”

It’s not the only time that bogus science reports have slipped under the radar. A pair of mischievous French twins, Igor and Grichka Bogdanov, produced five papers about the early stages of the Big Bang, which have been described by string theorist, Jacques Distler, as “consisting of buzzwords from various fields of mathematical physics, string theory and quantum gravity, strung together into syntactically correct, but semantically meaningless prose”.

The papers were published in Annals

print. Sokal scored quite a few points for scientists engaged in the Science Wars of this era.

Nowadays you don’t even need to write a nonsensical paper from scratch.

Online generators can whip together a lot of jargon to create a passable essay on nearly any subject in seconds. They even provide bogus references. This is plagiarism at its best. (The Postmodern essay generator at http://www.elsewhere.

We can laugh but there is a serious side; it shakes your faith in the system to hear that professionals can be so easily deceived. Peer-review is much less reliable than we would like to believe. We can learn a lesson from the British scientists in the 18th century who took the platypus sent over from Australia as a hoax. “A creature with webbed feet, a bill and fur?! Preposterous!” In the words of Mad-Eye Moody, as students and academics we need to be constantly vigilant!

SPORT

Australia’s rediscovering its mojo

It wasn’t pretty, but Australia delivered on their tour of the Windies, writes Fabian Di Lizia tem failed to work for the West Indies, even though it worked earlier in the day for Australia. Similarly, the match broadcasters faced technical difficulties for 20 minutes. Consequently, play was suspended even though there was no rain or other factor in the law book that would have stopped play.

Australia began its March-April West Indies tour turbulently. The T20 series was drawn 1-1 and the ODI (One-Day International) series 2-2, including a nail-biting tie in the third match. Despite a shaky start to the tour, Australia gelled together nicely for the Test series, with the focus resting on notable performances that emerged from both sides.

Although the West Indies suffered a 2-0 defeat, it was arguably the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) that experienced the biggest losses during the series.

Honi Soit recently published a piece on the shortfalls of cricket administrators and the WICB was the latest to put corporate interests above the interests of the game.

At one stage, the decision review sys-

When cricket was being played, Michael Clarke again underpinned Australia’s success. However, his most important contributions were not with the bat, contributing in other subtle, but significant ways. Clarke took a five-wicket haul that was desperately needed to wrap-up the series and his captaincy was innovative, always searching rather than hoping for breakthroughs. His bravest move was to open an innings with a spinner, the first time since Bradman had done so.

Clarke’s off-field player management reflected his growing maturity. Brad Haddin remained home after discovering his 17-month-old daughter had cancer and Clarke maintained his support in the long-term for the out-of-form, but not yet out-of-favour, Haddin. Stand in

wicketkeeper Matthew Wade was not shunned either, with Clarke praising Wade’s every improvement, including his gritty, maiden Test century.

On the bowling front, Australia’s spinners were under pressure to deliver. This was a result of the Windies preparing dead pitches that prevented Australia’s strong batting and pace attack from performing at its best. Nathan Lyon and Michael Beer performed impressively – Lyon especially, who took 13 wickets at an average of 25. Lyon’s best performances came after early failures on the tour and criticism from Geoff Lawson and Lance Gibbs. For now it appears that Australia’s spin cycle has been arrested.

The Windies came out firing and showed that they are beyond their lowest point. Shivnarine Chanderpaul joined the 10,000 run club and is now first in the Test batting rankings. Darren Bravo continues to show canny parallels to his cousin, Brian Lara, while bowlers Shane Shillingford and Kemar Roach picked up 14 and 19 wickets respectively; both

facebook.com/honisoitsydney

notching 10-wicket-match hauls. Roach’s haul came on a spin friendly pitch, a performance that bettered that of legendary Windies fast bowlers of years past.

Roach placed Ponting in particular under a lot of pressure, troubling him throughout in a series where Ponting rarely looked comfortable.

Ponting’s performances only resulted in more fuel being added to the speculative fire over his future. He had some good performances and bad ones and arguably did enough to maintain his spot. The reality is supporters hoped rather than assumed he was going to score when he went in – a change from the past.

Uncertainty is on the horizon for Australia now. Ponting is safe for the next series, but the Ashes seems too far away. Injuries have marred the pace attack in recent months but with Doug Bollinger and Mitchell Johnson now set to return and push for spots it will be a packed pace line-up come the Australian summer.

Fabian is on Twitter: @the_rovingeye

honi soit

21

SRC Reports SRC President’s Report

Phoebe Drake might like to wear cotton, might like to wear silk

Other campaigns, such as the campaign for Political Economy, have seen occupations of the Bell Tower and disruption of Senate meetings.

It seems little has changed as the cost of degrees continue to rise, but yet the quality of our education drops. The issue with the staff cuts, is primarily that, in a deregulated environment with more and more students at university, there is little spectrum for faculties to get rid of either academic or general staff. The issue is also that the majority of faculties in their submission to the university have made it clear that they are already operating at the base level and cannot find space for even one lecturer or research assistant to be made redundant.

Last week national media portrayed, in a rather unflattering light, the protest that converged on Darlington Terrace.

It is important to state here that the SRC supports the right for students to peacefully protest and assemble. It is also hugely important that all students feel comfortable participating in any event whether it is a rally or a sit-in.

The almost fascinating component of the campaign is, however, seeing the broad range of students who have become involved. From students in my tutorials who may never have even actually voted in a student election before, to those who have always been interested, thousands of students are passionate about staff losing their jobs.

The media coverage around the issue of staff cuts, has unfortunately obscured discussion around the issue of a quality education. In 1967, Geoffrey Robertson asked in his SRC President’s Welcome, “why then is a ‘University Education’ so highly sought and so fondly prized when it outwardly resembles the processing of some academic sausage-machine?”

One of my friends, recently wrote in a letter to be sent to the senate that, “I wanted to write you this letter about my experience of the staff cuts because, despite not being a student that is usually that politically active around campus, the general disregard that I have seen from the university for teaching standards and my student experience has

the then President received a letter from university administration asking them to ‘PLEASE TAKE NOTICE that the caravan situated on the front lawn of the University of Sydney constitutes a trespass and nuisance and is, amongst other things, in contravention of Resolutions laid down by the Senate of the University of Sydney concerning control of traffic within the university’.

The SRC has a strong and proud history of student activism. The walls of my office are only testimony to this, as they are covered in the posters of the past.

From women’s safety, to VSU, to fairer youth allowance, and a quality education the SRC has consistently been at the forefront of every issue, advocating for change in areas that are essential to the student experience.

Causing, ahem, difficulties for the University is nothing new either. In 1983

Tom Raue might like to drink whiskey, might like to drink milk

After a successful march through Victoria Park and up City Road, a group of several hundred students converged outside the building we thought the university senate was meeting. After several speakers, including myself and Freya Bundey from the Education Action Group, we attempted a peaceful sit in of the senate. As around 20 students tried to enter the building, we were surrounded by riot police who began

22

I was one of three people arrested.

None of us were charged with an offence, because none of us had committed a crime. The police were not there to prevent crime, they were there to prevent a peaceful protest. Michael Spence should be condemning the police violence, but he won’t. He supports the use of violence against his own students because he is afraid – and well he should be! The movement against the cuts is putting Spence in serious danger of losing his job. When I bring up the subject of renewing Spence’s contract next year, most students are not enthusiastic. They think the university needs only one staff member cut.

I will not be intimidated by Spence’s support for police violence, by his threats against students and the SRC. I will continue to fight the cuts because it is becoming ever clearer that the administration of this university doesn’t care about the wellbeing of students.

Let’s keep fighting the cuts. Let’s fire the boss.

Tom Raue is the SRC Vice-President

Consequently we have seen, a large number of students who are extraordinarily passionate about this issue - from the 2000 that came to the first rally, to the 4000 that voted in the referendum, students have consistently been vocal around the fact that staff are losing their jobs.

The campaign around the staff cuts is an important campaign and I encourage students to be involved.

Phoebe Drake is the SRC President

David Pink might like to eat caviar, might like to eat bread

violently dragging students away. We all linked arms and stood our ground, none of us being violent towards the police in any way. Police removed people by dragging them along the ground, throwing them, using painful wristlocks, headlocks, and dragging one protester by his neck.

If you’re one of those special people that find the bureaucracy of the SRC interesting, I am sorry, but I will talk mostly about my arrest instead of the executive.

The thing is that Sydney University is a community. And, indeed, this is a strength and, in my instance, a reason why I chose Sydney University in the first place. It is, however, this factor that makes the issue of staff cuts so personal because most students know someone on the hit list for redundancies.

Education Officer’s Report

Vice President’s Report

On Monday the 7th I missed my first SRC Executive meeting because I was in a cell beneath Newtown police station.

The executive is made up of 8 students that make the day-to-day decisions of the SRC. I previously had an unblemished attendance record at these meetings, but now only the President can claim to have been at every one.

driven me to action.”

actions. And that’s what direct action is – a way of gaining leverage by disrupting university administration and increasing the cost of their chosen course of action.

Last week, we succeeded in shutting down the university Senate meeting. We also found out that the university has already spent its entire security budget for the year in just two months.

Congratulations USYD. In a two day referendum, 4000 of you voted and 97 per cent said no to staff cuts. Despite what Spence says it is clear that students overwhelmingly oppose the cuts and are willing to make their voices heard on the sacking of their teachers. This has been an extraordinarily broad-based campaign that has had more energy than any education campaign I’ve seen. I’d like to thank the 50 activists from the Education Action Group who helped out on the day, as well as the NTEU and SUPRA for providing the SRC with material support.

It’s unfortunate, but not all protest can be purely symbolic. Purely symbolic action can at best call upon the conscience of university administrators, but we cannot rely on their good nature. We need to make them feel the consequences of their

Our campaign is working. Our strategy has already saved 63 per cent of staff from being dismissed. We have occupied the Dean of Arts Office, shut down central administration in the Quad for 6 hours, stopped SEG meeting on two occasions and blocked traffic up City Rd for 5 kms. This is all legal, peaceful protest – as students enrolled at Sydney University we have a right to peacefully assemble anywhere on university grounds. There was nothing different about what we did on Monday.

I’ve heard it said that 30 students linking arms outside a building we have a right to enter constitutes violent protest.

Yes, we were instructed to abandon our sit-in by 70 riot police. But if a police instruction simply amounts to ‘stop protesting’ I say we have a right to ignore it. And we have a right to peacefully resist police attempting to drag us away like ragdolls. We will continue to make Spence pay until the cuts cost him more than he thinks they’ll save.

David Pink is one of the SRC Education Officers

For more information about the SRC, visit: www.src.usyd.edu.au honi soit

@honi_soit

SRC Reports General Secretary’s Report

Tim Matthews might be sleeping on the floor, sleeping in a king-size bed article (“Out of the box: lunch with Michael Spence”, SMH, 12/05/12) casts Spence as ‘an academics academic,’ struggling in difficult financial times.

If you opened up this weekend’s Sydney Morning Herald, you would have seen our university’s latest attempt at marketing. Rather than oversized colourful Perspex cubes, a glossy prospectus, or strangely stalker-ish Twitter page, we were greeted with a fireside chat with everyone’s favourite Vice-Chancellor/Machiavellian villain stereotype, Dr Michael Spence. The

The article, though instructive if you were interested in his oboe-playing skills (six grades in three years), the number of passports his family owns (19, between them) or his favourite subjects in secondary school (English, Italian and law…), seldom touched the ‘juicy stuff’ of Spence’s tenure as Vice-Chancellor.

However, it does touch on the way that Dr Spence conceives of his role within the university, and his outlook as a ViceChancellor – and that is where the juicy stuff really is.

Spence says in the article that he sees himself as a “CEO, elected head of a workers’ collective and a town mayor.” Coincidentally, three positions that have historically been criticised as unrepresentative and prone to corruption. Moreover, if we take Dr

Spence’s analogy, then in the referendum on the staff cuts held by the SRC, his shareholders/workers/rate-payers just voted him out of office. On the issue of the staff cuts, the Herald reports his tone as ‘more bemusement than irritation.’

Concerning.

Indeed, the treatment of students in the article is as amusing add-ons to the real work of university. His anecdotal evidence of historical student political activism is as much an episode of ‘Kids Say the Darndest Things,’ as an actual reflection of student sentiment. Crying poor in response to staff cuts criticism, a frequent Spence/ University tactic, ignores the relevant criticism of the process of the cuts, if not the need for the cuts themselves.

Much of the article is comical puff. Dr Spence, a frequent patron of the nonUSU- owned Taste Baguette, describes himself as “a lunch-in Manning person.”

Funny, I am a huge fan of the new

Manning burgers, and a theatresports regular and haven’t run into the good doctor in everyone’s favourite studentcontrolled bar recently. Maybe he, too, likes to smoke on the balcony? True to his Union-loving, Manning-eating form, the VC held the interview in the Darlington Centre. Owned by the university. And distinctly student-free.

My cynicism isn’t intended to furnish the opposite Spence stereotype (picture a large mustache and bag with a dollar sign), but rather to point out that Spence DOES represent a particular business paradigm of university management, which is a far cry from that contained in the article. If anybody wanted to probe Dr Spence any more about his philosophy of university management, I’m sure you could find him on the Manning balcony, right?

Tim Matthews is the SRC General Secretary

International Student Officer’s Report Ronny Chen is gonna have to serve somebody

concession transportation fares for international students. The basis upon which we built our arguments is always, and always should be, the views from ourselves, the international students.

Why do International Students want concession?

The International Student Collective has been particularly vocal for

The most common grounds on which arguments are made is financial hardship, probably because money is always an issue to 99.9% of international students. We have students from all over the world, from a wide range of backgrounds. Money-wise we do get the full spectrum. It is unrealistic to argue that all international students are unable to afford transportation. However it seems extremely unreasonable that even those who are in genuine need can’t seem to get any compassion from the transportation department.

That said, we are not idiots. We understand that the Australian government views international students as gold mines. As a matter of fact, it has been on media report that without the economical simulations that international students bring into this country, a significant portion of the domestic students wouldn’t even able to afford an education in the first place.

Having that in mind, no wonder the transportation department wouldn’t give us concession.

However, what we do like to argue, is equality. It is not always about money.

It is about dignity. It is about the sense of belonging that we deserve at least for the duration that we are here. And it is core to the Australian value: we

textbooks

CHEAP!

Don’t pay full price for textbooks... buy them at SRC books.

are all different, we all speak different languages, we have different jobs and/or eye-color, our penises (penii?) and vagina (and variations thereof) are of different shapes. But at the end of the day we are all equal.

So international students please come to our collective meeting on Tuesday 16 May. In that meeting we will be auctioning bus tickets. The collective wants to know what you think you should be paying for transportation.

Please bring your student ID so that we know you are NOT entitled to concession.

Ronny Chen is one the SRC International Student Officers

• We buy & sell textbooks according to demand • You can sell your books on consignment.

Please phone us before bringing in your books.

• We are open to USYD students & the public NEW Location!

Level 4, Wentworth Building (Next to the International Lounge) Hours: Mondays to Fridays 9am - 4.30pm Phone: (02) 9660 4756 Email: books@SRC.usyd.edu.au Search for text books online www.src.usyd.edu.au/default.php Call 02 9660 4756 to check availability and reserve a book.

facebook.com/honisoitsydney

honi soit

23

SRC Help

SCAMS: How to Avoid being tricked

Ask Abe

So you think you can’t be scammed? Well we’ve heard that before.

A scam is a trick to take your money directly or indirectly by getting your personal details. There are new, imaginative scams being hatched everyday. They even target low income earners like students and come in many forms including mail, e-mail, telephone and door-to-door.

Fake websites can easily be set up to look like the real thing. Giving your personal details to anyone should be handled with a large degree of caution.

For example, how many websites have you supplied with your name, address and date of birth in order to win a competition?

Some of the more recent scams have included lotteries, sweepstakes and competitions. Some are obviously fake, like the Nigerian millionaire dying scam, but some are very subtle, like the competition to win a new Nokia phone. Some scams involve government departments like the tax department asking you to confirm your tax file number so that you can claim your lost superannuation. Some involve people pretending to be from a large computer company offering to help you rid your computer of viruses.

Banks have very strict rules about how they identify you to speak to you.

However, they do not seem to be so strict about contacting you and asking for your details. Ask who they are and find the number yourself. Do not give any details, no matter how incidental, until you are sure of who they are.

According to the Australia Houses of Parliament publication a typical phone scam involves a caller claiming

to be large telecommunications or computer company, such as Telstra or Microsoft. Victims are told they need to get rid of viruses and should provide the caller with personal details and remote computer access. The cyber criminals can then access your credit cards, bank accounts or superannuation, or use your details to establish false identities.

Mobile phone ring tone offers are another potential type of scam. For some once you sign in, you can never sign out. This will lead to huge phone bills.

Health and medical scams may offer products or services that will cure your health problems or offer a simple treatment. Often these cures and treatments do not work.

Follow these golden rules to avoid being scammed:

Dear Abe,

genuine website.

• Don’t open unsolicited emails.

• Never click on a link provided in an unsolicited email as it will probably lead to a fake website designed to trick you into providing personal details.

• Never use phone numbers provided with unsolicited requests or offers as it probably connects you to fakes who will try to trap you with lies.

• Don’t reply to unsolicited text messages from numbers you don’t recognise.

• Don’t respond to offers, deals or requests for your personal details.

Stop. Take time to independently check the request or offer.

• Always look up phone numbers in an independent directory when you wish to check if a request or offer is genuine.

• Never send money or give credit card, account or other personal details to anyone who makes unsolicited offers or requests for your information.

• Don’t dial a 0055 or 1900 number unless you are sure you know how much you will be charged.

• Don’t rely on glowing testimonials: find solid evidence from independent sources (not those provided with the offer).

If you are scammed contact the NSW Fair Trading online through Lodge a complaint, call 13 32 20 or in person at one of our Fair Trading Centres.

• Never respond to out of the blue requests for your personal details.

For more information, visit www. scamwatch.com.au

• Always type in the address of the website of a bank, business or authority you are interested in to ensure you are logging into the

help@src.usyd.edu.au Phone: 9660 5222

I hope you can help me with a problem I have with Centrelink. I am in my third year of my medicine course and I am on an Austudy payment. Even though I didn’t receive anything while doing my Science degree, they say that it counts towards the amount of time I’m allowed to study and my payments will run out in the middle of the year.

Is this true? And if so, what can I do?

Doctor in Trouble

Dear Doctor in Trouble, Centrelink should know better. The basic formula for the “maximum allowable time for completion” of your course is the normal length of your course plus the length of one subject. For example, for a Bachelor of Arts course that would be 3 years plus 1 semester. For a medical degree that would be 5 years plus arguably 1 semester (sometimes 1 year). In any case, the time that you took to do the Science degree does not count because it is part of THE way to gain entry into the Medical degree. If it was not necessary then the time spent on that course would count. If is confusing for you please contact SRC help to clarify your details.

Abe

For undergraduate Sydney Uni Students

FREE

SRC HELP at Satellite Campuses:

FREE legal advice, representation in court and a referral service to undergraduate students at The University of Sydney.

We have a solicitor who speaks Cantonese, Mandarin & Japanese

Cumberland: Tuesdays and Wednesdays in the Library

法律諮詢 法律アドバイス

Conservatorium of Music: Thursdays, Room 2125, level 2

• • • • • • • •

NEED a Justice of the Peace?

Our solicitor will certify documents & witness statutory declarations Appointments Phone 02 9660 5222 Drop-in sessions (no appointment needed) Tuesdays & Thursdays 1pm-3pm Location Level 1 (basement) Wentworth Building, City Road, Darlington

Immigration Advice Tenancy law Credit & debt Discrimination & harassment Traffic offences Criminal law Employment law Credit and debt

24

honi soit

• • • • • • •

Administration (gov) law Victims compensation Consumer complaints Domestric violence Insurance law University complaints and more ... please ask us

@honi_soit

Dentistry: Fridays, Room 8, Level 8, To make an appointment or just ask a question: email: help@src.usyd.edu.au or phone: 9660 5222 / 0466 169 664 skype: srchelp

Please note that times may vary without notice.

Lecture Notes THE QUIZ

SUDOKU

1. Written by Philip Pullman, what is the name of the second novel in the His Dark Materials trilogy of books?

2. “Some people are born to sit by a river. Some get struck by lightning. Some have an ear for music. Some are artists.

Some swim. Some know buttons. Some know Shakespeare.

Some are mothers. And some people dance”, is the final line from what film?

3. Which of the following is an official language of Brazil?

A) Portuguese B) Spanish C) French 4. Which rock star famously died due to ‘aspiration of vomit’ in 1980?

5. ‘Br’ is the official abbreviation for what element?

6. In what year was the UN founded to replace the League of Nations?

7. ‘Roundup’ is the brand of herbicide used by which USbased agriculture business?

8. Philophobia is the fear of what?

9. Name three female actors to have won multiple ‘Best Actress’ Oscars.

10. Which two football teams will feature in the European Champions League final to be played in Munich on May 19th?

11. What is the largest mountain range in the world?

12. Lev Davidovich Bronshtein is the birth name of which famous European political figure of the 20th century?

13. The poem ‘Bright Star’ was written by which Irish poet?

14. What is the square root of the number 576?

15. Who is the author of the highly-controversial novel American Psycho?

16. Which football team was crowned winners of the English Premier League last weekend?

17. Who had a hit with the 80’s song, We Didn’t Start The Fire?

18. What is the native language version of the name for the Czech Republic?

A) Suomi B) Hrvatska C) Ceska Republika Cesko 19. What is the name of the recently elected French KenKen tips: 1. Numbers can not repeat in any row or column. president?

2. The puzzle is split into boxes called “cages”.

20. Who is the director of both Inception and The Dark 3. In the upper left-hand corner of each cage is a target number and a Knight? mathematical sign indicating how the numerals within a particular cage Answers below interact to produce the target number.

KENKEN

CROSSWORD

ACROSS

TEASER

TARGET I

T

P

Y

E

R

W E T Make as many words out of the letters above, always including the letter in the centre.

12 = Those are silly words.

26 = I’m not impressed.

47 = Three letter words don’t actually count.

DOWN

8. Amazing, more than average (13)

1. Old Mark is moving backward (10)

9. Did the prophet smuggle a knife or a cleaver? (6)

2. Chat nice and adapt without skill (8)

10. Bad point, land shrink! (8)

4. Of pee sounds: you are, I see (4)

11. Incorrectly diagnose, and pained severely (8)

5. I’ve heard vice and Mona North damaged a sweet spice (8)

13. I muses: does I need an grammar?

(6)

6. To get to Chennai, see dramas at sea (6)

15. Collate messily without Titanic star? It’s just baby powder!

7. Coordinate, say , in quicksand (4)

16. Shogun’s end taken from gun - is it law? (5)

14. Doctor Nips, Doctor PR Man! (4,6)

17. Swelling will raise the temperature (4) 18. Meg Ryan stuttered and forgot Yorick’s head for a European (6) 20. Mules did toil when the dirt came down (8) 22. Obscure my tweaky coteries? (8) 25. French Lorraine lost her first half in her spinning calesa (6)

Eric & Dom

What is the only type of cheese that is made backwards?

26. A hostage composed with bad frays becomes the limit for those people (2,3,2,4,2)

3. Look after vessel with soft touch (6)

12. Mined up fabric (5) 16. Mary, Mary is quite antithetic (8) 17. Pamplona’s famous residents see the target (8) 19. Repeated patterns reverse athlete’s fit omission (6) 21. Casualties healed at shed (6) 23. Over-the-top production is cleansing (4) 24. On the verge of a circus performance (4)

Answers The Quiz: 1. The Subtle Knife 2. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button 3. A – Portuguese 4. Bon Scott 5. Bromine 6. 1945 7. Monsanto 8. Fear of love 9. Options include: Katharine Hepburn, Meryl Streep, Ingrid Bergman, Bette Davis, Olivia De Havilland, Sally Field, Jane Fonda, Jodie Foster, Glenda Jackson, Vivien Leigh, Luise Rainer, Hilary Swank and Elizabeth Taylor 10. Chelsea and Bayern Munich 11. The Andes Mountains 12. Leon Trotsky 13. John Keats 14. 24 15. Bret Easton Ellis 16. Manchester City 17. Billy Joel 18. C - Ceska Republika Cesko 19. Francois Hollande 20. Christopher Nolan Brain Teaser: Edam

facebook.com/honisoitsydney

honi soit

25

The Sandstone Report College Cultcha with Damo ‘Donger’ Thomson

G

’Day fuckos! After a few weeks of ‘studying for midsems’ (HAHAHA fuck that shit), Donger’s back! I told youse cunts I wasn’t going to get expelled from Col-col! Dad got the Old Boys behind me and the other lads and they forced college to let us back in! I know youse all have missed me, but I’ve got good news for ya’s! You’ll be seeing a lot more of this handsome mug around the place… Donger’s going to get elected to Union Board! Me old man told me about this thing called the ‘USU’ (University of Sydney University or some shit).

Apparently it enhances what all you muggles call ‘the student experience’.

There’s this thing called an ‘Engineering Society’ that exists JUST to get pissed for free! It’s no Wednesday night punching rumbos at the Marly, but hey, a PCL like me needs to find somewhere to drink the other six nights a week. And then ol’ Donger took a look on the website and just saw a whole bunch of smoking first year chicks drunk off their tits at these places called ‘Manning’ and ‘Hermanns’.

Amazing! A few prawns, but most of the birds were pretty top shelf. All youse uni cunts look weak as piss too. How could they resist the legend that is Donger? It was pretty clear from the photos that the guys hitting on these chicks were shit cunts – like fat guys in ugly pink T-shirts and sleazy rangas that have forgotten to shave. Hah! Like shooting fish in a barrel! I had to get involved! Clearly I wouldn’t have much time for the Union with all the stuff I do at Col-Col - it’s a pretty busy life cutting piss, and if I want to be the fResher Rep next year (great way to get in with the looooose fResh chicks), I’m going to have to put in some serious work with intercol.

Anyway, back to point, fuckos! The old man told me about this ‘USU’ thing, and said they elect a whole bunch of guys to run the thing every year! Not only could I get some sweet first year tail, I could have a fuckload of power doing it, too! And it’d look great on the old resume, dad said. So that had DongDong hooked. Obviously it’d be a great help in becoming Senior Student some day too.

I talked to Ripper, and he said he knew a guy who ran last year.

Obviously he won because everyone at college voted for him.

He’s such a top bloke!

He didn’t get on board at first because of some fucking rule where there has to be a certain number of girls or some shit, but he got there in the end ‘cause he just made ‘donations’ to

the right people and he was in there like swimwear. I don’t know how all this shit works, but sounds fucking dumb, hey.

Keep an eye out for this sick cunt over the next few weeks!

Cheers cunts!

Engineering boys have got nothing on piss-wrecks like me and Ripper.

WE are the 99%! with Artemis ‘Death to Corporate Scum!’ Dreamcatcher

H

ail automatons from the right! (Sydney University students – Eds.) Firstly I’d like to acknowledge the traditional owners of this land, which we desecrate daily with our feet, the Gadigal people of the Eora nation.

I tremble with part plebeian hesitation, part Robespierrean anticipation, to announce that I will be cutting down my involvement with the No Alternative Choice True Left Collective to throw my hat into the moral vacuum of bottomfeeding back-stabbing that is the USU elections.

Sure my comrades may have a few concerns about why I am running for the Union. Sure it might make Faust blush, but I believe in my bleeding heart of hearts that putting aside my convictions to bring down the corporate machine that is Taste.

I thought I could limit my allegiances to the downtrodden with my volunteer work with the Action Against Anti Socialism Alternative but then I realised something. This was a battle, to topple the Goliath of autocracy. I understood the truth ringing in Batman’s words - to conquer the Union, you must become the Union.

Also on second thoughts – No Smoking Ban! I want to smash the patriarchal smoking ban that stops the most vulnerable in our university community – our womynidentifying womyn and/or trans/ambigendered comrades, and the poor people propped up by Centrelink.

Obviously in my push for crippling transparency it’s important to introduce my policies. My first goal – Abolish the Union! Enough said. The Union is a financial black hole. Never mind that I don’t really know what the real state of the Union’s finances are. I don’t believe in them. Never mind that, should the auspices smile upon me, I’ll soon be sitting down to drinks with old Michael ‘Bernie Madoff’ Spence, hopefully to renegotiate our commercial services, or shall I say, corporate whorehouses.

My third policy – We Want Welfare State! I want to establish a protectionist system, like a nanny state but without any of that stomping on the rights of free-thinking uni students. I want Scholarships for all our Minorities and Disadvantaged Friends from the International Community, whom are all Important and Contribute to the Fabric of Our Society.

I want transport concession for ALL students, because part of the Solidarity Forever movement is to push for rallies to be conducted via Monorail as well as

Fourthly – Make Poverty History! I want to instigate a Student Poverty Day where each student is given $2 to spend on USU outlets and taped denouncing Make Poverty History™ and all corrupt, meaninglesss campaigns for ‘African children’. Every cent you give is crushing them under the corporate machine.

of the chat Q had me convinced that I should walk briskly for Union Board (I explained to Q that my running days were well and truly behind me).

He had it all worked out. He would, assuming I get consent from my husband, be my ‘Campaign Manager’. He says also that the Greens on Campus were prepared to support me, so long as I followed a strict set of instructions when speaking in public. The only thing holding me back from pushing the button is one thing Q insists is a requirement of my participation: that I ask my nemesis Roger to support me. Q says that having another mature age student on the campaign team would add considerable legitimacy to my bid to be the mature age student board representative. I can’t say for sure, but I just

might go ahead and do it.

Tracy Is Running For Union

H

ello

friends! It’s Tracy again, your dedicated mature age student reporter! It’s so wonderful to be in print again after my break because of the Women’s edition. I wrote a report for the lovely ladies that edited last week, but, would you believe it, they refused to print it. Even though I’ve written nearly every week! They cited my report as expressing “inherently conservative opinions that did not align with their ideas for the special Women’s edition”. I tell you, old Tracy has a lot of

26

honi soit

things, but opinions about the Conservatorium of Music is not one of them.

I was so furious, in fact, that I broke down crying in front of Q when I saw him for our evening MECO1010 study session. Q told me that I needed to stand up for myself, that if I wanted to be treated fairly I had to make my voice heard; that strong women like me had a responsibility to make the grievances of mature age students everywhere accounted for in a way that really matters. My heart began to swell. “But how?” I said.

“You should run for Union Board.”

Q spent the next two hours explaining what the Union Board is and the important role it has in defining the university experience. I found out astonishing things, such as the fact that Manning House is owned by the Union and is usually called just Manning. By the end

@honi_soit

Posing as a normal student politician I will infiltrate the Union and make it burn!

by foot.

And of course, I shouldn’t forget Abolish the Smoking Ban! I just hope that Honi ‘Rupert Murdoch’ Soit don’t get wind of my backing by Dick Smith and Adidas. Oh. STOP THE CUTS!

According to Q so long as he doesn’t have a stroke before election day Roger might become a ‘powerbroker’

The Sandstone Report The Lord lives on Campus and he’s running for Union!

O come all ye faithful, Joyful and triumphant, O come ye, O come ye to the voting booth.

Come and behold him, Born for the U-S-U, O come let us adore him, O come let us adore him, O come let us adore him: our Union candidate.

W

ell it’s that time of year again where we foist our overly-pious worldview on to the greater student population, despite being grossly underrepresentative of said student population, by overzealously campaigning for our on-campus representative of Christ, our Lord. And who is the chosen one you ask? None other than yours truly!

At first I was unsure as to whether

I was ready to run for Board, so, as I always do in moments of doubt, I asked the guy upstairs. Incidentally, I was in the Holme building at the time, so the current board director who’s running my campaign was upstairs and he assured me that between unswerving zealotry of my disciples from Christians on Campus, his unflinching political skullduggery, and the support of the extreme conservatives, I had no cause for concern. Besides as he reminded me the venerable Reverend Nile is the longest serving member of State Parliament, so the fact that I’m horribly out of touch with the rest of you heathens should be no impediment to my electoral prospects. That being said, I am not regarding my election to Board as a foregone conclusion, as we, or at least we the true believers, all know the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.

However, seeing as the rest of the field

resembles a roll call of the nine circles of Hell, I’m quietly confident that he’s going to giveth to me. As you probably already know, and disapprove of, at least one of my competitors, the ambiguously gendered ‘Artemis Dreamcatcher’, has most likely engaged in homosexual acts of sin (sex stuff - Eds.) As I’m sure you agree this is not only morally unacceptable but also calls into question whether or not Mr./Ms. Dreamcatcher is eligible to run at all. Subsection 71 of the Christian’s on Campus Guide to Discrimination clearly states: “It’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve”. While this scholarly tome has yet to be officially ratified by the USU, it is my firm commitment that if elected I will ensure that it is.

Now, I know a lot of you will be wondering why I have chosen to run for Board despite my only involvement with

the Union or the university for that matter being with Christians on Campus. It is because I believe that the Union is an opportunity to shamelessly represent the views of one group to the detriment of all others. Don’t agree with me? Tough luck, I’ve got a 600-strong student holy army to back me up and we’re starting our crusade!

It’s not hatecrime if Fred Nile says so.

S trictly S ara Forgive me Honi, for I have sinned...

H

oni baby, I have a confession to make.

Sometimes it does get to me, being perfect. And I mean really fucking perfect.

I thought university life could be a blip, a blemish on the unbroken chain of successes that have defined my life.

God knows it was for mummy when she was photographed with those nasty communists! I would like to state now that mother would never, ever speak to a registered member of the Labor party. I’m not going to get into the legal specifics of anything (but god knows I could!), all I’m saying is Photoshop exists. Make of that what you will.

Now, back to me.

I’ve really have hit the Uni ground running - ;) . To start with I went to Beachball. I know I can come on a bit strong “Hello involvement!”. Whatever, I wave back. Own it. Beachball was pretty fun. I hooked up with the SULS

President. “Hello networking” you may cry. Srsly? I’ve been I’ve got more networks than a spider on two doubleshot-moccachinos. Networked from birth. Own it. I’ve even started getting awards! Law camp saw me took the top prize for first years- the golden spade (awarded to the hottest student - Eds.) Anyway with that in mind, I’m pretty sure that you know what might be coming (need I remind you of my ATAR of over 99.7?!)

I’m running for board baby! I just had to confess!

I’ve told some of my close friends.

They responded by asking me some pretty hard questions. “Sara how do you keep your hair so shiny and your grades so high”. Unphased by their pointed questions I plunged forward “keep your French stylist on standby and make sure you only take classes of daddy’s old college friends. There are the most qualified after all. People don’t call Paul’s

elitist for no reason!!!! There you have it. Sara is accountable.

People have been telling me the easiest way to get a graduate position out of uni will be to get a paralegal position and work my way up but I figure why not go for a position where I CAN CREATE law?

Bitchin relevance.

To summise: I will be running for Union Board and though it was never in doubt, I’m totally guaranteed a clerkship with Mallesons now.

embroidered.

A final question for the students- Do you think Kikki K will be able to print personalised campaign stationary for me? Of course they will- I’m filthy rich!

So what will my slogan be :D who will I flow my preferences to ;) and what can ‘you expect?

That’s not a secret I’ll ever tell, xoxo

Sara

To my supporters I would like to address your concern’s publicly. Of course I am concerned about the campaing shirt debacle. I know Some of you want Ralph Lauren others Burberry.

The Yank/Brit question affects us all. I WILL PROVIDE BOTH. Democratic right?

Don’t worry I’ve decided to the enlist the help of our family Tailor Trang to make sure that my shirts are custom

Mummy tells me Trang’s so skilled he can also make iPhones! Brand win!

The Anti President’s Report

T

o my readership,

It is my sincerest wish that this is the last time I address you in my capacity as Anti-President of the SRC. This is because it is my intention to rectify the injustices of the past by acquiring a position on the Union Board of Directors.

It was recently brought to my attention that the destruction of the SRC is not the only way I can terrorize students.

It is also possible, I’ve been told, to get to them from the inside. I will use their most prized possession against them: The Union. It’s absolutely brilliant. I will infiltrate their silly safehouse, then turn it against them by implementing fiscal policy so stringent, so capitalistic that even the inherent communist rhetoric of the organisation is overcome.

“Redistribution of wealth?” Oh yes, it’ll be redistributed, yes. Redistributed straight back to the Colleges, that is!

Where the money should have been going all along!

The election component has been dealt with. I’ve thought a lot about my failed SRC bid last year and feel I can now say with certainty that had I not so naively followed the rules set out for campaigners I would be currently addressing you as the official SRC President. I will not be making this mistake a second time.

This time I’m going blockbuster. The Colleges have been notified and the army is being amassed. I’ve promised every fResh that shows up to support me on election day a bottle of the esteemed Johnnie Walker Blue. I am taking no chances. The Board will be mine! And do

My ideal board. Diversity is key.

you know what the funny thing is? None of you will ever get to read any of this, because I’m deleting it as I speak.

facebook.com/honisoitsydney

Dear John, always remember to empty the trash - Eds.

honi soit

27

Students’ Representative Council The University of Sydney

C R S i n U y Sydne

ni u t a s t h ig r r u o g n i Protect

!

R E 660 5222 9 B r o M p o E h s k C Boo OME A M C Office, SR

BEC

ll, SR

SRC sta k e e W O t rson a

Join in pe

UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS Support & Advocacy

• Centrelink • Academic Appeals • Discontinuing/Withdrawing • Show Cause • Exclusion • Tenancy • Fee Refunds • Harassment & Discrimination • International Students • Plagiarism & misconduct

Free Legal Advice

• Referrals • Discrimination & Equal Opportunity • Employment law • Minor criminal matters/traffic offences/ fines • Victims of violence • Debts

The SRC’s operational costs, space and administrative support are financed by the University of Sydney.

SRC Books - Buy your textbooks cheap!

• Buy & sell your textbooks • Search for books online SRC website Wentworth Level 4 (next to the International Lounge)

Emergency Loans

$50 emergency loans for students in need

Student Publications

• Honi Soit weekly newspaper www.src.usyd.edu.au/honisoit • International Students Handbook • Orientation Handbook • Counter Course Handbook • Growing Strong - Women’s Handbook

Student Rights & Representation

SRC Representatives are directly elected by students each year to stand up for students’ rights on campus and in the wider community.

Find the SRC at...

Level 1 Wentworth Building (under City Rd footbridge) Ph: 02 9660 5222 www.src.usyd.edu.au If you are at another campus, email: help@src.usyd.edu.au

www.src.usyd.edu.au

DOW

SRC

N STA

Wentworth building

IRS

Student Central