Salient 24, 2013 - Finalient by Salient

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

E I L N A T S 1938

An Organ of Student Opinion Since 1938

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

contributors: Tyrone Barugh, Hilary Beattie, Catherine Gaffaney, Penny Gault, Freddie Hayek, Hector and Janet, Ashleigh Hume, Russ Kale, Knuckleduster, Gerald Lee, Lux Lisbon, Sam McChesney, Jordan McCluskey, Rory McCourt, Duncan McLachlan, Carla Marks, Cam Price, Sofia Roberts, Carlo Salizzo, Emma Smith, Ben Speak, Steph Trengrove, Nick Truebridge, Julia Wells Contributors of the Week: Us, motherfuckers.

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

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It happened in much the same way as everything on the internet: I was bored, and it seemed like a funny thing to do. Don’t worry, I kept my

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

clothes on. A Supposedly Fun Twitter Account I’ll Never Follow Again - Page 26

about us: Salient is produced by independent student journalists, employed by, but editorially independent from, the Victoria University of Wellington Students' Association (VUWSA). Salient is a member of, syndicated and supported by the Aoteroa Student Press Association (ASPA). Salient is funded by Victoria Univeristy of Wellington students, through the Student Services Levy. It is printed by APN Print of Hastings. Opinions expressed are not necessarily representative of ASPA, VUWSA, APN Print, regret, [ITALICS: Salient], naive optimism, but we of Salient are proud of our beliefs and take full responsibility for them. This issue is dedicated to:

Victoria University— thanks for paying for this rag!

www.salient.org.nz

@salientmagazine

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

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

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

BFFL's:

editorial

“Send out, Salient, the swift satiric point, to smart the sluggard mind awake, while freedom anywhere in bonds is pent no compromise with falseness make. Those freed today tomorrow forth must leap Some further outpost there to take and keep.” —Salient, 1938 And so, eight months, twenty five issues, and twenty crates of Red Bull later, we’re here: the final issue of Salient for 2013. It’s our twenty-fifth Friday morning in the Salient office; our tireless volunteers have long since gone home; the pages of this magazine have been meticulously checked, and in about 20 minutes we’ll wake up our designer, Laura, who has fallen asleep on the couch waiting for us to finish. 76 years ago, when the magazine first went to print, its editors had some pretty ambitious ideas for just what Salient should be, and what Salient should do. In 2013, it is clear that what is required to “smart the sluggard mind awake” has changed a lot since 1938. This year we have printed features on dating apps Tinder and Grindr, female masturbation, and interviewed a student who is a stripper, and another who has been to prison. It is hard to imagine any of these topics fitting into the Salients of yesteryear, whose articles were geared more towards campus sports and the lead up to World War II. But despite all of these changes, the role of student media remains the same: to function as an organ of the opinion of you, the students. And to this end we hope we’ve succeeded, at least in some way, over the course of the year. (If you’ve bitched about us on Overheard@Vic, we’ve still won.) If there’s one thing that hasn’t changed over the magazine’s history, it is the countless hours of effort

CONTENTS that year after year, students put into Salient. Though we’re never ones to pick a favourite child, us Salient Mums have been very thankful to have designer Laura sticking around with us as we made her stay up later every week, despite promising every Friday that next week we’d be better. Laura, thank you for all the lols, and for ensuring that Salient filled its weekly cat quota. We’re sorry we couldn’t get you into the VUWSA Presidential suite, or manage to finish our final editorial before the sun rose. Special mention must also go to big guy on campus Chris, who, despite being brand new to the news business and breaking his wrist halfway through the year, still managed to score some great scoops and polish off eight pages of news every week before the rest of us had even finished dinner. We don’t know how you do it. Another thanks to Henry and Patrick, our feature writers. You were already fantastic when we hired you, but you’re even better now. We’re just chuffed. To Philip, our delightful Arts Editor, you have worked your classic McSweeney charm on the Arts section this year, and Salient has been all the richer for it. Finally, to Nick, our very loyal sub-editor. Sori 4 al of oUrr b4d gramma and speling. Thanks to all those who contributed in any way, shape or form to Salient this year—whether you were paid and underappreciated, or unpaid and underappreciated, let us just say, for the record: we appreciate you more than you could know. We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: we could not have done this without you. And if you picked up Salient and loved it every week; despised Salient but read it occasionally, or just took copies home to your flat to burn during winter, whether you intended to or not, you were a part of something within the Victoria University community that took place outside of a lecture theatre. Wasn’t that nice? You should try it more often.

Weekly Content: VUWSA

News

year in news

Politics

Campus Digest

Features: the other david

a supposedly fun twitter account i'll never follow again

i went to a protest once. it was shit.

tilted head, raised eyebrows

the political year in review

holiday crossword 36 we regret to inform you...

just pash already

regrets

going the distance 42 what is your social media personality 43 top of the charts

horoscopes 47 quiz

faces to deface

Columns: secret diary

weekly rant

hoopin' and

hollerin' laying down the law things that go

bump in the night

And just like that, faster than we every thought possible, our time as Salient Co-Editors has drawn to a close. To our successors Cam Price and Duncan McLachlan: we wish you all the very best; to our friends and family: you can look forward to seeing a whole lot more of us from now on (sorry!), and to the rest of you: see you in the StudyLink queue next year. Love, forever and always,

molly & sbk

Fixing your life

lifestyle

Arts: theatre

visual arts

music

books

film

VUWSA 

YOUR STUDENTS’

ASSOCIATION

your students' association

THE McCOURT REPORT VUWSA President Rory McCourt

Well, here we are. The final Salient in 2013. By now, you’ve seen the ins and outs of university life, your students’ association, and my nipples, through these pages. You’ve hopefully shared with us the ups and downs of being at Victoria and saw how hard we tried to make it a better place in 2013. Is this year half what I expected it to be? Yes and no. Yes I expected it to be hard and challenging leading VUWSA through its second year of the confusing underfunded environment that is VSM. No I didn’t expect it to be this hard and challenging! Or as all consuming. I think this is the kind of job that you think about putting your life on hold for a year to serve others, and friends, free time and relationships just have to take a back-seat. I never found a good balance: but then I’m the kind of person who would hate not getting the most out of this awesome opportunity. Long hours and little sleep, that’s just me. I know it’s been a choice, and I know it’s been a pleasure working my fantastic Exec to serve you until we had no energy left to give. I want to thank Sonya, Rick and Mica for being a real moral support throughout the year. We had some pretty big battles over the Student Forum, student representation, the transparency of the Levy setting process and less, err, important issues. Through it all, this team, including often the wider Exec, kept each other reinforced about why we were here and what we were doing to make Vic a better place to be a student. I thank my Exec. Including Gemma who left us partway through the year, for her spritely enthusiasm, and Rāwinia, for her injection of positivity at a time when the rest of us were pretty emotionally exhausted. Ramon, for his reliability and sense of humour. Harry for his exclamation marks and perceptive political skills. Jordan for his loveable right-wingedness that really wasn’t, and the sacrifice Sam made so he could spend time counting the treasure. Matt, for his cool, consistent reasonableness and connection to real life, when the rest of us descended into VUWSA bubblemania. Rick, for his hard work and passion for the boring bits—a crucial part of our success this year. Mica for her undisputed knowledge of what was trendy, and what students actually wanted (and her bloody hard work to get it). Finally, Sonya, for believing in me when it felt like every University manager and their dog was against me and our association. I do, also, want to thank those managers who backed us throughout. To the wonderful Pam Thorburn, whose life we haven’t made easy, and who is known to tell me she isn’t speaking to me in a joking/not joking

way after I’ve screwed something up, but always with good heart. To Jenny Bentley, who I’ve learnt a lot from this year, even though we’ve disagreed over some stuff. To Karen Davis, Rachel Anderson-Smith, Gerard Hoffman, Catherine Nelson, Gary Brown, Jan Stewart, Karl Whalen, Marie Cocker and your services staff for being awesome and making it easy for us to improve what we do for students at Vic. The Associate Deans and the Academic Office have been outstanding to work with. They’re like academic rockstars who protect university as a place where knowledge and academic success is valued and encouraged. Kathryn Sutherland, Colin Jeffcoat, Shona de Sain, Jenny Christie, Gordon Stewart, David Crabbe and Martin Boswell taught me that working in a large bureaucracy didn’t mean forgoing your principles, your fight or your courage. They might not have known it, but they kept the passion alive in us in the darkest of times this year, the little voice that said: speak up, it’s not right. Sandra Grey from the TEU and Alistair Shaw from NZUSA were other such voices that helped to confirm that we weren’t in fact going mad to question the Forum and the place of VUWSA in a post-VSM university environment. We lent on them quite a bit during the rough period, and built really strong partnerships. I also want to thank the hundreds of students who worked hard to make this year happen: the class reps, faculty delegates and leaders of clubs, societies and rep groups who slogged away so Vic could be a little better. Can-Do, the Pasifika Students’ Council and the Science Society stand out as three particular student groups who really grew and flourished this year. Every win for them felt like a win for us. From using the new Hub space, to getting funding from Vic: those small wins helped remind us why we’re in this and that there’s a community here to support. Thanks to my flatmates Tim and Reed for keeping me grounded and advising me when shit got crazy. To my friends Liam, Phillipa, Ruby, Alex and Jody for giving me some semblance of a social life at the end of those 60-hour weeks. And of course thanks to Molly, Stella and the team at Salient. Without their support and encouragement to make VUWSA relevant and exciting, we wouldn’t have got half as much done. I’m so proud of what you guys achieved. This is the best student magazine in New Zealand. Fuck the Critic(s). Dad likes to describe my job as professional shitstirring. I think it’s slightly more collaborative than that, but not much more glamorous. I’m proud of what we did this year at VUWSA to raise the issues of bus fares, cold flats, studylink, campus safety and others to Vic, the Council and the Government. I think I’ve been a pretty good professional shitstirrer. I’ve been proud to stand up and have a go on your behalf when the odds were against us, and the world didn’t give a fuck at first. I’ve been proud to serve you. Thanks for the opportunity. All the best to Sonya and the babyexec of 2014. It’s worth it.

>>> salient.org.nz

 VUWSA

NGAI TAUIRA

President-Elect By Sonya Clark

Thanks to everyone who voted for me in the VUWSA elections! After a jam-packed two weeks of lecture-bashing, chalking, postering, speaking to clubs and approaching poor students trying to eat their lunch, I was honoured to be announced as your VUWSA President for 2014. I’m excited for next year. I’m excited that VUWSA is on the move (we’re moving to the old VicBooks, top of the Student Union Building) and I’ll get an office where students can knock directly on my door. I hope you’ll all want to come say hey and introduce yourselves over a cup of tea. I’m excited for O-Week and meeting all the first-years and bonding over sausage sizzles. I’m really looking forward to leading a new Executive, and am proud of the fact it is 60-per-cent women. Its probably healthy to be also a little bit nervous about becoming your President. I look forward to election year, because I want to see the Hub filled with students, asking politicians the questions that will make them squirm. But I’m also nervous, because when the media calls for a “student view”, I know that there’ll sometimes be letters in Salient the following Monday that disagree with what is said. It’s not easy representing such a diverse bunch, but I’ll do my best to listen. But before I get too excited, I’m keen to get stuck into my exams, and have a wee bit of a holiday before I hit the ground running on 5 January. Before you launch into café work, or trek home to Hastings or Invercargill, make sure you take at least one night to be young and drunk in Wellington and remember how beautiful the world (and the waterfront) really is. Thanks Rory, for the constant encouragement and for making me laugh with your quirky outfits. After all the weekends at VUWSA, and the endless meetings, I’ve learnt so much from your courage and I’m proud to follow on after you. For everyone else, see you in O-Week. I’ll be frying onions like a boss. Beyoncé’s ‘Who Run the World (Girls)’ will be on the radio and 2014 will be the best year yet. Your humble President-elect, Sonya.

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Kia ora mai tātou, Kia mōhio mai koutou ko tēnei te wiki whakanui i te hauora ā hinengaro. Nā, mena kua nui te mahi, ā, kua pā mai a awanga, a wiriwiri, hoatu ki Mauri ora hei āwhina i a koe. Ina hiahia noa iho ki te pahupahu atu ki tāngata kē, haramai ki Te Tumu Herenga Waka, kei reira mātou ngā tauira, ā, mātou o Ngāi Tauira mena e hiahia ana. Heoi anō koutou mā, kia kaha rā mō ngā wiki e rua e toe ana, ākuanei ka wātea tātou ki te hararei! Kia mau ki tēnei o ngā kōrero, kei tua o tāwauwau te rā e whiti ana :) On another note, Ngāi Tauira will be holding a Special General Meeting to amend and ratify the Ngai Tauira Constitution, at Te Tumu Herenga Waka at 5.30 pm on 23 October. Kai will be provided!

PASIFIKA STUDENTS' COUNCIL

Warm Pasifika greetings! A friendly reminder about our sessions that are happening this week: LAST LOTO AHO STUDY SESSION When: Wednesdays, 4–6 pm at KK001, Kirk Building, Level 0. FHSS DROP-IN COURSE ADVICE Fridays, 1 pm at Pasifika Haos. TE PUTAHI ATAWHAI DROP-IN SESSIONS with Pasifika Support Co-ordinators: Jenny Taotua and Sera Tokakece, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, 1 pm at Pasifika Haos. TE PŪTAHI ATAWHAI REVISION WĀNANGA TIMETABLE, 21ST-23RD OCTOBER For more information, please contact Garth Wieser, Kaiakiaki - Māori Support Coordinator, Te Pūtahi Atawhai Phone: (04)463 5304 Email: garth.wieser@vuw.ac.nz Location: 14 Kelburn Parade (rear entrance) Room 109C “Kia akakoromaki, which means be calm. Oceania reassures us that everything will be okay. It is good to wait on her, reflect, and then make it happen.” Papa Rangi Moeka’a

NEWS





NEWs 

Commerce not accounting for earthquakes For once, students unhappy to miss out on study Steph Trengrove

Despite assurances earthquakes would not disrupt their study schedules, Commerce students have been voicing their unhappiness as study breaks are shortened. After the 6.5 magnitude quake in July, Commerce students faced cancelled lectures as the Pipitea Campus underwent inspection by specialist seismic engineers. As a result of these cancellations, Commerce exam dates have been altered, with classes taking place during study week to make up for those cancelled. At the time of the earthquake, Dean of Commerce Professor Bob Buckle told Salient that every effort would be made to ensure that Commerce students were not disadvantaged as a result of the quake. “We appreciate that this may be an inconvenience for some, but we want to ensure you are provided with every opportunity to cover the appropriate material,” said Buckle at the time. Despite alterations to the exam schedule, Commerce students remain unhappy with the short amount of time between the end of classes and the start of exams. Students believe exams should have been pushed back further, in order that they have more time to prepare following the end of lectures. Second-year Commerce student Amber Mullins 6

told Salient her biggest complaint was that the rescheduled lectures take up valuable time during study week, and was highly inconvenient for students such as her who “don’t just do Commerce”. “The impact isn’t as bad on me because I only have two exams, but it’s a pain to finish so late and not be able to pack up the flat until then,” added Mullins. Another student indicated discontent with the fact that examinable material would be taught in the ‘catch-up’ lectures, very soon before they would be assessed on it. “Instead of the University moving class into study week, I believe they should have cut a week out of the course content all together, or [content] covered in study week [shouldn’t] be assessable in our exams”.

“Scheduling university exams is extremely complex, and every effort was made to schedule those courses most impacted by the earthquakes later in the exam period. We have worked hard to produce the best possible timetable for all students,” said Thorburn. VUWSA Vice-President (Academic) Sonya Clark said that while the University has “done well for the most part”, a lot can be learnt from the process, and she would advise lecturers to be empathetic when deciding on final course marks. Any students feeling stressed about the exam period are encouraged to seek the student services available, including Student Learning Support and Counselling Services.

Director of Student Academic Services Pam Thorburn told Salient that the decision to alter the end-of-year timetable was made in July and “widely publicised” through a “range of channels”.

>>> salient.org.nz

 NEWS

“Hobos” sleeping in Cybercommons New approach to bums on seats Sophie Boot

Students staying at University overnight to finish their assignments are finding that they are not the only ones taking advantage of the 24-hour facilities.

sleeping on University premises. Dix said security is a high priority for the University, and that University buildings were monitored “around the clock”.

One student reported to Salient that he had seen and talked to homeless people sleeping in the Cybercommons in the course of pulling an allnighter. The student described the experience as “a bit surreal”, but described the men as “pretty lovely”. He also claimed that their stay was not a one-off occurrence.

If security staff do find people sleeping under desks, protocol is to ask for identification and escort any non-students off the premises.

“One of them … told me that he was really good at sleeping under desks,” said the student. Associate Director for Campus Operations Rainsforth Dix told Salient that University security staff “occasionally” found people

“Security staff investigate all reports of people sleeping in University buildings and address each on a case-by-case basis,” said Dix. “If there was found to be an issue at a specific location, actions could include strengthening security around the area and/or increasing security patrols in the area.”

said VUWSA was aware of students who had been forced to stay overnight, though stated high transport and housing costs were often to blame for this. Students could find themselves stranded with no way to get home, and the Cybercommons were sometimes used as an alternative, he said. “[VUWSA]’s approach is to address the more fundamental issues over why students are forced to stay overnight.” Zwaan hoped that restricted access to Cybercommons overnight for non-students would not impinge on students’ access to 24-hour University facilities.

VUWSA Vice-President (Welfare) Rick Zwaan

Another one bites the dust massey cancels exmss Chris McIntyre

Massey University has relieved the embattled Extramural Students’ Society (EXMSS) of its duties following concerns student services were not being delivered effectively. Massey University sent an email to all students on Monday 7 October, informing them that the University would be taking over a number of responsibilities from EXMSS. The University— which funds EXMSS through contract agreements—stated it wanted students “to have uninterrupted access” to EXMSS services, particularly ahead of exams. “From today Massey University will deliver the services it previously funded EXMSS to deliver to distance (extramural) students. These include advocacy services and administration of hardship grants,” the email read. It is as yet unclear if, or when, Massey University will return service-provision contracts to studentrun organisations.

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The University had found discrepancies in EXMSS’ monthly progress reports, with Massey University Assistant Vice-Chancellor Stuart Morris stating last week that the University was "clearly aware" of problems with EXMSS. "We want to ensure smooth provision of services for students is maintained and we're doing all we can in relation to that, and we are taking action to make sure that occurs,” said Morris. Each society had to provide the University with monthly reports on the services they provided and what they were delivering, and these were "monitored closely", he said. "If we are not satisfied with information provided, we seek more information, and if we're not satisfied we won't pay them." Massey University did not elaborate on what the specific issues with service provision to students were.

As previously reported in Salient, EXMSS President Jeannette Chapman has come under fire after it was revealed she earns more than $50,000 per annum for her part-time position. Her salary was approved after she rejigged the make-up of the Executive by co-opting her friends into positions. A recent annual general meeting failed to reach quorum, and a letter signed by 28 EXMSS members calling for a vote of no confidence was rejected. Chapman claims the letter was anonymous, unsigned, and was void due to it lacking the appropriate authority. "We shall not be diverting from the rules of our registered society, nor shall anyone not part of our executive dictate, bully or demand of us to move outside of these terms," said Chapman, who has repeatedly denied any claims of wrongdoing throughout the year. EXMSS will hold a special general meeting on 19 October, where a vote of no confidence in Ms Chapman may be held. 7

NEWS

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Veni, Vidi, VC Take a Vice-Chancellor on me, says Grant Guilford Chris McIntyre

The University has announced the appointment of the next Vice-Chancellor, and has chosen a candidate with a strong history in research and commercial ventures. Last Wednesday, Victoria announced Professor Grant Guilford as the successful candidate to succeed current Vice-Chancellor Pat Walsh, who said in February he would not stand for a third four-year term. Professor Guilford is currently Dean of Science and Chairman of the Food and Health Programme at the University of Auckland. He has previously run start-up businesses and commercialisation companies, in addition to a Crown Research Institute, and a number of scientific research and advisory boards, graduate schools, research centres, and academic institutes and programmes. “Victoria University is a capital-city university of global standing, with a clear commitment to excellence in research, teaching and public service, and a well-deserved reputation for

leading thinking on major issues,” said Professor Guilford.

standing with a world-class reputation,” said McKinnon.

“It will be a privilege to contribute to Victoria’s continued national and international success.”

VUWSA President Rory McCourt welcomed the appointment, saying he had no doubts that Professor Guilford could achieve the best for students and for the University.

The selection process for a new Vice-Chancellor ran throughout the year, and concluded with the final interview held approximately a fortnight ago. Five candidates both from within the University and overseas were interviewed extensively by a panel of management, staff and students. Chancellor Ian McKinnon said Professor Guilford would bring “a wealth of leadership experience” to Victoria, describing him as an “outstanding academic” who has had a “highly successful career in research and teaching.” “The Council of Victoria University believes his experience, knowledge, and leadership style are the right mix to continue Victoria’s proud tradition of an institution of excellent academic

“Professor Guilford brings a vibrant vision for Victoria in realising our potential as a leading capital-city university, where students and staff work on the big issues facing New Zealand and the world. “His challenge will be to craft a unique strategy at Victoria with our many stakeholders, communicate a higher purpose for a university worn down by years of Government underfunding, and put a check on the short-term managerialism that is holding students and staff back,” said McCourt. Professor Guilford’s term will begin on 1 March 2014.

>>> salient.org.nz

 NEWS

Fight! For your right! To stuuuuuuuuuuuuuudy Nick Truebridge

A new group is pledging to hold tertiary institutions to account, to ensure they are operating for the public good rather than for the interests of New Zealand’s economic and political elite. Academic Freedom Aotearoa (AFA) had its public launch on 4 October. The organisation is committed to ensuring universities fulfil their “public good roles” and steer clear of satisfying the interests of individual students and staff. AFA’s website states that “academic freedom applies to both teaching and research in tertiary education institutions and is protected by law (Education Act 1989 Section 161)”. The organisation also suggests that academic freedom embodies the right to “freedom in teaching and discussion” and “freedom in

carrying out research without commercial or political interference”, for instance. AFA consists of academics attached to institutions all over the country, and is seen as being crucial to a “strong democracy” according to co-chair Professor Jack Heinemann, who emphasises the link between academic freedom and responsibility. “Academic freedom is the responsibility placed on scholars to present uncomfortable truths that might otherwise cost them their jobs, liberty and life at some times and in some places,” said Professor Heinemann. AFA’s second co-chair, former Tertiary Education Union National President Dr Sandra Grey, has expressed her feelings that academic freedoms are jeopardised in the research sector of tertiary

institutions. Dr Grey believes that the research of scholars is too closely aligned with commercial interests. “The space for academics who are researching and speaking out on things that the Government does not want to hear is shrinking,” said Dr Grey. Some of the group’s current issues include the Performance Based Research Fund (PBRF) system’s promotion of commercially applicable research, and support for international academics in vulnerable positions as a result of challenging their nation’s political and economic elite. Academic Freedom Aotearoa was launched the day before Academic Freedom Day and World Teachers Day. Students can find more information and sign up to the group’s website at academicfreedom.kiwi.nz.

World Wide Deb Smell of India in de air Sophie Boot

Victoria’s top orators are to engage in some oratourism, with World Champs coming up at the end of the year.

Monash B in 2012.

Victoria’s Debating Society is sending two teams to the upcoming World University Debating Championships, which will be held in Chennai, India from 27 December to 4 January.

In 2012, Victoria had what then team member Richard D’Ath described as a “disappointing tournament”, sending just one team which bowed out in the octofinals. In 2011 Debsoc sent two teams; both teams reached the octofinals, and one the quarterfinals.

The two Victoria teams comprise Asher Emanuel and Jodie O’Neill, and Olivia Hall and Daniel Wilson. Around 400 teams will compete in the tournament, which was won by Melbourne’s

Roughly one-quarter of the expense for each team member associated with the tournament will be covered by University funding. The debaters are partially funded by the University

salient.org.nz <<<

through individual funding grants, which come from Student Service Levy funds. The stated purpose of this funding is to “support selected student initiatives, which help students to develop skills in leadership, communications and critical and creative thinking.” Debsoc is not sending any current students as judges; however, several Victoria alumni are enrolled as judges for the tournament. Salient remains unsure as to when the University will send a real sports team overseas.

NEWS

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Look where you’re going (At last) Sophie Boot

A campus path which has frequently been the subject of student complaints has finally been improved by the addition of LED lights along the length of the path and streetlights. As previously reported in Salient, the walkway, which goes between Boyd Wilson Field and The Terrace, is avoided by students due to safety concerns, and has been the site of at least one assault this year. LED lights have been fitted all the way down the path, as well as in the Mount St cemetery and the bush down to Salamanca Rd. The improvements have been made due to cooperation between VUWSA, the Wellington City Council, the University, and Te Aro School.

Outgoing VUWSA President Rory McCourt voiced his concerns about the safety of the path to Salient earlier in the year, saying it was a “perfect target” for potential attackers. He has now said he is proud that the path has been made safer. “Many Presidents—and Salient editors!—have talked about how unsafe the lack of lighting is around campus for over a decade ... I think our great relationship with retiring councillor Stephanie Cook helped tremendously,” said McCourt. One student spoken to by Salient was pleased with the changes, stating the installations had “really lightened up [her] late-night walks home from the library.”

Still better than Re-O Week Class Reps recognised for first time in 12 weeks Catherine Gaffaney

The building blocks of student representation were given more than just pizza by VUWSA at an awards ceremony last week.

student voice on the issues that matter. They are vital for building a sense of community, especially in large undergraduate classes.

Matt Woolley: Vice-President of VicCom, organised partnership with the NZICA to bring funded study groups to over 400 students.

Last Tuesday, Class Representatives, Faculty Delegates, and students who contribute significantly to life at Victoria were acknowledged at the annual Student Representative Celebration.

“We are very proud of the many Class Reps who organise study sessions and social events to support their classmates,” said Clark.

Erikka Helliwell and Lucy Croft: Both have reignited Can Do, are working with Disability Services on more inclusive assessment practises, and contributed in a major way to the Student Representation and Consultation review.

An outstanding Class Representative from each faculty was awarded $100 to spend at VicBooks or Gordon Harris, with Special Awards and $50 Hunter Lounge/VicBooks vouchers awarded to students who have done a lot for others at Victoria. VUWSA Vice-President (Academic) Sonya Clark said it was “important and exciting” to honour Class Representatives, who often work behind the scenes and without reward in the service of their classmates. “Being a Class Rep is an exciting and challenging role. Class Reps help get a strong, authentic

Victoria had 1373 class reps in 2013, and 94 per cent of classes had them this trimester—the highest rate in the country. Special Award Winners Ani Eparaima: A mature student in Māori Studies who has mentored and supported significant number of students in the Tohu Māoritanga programme, as well as being involved with NT and Te Pūtahi Atawhai. Mark Berry: A deaf student who has gone above and beyond to support students learning NZ Sign Language. Mark also recently won a Wellington Community Trust Young Community Leaders Award.

Roman Klapaukh: A PhD student in Engineering and Computer Science who organises out-ofclass programming experience and help for undergraduate and school students. Class Rep Award winners Elvina Quatermain (Architecture and Design) Fenyi Manning (Science) Amanda Eggers (Commerce) Rebekah Giesbers (Education) Kay Kissick (Humanities and Social Sciences)

>>> salient.org.nz

SALIENT RECAPS:

Mental Health Awareness Week Nick Truebridge

With just a few weeks until the start of exams, students have been encouraged to take care of their mental health with events on campus. Last week was Mental Health Awareness Week, for which Can Do and VUWSA organised oncampus events alongside Student Health. The week featured a Wellbeing Expo, held all week in the Hub of the Kelburn Campus. The aim of the Expo was to teach students ways to improve their own wellbeing. Also held were a Healthy Lifestyles Expo on Tuesday and Free Soup for the Soul on Thursday. The theme of the week this year was ‘connect’, chosen to emphasise the importance of connecting with the people around you in order to improve your wellbeing, and maintain positive

mental health. The aim of Mental Health Awareness Week was to raise awareness, show the prevalence of mental-health issues, and to teach people ways to improve their own states of mind. VUWSA Vice-President (Welfare) Rick Zwaan said the week had been successful, and had engaged many students. He suggested mental health was as much external as internal, emphasising the importance of connecting with others. “Your key ally for mental wellness is maintaining good connections with your friends, flatmates and family,” said Zwaan. VUWSA President Rory McCourt echoed Zwaan’s sentiments, adding that VUWSA has

As part of Mental Health Week, VUWSA ran a mental-health survey. The survey had 211 respondents, three-quarters of whom were female. Only preliminary results from the survey were available at the time Salient went to print:

 41 per cent of students said their usual level of stress during the academic year was “high”, and a further ten per cent classed their usual level of stress as “very high”. Less than ten per cent of students had “low” stress (eight per cent) or “very low” stress (one per cent).

 Assignments and exams were ranked as the highest source of stress, followed by money, work, health issues, and flatting. Family, friends and relationships were least stressful.

 77 per cent of respondents said high expectations for good grades were an aspect of university life they found very stressful. The time pressures of study (60 per cent) and pressure to find a job (58 per cent) ranked second and third for very stressful elements of university, respectively.

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been working to bring counselling waitingtimes down and raise awareness for students’ mental health. “Students are incredibly stressed in the 21st century. This week is about making that situation better, and looking at the support we all provide each other—including just to friends and family,” said McCourt. The week also outlined the services on campus available to students, such as Counselling Services, Financial Support and Advice, and Student Learning Support. A food bank and free bread service, both run by VUWSA, can also help students through tough times.

 Most students relied on friends and family to discuss mental health.

 Stressed students most commonly felt unmotivated (72 per cent) or depressed (61 per cent). Around half of respondents were discouraged from completing their study by stress. One per cent of students reported feeling happy when stressed, and five per cent felt excited.

 Of the 18 per cent of students who reported having a mental-health issue when they enrolled, over 80 per cent did not declare that issue to the University or Hall staff. More than one in five students who didn’t arrive with a mental-health issue had developed one since arriving at University.

 The top suggestion for what could reduce stress levels was not having to work while studying.

NEWS



YEAR IN NEWS

JANUARY The year actually began, providing the final nail in the coffin for the Mayan calendar. The final nail in the coffin of Vice-Chancellor Pat Walsh was readied as he signalled he would not re-stand after eight years in the job.

salient news editor chris mcintyre looks back on 2013: the year that was

with a shock resignation. Another person getting off: university caretaker Arana Kenny, who kept his job after stealing a PhD student’s phone from a bathroom. Also in February, murder allegations saw Oscar Pistorius, the fastest man on no legs, become the fastest man with no girlfriend.

MARCH Home Brew headlined O-Week, and threatened to beat up a student on Twitter, to the ire of VUWSA who responded by banning the group from future O-Weeks. The Hub had its official opening, with construction still visible in the background. VUWSA and other student representative groups pulled out of the Student Forum to make a point to the University, burning

FEBRUARY Everyone got a day off for Waitangi Day, but Mainzeal employees got even more: the construction company folded, and work stopped on the Hub. Students dodged a bullet as VUWSA fucked up O-Week, meaning we missed out on Macklemore. The Pope took time off too,

multiple bridges. Seven months later, and it remains to be seen whether this stunt worked as its replacement is still TBC, but for most of the rest of the year, student representation was left running on an empty tank.

APRIL Marriage Equality passed, to the delight of many and to the despair of Colin Craig, but people weren’t happy about all of Parliament’s work. Anger against the GCSB legislation got more and more shrill, to the point where John Key used the recent Boston bombings as an excuse for why the legislation was necessary. North Korea threw their toys, and Victoria threw a party after being announced the best research university in New Zealand. We weren’t allowed to smoke, though, with smoke-free changes implemented at the end of the month.

MAY Remember Aaron Gilmore? Unfortunately, so does everyone else. The Government's Budget cut some fat from the student-loan scheme, and threatened serious defaulters with arrest at the border. Repayments shot up by over ten per cent.

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 NEWS

Amanda Bynes ruined everyone’s memories of The Amanda Show, and All That really happened at VUWSA was no one resigning.

after finding out she was being paid $50,000 a year for the part-time job. The new Pope said he wouldn’t judge gay people, but Vlad Putin wasn’t listening as the Kremlin cracked down on “gay propaganda” to “protect the children”. Fonterra became Fon-terror as China cried over spoilt milk.

SEPTEMBER

JUNE The honeymoon didn’t last long, though, as Simon Tapp resigned from VUWSA over the mid-year break. The University decided it would get another student representative on the Council, and also that each letter-grade would go up by five per cent each. Students later revolted, and the University listened. Edward Snowden leaks documents about PRISM: “You promised not to tell!”, says the US.

JULY Education Officer Gemma Swan canned VUWSA to be the second resignation of the year, Egypt canned their President for the first time in 20-odd years, and Andy Murray won Wimbledon—the first Brit to do so in 77 years, unless you count female champions. Re-O Week was dire, but better than 2012’s Pyjama Party. Parliament decided to ban synthetic drugs until proven safe and the gods reacted with a large earthquake, shutting the University for days and, for some campuses, up to a week.

AUGUST The Waikato Students’ Union President threatened to leave NZUSA, and Massey students threatened their extramural President

VUWSA members got to say whether or not they’d like to be paying $45,000 a year to NZUSA, and $30,000 a year to the VBC. VUWSA presidential candidate Thomas Maharaj’s campaign stuttered as it turned out his dad didn’t own Snapper despite what he’d been telling students. Vic decided to put up fees for the umpteenth year in a row, and mayoral candidate John Morrison decided he didn’t really want students to vote, and then he did—what a misunderstanding. Kanye West got very angry at Jimmy Kimmel after the latter made fun of the former in a TV skit. Ye’s Twitter rant included the phrase, ‘PUT YOURSELF IN MY SHOES … OH NO THAT MEANS YOU WOULD HAVE GOTTEN TOO MUCH GOOD PUSSY IN YOUR LIFE”.

Encarta makes a comeback. Netscape navigator launches porn-only service. You see your dad on Tinder. Kim Dotcom and The Civilian Party form a coalition government. Salient transitions to CD-Rom format. Conflict in the Middle East.

OCTOBER And now here we are in October. Already, the Government has moved to allow universities to cut out students from top-level governance. Students have said they’d like Sonya Clark to be VUWSA President, and that they didn’t mind spending thousands on radio stations or ineffective national students’ associations. The US Government shut down amid a budgetary stalemate, and Rihanna called New Zealand paparazzi “Nazis” on Instagram.

FUTURE PREDICTIONS

Beards fall out of style.

People are still talking about the Beyoncé concert.

Community fans launch a renewal campaign.

Rory McCourt is elected NZUSA President, rolls David Cunliffe one month later.

Moviegoers are still watching the second Hobbit film.

Kimye have another baby, call it ‘South’. Miley has sex on stage at the VMAs.

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NEWS

ď&#x201A;ş

exec: a year in review

>>> salient.org.nz

 NEWS

david alsop introducing your "new" student rep

David Alsop was elected as student representative on University Council for 2013. Seeking a second term, he stood for re-election for 2014. His campaign was a resounding success; as the only nominee, David secured another year representing students at the highest level of University governance. Salient sat down with David for a chat about Council, interacting with top University brass, and his hopes for 2014.

What have you done as student representative on Council this year? Beyond [attending regular Council meetings], early on, with the collapse of the Student Forum, it became clear that a review was necessary. There was tension between VUWSA and the PGSA, which was clearly ongoing and had been there in previous years, so as a kind of neutral party I stepped in to chair that review. So, I have been Co-Chair of the Oversight Group, which is made up of both staff at Victoria and students, and chair of the Student Working Party, which has done the bulk of the work; and so throughout that, I have kept the process chugging along despite lots of interested parties and lots of things that inevitably slow this down. I helped us reach a consensus, I think, and tried to bring the different parties together, because everyone really wants what's best for the University and students, so all that was really required was to try and bridge those divides and try to find common ground. I think we've achieved that. Apart from the issue of the second University Council representative, all student representatives are on board, staff have been really supportive, and so that's been good process there. A lot of my work is quite informal, building relationships with Council members, because it's one thing being in a Council meeting and saying this is bad for students, or this is great for students, or we should do this; it's better if you can help other Council members understand what are the issues for students, what are their worries and so that when they comment, when they think, when they make decision, they’re taking that into account. I think

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I've been quite successful in that regard. Why did you decide to stand again? Shortly after I came in the first year, I started thinking about standing for a second year, because the first four or five months was just getting to know the ropes, building those relationships, understanding how to best operate and contribute to the University Council and improve the governance of this university. I've done all that; I'm up to speed and I've got that experience, so I thought next year I don't have to do redo that learning.

President, when it comes to changing the current situation of the Forum and universal rep? When I started this process of the review, I came in with a relatively open mind: I had known a few of the pros and cons of both positions, and I wasn't really sure what was best. The views of the students through the survey have leaned towards a preference for one student elected at large and the VUWSA President. I am more than happy to support that position. What do you hope to achieve next year?

I can jump in day one, January 1st, and be an effective Council member straight away, and I thought there's a benefit to students in being able to do that. That was my main reason, and also I think there's a benefit for continuity in terms of ensuring the same things stay on the agenda… There's always a loss of knowledge when you transfer from one student rep to another. I can help keep up the pressure on issues which are important to students, things like the quality of education. I think there's a benefit for that. So those were really the reasons.

It’s interesting because you can't really come to Council with a strong agenda, because events and circumstances dictate what happens. When I arrived 1st January as a new Council member, I had no idea that I would be leading a comprehensive review of representation and consultation… I'll be looking to carry through that implementation, make sure that the changes that we recommend to students are approved by the University Council and are implemented, because it’s no good saying we're going to change things if we don't actually follow through with it.

For two-thirds of this year you were the only student rep on Council due to issues with the Forum; did that make your job more difficult?

Something else I'd like to carry on pushing and keeping an eye on, and its good to know that the incoming VUWSA President Sonya Clark is also interested in this, is the idea of the quality of teaching and learning at Victoria. Something that came out of this year's fee discussions was that (and it’s come out in the past) students don't necessarily disapprove of fee increases so long as there is an increase in quality and benefits to students. We don't really know as students whether or not that's the case, and so, as I said at the meeting at the time, there is conception growing among students that the increase in fees correspond to static, or no increases, or decreases in quality, so I think we need to find out more. I don't know for certain, I can't tell, I don't have that information to hand about whether tutorials have been cut as a result of frozen funding or what the impact of that has been. I think there needs to be more information available to students so they can make informed decisions, and so I'll be pushing hard for that.

It was not the best... I think one of the limitations was that with one voice it's very difficult to be everything to all students and to represent the myriad of views of that students have and the myriad of experiences and opinions, and so, being the sole representative, I tried, but I don't think I was nearly as successful as I have been since Rory has joined the Council, because we can obviously both approach an issue from slightly different perspectives but still from the perspective of students. It also meant that in terms of Council Committees—I'm on two, Governance and Finance—Order and Risk was without a student representative for the year while there was only one student. Will you be advocating for two universal reps, or one universal rep and the VUWSA

NEWS

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Student media selfindulgent for once Trophies and ribbons mean nothing on your deathbed

this week's

ions

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

Hilary Beattie

The annual Aotearoa Student Press Association (ASPA) Awards were held at The Hunter Lounge recently, with nine university and polytechnic publications entered in the competition.

2014 Co-Editors Duncan McLachlan and Cameron Price shared Best Feature with Debate’s Nigel Moffiet, for their piece on the future of the gay identity.

The big award of the night, Best Publication, saw Salient place second to Otago’s Critic as judged by journalist Max Rashbrooke, Metro Editor Simon Wilson, and academic David Large.

Regrettably, McLachlan and Price did not win until after the former had asked the category’s judge Nicky Hager what he did for a living.

Salient received six first placings, equal to Critic. News Editor Chris McIntyre took home awards for Best Sports Writer (shared with Critic) and Best Headline (Uni can’t get it up; fee rise swears this never happens). Henry Cooke used his win for Best Feature Writer to remind the 45-strong crowd that “Beyoncé had the best music video ever made.” News Intern Sophie Boot won Best News Writer (Unpaid), and Salient also took home the award for Best Website.

US Govt Shutdown to end by 22/10

84%

“I write books,” the investigative journalist told McLachlan. The evening’s MC, former Salient Editor and selfdescribed “student media aficionado” Jackson Wood, hailed those present members of the “ex-student-media mafia” who had gone on to various positions in New Zealand journalism.

Labour to win Christchurch East By-Election

98%

In addition to Salient, Canterbury’s Canta, Massey’s Massive and Otago’s Critic sent representatives to “celebrate excellence in student media”.

Global Temperature to be Warmer in 2013 than 2012

58%

Government to Achieve Budget Surplus in 2014/15

70%

Student Bus Discounts to be announced in 2013

>>> salient.org.nz

 NEWS

Week That Wasn’t

GEN ZERO PROTEST WIND FARM Amid fears that planet Earth will run out of puff if current wind consumption rates continue, environmental group Gen Zero has called for a moratorium on wind farms. Wind is an atmospheric phenomenon, characterised by masses of air flowing from zones of high pressure to zones of low pressure. While not visible to the naked eye, its effects can be observed on plastic bags, hair, and occasionally skirts. Gen Zero has singled out Wellington—which has the highest per-capita wind-usage rates in the world—for a culture of waste which the group says “has to change”. Gen Zero has implored students to put their support behind more renewable energy sources, like hope, goodwill, and hemp.

away that we’ve let this desecration go on so long. Wind doesn’t just come out of thin air,” a spokesperson said. A wind-themed flash mob organised by the group has been scheduled for three years ago, when flash mobs were still a novel and relevant idea. While being accused of throwing caution to the wind, energy companies have dispelled concerns as a load of hot air. A energy-company executive, who wished to stay anonymous, told Salient, “Who is this?” and, “I’ve told your for the last time, stop calling this number,” when pressed on the issue. Gen Zero is asking students to join the conversation against wind energy by using the hashtag #dontbreakwind.

“To be honest with you, I’m completely blown

LOL NEWS

the birth. Worried neighbours, having overheard her screams, had called emergency services.

CHROFLIS MCLOLNTYRE

“I went into our bedroom after I had given birth and showed him the baby but he just went back to sleep,” his partner Nadia told media.

WHO’S THE BEST? TAKE A STAB Trash talk over a discussion on the greatest basketball player of all time led to three men being stabbed at a Pittsburgh bar last week. An uncle and nephew, who had been at the bar for four hours, disagreed with other patrons on who was better out of Michael Jordan or LeBron James, leading to the younger family member pulling a knife. Although it was not reported who won the argument, Salient suspects it was the guy with the knife. EMERGENCY CERVIXES ARRIVE JUST IN TIME A British man slept soundly in bed as his partner gave birth in the ensuite. Lewis McSweeney, 22, woke up as two police cars and three paramedics arrived minutes after salient.org.nz <<<

“When I woke him again and he realised what had happened he was in shock.” NOVEL CALLOUTS The London Fire Brigade has released a list of their strangest emergencies, and blames the ‘Fifty Shades of Grey effect’ for many of them. In the last three years, 79 people had to be freed from handcuffs, nine men had rings stuck on their penises, and one unlucky man had his penis stuck in a toaster. Each callout costs around NZ$500, meaning the cost of those incidents alone totalled nearly $50,000. “Our advice is simple: if the ring doesn’t fit, don’t force it on,” said a spokesperson for the Fire Brigade.

stay classy, world The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency have funded a robot which can outrun Usain Bolt. The cheetah-shaped robot would probably be useful if the US ever decided to run away from the prospect of a war. Also in war news, Team America World Police briefly invaded two countries last week, kidnapping a man from Libya and attempting to kill another in a raid in Somalia. The Somalia raid saw Navy SEALs swimming away into the night after the mission went wrong; Salient is unsure whether the SEALs also bathed on rocks. Just weeks after taking office, the Australian Prime Minister has had to defend expense-related allegations after he used Government funds to attend two colleagues’ weddings, and sporting events. Allegations of such impropriety are sure to be welcomed by Abbott, who usually has to deal with allegations of sexism, racism and homophobia. Sonny Bill Williams last week opted out, and then back into, playing for the Kiwis in their Rugby League World Cup defence. With Sonny’s indecisiveness, the ‘will William Williams or won’t William Williams’ speculation will probably continue. A student overheard talking to friends last week is reportedly “looking forward to exams being over”. Exams, a biannual period of University tests, are widely regarded by the University’s student population to be “shit” and “fucked”.

headlines that weren't Dead clothes designer fashionably late Big year expected for ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ brand in 2014 Confused Law graduate becomes barista Tony Abbott appoints large shark as Minister for Seals Elevator Orange Bandit appealing on so many levels "Irony decreasing", argues literalist 17

POLITICS 

left winners & losers of 2013

P O L I

By Carla Marks THE WINNERS: Snapper: Snapper were mentioned more times than ever before in New Zealand politics, after proposals to reduce the catch quota for recreational fishers were announced. The previously quiet fishing lobby swung into action, and before we could say “Go fish!” the Minister’s own caucus was turning on him and the plans were dropped. However, before the changes were abandoned, snapper did manage to find themselves in the centre of both the GCSB spying saga, after the PM said New Zealanders should be more worried about snapper than spying, and the resignation of David Shearer, who held two dead fish up in the debating chamber before he himself became a ‘dead fish’. Inquiry Fans: This year saw not only dozens of inquiries into government stuff-ups, but also meta-inquiries. The GCSB saga resulted in an inquiry into an inquiry into an inquiry after the original report into GCSB spying was leaked. Confused? You’re not alone. Aaron Gilmore: Because now we do know who he is. People who haven’t yet been blocked by Judith Collins on Twitter: The Minister of Justice discovered Twitter this year, and it has become her favourite medium of dishing out right-wing sass. She takes no prisoners,and unrelentingly swipes off futile attempts from the left to outdo her. Her style is unique and a pleasure to watch. She will make a fine replacement for John Key, assuming her Twitter sass translates to the ability to swipe off her main competitor: Steven Joyce. The Gays: Because marriage. But really, aren’t they always winners? David Cunliffe: After years of trying, Cunliffe has finally become the leader of the Labour Party. It’s looking like little will stop him becoming the next PM so long as he can hold together the caucus, the party, and his facial hair. The Losers: Colin Craig: Colin will possibly never learn that no matter how hard he tries, New Zealanders just aren’t into his dream of a conservative, binding-referendum, (light) blue-tinted country. Sorry not sorry, Colin. New Zealand: It’s sad to leave you all on a sour note in my final column, but the reality is that this year we’ve been screwed. National has left us asset-less, spied-upon, unemployed, uneducated, unheard, non-propertied and miserable. It’s a sad truth, but with National, we are the biggest losers.

Letters from a young contrarian By Cam Price On his 14th birthday, a boy gets a horse. Everybody in the village says, “How wonderful! The boy got a horse!” The Zen Master says, “We’ll see.” Two years later, the boy falls off the horse and breaks his leg. Everybody in the village says, “How terrible!” The Zen Master says, “We’ll see.” Then, a war breaks out. All the young men have to go off and fight, except for the boy whose leg is broken. Everybody in the village says, “How wonderful!” Thank you for reading my column this year. As some of you have pointed out, I plagiarised the title for this column from a book written by the late, great contrarian Christopher Hitchens called Letters to a Young Contrarian (but he stole that from another book addressed to a young poet). My aim, like Hitch’s, has always been to challenge the intuitive and commonly held views of my readers. Our minds are open to new ideas when we are young, but as we get older we seem to lose the ability to approach

things with an open mind. We become set in our views and lose our ability for self-critique. We agree with whatever the prevailing view of our peers is, without thinking of the ways in which we might be wrong. Eventually, we become the stubborn, grumpy, old, racist grandfather, always complaining about the current state of affairs. But it’s important that we don’t do that, lest we as a society lose our ability to constructively come up with new and better ideas. Everyone wins when you argue for the other side. When a new policy is being chucked around or your friends are chatting about something, deliberately pick the contrary view and force yourself, irrespective of your convictions, to make the best case for it possible. You might end up being right. Which would be great. But even if you are wrong, you force those who are right to improve their policy; to tweak it; to understand its strengths and pitfalls. This year, I was wrong more than I was right. But the point was, I played devil’s advocate and formed a stronger opinion for it. To recap:  When people say that gay marriage will lead to polygamous marriage, the response seems to be either that it won’t because the two are clearly different relationship constructs, or that it might but who cares if it does?  Cigarettes obviously cost the country, both in health terms and financially, but we should be sceptical of people

>>> salient.org.nz

 POLITICS

T I C S

right The Last Will and Testament of Freddie Hayek By Freddie Hayek

that we don’t know every single detail about the case enough to form a reliable opinion.  Foreigners coming over and buying our houses may be one of the factors in higher house prices, but we should remember that they also add to our economy and that there are other ways we can reduce house prices, like by opening up more land for development. who overstate the costs and ignore the benefits of smoking (however distasteful you find it).  Flatting warrants of fitness may ensure that all flats are warm and dry, but we shouldn’t forget that the policy might lead to higher rents. That will mean that those who were happy to be cold in order to pay less will suffer.  Interest-free student loans are great for us, but we should check our privilege when it comes to complaining about how expensive uni is for us, when the policy costs everyone else in the country massive amounts of money.  We may think that Bain and Lundy and George Zimmerman are all clearly guilty murderers, but we should remember

 Unpaid internships and low minimum wages may sound like exploitation, but the point is that the people who participate are doing it freely, they’re gaining valuable experience from it, and those positions might not exist if the businesses have to pay more for them.  Spending $36 million on a boat in San Fran sounds nice, but maybe we could spend that money better on starving kids back home.  As students, we are some of the most open-minded contrarians in society. But we can always do better. When all the villagers are saying how wonderful or how terrible something is, be the Zen Master and say: “We’ll see.”

This column was named for Friedrich von Hayek, my favourite economist and political philosopher of the last century. Hayek is often overshadowed by his fellow free-market dudebro, Milton Friedman, and John Maynard Keynes, whose statist economic ideas were very dominant after the Second World War. Hayek is arguably as influential as the other two for his greatest idea in his magnum opus The Road to Serfdom. Hayek’s argument is this: Government always wants to get bigger. It has an insatiable urge to grow and gain more power. Government takes more of the economic sphere under its management for planning of the economy to supposedly benefit the majority. When economic life is constrained, the individual then loses their rights to make decisions in the economic, then social spheres. Finally, a society that surrenders the rights of the individual will inevitably become ruled by a tyrant. In the New Zealand of today, this might seem like far-fetched lunacy. The book was, after all, written during 1940–1943 after Hayek had fled Nazi-occupied Austria. New Zealand was thoroughly deregulated and opened up to the free market after 1984. We are one of the most pro-free-trade nations in the world, with no tariffs or subsidies. Before 1984 though, Sir Robert Muldoon through three terms as Prime Minister accumulated more and more economic power to himself. Law Professor Geoffrey Palmer called New Zealand an “elected dictatorship”. People think a New Zealand Road to Serfdom has been forever abjured by MMP. They are wrong. Throughout this year, I have consistently highlighted the dangers of the policies put forward by Labour and the Greens. Labour have indicated over the past five years that they favour placing the Reserve Bank back under government control, new taxes, higher taxes, and nationalising the productive parts of the economy. Funny that Labour never implemented those policies during nine years in government… Green policies are broadly the same, but with more whingeing and sanctimonious bleating. The Greens also believe in ‘Green’ ‘jobs’, jobs that are created with massive subsidies that destroy two to 30 real jobs. In the previous 23 columns, I have tried to highlight that the policies of the left are mad, bad and dangerous. If that spark ignited in one person’s brain, then this column was worth it. In constantly trying to take away the rights of the individual to enhance the welfare of all, human beings have never achieved a desirable outcome. Thank you for reading.

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CAMPUS DIGEST



CAMPUS DIGEST get amongst "the best" VUW Confessions #749 I FUCKING LOVE MLP (My Little Pony). So when my roommate asked me why I had a MLP plushie I told him it was my sister's and she gave it to me to remember her by. Confession is that I don't have a sister, it was mine and MLP rules!!! bronies unite #747 Selina Kunac, we've been friends for ages and I don't know if you know, but you are a stunning person, and I love you. In a bisexual way. Please bake for me more often VUW Cupid II #219 To all of the seemingly invisible lipstick lesbians at Vic, Do you all feel this lonely? It seems impossible to meet other femmes without predating on other women, so many of whom are beautiful and interesting, but ultimately unattainable. Love, Dyke in a dress Xx #216 Jazzmin Pearse you sexy minx, you light up the hope bros stage. Your smile radiates for miles. Your may be theatre student but hey will you be mine. XOXO anon. #208 Sonnet 147 My love for him is like a hangover still,

Constantly desiring that which caused this ache Your smiles and hugs are a torture that do kill They please my heart, yet keep me awake. My reason prescribes a cure to my love and pain, She rages that her directions are not met Now abandoning me, my studies seem to wane Relieve me from this desire that has set Itself within my heart and internal hate I’m beyond cure, and Reason beyond care PMS seems to control my mental state Rants of nonsense and of despair I’ve insisted that you’re good and sweet You might think that you’re prince charming But I know something here is off beat I know this plea for love is somewhat alarming Anon. #206 I remember well the times we had We were young and full of life yet coming All was good and none of it was bad My guitar it was, I think, you heard me strumming We met with friends around us superficial Yet you stood out as someone with real heart Our meeting seemed to be so beneficial Seems we hit it off right from the start Now the years have passed and we are older We could think love has cooled and somewhat done But really we are seasoned and much bolder So I reinforce that you're my lovely one. As I shall breathe and look upon my life

#196 My Girlfriend is a typical loud and crazy theatre geek, But I’m the opposite, kinda shy and meek. We’re not perfect, sometimes a little bit volatile, So this is for her and she’ll see I’m worth her while. #194 Aimee Cruz For you I would bruise all of the things. You are allowed to tie my apron strings. I Want to go the this play But I would prefer not to pay As I am broke, But I hope no one thinks this is a joke Because I love you so much, I long for your touch! Bas-ic-ally we are one I love you more than my favourite son Overheard @ Vic Overheard in the HUB: Girl 1: "Afro-Americans are just Americans with Afros right? Girl 2: "Only the black Americans with Afros I think". Wow...just wow. This is the future of New Zealand. Amanda Louise

Overheard in film edit suites: "Two terrabytes nga iwi." "Aue!" Caryl Alyssa

Overheard outside Kirk lecture theatre: Ewoks aren't little Wookies, they're an entirely different race Sasha Tilly

I'm nobody if I don't have my wife.

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Top Ten Top Ten Rejected Top Ten Lists 10. Top Ten Inside Jokes 9. Top Ten Unprintable Words 8. Top Ten Men’s Rights Arguments 7. Top Eleven Doctors 6. Top Ten Races 5. Top Ten Booty Pics

COUNCIL ELECTIONS 2013— Election by the Students ELECTION OF ONE MEMBER TO THE UNIVERSITY COUNCIL BY THE STUDENTS Nominations for the election of a student representative to a 12 month position on the

4. Top Ten Reasons Commerce Students

University Council from 1 January 2014 to

Can Get Fucked

31 December 2014 closed on Wednesday,

3. Top Ten VUWSA Achievements

9 October at 5pm. One nomination was

2. Top Ten Crystal Meths 1. Top Ten Thank Yous For Reading carlo salizzo @louderthoughts

received from: Mr David ALSOP As there is only one candidate, I therefore declare Mr David ALSOP elected to Council from 1 January 2014 to 31 December 2014. These elections are governed by the Council Election Statute. The list of current Council Members is available on the University’s website at www.victoria.ac.nz/home/about/council Caroline Ward Secretary to Council and Returning Officer Caroline.ward@vuw.ac.nz

Environmental group Generation Zero erected this in the Hub last week. Although the stunt was intended to urge students not to vote for dinosaurs, security considered it an eye-saur and it was soon taken down.

04-463 5196

Later in the week fire engines were called out twice to Kelburn campus, first to put out a fire in the Adam Art Gallery, and then after a heating oven in the Biology department caught fire— delaying Jurassic Park by 12 months.

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the other david What did you think of the politics of the day when you were a Scarfie? I was a Scarfie in the early 80s, so that was the last days of Muldoon. To say I was no Muldoon fan was an understatement—I thought he was awful, I thought his economic management was a joke, I really hated the way he overrode good process and public involvement with things like the Economic Development Act. It was basically what he wanted, and when. That’s how the Clive Dam was built, among other things, which proved to be very expensive. How much did it cost you to go to university? I grew up in a generation where we had a better deal than students have today, and I’ve always been very conscious of that. I want to make sure that today’s generation gets a better chance than they’re currently getting. I forget exactly how much fees were, but from what I can recall is, if I worked at the pub in the weekends, and worked in the varsity holidays I could normally make the budget pretty much balance, except for in my last year when I got into debt a little bit. But I was able to get through. In those days we had a bursary as well, which helped people. We didn’t have to take on student debt as people do now. Why do you think students of your day got a better deal than students currently? We went through all the rigours of Rogernomics and neoliberalism and particularly in the early

90s the idea was that education was just a market like any other, and I think that really ignored the fact that it’s a public good. It’s not only good for the individual student but also good for the community, if people are going to be productive. What made you decide to get into politics? I’ve always been pretty passionate about public service, but not always thinking I was going to be a politician. I was a student at Otago, I was studying politics and economics, and a couple of other things. I thought I’d probably end up working in the public service. I turned down a job at the Treasury because i didn’t like Rogernomics. About ‘87, ‘88, I went to work in Foreign Affairs and had eight years with them, a couple of postings overseas, worked on an aid programme in the South Pacific for a while. I found that a really good learning experience, but after a while I got a bit frustrated with being a civil servant. I thought that only very rarely you got to make a decision, and I wanted to see if I could have a more direct impact. After Foreign Affairs I took some study leave, I went off to grad school on a Fulbright Scholarship. Then I went private sector for a while, to see what it was like in the so-called “real world,” and learned how business worked, because I thought, “well, you won’t be that useful in government if you haven’t seen it from the other side of the fence.” I did that for four years or so, and then ran for Parliament—a little earlier than I thought I might, I was 36 when I ran in 1999, in Titirangi.

And now here you are as leader of the opposition. Congratulations! Thank you very much. Yeah, well, you never know how these things work out, do you? I’m just part of a really good Labour team, and we’re all committed to working together to make a difference, and hopefully that will make a difference to Kiwis. Thinking about Labour’s presence in the political sphere at the moment, in recent years there’s been a feeling that some of Labour’s campaigning and its media presence has failed to excite voters and has missed the mark at times. What changes do you think need to be made to Labour’s public image? Well, let me just say that it’s never easy for any party going into opposition, and I want to give credit to Phil Goff and to David Shearer and the teams that have led us through those very difficult years, where the public is typically enthusiastic about the prospect of a new government actually doing something useful. It takes four or five years to dawn on the the public and I think it now has, that actually the Key government isn’t really on their side, and isn’t really showing us a way forward. So I do want to acknowledge my predecessors for all they’ve done to keep the party together and to keep us in as good a shape as we can be. Some of the things that I think we can do that are appropriate for this time now, are to move

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more towards a proactive rather than a reactive approach to the media, to be very clear about what we stand for. Let’s be clear and different from the current Government, because they are taking the country in a different direction from where we want to go, and let’s be as proactive and as strategic in the media as we can be, so that we are disciplined about talking about our agenda and our messages, and making sure people understand our direction. Looking ahead to next year, with the general election coming up, what do you think will excite young voters who are traditionally and increasingly apathetic when it comes to voting?

What do you think it is that makes New Zealand different from the rest of the world?

[Laughs] Will you be going to the concert?

Oh, all sorts of things. According to the World Bank, we’ve actually got the highest level of “natural capital” of any country, per capita, in the world. That is, Kiwis are blessed with wonderful natural resources, whether it’s our farms or our forestry or our fisheries, and we should be able to have a good life for everybody based on that. We’ve got a wonderful cultural heritage, bi-cultural, Treaty partnership. I come from West Auckland which

Yes we are—have you got the GCSB onto us?

No, but I hear you are!

Not the GCSB, yet. What do you think are the major issues that are facing young people specifically today? I think a lot of people are concerned about whether they can get a good job in New Zealand, or whether they have to leave the country. And a lot of their parents are hoping they’ll stick around so they can be with them too. So I think good jobs are the number one. Access to education—in the university system we’re particularly concerned about the situation of postgrad students for whom the ability to continue to take out student loans is limited by the current government. A lot of people won’t be able to finish postgrad degrees. There’s a whole lot of stuff—there’s a sense of drift, there’s a sense that the country’s not as thriving as it used to be, and in an Internet world, we can make anything in the world happen right here. So we want to be able to take advantage of those opportunities.

the first thing I’d say to young voters is that you get what you vote for

Well, I guess the first thing I’d say to young voters is that you get what you vote for. And if you want three more years of widening gaps and an economy going nowhere, just stick with the lot you’ve got. But if you want a better chance at a good job, and if you want a country that means something positive, you really need to think pretty hard about getting off the couch and getting out to vote on election day.

is pretty cosmopolitan, four out of ten of my constituents, nearly, weren’t born in New Zealand, so we have a pretty positive, you might call Pacific fusion. So I look forward to living in a tolerant, decent, open-minded country where everyone can be themselves, and we celebrate difference and we celebrate culture, and we invest in the arts, and it’s good fun. I hear you two are big Beyoncé fans?

You mentioned young people leaving the country because of jobs. What would a Labour government do to create jobs for graduates to move into? Invest in R & D, invest in good science, look at the school-to-work transition, look at the tertiary education-to-work opportunities. But underneath all that there’s a strategic shift that’s got to happen, from being a sort of cost-based resource extraction economy where basically we’re farmed or mined for someone else, to an economy which is smart and investing in knowledge

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and investing in science and innovation, and commercialising that, and adding value to our raw materials, protecting our environment, enjoying tourism, and just earning a better living in the world. At the moment it’s just a third less per capita than Australia, and we can’t sustain a further widening of that gap, really. Where are you going to get the money to put into those areas? Investment in R & D won’t be cheap, and we’re going to have to work hard to garner more resources for that—within a fiscal framework that is responsible and keeps us in a situation where we’ve got a well-balanced economy and our books are looking okay. But the great thing about when you move things forward, and you get some growth going, tax receipts go up, and if you’re careful with spending you can move some of those balances towards high-return areas of investment, both social and economic. Another factor that is likely to drive young people overseas in the coming years as more and more of the Baby Boomers move into retirement, is increasing financial pressure on our generation. What can the Government do to alter this situation and what will a Labour government do? To be honest about the cost of superannuation. And the current government is not. They’re saying they’ll never change the age of superannuation, but they’re being very disingenuous with younger New Zealanders by not telling them what the impact on their tax burden will be, which will virtually double if you don’t do anything about super.

What Labour stands for is keeping sustainable publiclyfunded universal superannuation, but moving to take some account of the fact that people are living longer by gradually raising the age from 65 to 67, starting that process of change after 2020, while at the same time making sure that there are transitional benefits available for those who are no longer able to keep working in their regular job. And that’s important because if we do that and we resume pre-funding NZ super once we’re in surplus, then we’ll be able to drastically reduce the impact on today’s younger generation’s future taxes. Last week you promised to better fund tertiary education at a rally at Auckland University. How would a Labour government fund tertiary education differently to how National is? It’s a matter of priority-setting within the Budget. We really do believe that education should be a right, not a privilege, and we really want access to education to be based on ability, not based on ability to pay. And it’s really important in terms of our future productivity that as many people as possible can get the best education they can, and it’s important for social mobility that a kid of a miner or a driver can have pretty much the same opportunities that the kid of a doctor can have. You need access to a combination of a very heavy state subsidy for public education, right through to tertiary; and the ability to finance that

Becoming Prime Minister is not about me; it’s about getting a job done for Kiwis. 24

through a combination of part-time work and student loans. Do you agree with popular perception among students regarding degree inflation (degrees are worth less in the job market despite costing more)? I think it’s certainly true that internationally there is a trend towards more careers requiring more than just a basic bachelors. A bachelors is a good general foundation, but increasingly people are either getting honours, masters, or professional qualifications on top of that. I think there is that trend, and that could be said to disadvantage those students, but the world is getting more competitive and standards are rising. To a certain extent we just have to compete with that. What would a Labour government do to combat degree inflation? Making sure that our tertiary education system is as good as it can be; funding it as well as we can; helping students to keep it affordable right through their degrees, and ensuring that—which is really a matter of the universities and technical institutes’ own governance—but that the degrees and diplomas that are being taught are relevant and taught well. What do you think of Voluntary Student Membership? I’m worried, frankly, about the free-rider problem. I think university students’ associations do a really good job for the welfare of students. I think it’s fair if students contribute to that through memebership. I didn’t particularly like

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the fact that the current Government made it impossible to have a required student association membership—compulsory voluntary if you like. I would hope that we could look at a system— subject to full consultation with my caucus colleagues—where if people weren’t opting to join a students’ association, that the equivalent cost might be donated to charity or something like that. So that there wasn’t a financial incentive for people not to belong—it’s not fair if some people do the work and pay for it and others don’t. Last week you said that you would repeal Steven Joyce’s changes to University Council size, despite the fact that it’s been supported by many Vice-Chancellors. Why? We think that, as well as effective governance, there’s an important role for representation. I’m advised that this is not new; this is the position the Labour caucus has held for some time. We think that it’s proper that there’s a student voice on university councils, and a staff voice—as well as the voice of independent directors and academic administrators. Why do you want to be Prime Minister? It’s not about me, it’s about getting a job done for Kiwis. New Zealanders want a change of direction; they don’t want a country that’s tearing itself apart. The gap between the haves and the have-nots is getting wider and wider. A lot of them are getting sick and tired of an economy that’s stuck in first gear, and they want less unemployment and better jobs and better opportunities for young people. They want to believe that we’re a country that means something positive, and that we’re going to look after our environment and we’re going to thrive and flourish—and I just don’t think they’re seeing that under the current government. I think it’s lacking of imagination, short of ideas, and is patently governing for the few not the many. People are sick of it, they want to change. My job is to give them the opportunity to get a change by ensuring that our team works together to be a credible government in waiting, and create policies that will deliver a better result.

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what we really want to know... If you could go back and give your Scarfie self one piece of advice, what would it be? Enjoy the moment, probably. Is that the equivalent of today’s YOLO? YOLO, what’s YOLO? What?! Errr… It stands for You Only Live Once. [Laughs] Oh, I like that. Yeah, you only live once. Of course I wish I knew then what I know now. I had a lot of fun; I played sport, had good friends. I worked pretty hard, played reasonably hard. I enjoyed the university life as well as the study, so no regrets about that. Were you involved with the Otago University Students’ Association? No, not formally. I wasn’t big into student politics, I was more into sports and academics and my friends. I wasn’t a student politician. Should the Kiwis take Sonny Bill Williams back? Yeah, if he behaves himself. How do you feel about One Direction? Not my gig. Would you consider bringing your beard back? Hmmm…. No, it might cause a revolution.

Thank God. What’s your favourite song on the Top40 right now? The last one I listened to was Lorde’s ‘Royals’, but my kids have been getting me to listen to Imagine Dragon’s ‘Demons’, which I like. Are you aware of the ‘Cats That Look Like David Cunliffe’ blog? I am. Why do so many cats look like you? I think people have trawled the internet to find lots of cat photos that do, and it’s pretty funny. So it’s misrepresentative of the wider cat population? Yeah I think it’s unfair to cats. Who will you be voting for in Bird of the Year? There’s a hot debate going on within our caucus about Bird of the Year. I think the kea is much maligned, so currently the kea’s got my vote. Will collective responsibility apply to the Bird of the Year vote? No, it’s a free conscience vote. I hear that you have chickens at your house, should I get them at my flat? We’ve got chooks—they’re really good at turning food scraps into eggs. Do you think Parliament should get chooks as well? Hmmm… chook house on the back lawn? No, there’s probably enough muck in Parliament as is.

Which superpower would you have? I’d stay on good terms with both. What is your favourite Beyonce song? Hmmmm… I’m not a big Beyonce fan. Travesty! Is that official Labour policy? No.

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A Supposedly Fun Twitter Account I’ll Never Follow Again

He’s a notorious homophobe, sexist and all-round hater, but it’s not all bad— he’s also on Twitter! So should you delve into Brian Tamaki’s online alter ego, @BishopTamaki? After following him for a month, I can resoundingly say: no. Don’t. Never again.

By Alexandra Hollis It happened in much the same way as everything on the internet: I was bored, and it seemed like a funny thing to do. Don’t worry, I kept my clothes on. After scrolling through a couple of pages, I even put on a jersey. I mean, it’s Brian Tamaki. But seriously, if you haven’t yet experienced @ BishopTamaki, give it a look. His Twitter style is fascinating, and possibly unique in the history of the internet: his capitalisation is all over the place, “words” are “quoted” “at” random, and the two-dot ellipsis is frequently used instead of a space. More often than not, they read like the best kind of Twitter surrealist humour; a better, less performance-arty @Horse_ebooks. It’s fantastic. The tweets themselves follow a vaguely religious/ self-help theme, but can vary drastically in tone,

from the laughable, “The First 3 words of the number one all time Best Seller ‘The Bible’ says it all..‘In The Beginning God...’” to the baffling: “Half Human..Half God..hmmm just another way of lookin at.” His ‘advice’ is often questionable; I can only presume that when he tweeted, “2 Biggest keys to increasing "CashFlow"..1) Solve Problems..2) Remove Pain,” Wall Street was immediately alerted, and the global financial crisis was solved. The inspirational tweets are truly that: “How is it to know that Superman is inside you.. only to spend your life living as Clark Kent.. #dontforgetwhoyouare,” he tweeted in September. A week later, he unleashed a series, beginning with the innocent, “You never know until you try.. don't be scared to try new things..just a thought.. an idea..an inspiration can change your world Today.”, before moving on to the more bombastic,

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“Keys to "Comebacks"..Believe you are Valuable.. Never say Die..Anything can Happen..Cannot be Defeated..No Blush..Hate Losing..Be There..!”, and finally, in a move so sincere I can only believe it came from a religious leader, “Im investing all my Leadership and Entrepreneurial Skills into Destiny Schools ‘Business Studies’ class equipping our Students 4 Succeess.” His adherence to prosperity theology—which teaches that faith in God leads to material riches, and that this comes about through ‘donations’ to the church—could be found in tweets like, “‘I Wanna be a Millionaire...’ So the song goes..#D.M.C.” In other theological matters, he provided us with a direct translation from the Bible when he wrote that “Apostle Paul thru Revelation says ‘Gaining ‘Spiritual Knowledge is equated to classing ManKnowledge’ as ‘DUNG’”. At other times, he is more irreverent. Presumably in a belated attempt to ride the wave of Charlie Sheen’s success, last week, Tamaki tweeted, “Grinning..cause im Winning..” By contrast, his mid–America’s Cup, “Tell me winning isnt everything..Go Team NZ.” is shockingly relevant. A beautiful sentiment is expressed in, “On Our way to a Better Day..The Past is Passed..You are now coming into Your MOST FRUITFUL TIME YET..Hard Out.” And finally, in words I want engraved on my tombstone, the eternal anthem: “Sparkle comes from Within.” I’m not sure if it needs to be said, but I’m not a Brian Tamaki fan. Virulent homophobia, sexism, and a prosperity theology which requires its congregation—often made up from economically disadvantaged groups—to stump up ten per cent of their income on church-related projects in a way that seems vaguely culty and exploitative; these are things that I’m kind of not into. So I was disturbed to find, a few days after venturing into the online world of @

BishopTamaki, that he wasn’t so bad after all. This was more than getting into his Twitter feed, in an abstracted, ironic sense; I was liking Brian Tamaki. It was a truly weird exercise in cognitive dissonance; the internet equivalent of being simultaneously mortally offended and deeply relieved when someone doesn’t sit next to you on the bus. Except with more two-dot ellipses and erratic capitalisation. Which I’m not okay with. As much as I find Tamaki’s tweets funny, I followed him to laugh at him, not with him. Any inkling that he might be in on the joke ruins it. Even if he’s not, the glimpses of humanity I made out from between strange abbreviations show a man who wishes his granddaughter a happy birthday, and that makes me at least slightly sympathetic towards him. Even if I still didn’t think he was a good person, I was starting to think that he might be an entertaining one, and, as an occasionally terrible person who tends to prefer entertaining to being good, I started liking him for that. It’s problematic, this. Because for a religious leader—especially one in Tamaki’s position—it’s far more important to be good than entertaining. Any personality game is dangerous and distracting; it draws attention away from questions about his theology and religious teachings and towards deciphering whatever he’s trying to say about his granddaughter’s dog on Twitter. But it’s one that he’s playing to his advantage, and he’s not alone. The ironic deification of people like Judith Collins, where many of us think that she’s horrible but also love her for being so online, serves to deflect genuine ideological disdain and turn it into a form of personality politics where only the most Buzzfeed-worthy win. The danger in making Brian Tamaki a comedic figure is that the focus then falls on the ‘fun!’ ‘zany!’ Brian Tamaki character, rather than the man who marched on Parliament to oppose civil unions and is heading a church which is quickly descending into a for-profit cult.

That’s not to say that we should (as sometimes happens online) jump to instant vilification on the basis of a comment, or an action, or even an ideological stance. People can hold views you fundamentally disagree with, and still be perfectly nice. We can handle contradictions, even if they are between, “this person hates gay people,” and, “I’m starting to feel vaguely sympathetic towards this person”—this is a wonderful part of what makes us human. But. Nuance is only valuable when it comes with clarity. If I was able to hold both sides of my impressions of Tamaki together, then maybe I’d be okay. But my impressions of him have always been only vaguely negative—Destiny Church as an ominous figure signifying the worst of Christian fundamentalism in New Zealand with Tamaki at its head. Whereas on Twitter—as there always is on Twitter—there was this sense that I was encountering the real person, and real people are inherently more sympathetic than a bullet-pointed list of their religious and political beliefs. When we met on Twitter, it wasn’t a fair fight by a long shot. The sympathetic side won out, and while I was still wary, I genuinely did start to like Brian Tamaki. In the end, I had to unfollow him. I was too worried that someone would see that I was following him and think that it wasn’t ironic, or, worse, that someone would see that I was following him and know that it was only halfironic, that I was starting to genuinely enjoy reading what he had to say, and was wondering if he’s such a bad person. That I’m still wondering. Even if @BishopTamaki is the new @Horse_ ebooks, I’m staying away.

The inspirational tweets are truly that: “How is it to know that Superman is inside you..only to spend your life living as Clark Kent.. #dontforgetwhoyouare,” he tweeted in September. salient.org.nz <<<

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i went to a protest once. it was shit. Protests aren’t what they used to be. They used to be good. Now, they are not. From this startlingly original observation, Sam McChesney took a look at the changing face of student activism. For your reading comfort, the leftist agitprop has been edited out. I went to a protest once. It was terrible. It was cold, the slogans were cringeworthy, and the marijuana lobby turned up to hijack the event with irrelevant hemp banners. Also, the protest was about VSM, so we lost. Inclement weather, misuse of the English language, selfrighteous hippies, and losing—pretty much a perfect stew of Things I Hate. Throw in Jack Johnson and celery, and I probably would have deflated into a misanthropic husk. I now see a little bit of that day in every protest I witness. If there’s something my protracted BA has taught me, it’s that marches don’t matter and things don’t change, because we’re all on an inexorable slide toward a liberal late-stage capitalist society with its own predetermined ideology and code. Yes, I find it interesting and less than ideal, but fuck getting out of bed and writing “National put the ‘n’ in cuts” on a sign; I’d rather just observe, crack cynical and collect a paycheck. I am Generation Y. Come at me, bro. *** Putting aside the arch posturing for a while, yes, we do come from a nation of protestors. New Zealanders are rightly proud of their suffragettes, their anti-Springbok-tour protestors, and their anti-nuclear stance. The ability to show mass

opposition to a particular event or policy, and to have this opposition listened to by those in power, is an essential part of a healthy democracy. At the same time, though, the traditional protest is in (terminal?) decline. Over the last three generations people have, or so we’re told, become more disengaged from the political process and, importantly, have become more individualistic. Our generation—Generation Y—is less likely to identify strongly with mass political movements or join mainstream political parties. We’re unique snowflakes—our identities are complex and multifaceted things, and we don’t like hitching our flag to any one banner. We don’t see any inherent value in being part of a movement that’s bigger than ourselves, and we’ll only participate if we see that there’s something in it for us: a classic Prisoners’ Dilemma that fatally undermines most group action. Generation Y is renowned as the “me” generation. Surveys of the attitudes of US freshers showed that while 45 per cent of Baby Boomers rated being wealthy as “very important” to them, this increased to 75 per cent among Generation Y. Meanwhile, “keeping up to date with political affairs” fell from 50 per cent for Baby Boomers to 35 per cent for Generation Y; and “developing a meaningful philosophy of life” fell from 73 per cent for Boomers to 45 per cent

for Generation Y. In short, we’re greedier, less engaged, and more nihilistic than our parents (though perhaps more honest). *** Veteran student activist and OUSA life member Mark Baxter has witnessed much of this change first-hand, and bemoans the apparent lack of activism among today’s students. “This generation who grew up in the nineties are more self-interested and greedy,” Baxter says (thanks for the kind words, bro), “and there’s the obvious barrier of young people thinking ‘I can’t change anything.’” When Baxter was at Otago University in the late eighties, more than seven thousand people marched against Labour’s tertiary fee hikes, over half of Dunedin’s tertiary population at the time. “Back then there was massive student engagement,” Baxter recalls. “Everyone in society had grown up in a welfare state where their parents and their grandparents for the last 50 years had paid for their children’s fair and equal access to tertiary education. That was just the norm. And all of a sudden Labour dropped a thousand-dollar fee on any university course, and a thousand dollars was a fuckload of cash for anyone back then.” According to Baxter, “the big problem now is that students of today have grown up in that neoliberal Rogernomics environment.” Young people feel alienated from a system that no longer provides for them. Having been socialised into an individualistic, user-pays mentality, we don’t care as much about society, and no longer engage in collective action or see solidarity as particularly important.

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*** As the traditional social justice movements have declined, much “activism” has shifted online. The rise of social media in particular has made possible ever greater levels of political engagement. However, the experience of activist groups is that social media has been far from a cure-all – as VUWSA President Rory McCourt points out, it’s hard to engage with someone who’d rather be looking at pictures of cats. Social media enables, even encourages, a shallow level of participation—slacktivism—that often consists of little more than a click; and carries the risk of information overload, with its associated fatigue. Baxter praises the way that social media can be used to coordinate large events at short notice. He’s right—I hear Kate’s party was a blast—but if the wind has gone out of the protest movement in the first place, there isn’t much point. Social media can #inform, but it hasn’t stimulated an unstimulated population. Seeking to bridge this divide between the online and real worlds are a new crop of activist groups like Generation Zero and JustSpeak. These single-issue, nonpartisan groups try to effect change within the current institutions of government, through submissions and lobbying. While they communicate primarily via social media, they also carry a physical presence, taking up the space once occupied by the social justice movements of old. This younger generation of activists largely sees traditional forms of protest, like the VSM demonstration I attended, as outdated and ineffective. Though Maddy Foreman of Generation Zero is quick to stress that she is “not a fan of telling people how to voice their dissent,” she also admits that “I feel like protest in the traditional sense is a bit passé ... I think there’s a time and place for everything, but having sit-ins and having marches are not as popular anymore, and there are reasons for that.”

“I think some people simplistically look at student activist groups and think that protest has to be like it was in the sixties and seventies,” Foreman says. “And so they expect, like, collective action, and people wearing berets and no shoes. And that’s not what they’re seeing, so one of their conclusions that they reach is that ‘these kids aren’t being effective’ or ‘they don’t have much support.’” McCourt believes that the “pragmatic approach” of groups like Generation Zero is proving far more effective than their forbears. “This is a new generation who understands and accepts for the first time in a long time that the structures of power exist the way they do,” he says. “And yes, you have to change them, but we’re not yesterday’s activists who were frustrated that the revolution didn’t happen tomorrow and gave up at that point. I think this is a savvy generation ... who are making real gains.” *** Savvy these groups may be, but their approaches also avoid rocking the boat or challenging social values, to the extent that “ideology” is somewhat of a dirty word. People are tired of generalised leftwing posturing—the ideological battle between right and left has already been fought and, as Baxter glumly admits, “the neoliberals won.” Indeed, Foreman balks at my suggestion that Generation Zero’s aims might necessarily involve wider ideological issues around the free market and the role of the state. “I think the values that drive people to act on the climate are quite compatible with values you’d find on the right and values you’d find on the left.

“I think there’s a tendency when people know you’re involved in a climate change organisation to automatically assume you must be anticapitalist, when that’s just not true. In fact, most of the solutions we advocate for are marketbased solutions and don’t talk about any fringe left ideas.” More than that, though, Foreman believes that remaining nonpartisan is vital to the movement’s very survival. “We don’t want to be seen as just another iteration of the left ... I think it’s really important that we remain nonpartisan and it’s one of the key things I love about Gen Zero. Climate change, which is our sole issue, shouldn’t be at either end of the political spectrum, and it’s not good enough for an issue like that to just be one party’s special issue.” While Baxter sees the value in single-issue movements like Generation Zero, he also rejects the notion that their causes can be separated from the wider political context. Single-issue campaigns won’t achieve a total victory, he believes, “until the country steps back and look at how they’ve fucked education, they’ve fucked health and they’ve fucked everything with neoliberalism.” However, Baxter also believes that broad-based coalitions of left-leaning groups are largely a thing of the past. “It’s certainly something that could happen, but I can’t see it happening ... joining all those dots has been absolutely useless from a general left perspective, to be honest. The single-issue thing certainly gets people thinking ‘hey, I can change this, and I can make this a better world.’ And that’s always a good thing, even if it is a single issue.”

Rather, Generation Zero is “fully involved in the processes at the local and central government levels. We try to engage with the civic structures that are already there, rather than having more of a counter-culture approach that you might have seen forty years ago.

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Tilted head, raised eyebrows How to take a good photo in 2013

By Henry Cooke

The internet was originally intended to be a text-only paradise, free of all the complications that come with photographs. It didn’t work out that way. The internet is ruled by images now, from the salacious YouTube thumbnail to the vandalised Snapchat selfie to the gigantic wedding album. How should one navigate this new onslaught of pictures? 30

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I. The front camera isn’t very good, but you don’t have a mirror handy. The app opens in seconds, a smiling ghost sliding away to reveal a pixellated reflection, your face lit by the screen’s glow. You will sit up, turn a light on, pull a face and then press the button. The button is nothing but an arrangement of pixels that respond to the heat of your thumb, freezing the rest of the pixels in place. These pixels are you. Kind of. Your eyebrows weren’t quite there. You will try again. You will look cute this time. You will get it right this time. You will press send. Snapchat will take these pixels, move them halfway around the world, then move them almost all the way back. Your friend will smile.

II. We’ve always told each other stories. That’s what sets us apart. Fuck opposable thumbs. Animals can communicate, can excrete pheromones to get each other horny or screech loudly to indicate danger, but they can’t spin a yarn. Humans tell stories, constantly, and it makes us who we are. We tell stories through a process of abstraction. There is no way to just show someone how something went down, but we can describe it with language, re-enact it with movement, or draw it with a picture. This process, called ‘mediation’, is inherent to any kind of storytelling. Your selection of words or movements or ink contribute to this abstraction, this removal from ‘actual events’, whether you like it or not. When photography emerged in the early 19th century, it seemed to change this. This was an authentic representation of events, untouched by the artist’s brush or the author’s opinion. Photography was scientific, methodical, precise. This was entirely untrue—photographers make choices too, in framing, in developing, in choosing what to photograph—but the fix was in. Photos were real. Photos told a thousand words. Photos were supreme. Photography became the ammo of our personal

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narratives, both our flashback-triggerers and our markers of significant change. You didn’t frame diary pages on the mantle, or bore relatives with your collected airline tickets, or treasure your birth certificate. You took photos, and you valued photos. Throughout this upheaval, a sense of beauty remained. The compositional principles that governed painting for centuries applied to photography too. Thus, two forms of photography emerged. Photography as art (‘Appreciate these tones please’, ‘Look! a penis’, ‘The bottle represents alcoholism’), and photography as documentation ( ‘I went here’, ‘My family is healthy’, ‘Three gunshots to the head’.) For most of this time, photography was kinda hard. It was expensive, inconvenient, limited by the physicality of its form. When each photo cost a considerable fraction of a dollar, you didn’t take so many. As we are all aware, the last decade has completely changed this. A baby born this year will have more photos taken of it in two months than their grandparents likely had in their entire lives. 20,000 photos are uploaded to Instagram every minute, 14 million snapchats are sent every hour, and 350 million photos are uploaded to Facebook every day. We do it large.

III. “It’s not weird to take a photo of plate of food. I feel like it used to be. . .” Dr Michael Daubs is a Media Studies Lecturer at

Victoria University. “Film and the physicality, by limiting photography, kind of made every photo a little special.” Special, and slow—even polaroids take a half a minute to develop. “You know right away, now, if you cut off someone’s head, or your eyes are half-closed. If your candid moment doesn’t look the way you want it to, you delete it, and try to recreate that spontaneity.” But spontaneity, recreated or not, now reigns. Snapchat is a smartphone app that allows you to send photos and videos to people which self-destruct within ten seconds being viewed. You’ve probably heard of it. Snapchat subverts the notion of both artistic photography and documentary photography. Instead, it fosters conversational photography. Your picture is the message, as ephemeral and unplanned as a line of Facebook chat. “The idea of using images to communicate isn’t new by any stretch of the imagination,” asserts Daubs. We have, after all,

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You didn’t frame diary pages on the mantle, or bore relatives with your collected airline tickets, or treasure your birth certificate. You took photos, and you valued photos. been sending each other postcards for decades. But Snapchat makes this all the more convenient, all the more ephemeral. 99 per cent of Snapchats will never be seen again. These are moments shared, not moments memorised. Snapchat’s popularity can be attributed to an emerging cultural cynicism, argues Daubs. “It kind of started with reality TV, which everyone just watches to mock. It’s a healthy dose of scepticism with the kind of oversharing that social networks encourage.” Facebook and Google want you to put as much of yourself as possible online, not for any altruistic ‘connectivity’ reasons, but because it lets them target their ads with more precision. They want your photos stored, analysed and catalogued. Photos are the main reason people use Facebook in the first place, and act as a perfect lock-in. The more photos you put on Facebook, the harder it becomes to leave. Snapchat rejects the permanent database, the enduring profile. Snapchat is a decidedly nondigital digital application—it doesn’t feel like the kind of thing we are used to doing on computers. But much of modern photography does.

IV. Consider, for a moment, Google Images search.

A sea of imagery, a grid of organised pixels, a keywordorientated wall of colour. Google can’t work out what’s actually in an image, not perfectly, so it uses the surrounding words to establish content. It works the other way too, the “search with an image tool” producing keywords and similar images from an inputted picture. This huge bank of images—seemingly every publicly available image online—is further refined and catalogued by an army of Tumblr and Pinterest users, tagging, recontextualising and editing images in a myriad of interconnected ways. Suddenly, your innocuous news photograph is plastered with captions and bounced around Reddit with reckless abandon. Suddenly, your dinner features on 400 different “roast” boards. Suddenly, the photo you took of a friend is tagged #girl #white #vertical #vintage #grainy #cute and used as inspiration for an eating disorder. “It’s much easier now to create a database, to create an archive, and some people will consider

this when they create images,” observes Daubs. “I know someone who has an archive of nothing but beer glasses that they take when they go on vacation. This guy is not an artist; he’s just a guy who goes on vacation and drinks beer.” Organisation seems relatively harmless, but to Daubs, the database can mean more than that. “You're almost at this state now where there is a premeditation of our daily existence—before we take a photo or even leave the house we are already considering ways we can mediate that day, can take a photo, we're considering how to create this curated narrative of our lives.” Databases create patterns, homogeneity. We want photos to fit our blog’s aesthetic, to not clash with the other photos on our Instagram grid. Without meaning to, you become a curator. Of your work, of others. Consistency is now important to you; you now realise you have a ‘personal brand’. Apps have sprung up to enable this consistency.

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The app ‘Everyday’ overlays the last photo you took with the one you are currently taking, allowing you to line it up to the pixel. What’s it for? Selfies, duh.

V. Of all the words the internet has produced, ‘selfie’ is one of the most hated. Selfies are the ultimate marker of ‘what’s wrong with our generation’, an immodest habit of narcissism that goes hand in hand with our supposed entitlement complexes. Daubs disagrees. “I actually don’t think selfies have much to do with narcissism at all. It’s almost the exact opposite of that.” He points to the motivation behind selfies, which he doesn’t believe is pride. “People don’t take selfies because they think they look great, they take them so people tell them they look great.”

Suddenly, the photo you took of a friend is tagged #girl #white #vertical #vintage #grainy #cute and used as inspiration for an eating disorder.

He’s not alone. “The right self-portrait directs others to see us the way we desire to be seen,” writes Casey Cep in Pacific Standard. “A selfie suggests that no one else in the world sees you as you truly are, that no one can be trusted with the camera but you.” Selfies are about control. You can use the front camera to get your expression just right. You can delete anything you deem unworthy. You get to shape the whole narrative. “People who take selfies want to remind others that they exist,” argues Daubs. “It's kind of a way to reassert one's existence.” One can’t control a lot of our experience in the real world, but our online existences are ours to shape as we please. Selfies, writes Cep, allow us to create our perfect self. “Staging the right image becomes the mechanism for achieving that desired identity.” But it’s not always just aspiration—sometimes it’s reclamation. Control means young girls—the ones who are taking most of the selfies—shape how they would like to be seen, away from the male gaze of most photographers. Just compare the provocative photos Rihanna takes of herself to the pervy photos the paparazzi manage. If you’re the one in the photo, why shouldn’t you be in control?

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“People don’t take selfies because they think they look great, they take them so people tell them they look great.” VI. No message is quite as scary as “tagged four photos of you”. The rush to your laptop. The eternal loading screen. The dismay as you realise how many more photos remain untagged. Most of us have some sort of anxiety about how we appear to the world, and as our lives move online, it’s only natural for this anxiety to follow suit. We have entire databases of ourselves to maintain now, libraries of our likeness which we struggle to control. Our obsession with images has existed for millennia, but has finally met its match. We don’t just use photos to tell stories any

more, the photos are the stories. That’s why you imagine the old world in black and white, or Iraq in grainy night vision. Our simulation is much more important than our reality. It’s estimated that around ten per cent of the 13.1 trillion photos ever taken were taken in the last year. It’s impossible to come to some kind of moral conclusion or summation about such a gigantic force of human culture. All you can do is stand in awe.

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The Political Year in Review Jordan McCluskey – @JordanMcCluskey.

January The year started with the truffle shuffle reshuffle. Kate Wilkinson was dumped in the delayed aftermath of the Pike River tragedy, and Phil Heatley for pretending to be the Count from Sesame Street. They were replaced by the rising star of Nikki Kaye, and old Nelson warhorse Nick Smith, back in Cabinet after being sacked in 2012 for vouching for a friend on Ministerial letterhead to his government department, ACC. (Protip: this is not a good idea, and is not advised).

February Parliament resumed, but controversy was stirred outside it by NZ First MP Richard Prosser. Prosser complained about how the extensive security precautions designed to stop terrorists from the made up country of “Wogistan” caused him inconvenience in airports. Twitter then spun into overdrive over who could condemn him the most. Prosser wisely apologised and tried not to be offensive for a while, which would be quite hard for Dick Prosser. David Cunliffe and his supporters were demoted for planning a supposed coup d’état against Labour Leader, David Shearer. Charles Chauvel, thinking Cunliffe will never be leader, and that he will never be a Minister, quit Parliament.

Russel Norman, saddened that the share float has been a success, that evening alone in the moonlight, ate his quinoa and brown rice salad then cried a single free-range organic tear. John Key visited Latin America to try to sell them more of our butter, cheese, milk and state-owned assets. He also wore a series of funny hats and dodged Hugo Chávez’s funeral. Close one. Dame Susan Devoy was appointed Race Relations Commissioner. No word on whether David Tua or Michael Jones will be the next Reserve Bank Governor.

April The GCSB affair began, and dominated the news for what seemed like forever. Outside the Wellington beltway, people thought GCSB stands for “Good Catch of Snapper Bylaw”, and were happy they would be allowed to catch more fish. In the best thing to happen this year, the bill to allow marriage between two people regardless of their gender passed its third reading and became law. Maurice Williamson, an old white National MP, became a gay icon for destroying the ridiculous arguments to those opposed to the love of other people.

policy. The Government was momentarily thunderstruck. Legendary Labour MP for Ikaroa-Rāwhiti, Parekura Horomia, passed away. A man beloved by all MPs, his loss was felt keenly by those who knew him.

May Aaron Gilmore set back the image of the National Party 20 years by getting shitfaced at a party conference and threatening to have a waiter fired by using the classic, “Don’t you know who I am?” Aaron was National’s lowest-ranked list MP, who, unlike most new MPs in the 2008 intake, never became a minister or a select-committee chair, and was let nowhere near anywhere he could do any damage. His ‘career’ was a flicker of stupidity in our national life, [Gil]more or less. He quit Parliament less than two weeks after making the comments. Oh yeah, the Budget passed too.

Labour and the Greens released their NZ Power policy. It shocked the electorate, giving them a different kind of buzz about power

March The Mighty River Power shares went up for sale on the New Zealand stock market. The Supreme Court also ruled in favour of the Government regarding Māori water rights, meaning the MRP sales and other sales could go ahead without any further legal challenges. The share float was a success, raising billions of dollars for the government.

June June was an absolute cracker, mate. David Shearer said during the Ikaroa-Rāwhiti by-election that Labour would “terrorise” its opponents, in an area that was part of the

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Tuhoe terror raids. Peter Dunne’s party registration was revoked, and then he resigned as a Minister rather than hand over his emails between himself and journalist Andrea Vance. You could say he was adVANCEing the cause of privacy, but it was a sad day for bow ties. Ross Robertson MP announced he will retire from Manukau East in 2014, prompting many people to go, “Who the fuck is Ross Robertson?” The Labour Party got a Meka Upload, with Meka Whaitiri winning the by-election in Ikaroa-Rāwhiti. Green activists in Wellington wondered why their tweeting failed to get the Green candidate Marama Davidson elected.

July Pita Sharples resigned as Co-Leader of the Māori Party, but remained a Minister because he had to pay his mortgage. A policy was leaked that would not allow men to contest every Labour Party selection for parliamentary seats, aiming for a 50-percent quota of women in the Labour caucus. A policy not without its merits, but it was roundly lampooned in the media and David Shearer publicly disowned the policy. The drums began to beat on the left for the removal of David Shearer.

exempt Australians, and as Australians buy the most houses here, the policy was essentially pointless posturing. Fonterra ruined New Zealand trade with China forever pretty much by declaring that some dairy products shipped there contain botulism, a deadly bacteria. The opposition milked this blunder for all it was worth, but it turned out the botulism scare was bullshit. The Government announced new housing policies that will perpetuate the housing boom… while the Reserve Bank prepared its LVR policy which will end the housing boom. LOL. In a televised debate between John Key and John Campbell about the GCSB, the Prime Minister dominated. This forced the left to take a bloody hard look at David Shearer, and they didn’t like what they saw. David Shearer resigned as Labour Leader on 22 August 2013.

September The Labour Party subjected the entire nation to a long, drawn-out, American-style leadership primary. David Cunliffe, Grant Robertson and Shane “Tightfist” Jones promised kitchen sinks, free cats, and their own grandmothers if the party chose them as the next leader.

15 September 2013, David Cunliffe became Leader of the Labour Party as was foretold by prophets when he was born under a double rainbow and a meteor shower. Grant Robertson refused (or is not offered) the deputy leadership. He began to plot in case of a 2014 loss…

October The Government, under attack by a competent Leader of the Opposition who isn’t shit, began to look a bit wobbly. Beset by foes on all sides, the potential for a third term had decreased. Ultra-fast broadband implementation, the share float and Kim Dotcom presented but a smattering of the political problems the Government must neutralise. John Key headed to APEC in Bali. Key was told off by Xi Jinping over the Fonterra contamination scare, and was snubbed by Vladimir “Rides Bears” Putin. David Cunliffe told the CTU conference the next Labour Government will deliver a tradeunion bucket list… then told journalists only if the Government can afford it. Clever guy, that Cunliffe.

November and December Predictions

Tony Abbott became Prime Minister in Australia. Became very quiet about boats all of a sudden. Funny that.

Key and Dotcom run into each other in a sauna, hug it out and the Government drops all the charges against Kim Dotcom.

In a date that will be mentioned in the History textbooks of schoolchildren for generations, on

Phil Goff retires, causing a by-election in Mt Roskill, to become a full-time alpaca farmer in Clevedon. Judith Collins decides to be a bit nicer to Labour MPs; several hospitalised with severe shock. Tip Top brings back Tropical Snow.

August Labour announced a policy, nicked straight from xenophobes NZ First, that would ban foreigners from houses. As the policy would

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A clampdown on beneficiaries doing something when the Government gets in trouble.

HOLIDAY CROSSWORD

PUZZLE 25: THE AMAZING RACE: ASIA Difficulty: Start googling Instructions: Each shaded square contains more than one letter. Which letters, and how many, can be figured out by looking at 77-Across and 41Down. Best of luck!

ACROSS: 1. Beastie Boys song named after a cocktail 7. Aussie fast food chicken chain 11. Letters before Pinafore or Bounty 14. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar ___â&#x20AC;&#x2122; 17. Pope after Marinus I 20. Irritating 22. Corp. that invented the floppy disk 23. Went for ages 24. Intermissions

25. League for the Chicago Bulls 26. In front of a viewfinder 27. Kiwi author Marsh 29. They get you online (abbr.) 30. Fold the corner of a page 31. Had sex, slangily 34. Republican pundit Coulter 35. Old Roman 1,150 37. Emotionally distant 39. One who stamps documents

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139. Flightless Australian 140. Financial maximum for some players 141. Perfect time 142. Knock on 143. Also 144. 1960 John Updike novel 145. Golfer with a 2009 infidelity scandal DOWN: 1. Two-letter combinations 2. Continue, as a storm 3. Suffix for prop- or but4. Sex Pistol Vicious 5. ‘The Da Vinci Code’ priory 6. Causing mischief 7. 98-Across city 8. It follows some phone numbers (abbr.) 9. __ es Salaam (Tanzania city) 10. NZ webcomic written and drawn by Sam Orchard 11. Short shorts 12. Breakfast mixes 13. Hissing sound 14. Container for transporting champagne, say 15. ‘Super Trouper’ band 16. Little of ‘The Wire’ 17. Take ___ at (insult) 18. 1962 James Bond film 19. Huckleberry Finn’s transport 20. Bloodline? 21. Suffix with rhythm28. Whichever 30. Samaritans 32. It’s needed for lawns 33. Coup d’___ 35. Irritated state or expression 36. ‘Heart of Darkness’ author Joseph 38. Yam-like vegetable 40. One who gets billed? 41. Collection of animals in the shaded squares 43. ‘Boston Legal’ figure (abbr.) 44. Horrifying-looking sea cucumber species 45. Like a Canadian Mountie 46. Musical chorus 47. Dalmatian’s home 48. Like some wild oats 50. Building floor 51. Dimness 55. He says “A hit, a very palpable hit” in ‘Hamlet’ 58. It may be special or limited 60. ‘The Way ___’ (Timbaland song) 62. Some prescriptions 63. Taking a holiday 65. 1976 horror film about Damien, now that there are sequels 67. One who walks nervously, maybe 70. Missing soldiers, for short 73. TV series about polyamory 74. Its capital is Castries

75. Makes, as energy 78. Mortgage holder, legally 79. Places for bouquets 80. Under the weather 81. Make over 88. See 91-Down 89. 73-Across or 76-Across, for example 91. With 88-Down, 2000 Ang Lee film 92. One of the tribes of Israel 94. End of a grace period? 95. Deathtrap for Indiana Jones 96. Director Vittorio de ___ 97. Continuing with 100. ____ 180 (spins round) 102. Old guy with a farm 103. Noted London gallery 105. Dull 108. Works at 103-Down 109. Guy who reads headlines, maybe 114. Brother of Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail 115. Letters on some stereo jacks 116. Combed (through) 119. Plate behind a padlock 121. Output of a cobra bite 122. Hindu deity 123. Fashion designer Cassini 124. It’s on Wall St. (abbr.) 125. Neruda or Frost 126. 1815 Austen novel 128. Lyricist Gershwin 129. Complain 130. Word in the Persian language? 133. Botanist Gray who wrote ‘Gray’s Manual’ 134. Norse god of law 135. Its main campus is in Setagaya, Japan (abbr.) 137. Day-___ paint 138. There’s a lot of it about nothing, in a play

Solution for ‘The Amazing Race: Asia’ Each shaded square contains one of the twelve animals of the Chinese Zodiac, in order around the circle. Starting in the top left, the circle reads Monkey, Rooster, Dog, Pig, Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Ram.

41. Makes soft noises 42. ‘Knowing’ star Cage 45. ‘Lord of the Rings’ baddies 49. Site of a Texas cult siege 50. “___ the Non-Believer!” 51. “See you then, sweetheart!” 52. Roman fiddler 53. Caesar’s question to Brutus 54. Steering system parts 56. “Donde ___ La Biblioteca” (‘Community’ rap) 57. Stat for a sports car engine 59. Satirical paper, with ‘The’ 61. “Do ___ say!” 62. “That’s all, folks!” speaker 64. Comedian Russell 65. “Truth ____?” 66. Surprise visitors 68. Island in a river 69. Huge McCahon painting in the Otago Uni collection 71. Hi-___ monitor 72. Poker game declaration 73. Series with Cylons, for short 76. Series with cadavers, for short 77. What 41-Down is, temporally (as displayed by the shaded squares) 82. Suburb- suffix 83. Inquisitive NZ parrot 84. Land of the Ephesians 85. Proposed gender-neutral pronoun 86. Spanish for “that” 87. Amino acid also shortened to ‘Q’ (abbr.) 88. Most saintly 90. Lemon or clunker 93. Worth 95. Scaly sheddings 98. State for 76-Across, for short 99. Fashion designer Christian, and others 100. Biden or Pelosi, for two 101. Like the piper of Hamelin 102. Campfire cooking vessel 104. Incredibly 106. Kiwi TV host Ashton 107. Winter Olympics performance since 1976 110. With ‘Den’, ‘The Hague’ in The Hague 111. River that flows into the Ubangi 112. ‘Salient’ contributor Ollie 113. Grew narrower 114. Jack Sparrow franchise, for short 115. Spanning this grid, in a way 117. How something might be split 118. Lady sheep 119. “What was that?” 120. Is a butler for, perhaps 125. King Arthur’s surname 127. Petty argument 129. Adage 131. In a sly or sexy way 132. “Holy shit!” online 133. Almond liqueurs 136. Strips in a darkroom

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We Regret to Inform You... By Patrick Hunn The accountancy firm had advertised an open position at the end of June. Mr Mark Guerre, the Chief Operating Officer, had retired with his thin-lipped wife to a polystyrene house in the mock-Swiss chalet style in southern Florida. There had been a flurry of interest in the vacancy he had created, and Ms Madeline Browning and Mr Henry Blanche, the recruitment committee, had been overrun by a tidal wave of desperate résumés. With a kind of furious anxiety, people told them about the time they’d spent barely passing ungraded courses while on exchange in Sweden and the time they’d spoken at a rally protesting climate change attended only by their friends. One of them thoughtfully catalogued every award he’d ever received, dating right back to a “Headmaster’s Award for Effort” dished out to the entire underachieving year when he was 13. It took them a week to reduce the pile of anxious documentation down to a reasonable 20 for interviewing. On a Friday afternoon, hopeful candidates were notified of this decision. Those who had been unsuccessful were informed by regretful email, while those who were successful received an excited phone call from Ms Browning inviting them to come in the following Monday. When the Monday arrived, 20 people of various ages arrived at the office in respectable outfits. On the whole, people tend to assume that those who work in accountancy are mild-mannered and probably dull, and, on the whole, those people are correct. That said, those people have, of course, not witnessed the job-application process, which, in light of the world’s recent financial difficulties, has become somewhat more competitive.

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The prospective candidates were shown into the conference room. Mr Blanche took some time to answer questions about the position—pay rates, benefits, allowances for time off, that sort of thing. Then, when there were no more queries, Mr Blanche and Ms Browning thanked everyone for coming and left the room. There was a brief period of polite discussion between the hopefuls. Popular topics included the weather, the carpet, and money. A Mr Paige and a Ms Lyme, both graduates of the same university, bonded over the time they’d spent a foolish, but carefree semester studying English Literature together. A Mrs Davis and a Mrs Bleak, who both had children in the same primary school, talked about the upcoming play. Both agreed that the new teacher was a treasure, but that something had to be done about that one girl who kept wetting herself. Then, after inspecting her watch, Mrs Bleak said to the room that it was about time they get underway, before she launched herself at Mrs Davis, seized her by the neck, and proceeded to strangle her. Instantly, weapons were drawn from a variety of inventive locations. Amidst the throng, it was possible to spy a blowtorch, an 18thcentury rapier, and a set of fondue forks all being wielded in deadly concert. Just as Mrs Bleak had dealt with Mrs Davis, someone dropped a bowling ball that was masquerading as an avant-garde hat on her head. A Mr Salmon garroted a Mr Bell with his necktie. A Mrs Eileen Zhou ripped the firm’s Award for Financial Excellence (1999) off the wall and impaled Mr Salmon on it. As she revelled in the fountain of blood now issuing from Mr Salmon’s very expensive tweed jacket, she was messily decapitated by a machete that a Ms Anita Rajpal had strapped to her inner thigh. The machete was not entirely up to the

task, however, and while Ms Rajpal was trying to wrench her weapon free from Ms Zhou’s swinging head a Ms Samantha Hamelin, the owner of a newly minted degree in Computer Science, shot her in the kneecaps using a pistol that she had cunningly concealed in the heel of her shoe. Meanwhile, Ms Lyme brandished an Arab-style scimitar that she had cleverly disguised as an A4 ring binder at Mr Paige. Panicked, he ignited the small amount of plastic explosive he’d mixed in with his hair gel and, in the ensuing explosion, killed both him and Ms Lyme. Mr A. R. Blythe skewered three haggard, not-so-recent graduates like he was stringing pearls with the stiletto now issuing gleefully from the tip of his umbrella. They all looked completely resigned to what had happened to them. The proceedings were generally of this nature, and when Mr Blanche and Ms Browning came to see who would be their new colleague, there was one person left standing. The last person standing was a Ms Catherine Claret, a cadaverous woman of 72 who had stayed alive because of the wide assortment of poisoned darts she kept in her towering grey beehive. Mr Blanche, upon re-entering the room, was particularly pleased, as Ms Claret was a noted expert in corporate tax law, and would be a valuable asset to the firm. If you’re about to enter the job market, there are two important things to remember. I. Make sure your résumé is impeccable, and never describe yourself as “fun to be around”. II. Always kill the old bitch first.

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Just Pash Already By Molly McCarthy Last week I stumbled across a Would You Rather that challenged: “Would you rather have a bell go off every time you were aroused OR have everyone know what your past internet searches are?” It got me thinking—what would people find if they trawled through my internet searches of late? There would be—incriminatingly— numerous searches for pirated versions of rom coms; given a history of hypochondria, searches along the lines of ‘shoulder ache = heart attack ?!??’ would certainly rank highly, but, without a shadow of a doubt, my number one search trend would be making enquiries to Google about how to know when someone likes you. Time and time again I have searched in vain for a fail-safe clue, trying both closed and open-ended questions; specific and vaguely worded questions, and search terms both in and outside of quote marks. Sadly, wikihow Yahoo Answers, and About.com are all pretty limited when it comes to answering the age-old question: are they even into you? Does she say “awwwww” after you cough, trip, or say something cute? She’s probably in love. Does he chat to you on social networking sites? Definitely down. Try making an inside joke with your crush! Only people who are keen for you make inside jokes. What I really wish Google had told me, all those years ago, is that the fastest, easiest, and most genuine way to find out whether someone’s interested in you is to just ask. Only acting on your feelings, allowing them to reciprocate, and seeing where things go from there will tell you whether it’s ‘meant to be’—writing their name beside yours over and over again; trawling through every photo ever taken of them on Facebook, or checking

your horoscope compatibility, on the other hand, will not. Most people, just like you, invest most of their time focussing on themselves and their issues rather than you and yours. Chances are, then, that whoever you’re interested in has completely failed to pick up on the ‘clues’ you’ve been dropping: all your ‘awww’s, Facebook chats, and in-jokes have gone to waste.

the fastest, easiest, and most genuine way to find out whether someone’s into you is to just ask Being honest about your feelings is never the easiest task, especially in New Zealand, where we are notoriously bad with talking about our emotions and no one has sex unless they’re drunk. You may consider ‘just asking’ akin to having a bell go off every time you’re aroused in terms of levels of embarrassment and impending social death. But what, really, is there to be scared of ? It is unlikely that this encounter will land you with an anecdote ripe for the ‘How Embarassment’ pages of Girlfriend magazine—and if it does, then they’re probably not worth pursuing anyway. Sure, you have insecurities—we all do (Molly, 22, perpetually convinced that she has no friends)—but chances are (just as with your feeble attempts to drop more ‘awww’s per sentence) you’re the only person who’s taking any notice of them.

No one likes to be rejected, but refraining from acting on your feelings for someone will not help you to get over them any faster than if you tell them but they don’t feel the same way. In fact, the latter may ease you out of you tub-of-ice-cream-and-a-rom-com gloom even faster, as at least you will attain that much sought after c-word (nope, not that one): closure. And, if you’re still not convinced, consider the alternative: after you’ve gone to all the effort of developing feelings for someone, boring all of your friends by talking about them all the time, and building a shrine to them in your cupboard, are you really going to throw it all away because you’re too scared to tell them how you feel? If you’re waiting for the apple of your eye to turn up on your doorstep one day, when it’s snowing outside and you’re only wearing sneakers and leopard-print underwear, and they’re on a ride-on mower playing your favourite song, holding up a series of signs that explain all the ways in which they love you, then trust me, it’s not going to happen. This is real life, not a mash-up of the closing scenes from all of my favourite romantic comedies. One of the most glorious things about these brief, confusing, and often troubling lives we lead is that we get to muddle along with everyone else, who are just trying to make sense of this all as well. If you’re lucky, you’ll find that more than a few of the millions of other beings who make the muddling along a little more bearable, and if you’re really lucky, you’ll find someone who makes it all make sense, at least for a while. So when that does happen, by all means, seize the opportunity, and—plain and simple—see if they feel the same way too. In short: just pash already.

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REGRETS: I THINK THEY’RE JUST SCOOBY-DOO SAYING ‘EGRETS’, AND I WANT TO DEBUNK THEIR MYSTIQUE RIGHT HERON NOW By H G Beattie At the end of semester, especially the second one, everyone starts saying that they regret stuff. I reckon they use the term too loosely. It’s not to be used every time something less than awesome happens. My own two biggest fake-regrets right now are not taking any Econometrics papers and sleeping with a faulty hot water bottle.* I sit nonplussed in a lot of Economics lectures with second-degree burns. I am a joke. Conversely, regrets are things that you feel repentant about or disappointed by, things that you wish hadn’t happened or that you hadn’t done. My own issues are minor. Speaking of minors—had a bet with myself that I could get the worst segue in Salient this week, cha-chinggg—I got coffee the other day with a mate of mine who is 17. I used to babysit her, and our parents used to say that we were similar because we were both mouthy. Now she’s this really cool and savvy 17-year-old. I’m 21 and so irrelevant I don’t even have Instagram. (Because I don’t need visual stimulation to laugh at people who think they’re being smugly healthy and ordering muesli at brunch. It’s pure sugar. Enjoy the bloating and the dentist bills.) Anyway, my pal was saying that anorexia and depression seemed endemic at school, that she can’t wait to leave and do the stuff that she keeps telling people she wants to do after leaving, and that she was thinking of hitting the clubs and did I know anyone who would give her an ID. I tried to ‘smash it out of the park’ wisdom-wise,**

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by saying realistic things that weren’t too alien to her. “A lot of people are sick and sad a lot of the time. Sometimes, other people can understand the external factors that might be said to ‘cause’ it, but sometimes they can’t. Either is fine. Usually there is something, however small, that you can do to help. Get to know your own mental health. When you feel alone, sitting around on Facebook will only make you feel more alone. It’s cool that you know what you might want to do after school; now work on finding a hapless organisation to fund it. The clubs suck. I understand why you want to go, but they suck. I don’t look like anyone either. When I was 17, I nearly got denied at RnV on a bad fake and cried in front of all my friends.” She said, “Okay.” I think there’s still time for me to salvage this, to turn it from ‘self-indulgent rant that I made to a cool young woman that I want to have a good time’ to ‘concluding remarks on 2013 with plea for fresh-but-still-self-indulgent-Salient-columnistmeat in 2014.’ I wasn’t sure whether I was saying things to my 17-year-old friend that I really regretted, as opposed to things I just disliked about the last five years or about myself. It was a weird feeling—I wanted her to know that right now she felt like she had never really fucked up, and she’d eventually feel for a long while like she was fucking everything up, and then eventually she’d just have to tell herself every now and again that the stuff that she was fucking up wasn’t the be-all and end-all.

I don’t think it really matters. Maybe you just shouldn’t have coffee with people when you’re a premenstrual empath. Enough of me. Not just because this is the end of the page, or the end of the year. I think you should write for Salient next year. Do you think I’m really shit at writing and that you could do better? My God, do it, then. It is kind of fun.*** I made a Venn diagram of people who think I’m funny the other day and it was basically two separate circles; one that said, “My friend Chris”, and another that said, “People who haven’t read Thought Catalog and don’t know that I’m ripping the format off.” Oh no. Have I just given it all away? Now you have no excuse. * You read that twice wondering who I’d slept with, didn’t you. Bless you. ** This works as a gag and I don’t care if you don’t think so. What are you going to do, write a letter to next year’s Editors? *** Fun-ish. Quasi-fun.

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Going the Distance long distance relationships

By Steph Trengrove I met my current lover (probably the love of my life, but no one wants to read that) at the shittiest possible time. I was 18, had just finished high school, and was ready to go to uni and meet an endless number of goodlooking men. Unfortunately, fate intervened, and during the summer between the barren wasteland of high school and the plentiful orchards of uni, I accidentally fell in love. He was hot, a musician (holla!), smart, funny, blah blah blah... and I was smitten. It got worse though. Not only did the boy thwart my plans for rampant pashing around Wellington by coercing me into a relationship, it turns out he studied in goddamn Dunedin. The mother of all shitholes and 789 km away from my intended uni destination. Fuck. There was no way it would work. He’d go off to Dunners and I’d head up to Wellington and it would all fall over and end in a fiery inferno of heartbreak and despair. What we should have done is have our summer romance, and then quit while we were ahead. That would have been the smart thing to do. However, I’m not known for making the world’s most intelligent decisions. I tend to do the exact opposite of what I know is a good idea. And so we decided to give the long-D thing a whirl. He left for Dunedin; I sobbed and snotted for about a week, then got my shit together and moved into Weir House.

Two years later, I’m still in Wellington, he’s still in the southern cesspit, and we are still together. So, all of you freshers out there who have met the guys and gals of your dreams at uni and are about to be cruelly separated over the summer, I am here to tell you that it actually can work. The rhetoric that I know is being fired at you from left, right, and centre—“It’s definitely going to end badly,” and: “You should probably just break up now”—from all your pals and parents is bullshit. I mean, I don’t think that it’ll be a hoot. I can wholeheartedly attest to the fact that it can be godawful from time to time. Sometimes I miss him so much that I think I may just cark it then and there. It sucks that we have to have our fights over the phone and we can’t hug and make up afterwards. I spend every extra dollar I have on my trips down to visit him which means that I am constantly poor, and sometimes I go so long between getting laid that I swear to God cobwebs start to form down there. It’s also going to need work. All relationships do, but one with a whole lotta distance shoved between the two of you needs a lot more. You’ll need to be sensitive, and patient, and very aware of the fact that you’re both going to get needy and annoying every so often. Thankfully, you no longer have to rely on pen, paper and a pigeon when those moments strike. Technology is definitely a long-distancer’s friend. Prepare to become intimately familiar with the workings of Viber, Skype and Snapchat, as those puppies will be what keep your relationship alive.

I can pretty solidly assure you that you’re going to cry, or get frustrated, or jealous, or just plain pissed at different points. But if they’re the right person and your relationship is worth going through all of that for, then it’ll work out in the end. There are also some good aspects of longdistance relationships too. I’ve found that because we don’t spend too much time together, we don’t get sick of each other and fight about stupid shit. The time we do get to spend together is magic, and the sex is fucking mind-blowing. We still have our separate lives and friends, and long distance has definitely made us stronger both as a couple and as individuals. In the end though, dear fresher, it might not work out. Your love may not last the distance, but the prospect of long-distance itself shouldn’t be a reason to pussy out on your relationship. Nothing ventured, nothing gained; if you never try you’ll never know, and various other clichéd phrases actually do make a valid point in this instance. Who’s to say that your relationship won’t make it through a bit of long D, and maybe even be better for it in the end? So, best of luck to all of you fellow long-Ders. I hope the summer flies by and that you are reunited with your lovers swiftly with your relationships still intact. If not, though, you can live out my initial plans and plunder Victoria’s ripe plantation of singletons. I’ll live vicariously through you.

>>> salient.org.nz

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what is your social media personality? BY PENNY GAULT & CARLO SALIZZO

Are ‘motivational’ quotes typed over photos of sunsets ever acceptable? NO YES Do you think social media is an Do you think people are interested in

appropriate forum to share your

strongly held political beliefs?

what your dinner looks like?

YES

Do you post intentionally vague updates to encourage people to react

YES

Do you understand the difference between a Facebook status-worthy

and inquire for more details?

anecdote, and a tweet?

NO Would you be embarrassed if your ex knew how many times you’d checked their Facebook page in the past month?

YES

Does getting 50 likes in a day on your

Do you feel that people need to be

Facebook status provide you with a

updated on your life without being

greater sense of accomplishment than

prompted?

knowing what everyone had for lunch?

YES

The Show Pony/Peacock

The Lurker/Python

The Over-sharer/Hyena:

You carefully maintain your online presence across multiple social networking platforms. Social media, for you, is a means of validation. You live for the thrill of a like, upvote, favourite or retweet. You’re quick to share funny YouTube videos, thought-provoking articles, and controversial news. You change your profile picture at least once a fortnight, because hey—you’re up to date. Just chill out a bit. Everyone needs a break from your face in their news feed, and surely you have an exam to study for.

You know anything and everything there is to know about a person. You’re justified in Facebook stalking people and following Twitter threads because you just like to know stuff, and hey, it might be relevant later. Just be careful of accidentally liking someone’s photo from a year ago or otherwise leaving a trace of your ‘investigation’. Maybe post something every now and again, or comment on a post you’re reading to show you’re actively engaged in your online community/alive.

While you may think you’re getting a lot of likes on your status because people are interested in your daily cleaning routine, the reality is people just feel sorry for you. Save these stories for where they belong – letters to your nana. As a general rule of thumb, posts about domesticity, illness and test results should be limited to once per month or generally extreme circumstances. Keep your food diaries on the fridge. We get it; your kid/pet is cute. We don’t care. Let us enjoy nasty Hope Bros pics in peace.

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The Vaguebooker/Domestic cat: You post vague updates about how shit your day was, how lucky you feel today, or subtweet sarcastically about how ‘people’ are ‘lovely’ or ‘hilarious’. If you aren’t going to elaborate after the first person asks what’s up, don’t expect anyone else to succumb to your childish attention-Seeking. Get a padlocked diary; write your shit yarns in it. Burn it.

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top of the charts Observations of the world through graphs and diagrams By Chris McIntyre

HEAD COVERINGS vs STRENGTH OF BELIEF HIGH STRENGTH OF BELIEF

NEO NAZIS

MUSLIMS

NZ FIRST VOTERS

KKK

EXCLUSIVE BRETHREN

PUNKS

NINJAS

PIRATES

JUDGES

LOW HEAD COVERAGE

A LOT OF COVERAGE

RAPPERS

MATHS TEACHERS

BALD GUYS IN WINTER

BALD GUYS

ALTY BABES IN 2008

ALTY BABES IN 2010

LOW STRENGTH OF BELIEF

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venn diagram of people who wear puffer jackets how much this graph looks like an arrow

rappers

commerce students

time

PEOPLE WHO OWN SURFBOARDS

PEOPLE WHO OWN VANS

HOW FINE IT ACTUALLY IS

GIRLFRIENDS

PEOPLE WHO SAY 'GNARLY' "IT'S FINE"

HOW MANY YOU GET

POTATO FRITTERS

box and whisker graph

HOW MANY YOU ASK FOR

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>>> salient.org.nz

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November’s horoscopes: ARIES: use your apathy to create something productive! use your hair TAURUS: do not shake hands. look upon one another as the past, congealing, sublime GEMINI: everything dies inside you. vegetables. love. the brother you might have been CANCER: be AWARE LEO: new car!!!! call __________ to win. please. ples5e! plea VIRGO: severed and put in a vase to marvel at LIBRA: underwater SCORPIO: but do they love you for your weakness? this is the real test SAGITTARIUS: hot singles ! starving cannibals in your area CAPRICORN: springtime! the birds will not stop screaming about sex. will not stop screaming AQUARIUS: everybody knows you are a victim. or will be. they discuss it often PISCES: a malfunctioning street light, not yet replaced

December’s horoscopes: ARIES: 93% of the phone calls you receive are because you have misplaced your cellphone TAURUS: brush your teeth. your gums are bleeding? keep brushing. GEMINI: the Ouija board keeps spelling out PENIS. nobody at the séance will admit responsibility CANCER: your expectations are probably very unreasonable LEO: meeting new people? be memorable! instead of a handshake, go for an open-mouthed kiss VIRGO: *muffed rap music plays in the distance* LIBRA: tiny drops of water create the mighty ocean. the army gathers. join us SCORPIO: a creature on a far-off planet contemplates the sky and doubts your existence SAGITTARIUS: oh I’m SO glad! phew. that was a close one! better not try that again, huh? CAPRICORN: the interior of a wooden box. the shape of your body. a hammer AQUARIUS: Crunchy Teriyaki PISCES: do not trust your government. do not trust news media. greed destroys all.

By Rebecca Hawkes

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salient 2014 Hey team, Our names are Duncan and Cam, and we are Co-Editors of next year’s Salient. We want it to showcase what it means to be a student in 2014. If you have good ideas for the magazine, we want to hear them. If you are doing something interesting or know anyone who is, we want to talk to you. If you have never contributed before we want to get you involved. We want diverse, interesting, engaging content. As well as long form features, we want your art, your photography, your poetry, your short stories, your cartoons and your reflections on music and film and sport and life in general. We want any idea you have for Salient. To get involved, send us an email at salient2014@gmail.com. Look forward to hearing from you. Love, Duncan and Cam

We are looking for: Paid Positions:

Contributors:

 Designer (full-time)

 Photos

 Features

 News Editor

 Illustrations

 Poems

 Feature Writers

 Comics

 News

 Web Designer

 Short stories

 Distributor

 Reviewers (music, film, book, sport)

 Sub-editor

 Columnists

 Anything we haven’t thought of

salient2014@gmail.com 48

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Quiz NEWS

Daniel Bruhl in Rush?

seasons?

1. Which court quashed Mark Lundy’s murder conviction last week?

3. Which famous singer got a Maori-style tattoo while in New Zealand last week?

8. Which two countries are co-hosting the 2015 ICC Cricket World Cup?

2. A boat carrying hundreds of African migrants capsized off which island last week?

4. Who recently had a heated argument with Miley Cyrus online?

9. True or false: Russian President Vladimir Putin is a former Olympic wrestler.

5. Which high school did Lorde go to?

3. Te Waipounamu is now an officially recognised alternative name for which of New Zealand’s islands?

6. Name the five members of One Direction.

10. Robert Griffin III, Troy Polamalu and Michael Vick all play which sport professionally?

4. Swarms of which animal have killed tens of people in the last few months in Shaanxi Province, China? 5. True or false: recently nominated Janet Yellen would be the first woman to head the Federal Reserve, the central bank of the US. 6. Which country does Anas al-Liby, a suspected terrorist captured by the US last week, come from? 7. More than 40 new persons of interest have been identified in the case of the 2007 disappearance of which British toddler? 8. The President of which country won the 2013 Ig Nobel Prize for Peace for making it illegal to applaud in public? 9. Russia is currently prosecuting activists from which international organisation for piracy? 10. The US recently announced a cut in military aid to which Arab country?

POP CULTURE 1. Robbie Ellis released a mash-up of ‘Royals’ and which other New Zealand song last week? 2. Which Hemsworth brother co-stars with

7. The creators of which TV series turned down an offer of US$75 million to make three more episodes?

POLITICS

8. In which city did Banksy’s graffiti turn up last week? 9. Who is the director of Mister Pip?

1. Which is the only party in New Zealand’s Parliament to have a majority of women MPs? 2. How old is Francesca Pascale, the fiancée of 77-year-old former Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi?

10. Which New Zealand classical opera singer has a role in the fourth season of Downton Abbey?

3. Narendra Modi is running for PM in which country next year? 4. What has David Cunliffe promised to raise the minimum wage to if Labour becomes the government next year?

SPORTS 1. In which city will next year’s Tour de France start? 2. Who scored the first try in this year’s NRL Grand Final?

5. Based on this year’s Census, where will one new electorate be added: in the North or the South Island?

3. Which football team does former Liverpool and Chelsea manager Rafa Benítez now manage?

6. Which island hosted the annual meeting of APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) leaders last week?

4. Which high-profile Serbian tennis player will be competing in the ASB Classic in Auckland next year?

7. True or false: Gareth Hughes is the youngest MP in Parliament.

5. In the last ten years, how many times have the All Blacks won the Tri Nations/ Rugby Championship? 6. Australia’s national team in which sport has the nickname ‘Diamonds’? 7. Who has won the NBA Most Valuable Player Award in four out of the last five

8. Who is John Boehner? 9. What does TPP, the name of a international trade agreement New Zealand is currently negotiating, stand for? 10. The two National MPs who have already announced they will retire at the next election share which first name?

Answers: 10. Dame Kiri Te Kanawa. 9. Andrew Adamson.

10. Egypt.

9. False.

8. New York.

9. Greenpeace.

10. American football. 8. Australia and New Zealand.

7. Breaking Bad.

8. Belarus.

Liam (Payne), and Niall (Horan).

7. Madeleine McCann.

6. Zayn (Malik), Louis (Tomlinson), Harry (Styles),

6. Libya.

5. Takapuna Grammar School, Auckland.

5. True.

4. Sinead O’Connor.

4. Hornets.

3. Rihanna.

3. The South Island.

2. Chris Hemsworth.

2. Lampedusa, Italy.

1. Dave Dobbyn’s ‘Loyal’.

1. The Privy Council.

Pop Culture Answers

News Answers

7. LeBron James. 6. Netball. 5. Seven times (2005–08, 2010, and 2012–13). 4. Ana Ivanovic. 3. Napoli. 2. Manly winger Jorge Taufua. 1. Leeds, England. Sports Answers

10. Chris (Auchinvole and Tremain). 9. Trans-Pacific Partnership. 8. The current Speaker of the US Congress. 7. False (Jami-Lee Ross is). 6. Bali, Indonesia. 5. The North. 4. $15 per hour. 3. India. 2. 28. 1. The Green Party. Politics Answers

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WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! ϟ • FEATURES WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! Thanks to everyone who entered this year's Vic ITS-Salient Giveaway. WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON!to WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! Congratulations firstWON! placeWON! winner Michelle WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON!Gifford, WON! WON! WON! WON! who takes home WON! a 32" WON! LED TVWON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON!toWON! WON!place WON!winner WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! Congratulations second Juan FernandezWON! WON! WON! WON! WON! Castellano, WON! WON! who WON!snapped WON! WON! WON! WON!Tablet. WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! up an Android WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! again toWON! Vic WON! ITS for providing WON! WON! WON! WON!Thanks WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! the WON!prizes WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! 52 >>> >>> salient.org.nz salient.org.nz WON!52 WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON! WON!

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Secret Diary of...

GRANT GUILFORD Dear Diary, Who am I? On 1 March 2014, I’ll be the Vice-Chancellor of Victoria University of Wellington. That’s who I will be. But who am I now? I can already hear students asking, “Grant? Who’s he when he’s at home?” I phoned Pat Walsh for some advice. He laughed. I heard a crackle. It sounded like some water had dripped into the mouthpiece. Tears? “Know who you are?” he cawed. “I’ve been Vice-Chancellor since 2005, and people still think I’m Peter Dunne!” Unsure of how to best present myself to the staff and students of Victoria, I asked Pat for some guidance. “Do I tell them I’m from Auckland?” “Avoid that at all costs. If they find out … Quit.” “What about that I was Dean of the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Auckland?” “Probably not.” “Does anyone even know what science is, in Wellington?” “Only the social ones.” “I see. Well then, do I tell them that I have a Bachelor of Philosophy?” “Yes, I think they would like that. Where did you study?” “Massey.” “Ah. Best to keep that one under your hat.” “I’ve also trained in Veterinary Sciences.” “Good. You’ll need that here. It’s a zoo. What do you know about dinosaurs?” Feeling disheartened, I wondered if anyone

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would remember me from previous media appearances. I hope not; my media presence doesn’t extend much beyond my staunch opposition to the introduction of millions of dung beetles to New Zealand to speed up the burial of livestock manure. I used to have nightmares about shaking the damned things from my boots, while children consumed cowpat-filled dung beetles. There was just poo everywhere. Now I have nightmares about becoming Wellington’s resident DungBeetle Guy. I asked Pat about his time in the role, to gauge an impression of what would be expected of me as Vice-Chancellor. “Oh, well. I ah, I manage and coordinate, I suppose.” “Manage and coordinate what?” “Papers on my desk. My pens. The contents of my lunch box. If there’s one piece of advice I can give you, it’s that you can never have enough Post-it notes. Oh! And don’t go for a wander at ten minutes to the hour, in case someone asks you for directions.” “Is there anything more you wish you had achieved in your time at Victoria?” “Yes. Cellphone reception in the Hub.” He warned me to watch out for We Are the University, and various other associations with unintelligible acronyms; “View-sah, not Voosah.” He warned me of the danger of the serious faux pas of referring to the student magazine as “The Salient”. He warned me that students were developing an immunity to free-pizza bribes. He warned me not to compliment anyone on their outfit, lest I be taken to be suggesting they were materialistic.

He warned me that the students who looked most like hobos were probably the wealthiest, and not to offer them my leftover lunch. He warned me not to point out that everyone complaining about financial hardship was juggling MacBook Pros and iPhones between fingers laden with Meadowlark rings, while flicking expensively cut hair out of their eyes and rearranging Karen Walker scarves. When the conversation ended, I despaired. The University on top of the hill loomed large and unknown in my mind like Edward Scissorhands’ mansion. I was about to approach, just as Peg had, with a basket full of Avon. Pat said they don’t even use compasses during O-Week anymore. That I’d need to design a toga that carefully negotiated self-awareness with not-giving-a-fuck. Perhaps something burgundy. I’d need to start now. I took a deep breath and asked myself, “Who do I want to be?” I want to contribute to Victoria’s continued national and international success. Whatever that means. I want people to know I’m not Zac Guildford’s dad. I want the people of Victoria to see me as a modern, white, educated, middle-aged Luke Skywalker. I want to learn the Force and become a Jedi, with Ian McKinnon as my Obi-Wan. Most importantly, though, I just don’t want to be Dung-Beetle Guy on my first day at my school. Yours apprehensively, Grant.

COLUMNS 

Weekly

Rant

Check Our Privilege By Tyrone Barugh A New Zealand birth is nearly the apex of early-life outcomes. You don't get one of those cot-boxes with bedding and baby clothes like in Finland, but birth into relative wealth and safety can't be far off the jackpot. Admittedly, Aotearoa has one of the highest rates of inequality in the OECD, but the 99 per cent live well relative to the global poor. Discontent from changes to industrial law are great examples—attacks on collective bargaining and meal breaks hurt our poorest, but our poorest are relatively lucky to have minimum protections anyway. Many countries have no minimum wage, and almost every minimum rate is lower than our own. Even queer women of colour are incredibly privileged if they live in Aotearoa rather than in the developing world. Why, then, is first-world privilege not critiqued and checked by city liberals as often or as publicly as cis-gendered manhood, heterosexuality, or whiteness? I think it's because effectively checking class privilege impacts us economically in a way that checking identity privilege might not— donations and aid burn your pocket, while opening borders is (erroneously) thought to cost jobs and weaken culture. We don't want to discuss First World privilege in case we realise our token attempts at donations and refugee quotas make us more flake than ally. The First World is obliged to empower the global poor to live their conception of the good life. We should care about development and the poverty trap just as much as we do about gender and its plethora of implications. An example: feminism has moved to stand with women of colour and poor women. When WINZ payment cards allegedly blocked purchasing pads, feminists were especially outraged. Why then isn't New Zealand's mainstream feminism more perceptibly

outraged at the plight of women in poverty globally? Or am I just not noticing it? And is being outraged enough? Talk is cheap; so is Twitter. Neither does much for the global poor. I think two things help the worst-off globally. Firstly, you can give them stuff. I'm not a development economist, so I can't say what. Like Christmas presents, money's probably a safe option. Anything on Givewell.org's list is better than giving to World Vision or Oxfam because transparency. The big thing here is that you give more than just a token amount. Making a token attempt to address rape culture, homophobia or racism counts for very little. Likewise, giving a few dollars to your mate's ‘Live Below the Line’ is fuck all. Privileged Kiwi students might like to consider donating their course-related costs. Does 1G seem extreme? Not in comparison to your luck in life not to earn just that much year-on-year. The new laptop can wait. So can sinking piss. My favourite part of this is that it undermines nationalist government policy that prioritises New Zealanders' uni years over a half-decent aid budget. A friend pointed out, reading my draft, that charitable behaviour acts as a “band-aid” and impedes other important critiques— whom, for example, do we harm with our demand for a new iPhone? I appreciate her point, but I disagree. I don't think capitalism has created global poverty. Instead, it's created middle-class jobs, providing a path out of poverty for economies as a whole. It's institutions within those economies that are lacking if the poorest remain poor despite overall growth. Further, it's important to consider the costs of improvements. Tithing some income means I have to cut consumption in general, which might be more achievable than never purchasing consumer electronics which I strongly demand. Obviously, it pays to be mindful of the flow-on impacts of our purchases, but I note that even really ‘extreme’ social-justice people own and enjoy mass-manufactured

goods. Perhaps what's important is to negotiate a balance between the two approaches. The other imperative is opening our borders when our closest neighbours are closing theirs. Most favoured-nation statuses under free-trade agreements should be abandoned in favour of looser restrictions for all. This isn't to say we should relentlessly push our products in developing markets, because that's a great way to crush local industries. But it's ugly nationalism to protect our imports from international competition, especially if the competitors are from developing countries. The other side of the open-borders coin is immigration restrictions. They prevent people from seeking a better life out of an attempt to protect our privileged position as beneficiaries of a good economy and a safety net. Eliminating them, or at least weakening them, directly benefits the poor who get to come here. It also relieves the state's burden in developing countries—a few fewer mouths to feed. If individuals can shop for governments as for goods, the market can pressure governments to do better for their mobile citizenry. Maybe improvements to institutions and civil society would filter through to benefit those who can't easily afford to leave. Better still if we can find ways to make journeys safer and cheaper and reduce the risk that prospective refugees have to take on. If we can mobilise the poorest, then perhaps apathetic or malintentioned governments will have to give their worst-off people more reason to stay. TL;DR: the lottery of birth affects lots of factors. An acknowledgement of this shouldn't be First World–centric. That said, looking abroad shouldn't blind us to structural oppression at home. Fortunately, as my friend pointed out, humans have the capacity to multi-task.

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 COLUMNS

LAYING DOWN THE LAW

hoopin' and hollerin'

@Google v @Spain: #TheRightToBeForgotten

Sonny Bill

By Emma Smith

Every time I talk to my mum, she asks me if I’ve been keeping warm, if I’ve felt many earthquakes lately, and then she tells me off for posting drunk pictures or swearing on my Facebook profile. Apparently, potential employers and my Nana don’t approve. I’d never admit this to her, but it has got me thinking about privacy settings, stalkers, and stuff lasting forever on the internet. The law around privacy has got hugely complicated lately as a result of the interwebs, and I don’t pretend to know all of it— there are entire law firms around the place that just specialise in media law—but I have a few bytes of knowledge to share with you all. Firstly, if you post private information about someone, and a reasonable person would consider the publication of that information to be highly offensive, they can sue you. Which sounds exciting, but it’s probably going to cost you a lot of money and be really stressful—so don’t. Where it all starts to get interesting lies in the fact that it’s really really hard to delete stuff permanently from cyberspace. If someone posts private or embarrassing information about you, they might apologise, they might pay you money, they might delete the post from their Facebook wall, but chances are it’s still out there. Two weeks ago in California, the Governor signed in a new law that forces social-media sites, such as Twitter and Facebook, to give minors the option of permanently removing posts they have made. Over in Europe, the courts are currently dealing with a case between Spain and Google about whether or not there is a “right to be forgotten”. Mario Costeja, a Spaniard who owed a lot of money in social-security debts, had his house sold at auction, and details were published in the newspapers. Costeja, embarrassed, asked Google to eliminate all links to the newspaper articles so that he couldn’t be searched. Google said no. The European Court of Justice is still deciding. Whatever the outcome, the case raises some really interesting questions about data-privacy laws—there’s a tension between the right to privacy and the right to freedom of expression—and the role of companies like Google or Facebook as arbiters of content. Unfortunately, because the law develops in response to social needs, it will probably always be one step behind.

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By Carlo Salizzo

As a Law student, I know what it’s like to be a mercenary sometimes. I also know what it’s like to be hated for no reason. So in that way, and few others, I resemble Sonny Bill Williams. He’s had a fairly polarising history, spread across three sports, not to mention an incredibly successful one. From league, to union, to boxing and back to league, SBW has done it all with his trademark big hits and impossible offloads, as well as no small amount of good looks as the cherry on top. All of that adds up to one hell of a media profile—so it’s no surprise that he’s in the news yet again. Were we supposed to be shocked? After playing (and winning) the NRL Grand Final with his new team the Sydney Roosters, SBW made himself unavailable for selection in the Kiwis Rugby League World Cup team. Then, once the team had been announced, he suddenly decided that he was available after all. Poor Tohu Harris was kicked to the kerb as Steve Kearney hastened to include one of the greats in his side. There’s no doubt that the Kiwis with Sonny Bill stand a much greater chance of winning the World Cup than the Kiwis without him. He’s just that good, and deserves to be in the side. That said, a lot of sporting traditionalists are doubtless tutting with disapproval. It’s not quite fair, is it, that some poor kid has to miss out on what could well be his only shot at a World Cup, having his hopes dashed just because Sonny Bill couldn’t make his mind up. But is that the only reason behind it? Plenty of observers have wondered whether there’s something else working behind the scenes, and you can’t really blame them. Sonny’s got a track record of making relatively self-interested deals, like his move from the Bulldogs to Toulon in 2008. That’s not to mention the mercenary reputation he’s earned thanks in no small part to his high-profile agent, Khoder Nasser. And the stakes are high enough, too. The NZRL (and everyone else in league) stands to gain plenty from Sonny Bill playing in the World Cup, since he’s a massive drawcard for will-theywon’t-they audiences. Not to mention that they’d love for him to stay interested in their code for the foreseeable future. Maybe I’m being a cynic—he was taking a break when suddenly that patriotic fervour arose deep within his breast. Maybe money’s not the issue here. Hell, maybe he’s getting back with Jaime Ridge. It’s all guessing at this stage.

COLUMNS 

Things That Go Bump In The Night with Lux Lisbon & Knuckleduster

What a year it has been, sharing all that is confusing, delightful, engaging, intriguing, and sometimes totally hilarious about sex. If I have managed to share with you all anything at all, I hope it is that sexual encounters and experiences—whether alone or with a partner—are supposed to be fun for everyone involved, and the key is to communicate what you want and what you need. I think that so long as you are both comfortable and honest, not terribly much can go wrong.

For women, when you attend Student Health you can now ‘self-test’, meaning you can slip into the privacy of a bathroom, insert the test swab, pop it back in the test tube and hand it over to the nurse. On that note, ladies, you should also be sure to get your cervical smear testing ticked off the list annually—it may be a little uncomfortable but it really could save your life.

However, in my parting wisdom, I felt it appropriate to express to you all how important it is to look after number one, because sometimes sex can have some not-so-desirable side effects. It’s true: sex is awesome, but whether you are in the habit of having unprotected oral, anal or vaginal sex on the regular or if you have only done it once, it is so important to get yourself to a clinic to have regular sexually transmitted infection check-ups. Even if you have no symptoms, it is always possible that you may have picked something up which could cause you a bunch of grief later down the track, and more often than not it is something which can be treated reasonably easily with a course of antibiotics.

Lux you long time, xx

Student Health do them for free, and all you need to do is give them a bell and make a request to see a nurse; simple as that. You can also go along and see someone at your regular GP or pop into your local Family Planning Clinic. Sure, maybe it can be a little awkward having to get your kit off in front of a nurse, but they really are seasoned professionals who have seen it all before, and it is certainly a better option than discomfort or infertility.

Look after your sexy bits, and they will look after you.

Fistal Responsibility 21 October is International Fisting Day. International Fisting Day has been promoted by a bunch of queer porn stars and directors to bring attention to the way that fisting is often forbidden in mainstream porn, mostly because large studios fear being hit with an obscenity suit if they show fisting, and because they are concerned some retailers won’t stock porn which shows fisting. International Fisting Day is also my favourite holiday. I love fisting, whether I’m the fisted partner or the fistee. Fisting is intense and sometimes emotional, and often makes me really impressed and awed by my body. The first time I was fisted and the first time I squirted are the times I have been most content with and happy in this body of mine. Fisting often seems to get written off as being weird, or extreme, or violent, and it’s often censored out of porn released

in New Zealand on the grounds that it is obscene. Why is a fist obscene? Why does the addition of a thumb take a sex act from acceptable to illegal to show on film? Fisting has a strong presence in queer indie porn, and is the only sex act which could be performed between any two (or more) consenting parties no matter their gender. If you’re sufficiently bendable, you can even fist yourself. The presentation of fisting as obscene and ‘degrading’ (the reason often given in censorship decisions, according to porn editor Amie Wee) confuses the hell out of me and out of plenty of other fisting aficionados I know. Fisting for me is something I do with a trusted partner (not that this is the only right way to go about it!) and something I do slowly. As the saying goes, it is very much about the journey more than the destination, and fisting shouldn’t be solely about taking someone’s entire hand. It might take weeks or months, or longer to work up to that, and it isn’t a pass-or-fail sexy-time course. It requires a huge amount of focus to fist your partner, and being fisted draws your attention to everything about how you and your partner are interacting more completely than anything else I know of. Literally the only thing stopping me waxing lyrical about how much I enjoy having a hand in my butt for pages at a time is the word count of this column, so I’ll leave you with the suggestion that if you’re interested in fisting, then plugging ‘International Fisting Day’ into the ol’ Google machine will net you plenty of resources to get started. Knuckleduster

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and confidential.

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

>>> salient.org.nz

 COLUMNS

our Life Fixing Y[BECAUSE OURS ARE WRITTEN OFF] Hi Hector and Janet, Is there any advice you’ve really wanted to give this year and haven’t had the chance? Regards, The Flimsy Excuse

hard, imagining a movie montage of them getting better is self-indulgent and ultimately counter-productive. Yours transcendentally (given I was listening to Coldplay’s ‘Fix You’ just before and the Monty Python sketch ‘How Not to be Seen’ started playing over it),. Janet

JANET Hello, you sneaky little snake, I can’t think of any advice I’ve really wanted to give. On reflection, I am disappointed that I didn’t write a column entirely in U2 song titles. At any given time you are, after all, stuck in a moment you can’t get out of. I was even going to get them to print it on pink paper so that you were seeing it the same colour as Bono would. I suppose I’m also a little disappointed I didn’t use this column to plug my brother’s ask.fm, on which he responds to questions like, “What’s your favourite berry?” with: “Fucking excellent question. Really made my night.” I don’t know. What do you want me to say? If you’re in unrequited love that’ll never go anywhere, just wait and hope that you eventually stop feeling that way. That is the worst, but it’s pretty great when you realise that you no longer want what you used to. Go to more comedy. Contribute to my upcoming book that’s made up entirely of my friends writing columns in the style of Shelley Bridgeman and Megan Nicol Reed. Now I’m just barking directives at you. My advice to you is to be nice to other people and try to get Labour to drop NZ Power. I also think you should have a coffee with the person to whom you talk most on the internet without really ever meeting up in real life. Lastly, when you feel like things are

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HECTOR Hi, Flimsy Look, there are lots of things I wanted to say, and plenty more that I wanted to do. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to squeeze them all in, but I’ll try. I really wanted to obliquely reference every romantic encounter I’ve ever had at university, just to see if anyone would get it. I wanted to spell a message out to someone in the first letter of every word in a sentence. I wanted to follow my own advice, primarily to communicate more and to focus less on myself. So, with that in mind, here are some of the general tidbits that might have been lost in the fog. Don’t take yourself too seriously, but at the same time make sure you have faith in yourself. I could set most things up in that neat kind of dichotomy, but instead I’ll just say this: everything in life sits on some continuum or another. You’ll do well to stay in the middle. Being earnest or ironic, being relaxed and being focussed, chasing love and letting it go. Everything in moderation.

be them. That way you’ll be certain to add something to society instead of repeating someone else’s impact, and even if you don’t get anywhere close you’ll still have your own personality to be proud of. Something I’ve learned to value is emotional honesty, and I wish I had been able to work it into more of my columns. It’s hard to get by without being true to yourself, and it’s particularly hard to be open with others when you don’t even know the truth for yourself. If you want to be a writer, actually write things all the time. If you want to be anything which is just a verb with an -er at the end, go out and verb that verb. That’s the only way you can ever get better at it, after all. Don’t ever break up with anyone via text. Don’t ever break up with someone using the lyrics from ‘Call Your Girlfriend’. Learn the value of Real Talk, but also know when soft words are better than hard. We all make mistakes, and most of us don’t have pseudonyms to hide behind when we act like arrogant fools. So forgive people for that, and try not to judge people too harshly on first impressions. They’re probably judging you, but who gives a damn because you can’t see inside their heads. Finally, if you want your friends to stop making fun of you about something, steer into the bend. Take their joke too far, ruin it, and they won’t find it funny any more. Now you know. Yours, desperately in earnest, Hector.

I mean, that’s pretty easy to say and hard to do, but all the best things are. Aspire to be friends with your heroes, don’t try to

COLUMNS 

LIFESTYLES OF THE POOR & THE STUDIOUS weet The S p Scoo

By Julia Wells Wow. Like, wow. I can't believe it's the end of the year already. In my head, it's still very much mid-winter. I've got a handbag overflowing with Merino singlets, I keep making stodgy cakes, and yesterday I was so convinced I had a fever that I hunted the depths of the medicine cabinet for a thermometer. At least until someone pointed out that since it was brilliantly sunny, I might want to try taking off my jersey and thermals (I wish that wasn't a true story). Since it's now officially kind of warm (especially in the Kelburn library, which is like a sauna at the moment—I mean it, take an ice pack), here's a cool, summer-like dessert. As it's exam-doing/beach-sitting season, and both of those are very important and time-consuming activities, this is also quick and easy. It requires planning in advance, to allow for refrigeration time, but the actual doing-things bit only takes 15 minutes. At the same time, it looks long and complicated, and will impress people you don't know very well. All I ask for, really. Although the ingredients of this look quite plain, the final product is anything but, and I can't recommend it highly enough. In fact, a friend of mine described it as “a really sophisticated and delicious kind of chocolate yoghurt thing”, and, let's be honest, compliments don't get much better than that. It is velvety smooth, with a delicate mocha flavour. And, unprecedentedly for this column, this actually isn't that unhealthy. Look at all the milk! I can just hear my mum saying “good for bones and teeth”. This was adapted from a 1960s cookbook, back in the days when ladies wore skirts, took tranquilisers in the suburbs, and had jelly moulds in their cupboards. If you don't have one, then don't worry: just set this in a bowl. If you can borrow your grandma's, then try it; they're pretty cool. A few tips for use: before pouring in the mixture, wet the inside with cold water; when un-moulding the blancmange (what a wonderful phrase), sit the mould in hot water for about 20 seconds, gently press around the edges to separate it from the mould, then invert sharply onto a plate, tapping the base, and you will be left with a perfectly shaped dessert. Pics or it didn't happen.

Mocha Blancmange 3 tablespoons corn flour 2 tablespoons cocoa powder 1 teaspoon instant coffee

4 tablespoons white sugar 600 mL whole milk 1 teaspoon vanilla essence

Mix the dry ingredients with a small amount of milk to form a paste. Heat the milk and vanilla in a saucepan over a low heat, then pour slowly onto the paste, mixing it until smooth. Return all the mixture to the stove, and continue to heat. Bring it to the boil, stirring constantly to ensure it stays smooth. It will thicken rapidly. When it is boiling and very thick, pour into a jelly mould or a bowl. Leave it to cool and set, first on the bench, then in the refrigerator. This needs at least four hours, and is better left for a day or overnight. Un-mould, and serve as is.

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 COLUMNS

Health tip # 24

Four Ways With: salient magazines

Remember to take care of number one— you! www.calm.auckland.ac.nz is CALM: computer-assisted learning for the mind. There is loads of practical advice, audio files you can download, guided meditations and ways to manage stress. www.mentalhealth.org.nz is the Mental Health Commission’s website, which has tips about how to connect with friends, family and our communities—we feel stronger and happier when we are connected.

1. tinder

2. toilet paper

Finally, always remember these words from Mark Johnson at the Anglican Chaplaincy on the Kelburn Campus. Even when it doesn’t feel like it... “You are deeply loved Infinitely valuable and Wonderfully capable”

Things Your

Grandmother Should Have Taught You By Alexandra Hollis Dry your nails:

Not the dating app, the fire fuel. On cold nights, empty the baskets around campus and treat your flat to a roaring fire.

This issue's even printed on newsprint, which’ll be much kinder to your booty.

3. furniture

4. wrapping paper

Missing the comforts of your parental home? Furnish your flat with copies of this rag—like Design student Alex Polglase did.

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Stick them in a bowl of ice water, and you’ll have instantly dry nails. Remove red wine stains: Apply shaving cream; let it rest for a few minutes.

Christmas is just 71 days away; treat your family this festive season?

Study! Firstly, before you sit down to do work, always know what you’re going to do. For each course, make a detailed list of everything you feel you need to do to prepare for exams—chapters to read, lecture slides to go over, notes to write up, etc.—and block out certain days for certain courses, then try work your way through this list. Secondly, in terms of actual study, the best study/break balance is to work hard for 25 minutes, then have a five-minute break and repeat, except that every third break should be 20 minutes; use this time to make yourself some decent food and/or go for a walk. Thirdly, and most importantly, print out inspiring pictures of cats to stick on your walls.

ARTS 

ARTS Ratings Guide: 5 stars: Gabrielle Beran, 5 stars: Chloe Davies, 5 stars: Simon Gennard, 5 stars: Alex Hollis, 5 stars: Patrick Lindsay, 5 stars: Elise Munden

theatre 

year in review

What was meh: review

Gabrielle Beran

What was great: New Zealand International Comedy Festival. Oh dear lord, the amount of funny people in this city was too much too for my (non-existent) abs to handle. Guy Williams, Steve Wrigley, Jeremy Corbett, and some class international acts from which sprung the glorious Chris Martin (not the one from Coldplay). This talented young Brit had me laughing for a full 60 minutes and wanting to date him afterwards. YouTube him (perfect procrastination). The amount of improvisation going on in this city! There’s something for everyone: PlayShop late on Fridays, The Improvisors at Circa if you want to take your mum, and The Young and the WITless returned for a perfect flat outing. Well done teams. Any of you who took my advice and actually went to the opera… you’re my new favourite people. From a theatrical perspective, the ousting of Julia Gillard, the reinstatement of Kevin Rudd, and his subsequent loss to Tony Abbott was a tragedy that was so disastrous it could only be reality.

Rose Matafeo at Comedy Fest. I blame myself for having too high expectations. Is it my fault for expecting hilarity from the poster girl for young female Kiwi comedians (and probiotic yoghurt)? A lot of the Vic Uni productions this year. I’m not naming names or blaming blames, but there was not enough guidance and not enough assertiveness over the quality of the finished products this year. Oh and WOW. Once in a lifetime is enough. It’s like the America’s Cup for theatre: it costs heaps, has a few diehard fans, and everyone else just doesn’t give a rat’s.

a powerful, beautiful and moving story touted as a “benchmark of the possibilities of artistic cross pollination” by The Dom Post. What we’re hanging out for: National Theatre Live is bringing a recording of Othello to cinemas near you. With Forest Whitaker! It’s going to be spine-chillingly delicious Shakespeare, so go, I implore you! Circa is doing Dickens’ A Christmas Carol directed by the great Ray Henwood, just before (oddly enough) Christmas. JUST GO AND SEE SOMETHING AT BATS. Please. They’ve really got something to cater for all sorts of tastes.

What we wish we’d seen: Gryphon Theatre put on a production of Pride and Prejudice, which I was too afraid to see, being an Austen purist. But, apparently, Mr Darcy got drenched, like in the famous pond scene! Sydney Bridge Upside Down was apparently

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 ARTS

visual arts 

The Year That Wasn’t ARTICLE

Ben Speak & Simon Gennard

Well, that’s it. It looks like we’re out of time. It’s been a pretty busy year. After a rather sombre start with the passing of one of our greatest artists, Ralph Hotere, things picked up plenty. In April, construction of the Len Lye Centre began in New Plymouth. Bill Culbert’s show at the Venice Biennale was received very well. And my Art History lecturer made some wonderfully derisive comments about Caracci. I, personally, am pretty pleased with what we managed to cover on the Visual Arts page this year, but there’s still so much more left to be said. Such a shame. For posterity, I’ve compiled a list of the stories we could have written and headlines that could have been.

1. Aurélie Filippetti, France’s culture minister, proposes Sylvie Ramond replace the outgoing director of the Louvre, which would have made her the first woman to head the museum; Filippetti accused of discriminating against men, job given to another man, cue emphatic eyeroll.

12. Salient’s Visual Arts Editor asked to leave MoMa

2. Public uncertain whether works in the Turner Prize shortlist qualify as art. Surprise!

16. Salient’s Visual Arts Editor wins Drunkest Gallery Patron At Exhibition Opening Award

3. Ai Weiwei releases heavymetal song documenting 81 days spent in detention by Chinese government

17. Salient Visual Arts Editor celebrates by staging performance-art piece, induces self to vomit

4. “I wanted to rupture certain things”—James Franco on Tim Robey’s Hitchcock-inspired exhibition

18. Salient’s Visual Arts Editor caught vomiting on John Morrison

5. “I want to rupture certain things”—Salient’s Visual Arts Editor on James Franco

14. Tina Barton wins BestDressed Lecturer Award 15. Tina Barton <3 <3

19. Tumblr popularity of that one Bohyun Yoon performance piece SKYROCKETS after The National use it as cover art

6. The 10 Worst-Dressed Children at Venice Biennale

20. Is Banksy still a thing?

7. The 10 Best-Dressed Dogs at Venice Biennale

22. No, I don’t want to talk about Banksy

8. The 10 Most Dog-like Children at Venice Biennale

23. Damien Hirst creates children’s book from most famous work

9. "I feel like I should have been born in the ‘60s"—White Girl on Te Papa’s Warhol: Immortal exhibition 10. Tilda Swinton sleeps in glass chamber at MoMa 11. Salient’s Visual Arts Editor takes a closer look at Tilda Swinton

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13. Theatre student pays homage to Marina Abramović on overbridge

21. Banksy’s back

24. Auckland Art Gallery named World’s Best Building at World Architecture Festival in Singapore. Good for them 25. Te Papa considers moving collection from earthquakeprone city to city built around active volcanoes

ARTS 

MUSIC 

Elise’s Top 10 records of the year (so far) 1. Haim – Days Are Gone

6. Danny Brown – Old

2. Sheep, Dog & Wolf – Egospect

7. Darkside – Psychic

3. Vampire Weekend – Vampires of the Modern City 4. Drake – Nothing Was the Same 5. Fuck Buttons – Slow Focus

8. Lorde – The Love Club EP 9. The National – Trouble Will Find Me 10. Lontalius – The World Will Never Know About Us (EP)

Philip’s Top 10 records of the year (so far) 10. The Dead C – Armed Courage (Noise) ‘Fuckin’ Vitriolic’

Classical)

‘Fuckin’ Pristine’

‘Fuckin’ Harmonics’

1. The National – Trouble Will Find Me (Rock)

9. Four Tet – 0181 (Electronic)

5. Zahava Seewald – From my Mother’s House (Sound Collage)

‘Fuckin’ Lush’

‘Fuckin’ Kaleidoscopic’

8. Danny Brown – Old (Hip-Hop)

4. My Bloody Valentine – MBV (Shoegaze)

‘Fuckin’ Bangerz’

‘Fuckin’ Worth-the-Wait’

7. Lorde – Pure Heroine (Pop)

3. Kayo Dot – Hubard (Metal)

‘Fuckin’ Endearing’

‘Fuckin’ Ambitious’

6. Burkhard Stangl – Unfinished, For William Turner, Painter (Modern

2. Justin Timberlake – The 20/20 Experience (Pop)

‘Fuckin’ Flawless’

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 ARTS

tv 

Breaking Bad- A cultural icon review

Gerald Lee

Many scorn the notion that a television show can become an integral part of our cultural lexicon. Yet Breaking Bad is proof that television has an incredible power all of its own. 60-minute episodes and multiple seasons allow writers to delve into the motivations and lives of their characters. More convincingly than cinema, it can methodically chart out an interesting character or story arc that feels organic and is compelling. Indeed, for six years, the increasingly disturbing tales of a chemistry teacher turned meth cook has transfixed a devoted base of viewers. More than that, it has transformed the landscape of dramatic television. Like any classic cultural artifact, Breaking Bad explores and critiques the society in which it was produced. Through the brazen schemes of Walter White, the show has pulled apart notions of white-male privilege and ridiculed them, even if a portion of the audience mistakenly believes Walter is meant to be a hero. His sense of entitlement to money, power and even his wife’s body may fulfil his need for control, but it also wreaks havoc on everyone around him. From a moral standpoint, Gilligan and his writing team endorse a somewhat dichotomous view of what is right versus what is wrong. Don’t take that to mean that their version of

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morality is in any way simplistic, but rather that they believe Walt’s vapid justifications don’t negate the harm he causes. He may claim to be merely protecting his family, but the writers illustrate how goal-creep soon causes him to engage in empire-building. However, this empire is built on one man’s extraordinary arrogance and is therefore bound to crumble. Thus, in one sense the entire series is a carefully constructed morality tale that pursuing what is easy will only lead to ruin. However, the beauty of Breaking Bad is that it operates so effectively on a multitude of levels. Far from just being a dour rumination on the ills of a male-dominated society, Breaking Bad is also a hugely entertaining show. For every indictment of masculine hubris, there is a pair of axe-wielding assassins. Its narrative arc is simple if obviously far-fetched: Walter White cooks meth to provide for his family and quickly becomes seduced by the power it brings him. However, within this storytelling framework, Vince Gilligan and his team have accomplished some amazing feats. Season after season, viewers have been amazed at how the writers methodically set up the pieces before rapidly knocking them down. Unlike so many other programs, Breaking Bad rarely (if ever) drags out storylines or hesitates to make dramatic plot leaps. The result is a show that at times can be slow and contemplative; at others, breakneck and unrelenting. Moreover, the directors have managed to coax out of the show’s cast some of the most

extraordinary acting performances. In the days of premium cable channels, top-quality acting isn’t exactly a rarity on television; the most recent season of Game of Thrones happened to feature Dame Diana Rigg after all. Yet Breaking Bad has always towered above all others in this respect. Through the impeccable craft of the cast, the tribulations of the characters have become an intimate part of our lives. Breaking Bad’s final season wasn’t tense simply because it was the culmination of a tragic journey, but also because the actors so expertly conveyed the emotional turmoil that their characters were experiencing. Bryan Cranston’s performance as Walter White seems bound to be remembered as one of the greatest in any visual medium. His moral degradation has been terrifying to witness and yet simultaneously engrossing. Given this degree of acting skill, it is impressive that the supporting cast is just as excellent. Gus Fring was one of the most disturbing villains ever seen on any visual medium, largely thanks to Giancarlo Esposito’s chilling emotional reserve. As a result, every character resonates with the audience in a way that other shows struggle to achieve. In light of all this, claims of hyperbole regarding the praise for Breaking Bad simply don’t stack up. Over the course of five seasons, it has demonstrated the proficiency of television as a medium for storytelling, and is undeniably one of the finest cultural achievements of the 21st century.

ARTS 

BOOKS 

Books to read before you leave uni ARTICLE

Alexandra Hollis

A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens It’s like Les Miserables, but actually good. Aside from the fact that casually mentioning Dickens has the immediate (and slightly strange) effect of making you sound well-educated, I always think that Sydney Carton is a good test of humanity: if he doesn’t break your heart, then you’re probably not ready for the real world, and should definitely take an extra paper or two—FEELINGS 101 for a start. See also: Crime and Punishment Simulacra and Simulation – Jean Baudrillard Buy a copy; you’ll need to read it at least three times, but it’ll be the most fun you’ve had being the most confused since CHEM 114 (really only applies to Science nerds). See also: any and all Foucault, although by this stage you might as well just reapply and spend the next three years doing a BA. Twelfth Night – William Shakespeare

Before you leave university, you should read at least one Shakespeare play for pleasure (i.e. not with Sparknotes open on the computer next to you and your Year 11 English teacher breathing down your neck). But few people enjoy the big tragedies the first time around—a lot of them are too long and/or woefully inconsistent, and you know what Hamlet’s about and most of the speeches in it without having read the play, right? Twelfth Night, on the other hand, is consistently brilliant; funny, beautiful and eminently quotable.

See also: Big Weather (Poems of Wellington) for you soon-to-be ex-Wellingtonians; If on a winter night’s a travele for new Calvino-inductees. The Second Sex – Simone de Beauvoir

See also: Cymbeline—delightfully weird, but not for the faint-hearted.

Her feminism isn’t perfect, but this is a fascinating read, and, despite being written in the 1940s, much of the analysis of patriarchal norms is (depressingly) quite apt today. Read, weep, understand institutional sexism better, become a card-carrying feminist. It’s for the good of the planet.

The Shipping News – Annie Proulx