Politics | Issue 23

Finnius Teppett page 20-23 Finn is going to interview Robbie Nicol (White Man Behind a Desk)

Emma & Jayne page 16-19 Interview with Auckland mayoral candidate Chlรถe Swarbrick

Alex Feinson page 26-29 Interview with students on campus on where they stand in politics; left, right or centre

Politics 16 Tessa page 30-31 Tessa is in Washington and will write about the US Presidential race

Salient

Issue 23

Politics

Vol. 79

misc.wav

21:00 - 23:00 Sam

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Nathan

19:00 - 21:00 Moody Brew

21:00 - 23:00

Nick

Andy Tsao

16:00 - 19:00 Nic Roser

Chris Gilman

Sam/Andrew

Freddie

Kai/Tom

14:00 - 16:00 Laura

GRIME with Toby

Oh One Eight

Māori Matters

Mat Watkins

Chrissy/Briar

Dion Rogers

Benjamin Clow

12:00 - 14:00 ALEXA

in the mornings

Chris and Matt

WEDNESDAY

Anastasia

Michael

TUESDAY

10:00 - 12:00 Matilda

8:00 - 10:00

MONDAY

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Breakfast

Durries For

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sound time - Sophia

jonty panpipes’s

mom rock - Lily

Kii

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Mitchell Simenes

Olly Clifton

Nicholas

Sunday Coolin’

Vortex

Benchwarmers

Jack Alison

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SUNDAY

17:00 - 19:00

Joesph

Ali Greer

Simon & Elliot

Hugo

HAHA WEEKENDS

SATURDAY

Points Joints -

Flo/Tim

HighSchoolers

Paige & Kimberly

Kahu

FRIDAY

Rosie Glerson

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Jen Kendrick

Spicy Beats - Jazz

Olivia Poppe

THURSDAY

Salient FM Schedule 2016

ENROL NOW FOR COURSES IN TRIMESTER THREE Courses run between November and February.

Enrolment closes 1 November. victoria.ac.nz/enrol

Contents Features

16

Interview with Chlöe Swarbrick

20

On White Men Being Behind Desks

26

I Only Date People Who Vote…

30

US Election 101: Your Own Personal Guide to the Potential End of the World

Opinion 32

The housing crisis and the scapegoating of “foreigners”

News 7

Chuck some more money on your loan

7

Such a waste

8

A survey that matters

Regular Content 12

One Ocean

37

Poetry

12

Māori Matters

38

Visual Arts

13

Gee Mail

40

Film

13

VUWSA Exec

42

Music

15

Notices

43

TV

33

Queer Agenda

44

Books

33

Mates in the States

45

Theatre

34

WWTAWWTAS

46

Puzzles

35

Digitales

Editors: ?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

Emma Hurley ?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

Jayne Mulligan ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ?????????????? ??????????????????????????????????????????????? ??????????????? ??????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ??????????????????????????????? When are we not political ????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? Emma & Jayne xoxo

Editors' Letter

05

Going Up

*Interview* with Sam Wallace

•

All of the extra daylight at night time.

•

Your stress levels.

•

When the fam come to visit.

•

Course fees—by 2%.

•

Showing your legs again (hello Spring).

Going Down

How does it feel still being the Breakfast weather dude?

Really great—I didn’t want to host alongside Mumma Hillz anyway. I’m actually more of an entrepreneur.

How is it having Jack Tame back?

Oh yeah really great. Super happy for him. Great opportunity.

He shouldn’t feel embarrassed about having to come back from New York.

Where are all of your former Breakfast team?

They jumped ship. Off filming season one of Mediaworks’ Survivor New Zealand.

Plans for the future?

I’ve actually been working on my new paleo business for a few months now, “Forecast Supps.” Get it?

Not really, but cool bro. Kanye West or Kendrick Lamar?

Drew Neemia.

•

Letting rugby players off the hook.

•

Adam Holland.

•

Flatmates who don’t pull their weight.

•

Next week is the last week of Salient for 2k16.

•

The “what are you doing next year” question.

Humdingers A Bosnian woman who refused to see a doctor has successfully had a 29kg tumor removed from her stomach. The giant tumor was only discovered after she went to the hospital for an injured leg. Stoja Popovic is now home and recovering from the surgery.

Everyone’s favourite villain Tom Hiddleston has been revealed as the face for Gucci’s cruise 2017 collection.

The ad campaign features several pictures of Hiddleston petting giant dogs and it will give you life.

06

03.10.16

Chuck some more money on your loan

News

Over three days in September, Victoria University staff and students conducted a waste audit of rubbish from the Pipitea, Te Aro, and Kelburn campuses.

The audit was designed to analyse a day’s worth of waste from each campus to see where improvements can be made in the university’s waste management processes.

VUWSA Wellbeing and Sustainability officer Anya Maule attended the audit, which saw 283kgs of waste from the Kelburn campus being sorted and analysed.

Maule is concerned that approximately 1.4 tonnes of rubbish is sent to the landfill each day from VUW including “environmentally friendly” coffee cups and lids from Vic Books and compostable plant-based smoothie cups from the Lab. Maule thinks the system could be improved by installing more glass recycling and compost bins on campus, and said students and cleaners “need to be empowered to recycle responsibly, which comes from good education.”

She also noted that the cleaners at VUW are “some of the lowest paid and overworked staff at the university” and that the university “cannot expect them to become waste experts.”

Greens at Vic co-convener Mona Oliver, who also attended the audit, told Salient she noticed many instances of empty bin liners being thrown away with full ones, which she saw as wasteful as the university spends almost $200 thousand annually on non-biodegradable plastic rubbish bags.

VUWSA’s pending 2017 Wellbeing and Sustainability officer, Beth Paterson, said that in her role next year she hopes to make it “clear from the get-go that Victoria cares” about sustainable waste disposal processes.

Paterson hopes to see a colour-coded bin system that separates all types of recyclables and non-recyclables be implemented on campus, and have volunteers in O-Week to show new students how and where to dispose of rubbish, recyclables, and compostable waste.

The waste audit is an ongoing process, as the university and waste committee are still in the process of analysing the bio-waste disposal and other data collection surveys.

Kate Robertson

Victoria University Council have voted to raise domestic student course fees by two per cent in 2017.

The motion was passed during last week’s University Council meeting.

The university’s driving argument for the increase was based on the current funding model prescribed by the government not being sustainable.

VUWSA president Jonathan Gee and Academic Vice President Jacinta Gulasekharam, the only students who sit on the council, voted against the increase.

VUWSA president Jonathan Gee urged council members to “start a genuine conversation with students about how their fees are set and where they’d like them to go.”

“It’s about valuing students as partners, and being open to changing what we have always done. Until that happens, I cannot support an increase in fees,” he said.

University Chancellor Sir Neville Jordan noted that it is already “more than $300 less expensive to study humanities and social sciences at undergraduate level at Victoria than it is at a number of other institutions.”

The council also voted to increase the Student Services Levy (SSL) by approximately 1.75 per cent.

The SSL funds services for students not covered by tuition fees - such as health, financial support and advice, student advocacy, Salient, and student representation.

Such a waste

Alex Feinson

news@salient.org.nz

Productivity report gets radical

07

Kate Robertson

The Productivity Commission (PC) has released a draft report proposing changes to the tertiary education sector.

Recommendations include putting interest back on student loans, and a move away from an institutionfocused tertiary model in favour of a more studentfocused one.

Other recommendations include encouraging students to start saving for university during high school and removing the university entrance certificate.

Tertiary Education Minister Steven Joyce and Labour Education Spokesperson Chris Hipkins both shot down putting interest back on loans, and Joyce said “we’ve made it clear that we won’t be putting interest back on student loans. NZUSA have also come out in opposition of the reintroduction of interest on student loans.”

VUWSA President Jonathan Gee said “it’s great the PC is focussed on a student-centred approach and students being co-producers in their learning.”

The report takes a “whole-of system” perspective, whereby trends in technology, tuition costs, skill demand, demography, and internationalisation may drive changes in tertiary business and delivery models.

The final report is due to go before government in February 2017.

03.10.16

A survey that matters Thursdays in Black and NZUSA have launched their 2016 students’ survey.

The purpose of the survey is to understand how sexual harassment and sexual violence manifest in student communities and to identify gaps in education for young people. It is the first of its kind in New Zealand.

The information collected will be used to inform future programmes seeking to reduce victimisation of students in all areas of their lives.

The survey has been designed with input from students and survivors, and also includes sections addressing the experiences of disabled and queer communities.

Thursdays in Black’s National Coordinator Izzy O’Neill says the survey is a “unique opportunity for Thursdays in Black to better understand how and why violence happens in student communities.”

“Responses to this survey will allow us to produce programmes that will work to create environments where all students are able to pursue their academic, working, and social lives free from violence,” she added.

VUWSA President Jonathan Gee applauded O’Neill and NZUSA and says the survey “will go a long way in finding out more about students experiences, as opposed to just getting statistics and numbers.”

Thursdays in Black encourages all students who have been enrolled in tertiary education in New Zealand in the last five years to participate. The survey can be accessed online at thursdaysinblack.org.nz/survey.

Victoria University of Wellington has released a statement “debunking” misconceptions about the sale of Karori campus.

The statement comes after a recent community meeting with Karori residents and education sector representatives landed the university in hot water with residents and the wider public.

The main misconception addressed was that the university will make $20 million profit on the sale, as they only paid $10 for the title transfer in 2014.

At the meeting Vice Chancellor Grant Guilford said this was not true, as the university had invested “around $21 million” in the Karori campus facilities and Faculty of Education programs since 2005.

VUW has received further criticism, especially from campus activist group Reclaim Vic, asking that the land be returned to the iwi of Wellington.

Guildford said that while VUW is in contact with Wellington iwi as they are interested in the future of the campus, there are “no outstanding Treaty settlements that could require Karori campus land to be returned to Wellington iwi,” and the land is “not subject to right of first refusal under existing Treaty settlement legislation.”

A uni-relevant thing happened in parliament

Victoria University and VUWSA recently celebrated the Victoria University Blues Awards, recognising those whose sporting achievements have brought credit to the university.

The awards were presented by Vice-Chancellor Professor Grant Guilford and VUWSA President Jonathan Gee. 2016 Sportsperson of the Year was awarded to Kyle Pontifex, who competed for the Black Sticks and the Capital National Hockey League Men’s team in 2015 and 2016.

Recipients have joined what Guildford described as “an exclusive club of Victoria Blues Award winners,” including the “newest Olympians” swimmer Emma Robinson and blade-runner Liam Malone.

Gee says VUWSA is very proud to work in partnership with the university to recognise the university’s top athletes.

“The awards give us the opportunity to acknowledge students who have achieved outstanding sporting success through hard-work and dedication.”

“We’re really proud of the work recipients put in to manage sporting success on top of their studies and probably also a part time job,” he added.

VUWSA’s Clubs and Activities Officer Tori Sellwood says the awards have mutual benefits for student athletes and the university.

“Students obtain the highest possible recognition from the university for their achievements in sport while successfully pursuing their studies.”

Tertiary Education, Skills, and Employment Minister Steven Joyce has announced a range of possible amendments to legislation affecting tertiary education.

The Education (Tertiary Education and other Matters) Amendment Bill seeks to increase the flexibility of tertiary funding, further strengthen monitoring and compliance, and create equitable treatment of tertiary education providers.

Joyce said the changes would see increased flexibility in the funding framework, which would in turn improve accountability.

“We are now seeking feedback from stakeholders on whether the draft legislation is clear and easily understood, whether there are likely to be implementation issues, and the potential impact of these proposals on tertiary education organisation and students,” Joyce said.

NZUSA President Linsey Higgins supports “some” of the proposed changes, saying they would “bring clarity to a number of matters and includ[ing] changes that we have lobbied for.”

Higgins was cautious of whether or not the changes would be implemented, and whether the proposed changes to investment plans will be of benefit to students.

“If it’s for the Minister to choose the focus of tertiary institutions over the wishes of students, local communities, and other stakeholders then this is a step too far,” she said.

08

Kate Robertson

Thomas Croskery

University jocks recognized at Blues Awards

Kate Robertson

Alex Feinson

VUW make their case on Karori sale decisions

03.10.16

Quiz

1. Approximately how many people tuned in to watch the first US presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump?

2. September 19 saw the 123rd anniversary of what milestone in New Zealand history?

Fossil Free UC have presented the University of Canterbury (UC) with a petition requesting that the university stop its investments in fossil fuels because of their contribution to climate change.

On September 23, Vice Chancellor Dr John Wood was handed the petition with over 2000 signatures from students and staff members of the university.

Should the petition be accepted, fossil fuels would be added to the university’s list of other divestments— tobacco, armaments, and gambling.

Fossil Free UC spokesperson, Jessica Reeves, said of the current situation, “the university of Canterbury is literally paying for and profiting from causing climate change.”

The push for divestment comes at a time when various departments throughout the university, academics, and scientists are researching ways to cut back the rising tide of climate change.

UC has a history of rejecting movements for fossil fuel divestment, citing that the establishment of a sustainability policy, combined with locating and investing in non-fossil fuel funds, would be too difficult.

If the university chooses to divest from fossil fuels it would be the third university in New Zealand to do so, following Victoria University of Wellington in 2014 and Otago University in 2016.

Last week the Otago University Council voted to divest the university foundation trust from fossil fuels, after a campaign led by 24 senior academics and over 1000 collected signatures. The group behind this was Otago Uni Divests, founded at the start of 2016 with the sole goal of changing this funding choice. $2.75 million (1.5 per cent) of the overall investments from Otago University were rooted in “oil, gas, and consumables.”

3. Which Wellington mayoral candidate owns Kapai?

4. Who does a recent documentary claim murdered Jon Benét Ramsey?

5. What is the English translation of Tinakori?

6. Where is New Zealand’s oldest art gallery?

7. By what year does New Zealand aim to be predator free?

8. What city is paralympian Liam Malone based in?

9. Who was inducted into the Apra Silver Scroll awards’ hall of fame last week?

10. Pteronophobia is the fear of what?

1. 80 million. 2. Suffrage for women. 3. Justin Lester.

4. Her brother. 5. No dinner. 6. Nelson. 7. 2050. 8.

Wellington. 9. Moana Manipoto. 10. Feathers.

Alexa Zelensky

Push for fossil fuel divestment continues

09

03.10.16

Youthline under the pump Increasing numbers of youth seeking mental health support have left Youthline struggling to cope.

The volume of demand, which has increased dramatically since 2014, has resulted in 150 youth unable to access help from the service.

The number of calls for extreme depression have increased from 6909 in 2014 to 14,996 in 2015. The number of calls relating to suicide have also increased from 7241 in 2014 to 8291 in 2015.

Demand is expected to increase further, with the number of callers projected to rise to 12,000 by the end of the year.

Youthline Chief Executive Stephen Bell explained the situation: “Our capacity is so full we can’t actually take more calls. What has happened is that the number of people who can’t get our service has increased.”

“It’s quite distressing,” he added.

Bell explained the rise in numbers: “Symptoms like depression, suicide, self-harm, fear, and anxiety are a symptom of the environment our young people are trying to find their way through.”

He further added that factors such as financial debt, staying at home longer, and flatting in more crowded environments are some of the reasons behind increasing stress.

Stunt goes badly

Vic Uni really good at researching and citing

A University of Canterbury student has been hospitalised after attempting a stunt in order to join the Engineering Society of Canterbury (ENSOC) committee.

The 20-year old student lit his hair on fire and attempted to jump from a roof into a one meter deep paddling pool. He missed it narrowly and suffered a serious spinal fracture.

The student’s friends reported that he had not been drinking.

The necessity of the stunt as part of the ENSOC committee application process is somewhat unclear, but reports from the student’s flatmates suggest that entry to the committee can be gained through regular campaigning, but that entry via stunt was a lesser known, more radical, way in.

ENSOC reportedly do not accept stunts that are likely to endanger students, short term or long term.

They claim to have scrapped the stunt aspect of the application process following the accident.

The accident occurred on the same day as one of ENSOC’s biggest annual events, The roUNDIE 500.

The roUNDIE 500 is a carpooling pub crawl around the region and is the successor to the infamous Undie 500 which saw students drive from Canterbury to Dunedin, with multiple compulsory stops along the way.

Victoria University has seen a “considerable increase” in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings (THE) for research and citations of research produced by academic staff.

The university is now placed in the top two per cent of universities globally, sitting in the 451–500 top bracket.

This puts VUW third equal in New Zealand with the University of Canterbury, but still behind the University of Otago who ranked in the 201-250 slot and the University of Auckland who ranked 165th.

THE calculates citation impact by evaluating how much the university’s research is pushing new boundaries, and how much this research is being disseminated and shared.

VUW ranked highly for “international outlook,” coming in at 65th. This ranking is evaluated by looking at how “rich and multicultural” a campus is, how successful the university is in attracting international students and faculty, and how much they collaborate globally to produce good research.

Other fun facts from THE research include: VUW’s student to staff ratio is 21:1, the ratio of female to male students is 55:45, 21 per cent of students are international, and there are 17,142 students at VUW in total.

10

Olly Clifton

Olly Clifton

The University of Auckland (UoA) has released plans for New Zealand’s largest university fundraising scheme yet.

UoA is hoping to fundraise $300 million in donations by 2020 to help address “critical challenges facing communities.”

According to the university they are well on their way with half of the anticipated donations already received.

Of the $152m donated so far, $24m has been assigned to medicine, $9m to business and innovation, and $7m for environmental research.

The UoA “Campaign For All Our Futures” will be attempting to answer the big issues facing society such as natural disasters, the school system, cancer survival rates, and the benefits of creativity.

Vice Chancellor Stuart McCutcheon has voiced his support for the university’s increased philanthropy, saying “the resources… allow us to do some fantastic research and to bring great students into the university, and so we’re really setting our sights higher and being ambitious about what we can achieve with this support.”

McCutcheon believes the donations will result in tangible benefits for wider society, such as an improved school system and a reshape of the economy.

The university has also committed to actively engaging with “over half” of its 200,000 alumni during the campaign, to “further their work for New Zealand.”

Charlie Prout

McKenzie Collins

Fundraising Frenzy

03.10.16

thick and fast. The debate moderator, Lester Holt, asked why Trump had not released his tax records. Clinton took this as an opportunity to vilify Trump, to which he responded he would release his records if she uncovered her 33,000 deleted emails—to applause from the crowd.

On the issue of race, Trump brought up Clinton calling young African American youth “super-predators” and Clinton retorted by highlighting a previous lawsuit against Trump’s company due to an accused refusal by the company to rent apartments to African American people.

Another major topic of debate was security and in particular cyberwarfare. Hillary criticised Trump for being “praise-worthy” of Putin when Russia was suspected to have conducted the DNC database hack. The Syrian crisis arose in debate, to which Hillary spoke of intensifying airstrikes against ISIS. Trump was highly critical of how working with the Middle East had “created a mess,” proceeding to spend too much of his allocated time defending himself against claims he was originally in support of the Iraq war. Trump said the US could not be the “policemen of the world” and criticised interventionist foreign policy for losing the US billions of dollars.

The debate ended with petty politics and back-andforth teasing. Overall, a little childish and not enough policy.

The next debate will be held October 9 at Washington University.

Meriana Johnson watched the first presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in its entirety to save you the pain.

First things first, last week’s debate saw Trump step up his professional game, trading in the nickname “Crooked Hillary” for a more respectable “Secretary Clinton.” Over in the blue corner Clinton preferred to use Trump’s first name throughout.

The first matter of debate was economic policy: Clinton spoke to the middle class by focusing her policy on college debt management whilst Trump preferred to tax the rich less—in line with what Clinton called “Trumpedup trickle-down.” Trump honed in on America’s trade deficit and grilled Clinton on her stance on the TPPA— Clinton asserted she did not support the deal in its current state.

The highly contentious issue of race saw both parties agree that relationships between African American communities and the police force needed to be strengthened. Trump wanted a return to “law and order,” which was not expounded upon further. Both parties offered little policy on the matter: Trump wanted to enforce the “stop and frisk” tactic, while Clinton reinforced the need for a gun database to prevent those on the terrorist watchlist from obtaining guns.

It wasn’t long before personal attacks started to rain

11

Meriana Johnson

The masters’ debate in 400 words.

Maori Matters Tamatha Paul

One Ocean

Tēnā koutou katoa. I want to give a massive shout out to the Māori Matters radio show for having me on air two weeks ago, which contributed to my successful campaign for VUWSA Equity Officer. On the show we talked about reasons why Māori don’t typically run for VUWSA and perhaps reasons why Māori don’t participate in conceived “Pākehā” politics.

A lot of this lack of participation, in my opinion, is linked to the idea that we technically have our own representative body, Ngāi Tauira—VUW Māori Students’ Association (NT). NT does so much for tauira Māori, and it’s obviously important that we have this representative body. However when I look at the roles within VUWSA— such as Welfare VP, Sustainability and Wellbeing Officer, Academic VP—I see so much potential for Māori to implement ideas from within these roles, aligned with our own cultural processes, that I believe could be largely beneficial to all students.

For example when we think of traditional Māori processes of health and healing, we have a holistic idea of spiritual, mental, and physical wellbeing. A lot of the time the spiritual side of wellbeing is dismissed.

When in reality your wairua is something that is not only beneficial to your wellbeing, but to your academic abilities and determination. We also have this special, tangible connection to Papatūānuku which obliges us to take care of our environment and ensure that we’re being sustainable.

I feel like Māori have so much to contribute to so many typically “Pākehā” spaces that is special and unique, and it’s up to us to get more involved and interested in the people representing us. A lot of tauira Māori I have met so far this year are more than capable of occupying these ‘high-ranking’ spaces, but it’s up to us to make the effort and to transform the systems we inhabit to be more culturally inclusive to our, and other’s, needs.

Naku te rourou nau te rourou ka ora ai te iwi.

Salote Cama One day I will reach the source again There at my beginnings Another peace Will welcome me —“The River Flows Back” by Kumalau Tawali (Papua New Guinea) It’s local election voting time. Queue Phil Goff turning up at the Mangere Markets; queue the campaign adverts on MaiFM (in between the ads for Instant Finance); queue the think pieces lamenting low Pasifika turnout but don’t focus on generational political disengagement.

Full disclosure I’m an international student, who has only voted on online Beyoncé polls (long story with coups d’etat) and even I know it’s damn near impossible to be a Pasifika student and not be acutely aware of the politics of place: the pit in your stomach, the too familiar feeling when $10 land becomes $20 million land, the death stares we get in the library during “raucous” language week festivities, the “special treatment” conversation, whatever news story about NCEA that week. Whatever the case—it’s there.

As the inimitable Haunani Kay-Trask wrote “culture is political.” For me that means bringing the fear I felt during the 2006 coup in Fiji into every political science class. It means finding camaraderie in my PASI301 classmates when we’re challenging the academic theories even when, quite frankly, we don’t feel qualified to do so. Looking up to Dr Pala Molisa at VBS looking at sustainable accounting and Dr Teresia Teaiwa and the rest of Va’aomanū Pasifika—the very embodiment of Trask’s words.

The politics of being a Pasifika person at a university can be difficult to navigate, but the rest of us on the journey can make it easier to map out.

Ngai Tauira AGM: Wednesday, October 12, 5.30pm at Te Herenga Waka Marae.

Vinaka, Salote Cama

NT Exec Nominations open Monday, October 3, and close at 5.00pm Friday, October 7. AGM Nomination packs, which include role descriptions, can be found on the Ngai Tauira Facebook page (Ngāi Tauira—VUW Māori Students’ Association) or by emailing ngaitauira@ vuw.ac.nz.

This column is dedicated to the student protestors at UPNG and Caleb Bagau—a West Papuan student was killed on his way to class for wearing the Morning Star flag on his backpack.

12

Gee-mail

VUWSA Exec

Jonathan Gee VUWSA President

Rory Lenihan-Ikin Welfare Vice President

Last week I voted against a 2% increase in your fees Students want to be more involved in the setting of fees.

You want to see teaching quality increase as a result of increased fees and that can’t just be measured by whether we generally have ‘good’ and ‘very good’ teachers, as asked in the course feedback forms we get at the end of each trimester. We need to start a genuine conversation with students about how our fees are set and where we’d like them to go. It’s about valuing students as partners and being open to changing what we have always done.

But the situation is bigger than that too. It’s about the whole funding model for tertiary education. Since the introduction of tuition fees, students and the university have been at loggerheads over the $$. The reality is that tertiary education is increasingly being underfunded, which causes universities to grow the student body and increase fees in order to build their revenue.

When not just one, but all opposition parties support some form of free tertiary education, it shows that something needs to change in order to alleviate the $15 billion of debt that plagues our student population, and to support universities in focussing its attention on academic quality without the fear of being underfunded.

The financial pressures that students face have certainly reached crisis point. We pay so much for an education, yet we can barely afford the bus to get to class. We can barely get a relevant, good-paying job upon graduation.

Our mental health is deteriorating in part due to the high expectations we put on ourselves, as we look at that growing loan balance.

Whether or not you support free tertiary education, I’m sure you’ll agree that something needs to change in order to ensure students feel more valued by their universities and by their society.

Kia ora everyone!

Is your voting paper still sitting on your bench waiting for you to fill it out? I encourage you to grab it now, sit down with a cuppa, and make sure you have your say.

We have the power to stand together and push for a student-friendly Wellington where we can thrive and are actually valued in this city.

If you’re not sure who to vote for, check out these websites: For a breakdown of which candidates support making Wellington student friendly, see our Student Friendly Wellington website: studentfriendlywellington.nz If you want to get an idea of how you align with candidates on a broader range of issues, the Design+Democracy project at Massey University has designed a neat tool that can help: votelocal.nz Where to post it?

The free-post envelope in your voting packs means you don’t need to buy a stamp to send it away. If you are at Kelburn drop it in the post box at Vic Books, otherwise find a box somewhere convenient. Drop it off by October 5 at the latest!

Voting papers haven’t arrived in the mail?

You’ll need to call the Wellington City Council, or go down to their offices on Wakefield St to fill out what’s called a “special vote” so that they can verify your details. You can do this until October 8 (this Saturday).

Nga mihi nui!

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Be inspired TAKE A CREATIVE WRITING WORKSHOP AS PART OF YOUR DEGREE OR TO DEVELOP YOUR WRITING. CREW 256 Māori and Pasifika Writing

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Check www.victoria.ac.nz/careerhub for booking events, appointments and searching jobs Who is recruiting right now? GovTech Graduate Talent Programme 2017; Dept of Internal Affairs summer internships; GHD professional services grad development programme; Public Trust - Business Admin Analyst; Zomato (online restaurant and nightlife guide) Business Development; Volunteering roles with Samaritans and Ronald McDonald House… and more Need a CV check? Drop-in available at Pipitea and Kelburn Book for workshops to help with Job Search Strategies and Interview Preparation

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Slowly Failing Exhibition 7—14 October 2016. Level 1, James Cook Minitower, 294 Lambton Quay. Opening Night 7 October - 7.00pm: Performance from Firstname BASIS. Featuring works by Roydon Misseldine.

Exploring autonomous technology within the Post-Auto movement. ‘Slowly Failing’ is an exploration, speculation and reaction to the ‘Post-Auto’ movement using today’s available technology to communicate tomorrow’s message. The exhibited experiments explore the possibilities and outcomes of technology when the user is removed from the process and the technology is left to produce on its own. A final year Massey BDes project

by Harry Boyd and Isaac Laughton.

Slowlyfailing.com / @_slowlyfailing

"International Youth and Students for Social Equality public meeting: The US navy visit and the drive towards war Wednesday, October 5, 4:00pm, room SU220, Student Union Building. We will discuss the integration of New Zealand into Washington's preparations for war against China, and a socialist strategy to build an anti-war movement based on the uniting the working class internationally. We encourage all students to attend."

Applications for CREW 256 Te Hiringa A Tuhi Maori & Pasifika Creative Writing Course are now open.

Trimester 3 - January - February 2017 Email tina.dahlber@vuw.ac.nz “I can’t stop telling people about this course. The tutors are not only published Māori authors, they know how to teach and how to get the best out of the class. Our class was so diverse and we all had different writing styles.”

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Vote for Chlöe Interview with Chlöe Swarbrick Emma Hurley and Jayne Mulligan

Auckland mayoral candidate Chlöe Swarbrick is the most not-deathlyboring thing to happen in politics since someone chucked a dildo at Steven Joyce. She placed fourth in Auckland’s only mayoral poll to date and has run her campaign on a shoestring budget with a strong social media presence. Her campaign has faced a barrage of articles unable to get over her age or has been excluded from media coverage entirely—as though she is not a legitimate candidate because she doesn’t have enough grey hairs. Chlöe spoke to Salient, while she ate noodles (so relatable), and we asked her about more than her age, in fact we didn’t ask, because thanks to Taylor Swift we all know what it’s like to be 22. She told us about her campaign experience so far, her policies, and why she is running for mayor.

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quo and that’s what’s going to happen. That in itself creates a self-fulfilling prophecy which I don’t think is extremely promising for democracy.

How do you feel like your campaign is going so far?

It’s going overwhelmingly brilliant, for the most part it’s conducted only through social media and that’s just because I don’t have the budget to have any hoardings out there but what that means is I’ve been able to communicate in real time with feedback and with the live video that I’ve done, answering questions as they came up. There’s been a few trolls on Reddit but it’s all for the fun of it.

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Do you know how your funding compares to the other candidates?

I know about Phil Goff and Vic Crone. I know that Phil is about to go over the funding cap.

The funding cap is $620,000 and Vic Crone’s campaign has said that they’ll probably be spending around $500,000. Last time John Palino spent about $150,000. Today I’ve just reached over $5000, so yeah comparatively it’s a pretty tight campaign.

Congratulations on reaching $5000 though, that’s great!

Yeah, bare in mind though that $800 of that is mine. It’s going well though it has been insane, most of the donations I’m getting are between the $10 and $50 mark. So it’s a lot of people just giving small amounts and I think that’s awesome.

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Voter turnout in Auckland is 34 per cent to Wellington’s 40 per cent. What do you attribute this to and what do you think should be done about it?

Apathy is generally the answer circulated with quite a broad brush stroke, and it usually misses the point. I think there’s a range of factors: first, the way that voting happens, it’s a postal voting process over three weeks, that doesn’t work for our most transient populations which are our young people and our poor people who don’t have security of tenure so they move around quite a bit. Obviously post to begin with is archaic and that’s a thing unto itself, I mean who knows where their local post box is? Further from that local body politics just isn’t sexy. Local government in New Zealand actually doesn’t have all too much power, in Auckland in particular we’ve got our housing crisis and literally the biggest thing that we can do, obviously we can control the supply side of things and my policy goes the furthest in solving that, but the biggest thing we can do because we can’t build state homes is advocate to central government… which reinforces in people’s minds that it isn’t really worth it.

We have another issue whereby in Auckland in the past few months it’s been billed as a twohorse race, now it’s being reported as a foregone conclusion, and that’s not going to get people engaged—when they think that this is the status

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Didn’t Radio New Zealand leave you out of their [initial] candidates debate? You’d expect them to be more onto it.

Yeah that’s right. That’s an interesting one because that day there two debates both of which I wasn’t invited to, the Radio New Zealand debate and the University of Auckland debate.

Essentially the explanation given to me, as it always is, is there was limited time, but if you have a look at the hashtag essentially all of the tweets surrounding it are asking why I wasn’t there. When I’m asked about exclusion in my mind the media plays two roles, the first being to represent reality and the second if it’s in a more commercial mindset is to respond to consumer demand, and with my campaign there are both of those things. I’m a very serious candidate with some of the best policy and there is the demand to see me. I’m not going to go so far as to say it’s a conspiracy theory, but it’s quite odd. You guys don’t get the Herald, but in the paper they’ve put “one of these six people will be your mayor” and they’ve excluded me again. That’s kind of ludicrous especially when we have that most recent poll coming out which places me fourth.

I can imagine a lot of people in Auckland feel like when you get written out of the equation so do they, and so does their vote in some ways. If I were to not see you I would think why bother?

That echoes sentiments that I’ve received from quite a few people. Obviously I’ve been pigeonholed as being young and going after the youth vote, and definitely I’m seeking to represent young people because we know that young people are by far the least likely to turn out…. I’m definitely trying to stand for people who have the most to gain by voting, that’s the reason that representative democracy exists, but people who have the most to gain by voting are sadly our most disenfranchised, they’re our most disengaged. That kind of comes down to how the system works because those who are seeking to protect their own interests have the luxury and time to debate about who they’re going to vote for, whereas people who are living on the breadlines, who are struggling to survive, kind of don’t have the time to engage in this very privileged race of politics.

You were talking about the housing crisis earlier, can you explain your housing policy, and why you advocate for a land value rather than a capital value tax?

Essentially what my housing rates policy does is it does everything the council can do to increase supply. If we’re talking about controls on demand whether that be capital gains tax,

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in areas where people should be building people can’t just hold their land anymore because it’s financially impracticable.

taxes on second homes, potentially controls on immigration, only central government can control that. Also they’re the only ones who can build new homes because they have the resources to do that. Right now we have a chokehold on the funding that is going into local government in New Zealand, in the OECD the average amount of spending that comes from government coffers to be spent at a local level is 30 per cent, in New Zealand we’re less than half of that at 11 per cent. So it’s quite ridiculous where we can have parliamentarians, like Bill English, talking about this budget looking great and amazing and they’re heading towards a surplus, but what’s actually happening is there’s nowhere near enough funding going into the cities where the growth is actually happening. So the fourth part of my housing policy is to absolutely see a redistribution of that income because central government does see new income when those 40,000 new people come to Auckland every year, they bring income tax, GST, potentially company tax if those people are setting up companies, whereas Auckland feels the strain with the strain on our roads, there’s 800 new cars on the road every single week in Auckland, and with our housing because we can’t accommodate the people when the houses aren’t being built fast enough.

So the major thing is that reform of rates.

Essentially what we’ve got now is capital value plus fees and levies, but the core part is capital value because that comprises 80 per cent of what people pay. Capital value has two components, that is land value and improvement value: land value is the base value of the land without anything being built on it, improvement value is what you build on that land. So right now we have a system whereby people are taxed for having buildings on their property, in the midst of a housing crisis which to me is quite ludicrous.

Then we also have a problem whereby people who are holding their land vacant, with the likes of carparks or potentially just landbanking straight up with absolutely nothing on it, are paying less rates. So that is what my rates reform policy will change, it’ll balance out rates so all of a sudden people have to use their land efficiently.

These people are essentially holding communities to ransom because land value goes up when we as a community and as a society invest our taxpayers money into new roads and new parks and park maintenance, even when neighbours do up their properties, when new stores open in the area. The people who hold land vacant are essentially just profiteering of increasing scarcity by not using their land effectively and then they’re making capital gains off of the struggle of everybody else…. Land is one of the only things that is an elastic, it’s limited, which is why it makes real sense to tax land value and it means

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So it would flip the onus on to developing your property rather than just holding land?

Yeah, rather than just holding it vacant. Places where there could potentially be issues with that are with Māori holdings of land and also with farms, but there are potential discretionary ways we could go about solving that.

Another part of your policy is clearing up the building consent process and hopefully instituting an online way to do that. What do you think are the current obstacles with the consenting process?

When I’m talking about streamlining the consenting process I’m not talking about what right-wingers would say is cutting the red tape, so I’m not saying let’s have another leaky building process. We basically don’t need to reduce what boxes need to be ticked but we need to address how those boxes are ticks. Basically what we have a system of now is absolute confusion and exorbitant steps, so people who are applying for consents often have to defer to getting experts involved which costs more money, because they can’t begin to comprehend how the system works. What I’m saying is we need to make it more consumer friendly. The basic way of doing that, which sounds like a simplistic solution because it is (it’s not going to be hard to do), is we bring it online, make it really clear how you apply, what the steps are and how you are progressing through those steps.

In terms of the voting process, in Wellington we’ve got STV (single transferable vote), and in Auckland you’ve got first past the post. What do you think about the differences, what voting system do you prefer?

I’m all for STV and that’s absolutely what I’ll be changing it to should I be so fortunate as to get in, because basically having first past the post disadvantages people like me. It disadvantages people who are seen as the slightly more risky bet even though people want to vote for me, a few people have raised with me the fear that it’s risky because it might split the vote—it might allow Vic Crone to win. For the record that’s not plausible…. So STV I am a huge advocate for, it’s a fairer system, it allows people to rank their preferences, and I’m a little bit surprised that my competitors Phil and Vic in particular have said that they’re not interested in changing that system.

Does the Auckland Council have a living wage policy?

No, Len Brown did advocate for it when he came

Spinoff acknowledged that with their paragraph on him. Yeah Phil would be boring and status quo and managerial, but again I have full respect for Phil and he came out saying that if he weren’t in the race he’d vote for me.

into this term but then obviously the news broke about his affair and he lost mana; he tried to push through the living wage but it lost by one vote and that’s because council was focussed on that issue and everyone was kind of ganging up against him and he didn’t try to push it through again.

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What’s your stance on the living wage?

All for it, and for contractors as well. In a business like Auckland Council there are 3.5 billion dollars per annum going through the books and it would cost 0.02 per cent of expenditure to pay the living wage. Another fun fact, it’s not fun though it’s pretty depressing, is that the average rental property in Auckland is $509 per week for a three bedroom home and then the take-home wage for 40 hours on the minimum wage is $513, so for a single mother which is actually quite reflective of the staff on Auckland council right now, around 1500 of them, those single mothers are struggling and left with that $4 leftover, or living in overcrowded homes, or potentially working 60 to 80 hours a week to make ends meet.

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What’s the idea behind the nightlife advisory panel?

It’s quite similar to what we’ve seen in Amsterdam and London in terms of the Night Mayor, essentially what that does is there are a few different advisory panels that work with the council to advise them on policy, what the nightlife advisory panel would do is create a group of people who come from all kinds of cross sections, so businesses, musicians, police, potentially art gallery representatives, and they would come together to formulate the best plan for how we go about helping nightlife flourish in a safe way in Auckland. One of the major things is that we need buses and public transport that runs a lot later than it currently does and we need more police patrolling and things like that. It ensures that we have a great scene for nightlife because that is the hallmark of a great international city and right now in Auckland that doesn’t really exist.

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The Spinoff, who have been quite good in terms of covering you, endorsed Phil Goff the other day, with you as secondary candidate. Could you give us your opinion on that?

Yeah. Of course I’m disappointed. I’m disappointed because I have stronger policy than Phil and because at debates, which unfortunately are non-televised ones, I do perform better than Phil and I’ve gone a long way to engaging everybody who was left out of this conversation and I’ve had a lot of people tell me that this is the first time they’ve felt excited about the future of the city…. I think it’s sensible, it’s risk averse, but it’s not super exciting and I think that even The

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It’s great that he endorsed you…

Yeah, but it feels a bit like a pat on the head. If this debate the whole time has been about my legitimacy because of my age, for the candidate that everybody thinks is the most ‘experienced’ to turn around and say that I’m the next best option I think that’s probably the best form of legitimization but unfortunately it just comes a little bit too late.

But I think it really does speak volumes about the options that Auckland has this election, like I’ve said, Phil will be fine as a mayor and I have full respect for him but Phil just represents the status quo. If people want to be engaged and excited and inspired to live in Auckland, have a look at my policy and talk to me, and feel the visceral passion and we can really make this city great, it doesn’t have to be boring.

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If you don’t get it, would you run again?

You could have asked me six months ago if I would have been in politics and I would have told you no. The reason that I stood is because I was waiting for someone ‘experienced’ to stand up and do the job that I’m currently doing, which is engaging Aucklanders, because of all these problems that we’re facing are my personal problems as well. I have a $43,000 student loan, of course I don’t own a home, I use public transport every day because I don’t have a car, my friends are the ones who are leaving in this brain drain that we’ve got, so I’m very personally invested in the future of our city and I found that no one who was standing actually understood or was trying to understand those problems.

If I don’t unfortunately win, I can’t tell you. It’ll be a process of evaluation but for now I’m very strongly focussed on winning this thing.

After we hung up we were out of breath and full of admiration (she was so cool!), having tried to keep up with Chlöe for a full forty minutes.

She is not a 22 year old (show me the birth certificate), she is a serious mayoral candidate with robust policies, whose passion for improving Auckland is insurmountable. It’s a shame that cynics have been unable to see past her age and have assumed that being young and a credible candidate are mutually exclusive.

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Finnius Teppett

On White Men Being Behind Desks good seat you get there at like noon. When you finally get to leave the theatre after the show, it’s still light out.) But it’s easy to see why. Colbert is surely the undisputed king of the late night shows, and has been since he took over from the also legendary David Letterman last September.

He’s a powerhouse, with his unshakeable delivery and his super-refined screen charm. (It also helps that he just knows he’s king, the perennially depressed Jimmy Kimmel being relegated to second place, where he’s pretty safe, largely as a result of the limits of his own persona’s comic low self-esteem.) Colbert has heaved the Late Show back into the mainstream. YouTube loves him, because his nightly monologues and desk sequences are as quality joke-wise as any pro stand-up set, and a hell of a lot more relevant. (For an illustration of what else can happen when the helm of a late night institution changes hands, see the tragically fading Daily Show under the impeccably well-intentioned but kind of visionless Trevor Noah.) One of the reasons that Colbert’s Late Show has done so well is that, as everyone expected of the host of the Colbert Report, he shines the show’s spotlight onto the world of politics at every chance he gets. In a climate where the rest of the late night circuit is largely either apolitical (see Kimmel’s timeless “Mean Tweets” or “Lie Detective” series), or alarmingly naive politically (see Trump’s recent appearance on Jimmy Fallon’s late show, where the boyish host notes gravely that “…the next time I see you, you could be the President of the United States,” before getting the candidate’s fake-begrudging permission to mess up his hair, a bit which strongly feels like it was pitched by a campaign coordinator from Trump/Pence 2016), Colbert’s show is refreshingly and urgently current.

The day I was in the audience, which was the first show back after a two-week hiatus, Colbert presented a section called “What Donald Trump Did On My Summer Vacation”,

A little while ago I was in New York, trying really hard to not be a tourist. I didn’t go up the Empire State Building, I didn’t go on that free commuter ferry that goes kind of near the Statue of Liberty, I didn’t go to One World Trade Centre or even the Brooklyn Bridge. Some of it wasn’t entirely intentional (I told myself so many times “oh I’ve got plenty of time to do that” that on my last day I had fourteen attractions to visit, none of which I saw due to a real banger of a headache onset by the yesternight’s farewell boozing that kept me groaning and bedridden until a few hours before my plane home), but a lot of my snubbing was due to my being determined to dive into the NYC ecosystem with as small a splash as possible. I chewed gum on the subway to seem like more of an asshole and so blend in. I would roll my eyes at bewildered German tourists and smh at out-of-towners paying six dollars for a hotdog in Times Square. I walked around Manhattan with my head down, pretending to care nothing for those endless blocks of magnificent skyscrapers, and I stopped smiling, and it all totally worked. After a while I started getting asked about directions and subway connections. I didn’t know any of the answers, and usually at that point my facade crumbled within microseconds, but it was nice to be asked. The one thing though that I couldn’t help myself from getting totally un-New Yorkerly excited about was going to a taping of the Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

Colbert’s Late Show is shot in the Ed Sullivan Theatre up on Broadway and 53rd, and the tickets are free and in super-high demand. To get a ticket you have to fill out a whole online profile and present a photo ID, and then you’re only allowed to go once every six months. People travel from all over the country just to see a taping, and it’s a huge night out for them. (Or rather, afternoon: they had us gather at like 3pm for a 5pm taping. If you want a really 21

appetite for local satire finally whetted again, last year we got our very own funny man behind a desk, one who likewise emerged from the internet seemingly fullyformed, with White Man Behind a Desk (WMBAD).

One Wednesday in May last year, a video called “Invading Iraq | White Man Behind A Desk” started getting views and shares around Facebook and YouTube. In the video the presenter, an unshaven twenty-one year-old in a brown-grey suit and tie, doesn’t even introduce himself before launching into a list of current New Zealand troop deployments, including “South Lebanon, South Sudan, South Korea, and southest of all, Antarctica.” In later videos he would open with an introduction and we’d learn his name, Robbie Nicol, but the comic mould was, remarkably, laid down from the start of that first video.

In line with the modern newsy satire format pioneered

by Jon Stewart, and then freeze-dried by John Oliver, WMBAD (it rhymes with “Sinbad”) spins the delivery of real, important issues into entertainment, mocking the boring reverence that “the news” is usually treated with.

Watching the video that May, the most shocking thing for me was not learning about New Zealand’s involvement in so many international conflict zones, it was how honestly and truly funny the clip was. The Antarctica joke is dropped ten seconds into the video, and is delivered with the timing and perfect camera-friendliness of a natural. New Zealand broadcasting has struggled for so long with the filming of actual comedy (i.e. stuff that can be laughed at without a quiet, patriotic lowering of chuckle-thresholds, and that has only really been achieved by the effortless talent of Waititi and Wells, with the odd moment of bizarre brilliance captured on tape by the Moon TV gang—none of whom have ever been treated with the regard they deserve by people who matter, e.g.

TV commissioning editors, et al.) as NZ on Air constantly reminds us with that steaming heap of lame comedies that it keeps shoving millions of tax dollars into, but here WMBAD was making it look criminally easy. On the lowest of budgets WMBAD sat at a desk in his house, looked down the barrel of a DSLR, and proved singlehandedly that there is hope for the future of New Zealand TV. Soon after that he became, in the opinion of Grant Robertson, “a scruffy, somewhat oddly lit, shining light in the desert of political satire in NZ,” and in the words of my dad’s mate Steve, “Honestly… the funniest person in the land.”

“He’s not a character like ‘Stephen Colbert’ from the Colbert Report,” Robbie told me, “but he isn’t me.

He’s cleverer, and a lot more certain of his opinions.”

Alongside the comedy of the character, much of what is really engaging about the series is that not only do you get WMBAD’s opinion on the issues at hand, you also get his journey up to arriving at those opinions. The videos often begin with strong assertions (see the “Prison” episode: “The New Zealand prison system is fucked,” or the “The Auckland Housing Bubble” episode: “Auckland is totally fucked,” etc.), which are then broken down into their constituent parts—the who / what / why / etc.

where he skewered the candidate—or rather, let the candidate steadily twist himself onto a giant skewer—re. his bizarre plea to Black Americans which was basically a large-scale public neg, with Trump listing off all the reasons he thought that black people’s lives sucked, before telling them “what do you have to lose by trying something new, like Trump?” Colbert then showed us a doctored election ad featuring what he thought Trump’s new campaign slogan should be: “You’re already on fire, so you may as well shoot yourself in the head.” It was searing, bold, and totally unambiguous. It wasn’t just a funny joke at the expense of a public figure who is a walking comedy material factory, it was an outright judgement. If Trump is going to be president, Colbert was saying, we might as well kill ourselves now. Trump has been so present in the media for so long, and been taken so seriously (most media outlets are guilty to some extent of treating Trump and Clinton with false equivalence, by saying like “sure, Trump’s bad, but Clinton’s not so great herself…”) that our standards for judging him have slipped. In the “You’re already on fire” bit, Colbert was telling us in no uncertain terms that—forget the small hands and weird hair—the reality of a Trump presidency would be truly horrifying. It was real, biting satire, and everyone in the audience lost their shit about it.

America has a strong tradition of satire and has in recent history been enjoying a Golden Era of the genre.

You now have to be a pretty small-fry politician in America to escape the ridicule of one funny man behind a desk or other. New Zealand, on the other hand, has lately been stuck in something of a ditch satire-wise. Since the demise of Facelift in 2007 and Jeremy Wells’s frequently outrageous Eating Media Lunch in 2008 (though it was relegated from prime time television long before then), politicians here have found it pretty easy to avoid the attention of people who would make fun of them in public.

Nathan Rarere’s Brown Eye on Māori Television did a great job of comic current event commentary, but it lacked a mainstream audience, then vanished completely last year. We had to rely on the global-outreach arm of Last Week Tonight to step in and make the appropriate fuss about John Key and his sad flag referendum. And while it probably suits certain politicians pretty nicely to not have a keen satirical eye watching their every action, for others it’s a more worrying sign. Wellington Central MP Grant Robertson told me: “I grew up on a diet of McPhail and Gadsby, and while some of it was cringe-worthy, it did mean there was mainstream piss-taking of politicians every week. That has gone now. We desperately need more of it, and with more prominence.” Then in 2013 The Civilian appeared out of nowhere, practically mid-sentence, and quickly became a popular source of headlines in the traditional Onion style about New Zealand’s hypocritical politicians and strange, outspoken laypeople. We lapped up The Civilian like it was our first taste of fresh water in years, and its Facebook fandom quickly grew to the tens of thousands. And with our

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the ACT Party are a bunch of communists.” While displaying a stuff.co.nz article that quotes ACT saying “Home ownership now for privileged few.” The point is made: this isn’t an issue of left vs. right, it’s an issue of weak government policy. The distinction is important. As Robbie told me: “When people who care about politics become more partisan, they turn other people away from politics. They don’t know who to trust, and they become disenfranchised, which is obviously a bit of a blow to the whole democracy thing.” Next in the firing line is Housing Minister Nick Smith, who WMBAD gets into an argument with about the real solution to the problem: reforming the capital gains tax or the RMA. Then after noting that “National believes that What We Don’t Know Can’t Hurt Us is a valid basis for economic policy,” he takes aim at the Labour Party for the whole “Chinese-sounding names” fiasco. Because “as it turns out,” WMBAD says, explaining Labour’s dodgy numbers, “racism’s bad and it fucks up your maths.” Their ideas might sometimes be confused and their methods poorly thought out but, for Robbie, politicians aren’t bad people. “I’m not entirely sure at what point we decided public servants are evil, but I don’t think they are,” he told me. “They’re doing a really hard job to pass laws that they think will make your life better. I’m sure a lot of them are wrong, but most of them really do think they’re helping. If we keep spreading the idea that politics is a job for bastards, we’re only going to get more bastards in politics.” And as for the media, he reckons that they and politicians “serve different functions, but they’re on the same team. They’re both trying to make the country better, so the media should hold politicians to account without being dicks.”

Robbie was surprised when WMBAD took off. “It’s really not what I imagined,” he told me. “I really didn’t think people would share it around, but they did. And that’s everything for web-series. Do people share it? Then it’s a success. I don’t think that’s a great metric, because not everything that’s good is shareable, and vice versa, but we’re very grateful to the people who shared our early videos.” When the first episode of the show’s second season was released last month, it got nearly fourteen thousand views on Facebook within twenty-four hours, with over two hundred shares. And while it’s great to have a loyal, growing audience, maybe an even better metric of success is the degree to which your political webseries riles up politicians. When I got in touch with David Seymour for this piece, he told me that while he respects the responsibility of satire to “bring uncomfortable truths into the public view,” he regretted that “unfortunately White Man behind a Desk is not part of the truth seeking movement. He quotes me saying ‘housing is for the privileged few’ when I have never said that, but I always say the opposite. What a pity that that a guy with some talent is not committed to the honest exchange of political ideas.” [sic]

That “certainty of opinion” is crucial to the success of the series, because it provides something that we hardly see in the modern media in its pure form: bias. We are now well used to the blinkered tirades of Mike Hosking or Paul Henry or whoever, and they have done their fair share to dirty the name of bias, but English writer Alain de Botton has a more optimistic view of it. Bias, he writes in his book, The News: A User’s Manual, “is a pair of lenses that slide over reality and aim to bring it more clearly into focus. Bias strives to explain what events mean and introduces a scale of values by which to judge ideas and events.” When people disengage from world events as the news presents them, de Botton argues that it’s not necessarily the fault of a “shallow or nasty” audience, “but instead simply that the news isn’t being presented to us in a compelling enough way.” Fiction writers never assume the unearned engagement of their readers but, for some reason, newscasters do—and then they’re surprised when people don’t end up caring about the number of people killed in a remote African town as much as they care about the imminent royal wedding. Because people, it turns out, love stories. And if you can make sense of complex issues by contextualising them into stories, with characters and motivations and wants and needs (and the real trick: doing it with purity of intent), then you can easily get tens of thousands of views on the video you post to YouTube about “tax and spend” government. (Obviously there’s a whole other article to be written about the abuse of storification, but there is a balance to be struck between the current state of our monotonous, super-dry news and that kind of overwrought, slow-motion footage overlaid with a swelling string section to make a political point, or to sell cellphone plans or whatever. Campbell & co. usually do a pretty good job of finding a middle ground somewhere.) And Robbie knows that he’s navigating tricky territory. In a WMBAD-expositional episode he pleads, with honest vulnerability: “This show is about politics but you should watch it anyway. I don’t like political news anymore than you do. They make the whole thing seem like a complicated competitive sport, but it’s not. It’s the way we change laws to make people’s lives better.” His mission is clear then: to get as many people as possible somehow caring about politics.

In the episode about Auckland housing, WMBAD addresses non-Aucklanders’ concerns early on. “‘Woah there Robbie’, I hear you say,” he says, “‘I don’t live in Auckland and I don’t give a fuck about the Auckland housing market’.” What follows in the video is a great example of de Botton-esque “intelligent bias” being used to make sense, and relevance, of a complicated and widely disputed issue, the end result being a much more well-informed “giving a fuck” of at least one viewer. After describing the current state of Auckland housing, WMBAD goes on. “As you’d expect, crazy left-wingers have been pushing the National government to do something. People have said ‘home ownership is now only for the privileged few’, but of course David Seymour would say that because

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Olivia Day oliveday133@gmail.com

Send your art submission to designer@salient.org.nz and be in to win a $100 Gordon Harris voucher.

Alex Feinson

I Only Date People Who Vote…

Voting is the most essential component to a democracy, yet there is a common perception that students do not vote and do not care about politics.

As a political science student, understanding this stuff is kind of my jam.

We are around 15 months out from another election and I already know who I am going to vote for.

With that, I wanted to find out how other Victoria University students were feeling this far out from the 2017 election and if they actually gave a shit about New Zealand politics.

Six students spoke to me about their opinions on politics and voting. The views expressed are entirely their own.

Each student fit into one of these categories: a right wing voter, a left wing voter, a first time voter, a mature student, an undecided voter, and a protester.

The First Timer Tu Dinh is 19 years old and is a second year engineering student. The 2017 election will be his first time voting.

Do you follow politics, political issues, or any political party in New Zealand?

Not really, but student fares are important. The latest thing on the news was the flag and I was on the side that wanted to stay.

Since you came to New Zealand from Vietnam as a kid, do you think there are any similarities between New Zealand politics and Vietnamese politics?

There isn’t much of a voting system in Vietnam, because of Communism. So not really no. There is a lot of corruption, and no one talks about [politics] really. Local stuff is more important than the national stuff. They aren’t controlled by the government as much.

Do you think the stereotype of students being uninterested in politics and not voting is accurate?

Yeah it is. It is not really prioritised as important in their lives. The youth vote is a big number, but there is not really much targeting or engagement. I haven’t heard much about voting and students don’t go out of their way to vote and find out about it.

These are their stories:

Do you think you will vote in the 2017 election?

Maybe. I need to still find out more about the parties and the candidates first. Politicians really have to reach out and prove to us why they deserve that vote.

So they should try to reach out to more young people.

What do you think the outcome of the next election will be?

I am going to guess that it will be another National term. I don’t think John Key and the National government have much competition. With John Key, I don’t really follow how “bad” he is, but if there is no one else to vote for… He is the lesser of all evils.

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The Righty.

Jack G* is 20 years old and is an International Relations Masters student. Jack voted in the 2014 NZ national election and the flag referendum. He voted for UKIP in the 2014 European Parliament election and the 2015 UK election, and voted “Leave” in the Brexit vote.

The Lefty.

Damon Rusden is 22 years old, and is a third year International Relations, Political Science, and Public Policy student. He has voted in one national election, one local body election, and the flag referendum. Damon is the coconvener of Greens at Vic.

Do you support any political party and what influenced you to support them?

New Zealand First. My parents both vote Green and when I came to university I considered myself quite left-wing. But the more I was exposed to left-wing ideals in the university environment, the more I thought “that doesn’t make sense.”

Do you advertise your beliefs on social media and in person / on campus?

I’m not the most prominent person on Facebook, but I’m out there with Young New Zealand First during O-week and I’ll go along to just about any talk on campus and ask questions.

What are your political beliefs and what has influenced those beliefs?

The Green Party and socialism, which draws mostly from growing in a very poor family and seeing various attempts by my parents to escape poverty and not being able too. I also believe in clean renewable sources of energy and want necessary services, like water and electricity, to be more easily accessible to the public.

What policies do you think will be the most important in the next election?

Immigration, a lot of the debate is sadly uninformed and there is a lot to be said there. Also rising inequality, homelessness, and house prices will be on the forefront.

Because of your views, have you ever experienced bad criticism or attacks on campus?

Oh yeah, take a debate last year on the refugee crisis. I was the only one who had any divergent idea.

I suggested a solution based on what happened in Australia because I think it is a pragmatic way to stop more refugees drowning while attempting to cross the Mediterranean. Then [ACT leader] David Seymour called me a “bigot” straight after. I get the same from students as well.

What do you think of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between Labour and the Greens?

I think it is beneficial for the Greens. The media has both parties combined polling just behind National and that unity is key for the public. I think there could be more cohesion on transformative policies like power prices (under NZPower), clean rivers, and funding for necessary services.

What do you think politicians should do to target the student vote in 2017?

I think it is very much down to someone’s responsibility to want to vote or not. I find that most most of the vocal young politicians and youth wings are focused on ideology and while they have their best intentions at heart, they don’t offer feasible solutions. A change in that mentality would likely see encourage more youth to vote. That being said, I honestly say raise the voting age to 20.

Do you think the stereotype of young people and students not being involved and engaged with politics is warranted?

The disengagement with young people is worsening now and you can blame all sorts of reasons as to why young people don’t engage. But it is difficult to reach out to those who don’t care. I would be surprised if the youth vote fell considering that most students want free education policies, which is being reflected in many parties’ policies now. To vote on that alone is a good incentive.

What do you think the outcome of the next election will be?

I think it will come down to whomever Winston Peters and the rest of caucus decide to go with, based on whatever National or a Labour-Green coalition are prepared to offer.

What do you think the outcome of the 2017 election will be?

Not sure, but it will depend on whether New Zealand First support National. I would be very surprised if Winston does. It will also be interesting to see how the MoU works in strategic electorates.

*Did not wish to use full name.

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Alex Feinson

What issues do you think are the most important for you personally, and the rest of the country as well?

Housing, immigration, and I believe there will be a big focus on foreign policy. You see people coming to power over the world that are unpredictable. There is a real need for a great statesman who knows how to navigate the international arena.

Alex Feinson

The Oldie.

The Undecided.

Anna Apperley-Dill is 27 years old and is a third year English Literature student. Anna has voted in two national elections and two referendums, but never in a local body election.

Grace Carroll is 22 years old and a third year Political Science, International Relations, and Philosophy student. Grace has voted in one local and national election and in the flag referendum.

Do you support any NZ political party?

Yes, Greens and Labour, so you can imagine how excited I was when they announced the MoU. Both parties appeal to me for quite a few reasons, however I'm not comfortable claiming that just one party completely represents me. I voted Green last election.

Why were you undecided in the 2014 election?

I found it very difficult. I think I was even undecided when I was standing in the polling booth. It is not through lack of wanting to be involved and not being interested, but I am quite disillusioned with the political scene as it is now.

What issues do you think will be important in the next election?

I have always been proud of New Zealand and its incredible health-care system. However I’m concerned that it is deteriorating. I spent over two years within the public mental health system, and these services are absolutely vital. Cutting them puts up barriers and makes life-saving services inaccessible to the majority. As a mature student I’m not only thinking about the health concerns of myself, but also of my parents, and any children I may have in the future.

Do you think your views differ from the rest of the student body?

Maybe. I think some of my more liberal views, on things like LGBT issues, would definitely match with that age group. The only reason I hesitate on that is that when I was that age, I wasn’t all that involved in political issues the way most of us are now. It wasn’t really a priority.

Do you think the stereotype that students are not engaged in politics and don’t vote is accurate?

I don’t think it’s because they’re students, I think it’s because 18-22 year olds have just left home and are getting used to living as an independent person, and on top of that they have to decide their political positions. I don’t blame them for not voting. If politicians want 18-22 year olds to vote, they actually need to find out what this age group cares about and showing them that their vote is worth something.

What do you think the outcome of the next election will be?

I know what I want it to be, but I really can’t speculate. Just not National.

Do you think you will be undecided in 2017?

Yeah. I think that, although historically my family vote Labour, the current situation with Labour is that there is nothing to pick up on. It is not much of a party where you can see where it is going to go and what they have to offer.

Do you associate yourself with a party, or a belief?

No, it depends on the issue. I can identify with some part of most parties, but of course there are some extreme parties that I can’t relate to at any level.

There is a place I sit more comfortably on the political spectrum, probably more on the left.

What do you think are going to be the most important policies for you in the next election?

The housing crisis because from a personal perspective I have been impacted by that, so looking at the private market, state housing, and homelessness. Refugees and immigrants, and employment and education as well. Things like the “hot button issues” will be euthanasia and possibly abortion because it is a prolonging debate that unfortunately hasn’t had the right sort of constructive discussion.

Do you think it is important to vote?

This is the question everyone comes back to—what is the value of the vote? Voting is always forwardlooking, it involves taking action. Voting is linked with our sense of who we are and where we are going. Voting affects our self-determination, and is an effective voice generated through participation. I think fundamentally it is important that however we cast our vote we make use of it.

What do you think the outcome of the next election will be?

If the opposition don’t pull their socks up, we are in for another three blue years.

Dion Rogers is 21 years old, and is a first year Music and Media student. Dion has never voted in an election or referendum, but tried to once.

Why did you choose not to vote? Was it circumstance or protest?

It was both. The circumstance was I had an essay to do, it was raining, and I couldn’t be bothered switching [my electorate] over. But for protest was that nothing really reached out to me. Nothing was for students. I do lean towards the Greens though.

Do you think it is important to vote though?

I think it is important to vote, but I couldn’t look at one party and say I agreed with 75% of their ideas. It is important for people that will be affected by those changes, but changes I saw didn’t affect me, so I thought “what is the point?”

Is there anything that would get you to vote in the next election?

If a candidate made a decided effort to focus on my demographic it would be something that I would be interested in. Part of it is also exposure, I didn’t even know there was a [local body] election on.

What kind of policies and issues do you think will be important in the next election?

Housing, especially flatting and the rental warrant of fitness. The rental warrant of fitness should be a national standard. It would show us that they care about the student body and just everyone who lives in crap apartments because money is tight. Definitely living wage as well.

What do you think the outcome of the next election will be?

I am going to say that Key is going to win again, and it will just be the same over again. I would love to see a change, but not change for the sake of change.

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Alex Feinson

If there is anything that these interviews hopefully point out, it is that perhaps the stereotypes about students not voting or caring about politics are not true. Everyone I talked to knew their stuff, or wanted to learn, yet almost all of them felt disenfranchised and ignored by the political system.

They seemed to care and engage with politics and voting if they felt they were being treated as an important demographic, like their best interests were being represented, and as adults.

If these interviews are any way to predict the future, the next election will be about housing, education, health, and immigration. We are also probably in for another National term, and good ol’ Winnie P is set to remain as “the Kingmaker.”

So whether you are left or right wing, new to the political scene, or don’t want to vote at all, the important thing is to make your decisions to engage or not an educated one. The voting process shouldn’t be about feeling insignificant, but about getting involved and making decisions.

I do hope you all go out and vote in 2017 and help change the political landscape of New Zealand.

Or don’t. I’m not your mum.

The Protester.

Tessa Cullen

US Election 101: Your Own Personal Guide to the Potential End of the World. Unless you’ve been living under a rock (or in

Greymouth) for the past 18 months, you’ll be aware that in just over five weeks arguably the most polarising election in US history will take place.

The Republican candidate, Donald J. Trump (aka King of the Deplorables— source: HRC), and the Democratic candidate, Hillary Rodham Clinton (aka Crooked Hillary—source: The Donald), will square off against each other bringing to an end months of melodramatic controversy, eye-rolling campaign ads, and frankly exhausting media coverage of an election cycle that has confounded, well, just about everyone in the entire world.

But what has led us to this point? In a nutshell, how is it that come January 20, 2017, one of these two presidential contenders, who are debatably the two most hated candidates in twenty-first century politics, will have direct access to the nuclear codes for over 45 per cent of the world’s functioning nuclear warheads? I will endeavour to unmask the absolute conundrum of the 2016 US presidential election to see whether we all need to readily invest in NASA in order to escape this planet in T-minus thirty-six days.

How it actually works Before we throw ourselves into the wild worlds of these two candidates, it is best to establish how the US actually picks its president. Just like everything else in America (see: the metric measurement system, the use of Fahrenheit, listing the dates as month/day/year), the presidential election process is stupidly confusing, long-winded, and just a little bit suspicious.

First off, the two dominating US political parties, the Republican Party (like the National Party but with cowboy hats) and the Democratic Party (like the Labour Party but minus Aunty Helen, RIP) hold their primaries where their delegates, members of each party, vote for their preferred candidate at party conventions.

Unlike classic NZ, where someone just goes “right, ol’ mate Andrew hasn’t had a go at being party leader yet, let’s give him a run shall we, he can’t be any worse than bloody Phil,” registered voters within the US get to actually vote for their preferred candidate.

Once the candidates are confirmed the general election begins. Now, here’s where things get complicated. Instead of the simple “most votes wins” system, the US

uses the “Electoral College” to elect the president. Despite what the name suggests, the Electoral College is not a university or school that both Trumpy and Hills have to attend in order to become leaders (this is what I genuinely thought it was when I first heard the term).

Rather, when registered voters cast their votes in November, they are making an electoral vote, which makes up this bizarre Electoral College. Now there are 538 electorates throughout the US, so a candidate needs to win 270 electoral votes (the majority) to become president. The twist is that the number of electoral votes per state differs on population and federal delegation size and the candidate who wins the majority of the electoral votes within each state receives all of the electoral votes for that given state. For example, California has 55 electoral votes. So if Trump wins 28 of the Californian electoral votes in November and Hillary wins 27, Trump will receive all 55 votes. This means that a candidate can conceivably become the president by winning just 12 states (California: 55, Texas: 38, Florida: 29, New York: 29, Illinois: 20, Pennsylvania: 20, Ohio: 18, Michigan: 16, Georgia: 16, North Carolina: 15, 30

Virginia: 13, Maine: 11. Total: 280).

So even if a candidate receives the majority of the popular vote, but not the electoral vote, they lose the presidential election. (This happened in 2000 when fuckboi George Jr beat out good-guy Al Gore in the electoral vote, but did not receive the majority of the popular vote—and look how well THAT one worked out for you America.)

Now we’ve established just how whacked this electoral system is we can begin our examination of America’s two favourite villains, Hillary and Don-don.

Hilla the Hun Hillary Rodham Clinton, the democratic nominee, needs no introduction. Having lost the 2008 Democratic primaries to the original-gangster Barack, ya girl Hills is back at it again, leading the charge to become America’s first female president (get on NZ’s level @ America, Jenny from the block (also goes by Jenny Shipley) took out our title 19 years ago).

Despite many early predictions in her favour, Clinton’s road to becoming the Democratic nominee was not exactly smooth sailing. Her biggest obstacle came unexpectedly from

Tessa Cullen the far left, bearing the slogan of “Feel the Bern.” Bernie Sanders, age: approx. 105, a senator from Vermont, successfully created a movement which gained momentum among the millennial population in America. This surprised many political strategists and election junkies alike, as on the surface Bernie seemed to be just your regular, disheveled old white dude. You see, from early 2013 (if not earlier), Hillary had already secured the endorsement of many inside the Democratic institutions and donor bases. Her candidacy seemed to be a given and attentions began turning to who’d she’d run against on the GOP side. Little did Hills know, Bernie would get up from his rocking chair, grab his walking stick, and attempt to start a revolution.

And he nearly succeeded. Bern appealed to some voters in ways that Hillary could not: pushing ideas of democratic socialism, championing the oppressed, and challenging the political and economic establishment dominated by Wall Street.

Nonetheless, when push came to shove, the Sanders insurgency came a little too late. Whether it was because people believed his policies were too dystopian, or that he’d die of a heart attack while in office (I’ll stop with the age jokes soon, I promise), Hillary won by nearly 3.7 million votes.

Running on a platform focused on raising middle class incomes, expanding women’s rights, instituting and regulating Wall Street, and improving the Affordable Care Act (the current American health system is like, 1.5 stars out of 10 at best), Clinton wants to smash through that irksome glass ceiling and prove to gals (and guys) all over America that they are “stronger together.” Still, she continues to have a polarising effect on American citizens. That pesky email scandal, her role in the Benghazi attacks, that problematic pro-Iraq stance in 2002, previous dealings with Wall Street, and the general perception that she is a “wishy-washy, capitalist liar” are all prominent arguments made in the Anti-Hillary debate. Some people even hate her because she didn’t give sleazy old Bill the flick after he had “sexual relations with that woman, Monica Lewinsky” in 1997.

But at the end of the day, Hillary

and her running mate Tim Kaine (designated white male of the campaign, smiles with his teeth a lot, looks like he enjoys vanilla ice cream) need to prove just one little thing to the American public in order to win this election: “even if you do hate us, are we really worse than that other guy?”

The rise of “The Donald” “That other guy,” also known as Donald J. Trump, is the literal elephant in the room ( the national symbol of the Republican party is an elephant, hah). The mystery of Trump is, well, a little hard to get your head around. The first question on everyone’s mind seems to be “how on EARTH did we let it get this far?”

Well let’s hash this out. Trump, a businessman-come-television personality and now the potential 45th President of the US, first tried his luck in politics in 2011 when he considered running as the Republican nominee in the 2012 election.

Although he didn’t ultimately seek the nomination, and Mitt Romney (throwback to that guy) got the job, Trump’s enthusiasm for politics was sadly not sated.

Unlike the Democratic primaries, there was never any clear favourite on the Republican side with a total of 17 nominees filing as candidates through the primary race (including the Zodiac Killer, also commonly known as Ted Cruz, whose foreign policies ideas included “carpet bombing the Islamic State.” Hmmmmm, no thanks). GOP institutions, elites, and donors didn’t openly endorse any candidate until late 2015, and once they did finally decide that Marco Rubio was their guy Trump has already “trumped up” too much support to be stopped (bad joke, but you know had to go for it). It was almost as if no one really believed that The Donald would gain any traction on the political sphere so they largely ignored his campaign, thinking that his extremist, seemingly far-right, policies would be faced with widespread criticism and make him an object of ridicule from the American public. Oh how wrong they were.

Speaking of his policies, Trump and his running mate Mike Pence (imagine Voldemort, but with hair and looks like he eats charcoal for 31

breakfast) have what we’ll call an “interesting” policy platform. First of all, climate change? Nope, doesn’t exist. Mexico? Yeah, chuck that wall up would you? (Send them the bill while you’re at it.) Guns?

Frick yeah, gung-ho to the second amendment. Some of Trump’s other stances include opposition of birthright citizenship, is anti-TPPA (so Wellington of him), favours repealing Obamacare, and has proposed “across the board” tax cuts, the reduction of regulations, and the raising of tariffs as his economic policy.

So why does Trump have so much support? The easy answer would be to say that 41% of America (Trump’s current polling numbers) are racist, misogynistic imbeciles.

This could be true. However I think it goes beyond this. What Trump is offering is a complete reformation of American Politics. Having never served in Congress, Trump is not tainted by “corrupt Washington” and appeals to voters who have become disenfranchised by lack of change previous presidents and politicians have brought. Overall, Trump speaks his mind. Yes, most of the stuff that’s on his mind is overwhelmingly stupid, definitely racist, and almost always politically infeasible, yet it’s mobilising republican voters faster than John fricken Key himself, circa 2014.

So, are we all going to die?

The short answer is no. It is best to remember in these situations that a presidential term is four years, and is constitutionally limited to two terms for a reason. But the long answer is, well, eight years is a pretty long time to cause some ruckus. Previously mentioned fuckboi George Jr had a mere eight years in office and look at all the havoc that he created (invaded Iraq, forgot to ask permission, was generally not a cool guy). Simply put, this election has defied, and will continue to defy, expectations.

No poll, survey, or focus group can accurately tell us what going to go down on November 8. All I can suggest is that you strap yourself in, purchase that military bunker in inland South Canterbury, and prepare yourself for nuclear armageddon.

The housing crisis and the scapegoating of “foreigners”

Opinion

Ian Anderson

MA student (adapted from a thesis on “publics” in Aotearoa /New Zealand).

The housing crisis is a key site of struggle over inequality in Aotearoa / New Zealand. As many increasingly note, an increasing proportion of people do not own the homes they live in. Yet both of the major parties obscure the causes of the housing crisis, perhaps to keep investors and privileged voters onside (particularly older Pākehā, more likely than other groups to vote).

In Aotearoa / New Zealand the housing bubble has yet to burst at the time of writing. House prices in Auckland have quadrupled from 1991–2014, and wages have not kept up. The growth in exchange value (price) already undermines the use value of housing (a place to live) and decreasing numbers of people can afford housing. Recent years have seen a drop in homeownership to just below 50 per cent of the adult population. The same period has seen a 25 per cent spike in homelessness.

National barely acknowledges the housing crisis. As of late August 2016, Key has finally conceded the existence of a housing crisis after years of pressure. However Key evaded responsibility for the crisis, putting the blame on the previous Labour government.

Meanwhile Labour, attempting to court more of a working-class or conscientious audience, acknowledge the housing crisis while obscuring its cause. This was most shockingly underlined

by Labour’s controversial “Chinese surnames” intervention (where Labour released a list of home buyers with “Chinese surnames”), failing to distinguish between migrant labour and international capital. As local hip hop artist David Dallas argues, in his excellent track “I Don’t Rate That”: They buying everything that ain’t taxed Blame it on the Chinese Say it’s foreign buyers But if a Brit buys up you don’t bat an eyelid Fuckin’ wilin’ Could be third generation migrants But we out here checking up on last names What’s next gonna check what shape their eyes is Tell the truth it probably wouldn’t be surprising Growing social and economic contradictions among the people—between property owner and vagrant, mortgagee and lender, landlord and tenant—are safely displaced onto a nonpublic, an Other, defined through racial rather than economic characteristics. In fact, although the government does not collect comprehensive stats on ownership of housing, data from Land Information New Zealand indicates that only 3 per cent of buyers and sellers are foreign tax residents More broadly, content analysis of Labour Party press releases reveals that they never identify “investors,” “speculators,” or “bankers” per se as a negative influence; rather they only couple these sorts of terms with terms such as “Australian” or “foreign.” Considering business interests fund both major parties, and generally act as a coercive influence (“business confidence” is a key term in electoral commentary), Labour is apparently unwilling to alienate local business.

According to Roy Morgan polls, New Zealanders’ main concern is “inequality.” However content analysis reveals that the two major parties appeal to “New Zealanders” as their main constituency, a nationally rather than economically defined public. Examining opposite terms to New Zealander, National is the most likely party to use the term “international,” while Labour is the most likely party to use the term “foreigner.” Whereas National seeks to appeal to local and international investors, Labour scapegoats foreigners rather than challenging capital per se.

The housing crisis presents a challenge that both major parties are apparently unwilling to address. Marxist geographer David Harvey notes, in Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, that many middle-class “consumers” gain (precarious) wealth from housing bubbles, not only super-rich investors: “housing asset values have become important political objectives for larger and larger segments of the population and a major political issue because the exchange value for consumers is as important as the exchange value earned by producers.” Herein lies the contradiction for major parties; how to address the housing crisis without alienating voters who benefit from the boom. New Zealanders are the main owners of New Zealand housing and many benefit from driving up prices (landlords, for example).

The housing crisis is driven by the internal contradictions of capitalism, both local and international. As David Harvey argues, the “exchange value” (as a commodity) of housing undermines the “use value” (as a right). Neither major party will address the roots of the crisis. The existing movements for public housing and renters’ rights (see Renters United) offer more of a basis for building. We need a combined, independent social movement demanding an expansion of highquality urban public housing, a clamp-down on all speculation and profiteering (whether local or international), and prioritisation of the use value of housing over the exchange value.

32

Mates in the States

Queer Agenda

Renee Petero and Tessa Cullen

Uni Q

The weather is getting cooler and the pumpkin spiced lattes are here. (Renee genuinely enjoys them, but Tessa is refusing to even try them because she is still convinced that pumpkin is a VEGETABLE and therefore should not be consumed in sweetened liquid form.)

Because it’s our LAST column—*cries*—we thought we’d review the two most intriguing things in Washington D.C. thus far: Firstly the political events in D.C. are out of this world. Last week we were lucky enough to attend a proHillary rally where MICHELLE FRICKEN OBAMA made a speech (she is even more majestic in real life and has really toned arms). There are constantly events, rallies, and debates to go to, all which prove to be especially polarising and controversial during this current political atmosphere (Trump we lookin @ you).

Secondly: Greek life. Holy shit. Put on ya Ralph Lauren pink polos (buttoned to the top button please and thank you), tennis sweaters, tan shorts, and boat shoes and you my friend have a frat boy. Frat parties are EXACTLY what they look like in the typical-collegemovie and are full of what we will deem “the typical white boy.” While we won’t be repping our Delta Gamma t-shirts any time soon, frat parties have sure provided a completely different adventure: featuring beer pong (with the red cups of course) and freshers trying to sway to the tune of “One Dance” under badly-strung disco lights.

All jokes aside, we wholeheartedly recommend that everyone goes on an exchange sometime throughout their degree. Not only is it a fantastic opportunity to travel while you study, being able to meet, study, and live with other people from around the globe is probably the greatest thing that has ever happened to us—*sobs*.

Something that we hope that everyone has the chance to do!

We’ve both had such an unbelievable time so far, so much that it hurts to think about coming back to Victoria. (Vic Books BETTER have reinstated those veggie toasties by the time we’re back.)

See you all next semester (maybe, if we don’t manage to outrun US border control).

The personal is political and you cannot escape. The ideas we have in our head about what constitutes maleness and femaleness, as well as what constitutes ‘normal’, are all socially constructed (yes, all of them).

When you get up in the morning, put on a skirt, and desperately try to find a husband before your overbearing mother considers you a failure, you’re taking part in a production of power in which we’re all implicated.

In our heteronormative world refusing to perform the script of heterosexuality is radical. The same applies for non-heterosexual sex. Queer theory is all about breaking down norms and institutions, and queers are in a unique position to disrupt the reproduction of the social order by virtue of queer sex’s un-reproductive nature.

Unfortunately the queer community hasn’t been the best at destabilizing all norms. Queer culture has its own forms of transphobia and ‘ideal’ forms of sexual existence. This is topped off with a healthy dose of racism—while Europeans were busy ‘discovering’ the world, modes of queer sexuality were alive and well in non-white cultures. Modern queer narratives have not only elided their settler-colonial past, but are also centred on the figure of the white affluent cis male.

Queer theory, when it privileges difference over sameness absolutely, colludes with institutionalized racism in vanishing (thereby retrenching) white privilege.

Non-privileged queers are marginalized by their lack of this superhuman ability to transcend their own social location. The problem lies in the idea of a ‘queer exceptionalism’ that looks down on people who are too poor or marginalized to say “fuck it, I don’t need any social institutions,” because what they really need is to put food on their tables.

So what does it all mean? You can think of queer theory like Neo from The Matrix. It tells you that everything is a lie, that there is no spoon (gender), and you can bend it as you will. And the moral of the story?

The political is personal and you cannot escape.

33

What We Talk About When We Talk About Science James Churchill The UN made a pretty serious announcement the other day. They declared that antibiotic resistance is the “greatest and most urgent global risk.” Move aside climate change.

Antibiotics are pretty amazing things. They were invented in the early 1900s and quickly revolutionized medicine. Antibiotics save millions of people from dying from bacterial infection. They work in many ways: some interfere with bacteria’s metabolism, some attack DNA to prevent bacteria from multiplying, and others rip the outside of the bacteria to shreds so that their insides spill out. Full on stuff.

However by evolutionary chance some bacteria

inevitably develop immunity. In general this is not a big deal as the immune system deals with whatever slips through the antibiotics net. But these immune bacteria can escape and spread and eventually you get ‘superbugs’; bacteria that has developed immunity against many different antibiotics.

A race has emerged where scientists have to develop new antibiotics faster than the old ones become redundant.

A large disconnect has emerged in the use of antibiotics. In the developed world they have come to be treated like a right rather than a privilege. More liberal prescription gives antibiotics more opportunities to develop immunity. Antibiotics have also come to be ubiquitous in meat production in order to counteract the frequently unhygienic storage of livestock. In China pigs are given colistin, which is a last resort antibiotic.

It isn’t used much as it can damage the liver so bacterial resistance hasn’t had a chance to develop. Chinese pigs developed resistance and in 2015 this resistance was passed onto humans.

At the same time millions of people in developing nations still don’t have access to antibiotics. People continue to die from sicknesses that we wouldn’t bat an eyelash at in New Zealand.

Super bugs are scary, especially when you consider the interconnectedness of the modern world. The World Health Organisation says the overuse and misuse of antibiotics is the main accelerating factor. If we want to win the race then we must be more prudent in considering whether antibiotics are necessary.

Digitales Matt Plummer

“Feeling prejudice by walking a mile in someone else’s shoes is what VR was made for.”

—Jeremy Bailenson, director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab.

meet people around the world and understand them more viscerally. Yet here is Palmer pushing for a degradation in our virtual community, supporting a candidate who strictly promotes fear of ‘the other’ instead of trying to understand them. VR has the potential to make internet communication more heartfelt and real. But Palmer has decided to use his capital to support a fucking meme factory that delves online discussion into racist, angry, anti-intellectual bullshit.”

There’s so much feeling here. Belief in the transformative and beneficial potential of this emerging technology is mixed with an anger so forceful that it threatens to burst the utopian bubble. It’s as if, for rlg, the actions of Luckey and Trump weaken the hope that VR really will help us become better humans, as opposed to merely more isolated, selfish ones.

This case is a reminder that politics is everywhere: not just in the billboards we see at election time, or in debates between candidates battling over policies and punchlines, but in nearly every decision we make, from what shoes we buy to what coffee we drink. And yes, to what technology we use as well.

In our capitalist paradigm the decisions we make as consumers are powerful and the growing movement of political consumerism suggests that increasingly we’re making these decisions not just on price point or popularity, but also on ethical considerations. In the past few days a number of companies have announced they’re no longer going to develop content for the Oculus Rift, and the backlash on reddit has been typically fierce. At the moment I suspect Luckey might be pretty keen to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.

Earlier this year I was intrigued to learn that, in a joint venture with Stanford University, the NFL planned to use Virtual Reality (VR) not just to train athletes, but also to tackle sexism and racism. Via a series of diversity training simulations the initiative provided an immersive environment in which participants were given an idea of how it felt to be the victim of stereotyping and discrimination. According to former NFL athlete and current Executive VP of Football Operations Troy Vincent: “VR can deliver on real social issues that allow people to be better.”

At the time I mused on Twitter: “NFL uses virtual reality to confront racism & sexism, maybe Trump campaign could benefit from a few Oculus Rifts?”

So I found it ironic that just last week Palmer Luckey— the founder of one of the best known VR technologies, the aforementioned Oculus Rift—was outed as having close ties to Nimble America, a group which supports Trump’s campaign by circulating negative memes of Hillary Clinton (AKA “shitposting”). Although Luckey has disputed the extent of his involvement with Nimble America, his dubious backpedalling has done little to assuage a number of socially-minded VR enthusiasts.

As one redditor, who goes by the handle rlg, laments: “The worst part is that I bought into VR and Oculus [because] it has the potential to change how people view the world. It’s an empathy headset. You can literally walk in someone else’s shoes, see the horrors of war up close,

35

The Arts Section 44 Poetry 45

Visual Arts

46

Music

47 Music 48 Film 49 Film 50

Games

51 TV 52

Books

53 Theatre

The Arts Section is sponsored by:

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Poems generated by Experimental Deskjet - from upcoming exhibition ‘Slowly Failing’.

‘Slowly Failing’ is an exploration, speculation and reaction to the ‘Post-Auto’ movement using today’s available technology to communicate tomorrow’s message. The exhibited experiments explore the possibilities and outcomes of technology when the user is removed from the process and the technology is left to produce on its own. A final year Massey BDes project by Harry Boyd and Isaac Laughton.

7–14 October. 294 Lambton Quay @_slowlyfailing slowlyfailing.com 37

Fuck you but also thank you Visual Arts

Ruby Joy Eade

through a window (he makes art about surveillance, get it?) or Simon Denny in front of artwork with his phone out (he makes art about technology, get it?). Simon Denny is everywhere. Simon Denny is having an ‘art moment’. Simon Denny is the future of New Zealand art.

The installation of his 2015 Venice Biennale work Secret Power (or four $750,000 components of it) at Te Papa a few weeks ago has resulted in a flurry of talks, interviews, and one average “making of” video doing the social media rounds. It’s fair to say I am over exposed to Simon Denny.

Of course I went to see it / him (he describes himself as a brand *eugh*) at Te Papa last week. I was, to be honest, sceptical as you often are when you are overexposed to something. I was ready to hate Simon Denny.

But I didn’t. I quite liked it actually. I quite liked him. The four works were originally installed among others in the grand (apparently) Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, 2015’s New Zealand Pavilion for the Venice Biennale. The large humming glass computer server cabinets are filled with a hodge-podge of visual material related to the Edward Snowden-leaked NSA files, e.g. badly designed power points and 3D printed Nokias. Now installed in Ngā Toi | Arts Te Papa, the works sit on a large photographic floor and wall wrap of the original site. The installation is a super visual information overload, reframing what feels like intangible information into a very Te-Papa-esque exhibition display, complete with garish visualisations and illustrations, lighting, models, and laser etched texts.

“I’m not out to point out bad things that happen in the world. I’m not out to say, ‘That’s a problem, we need to fix that.’”

—Simon Denny “If you are going to have this platform, use it to say something, use your fucking white educated male arse to say something.”

—Faith Wilson Everywhere I go is Simon Denny. My social media feeds have been dominated by the the same few photographs over and over: skinny white boy with a serious gaze and short back and sides. A little bit fuckboy; a little bit Macpac. The photos are either Simon Denny taken 38

representative for a community that she knows she will never truly fit, never able to fully express herself within.

It’s not just our national museum that has been capitalising on the now Berlin based Simon Denny being in town. Several months back Artspace in Auckland announced a call for proposals for the exhibition New Perspectives with Simon Denny that aimed to bring together artists with “young practice” and “new perspectives” on the basis of a selection by… our hero Simon Denny. Even though I kind of hated it I also couldn’t help fantasising over the idea of being chosen, meeting Simon Denny, being part of this elite selection, perhaps sharing in someway in this “art world moment.”

Faith Wilson, a Wellington based artist and general person of good thoughts and actions, also saw the call, mused over this focus on golden boy Simon Denny, and unlike me responded. She sent in a confessional style video “which was not an artwork” dressed in pink bathrobe, condemning both the project: “How is Simon Denny relevant to new perspectives in Aotearoa art? And why are we getting NZ’s biggest WMA bro artist to curate this? Fuck Simon Denny.” And Denny’s noncommittal politics: “If you are going to have this platform use it to say something, use your fucking white educated male arse to say something.”

A few weeks later Faith is skyping Simon Denny. She had been invited to contribute to the show. Duh. This non-artwork, created in defiance, was accepted into the fold. Colonised by those she was rallying against. A way to claim and control her reaction or use it to prove a point of inclusivity? Or a genuine interest her New Perspective?

“I don’t want to be the poster girl for dissent.”

A particularly poignant moment, the turning point in the story, is a series of hand scrawled notes written on the edges of pages of books and readings. They come hard and fast, revealing the desperation and conflicted nature of Faith’s relationship with Denny. Interspersed with videos of barefaced Faith desperately flipping between anger, disappointment, and confusion the story becomes so much more uncomfortable—it departs from celebrity fan art to a darker space. The artwork and the reality of the situation blur and it becomes hard to discern the the line between performed and felt. How much is the continuation of the narrative an idea and critique, a performed reality, and how much a real lived experience reflecting her ongoing relationship with Denny as curator and commissioner of the work she has to ultimately produce for the Artspace show?

“My desire was to assimilate, yours was to colonise, what went wrong?”

“Lol found out Simon Denny is a Capricorn they’re like apparently the worst combo for me.”

Since then my instagram feed has been filled with a narrative trail of confessional videos, hand scrawled notes, stalker-esque images, and compatibility tests. I now know Simon Denny is a capricorn and Faith’s Tarot was on point this month, anticipating their meeting. Her anger manifested as something more complex, a romance of sorts—alongside the frustration was this same want to please, to be accepted, to be a ‘chosen one’ as I had felt reading the email. Her anger manifests as desire— physical and emotional. Struggling to claim a space for her body as a brown woman in an ultimately white male word, whilst being accepted, validated, and pleasing to those in power.

Thank you to Faith for @fucksimondenny and sharing your thoughts with me. If you are in Auckland over the next few weeks (until October 29) make sure you get to Artspace, Level 1, 300 Karangahape Rd, and check out New Perspectives with Simon Denny, Faith Wilson, Louisa Afoa, Diva Blair, Hikalu Clarke, Owen Connors, Charlotte Drayton, Matilda Fraser, Motoko Kikkawa, Louise Lever, Theo Macdonald, Quishile Charan, Tiger Murdoch, Dominique Nicolau, Aroha Novak, George Rump, Mark Schroder, Anna Sisson, Huni Mancini, Hannah Valentine, Tim Wagg, and Yllwbro.

“I thought you wanted to help me but you just wanted my body to include in your diverse show.”

She plays (or is) the girl in love with a man she hates, but can’t stop thinking about. A bad guy she can’t quit. I want you to want me so I can not want you back. I want to feel loved and validated by your gaze, hate it, and then fondly remember our awful interactions. Throughout the narrative structure of the Instagram Simon Denny becomes more than the man she is simultaneously attempting to seduce and condemn, but also a

**All quotes, unless stated otherwise, are from Faith Wilson aka @fucksimondenny.** 39

Visual Arts

I haven’t seen the work in New Perspectives with Simon Denny and am not sure how much of the @ fucksimondenny Instagram will be a part of it. The freedom and form of instagram provides a space where the resistance was was her own, unclaimed by Denny and unclaimed by the institution. How will the work continue inside the walls of the gallery, where there is more of a game to play, people to please, a format to fit?

In the end Faith has made herself vulnerable, spoken her mind, taken a risk, questioned the system. She shared a subjective voice, even if at times it confused her and left her conflicted. She owned it and revealed something.

She interrogated herself and the system around her. That’s brave and that’s political.

Film

Korean film special The Wailing

Train to Busan

Director: Na Hong-jin 4.5/5

Director: Yeon Sang-ho 4/5

Review by Mathew Watkins

Review by Mathew Watkins

The Wailing is a suspenseful, atmospheric supernatural thriller that rivals The Exorcist. Korean director Na Hongjin will have you not only question your faith, regardless of your belief, but also the meaning of good and evil.

The film revolves around Hyo-Jin, an oafish police officer living in a small Korean village with his young daughter. A brutal murder kicks off the story, where a kind and loving man slaughters his wife and young children with a kitchen knife. The man is found clearly unwell, suffering from rashy skin and speaking in tongues, and the police pass it off as the man having eaten the wrong wild mushrooms—until similar murders start to plague the village.

Upon investigating the events, Hyo-Jin’s daughter becomes increasingly violent and demonic omens, such as dead crows and terribly afflicting night terrors, begin to manifest in her home.

At the same time, rumors have started to spread about a mysterious Japanese resident living in the foothills above the village. What connection does he have to the victims?

Though the start of this film is funny and lighthearted, using subtle comedy and family dynamics to advance your connection with the characters, Hong-Jin soon turns it on its head as tragedy, suspicion, and paranoia start to ravage the police officer’s family.

The film draws on religious elements from traditional Korean shamanism and Christian exorcism to shape a world in which the director has full control of what you feel and believe. Filled with subtle “blink and you’ll miss it” type clues that’ll keep you guessing throughout; Hong-Jin has created a film that is as gripping and mysterious as one can get. At three hours, The Wailing is an absolute epic that will not only have you glued to your seat, but will stay with you for weeks as you try to decipher its meaning.

Yeon Sang-ho’s Train to Busan is easily the best horror / action film since Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later. (I classify it as ‘action’ over horror, as zombies haven’t actually been ‘scary’ since 1968’s Night of the Living Dead.)

Seok-Woo is a workaholic living in Seoul with his young daughter, Su-An. It’s Su-An’s birthday and in an attempt to become more present in her life he’s promised to take her to Busan via train to visit her mother, only an hour away.

By the time they get on the train in the early morning, the world is collapsing around them. People have become rabid and an infected passenger make it onto the train.

Similar to 28 Days Later, people become infected quickly.

They are both hyper-violent and fast, turning the majority of the carriages into a bloodbath before a small group of passengers are able to barricade themselves in first class. The characters of this film are believable and multi-dimensional, and the sparse use of CGI is expertly executed.

The claustrophobic feeling of this film is immense. As if being on a cramped train isn’t bad enough, walls of the undead collapsing over one another to take a bite out of you elevates this to new levels. This is a familiar zombiefilm trope, the Zombies are an allegory for over-population and enchlophobia (a fear of crowds), which the film executes perfectly.

Though today’s Zombie films are typically a gorefest, this film doesn’t feature nearly as much violence as your typical Hollywood faux-body horror trash. Instead Sang-Ho focuses on shocking his audience through both the will and sheer number of the undead—piling over one-another, falling in heaps out of windows to get to the living, and even trailing behind a train—to the point where I was saying to myself: “Oh f**k that. Seriously, f**k that.”

40

Snowpiercer Film

Director: Bong Joon-ho 4/5 Review by Dana Williams Curtis leads his fellow bottom-class friends towards revolution and they plan to make their way to the firstclass section of the train and escape their life of poverty and despair. Overpowering the guards, a small group of inhabitants, including a security expert and a clairvoyant girl, begin their journey to the front of the train only to be met with a new struggle at each cabin and a rather shocking confession from Wilford himself at the end of their journey.

Drawing on themes of cannibalism, survival, and dictatorship, Snowpiecer navigates its way through some pretty heavy content, although it never falters in its efforts to impress and the film feels believable and subtle despite this. Plus each scene is beautifully detailed—especially the in-car aquarium and shots of the train shooting through snowy and abandoned landscapes.

Although the film is an allegory, and an obvious one at that, it still sends a powerful message about unfair and unequal exercise of wealth, power, and privilege that prevail within society. It speaks to many modern areas of concern in today’s world, such as the ongoing debates over climate change and the unequal distribution of wealth between the East and the West: concerns that won Joon-ho and Masterson awards for Best Director and Best Screenwriters at the Asian Film Awards of 2014, and Joonho Best Director at the Asia-Pacific Film Festival of 2013.

If you’re a fan of the Dystopian Action-Thriller, Snowpiercer might be an option for you.

In alignment with this week’s theme of Korean films and / or directors, Snowpiercer is an obvious addition to the list. Snowpiercer is brought to us by Korean director Bong Joon-ho, who crafts this cinematic masterpiece as a South Korean-Czech science fiction thriller. Based off of the French graphic novel Le Transperceneige, this telling story was re-written for the screen by Bong Joon-ho and Kelly Masterson. Snowpiercer is Joon-ho’s English language debut and, according to The Hollywood Reporter, the most expensive Korean production ever.

The film stars the familiar Hollywood face of Chris Evans (Captain America) who plays the protagonist Curtis Everett. We are submerged into a post-apocalyptic world that suffers from a second Ice Age, due to humans’ efforts to engineer the climate in an attempt to control climate change. The last inhabitants of the earth have boarded the Snowpiercer: a train powered by perpetual motion that endlessly circles the earth in a last ditch attempt to avoid human extinction.

Inevitably the societal hierarchal structures that existed in the ‘old world’ creep their way onto the train and its inhabitants become separated by class and wealth. Curtis, inhabiting the lower-class tail end of the train, along with a hoard of other unwashed and starved proletariats, is under constant watch from the Snowpiercer’s creator, the ominous Wilford.

Conspiring to escape with his mentor Gilliam (played

by John Hurt), and fed up with his low quality of life, 41

Atrocity Exhibition Danny Brown 4/5 Music

Review by Robert Barratt

Boosh where they have doors in their heads. Danny is as off putting as ever, blasting lines about Kubrick and Spielberg at the same time as lines about coke and gang violence. But despite this absolute hodgepodge of noise, everything works so, so well together. It genuinely feels like a bad acid trip; it sounds like one of those crazy Ed Roth illustrations from the 80s where everyone is green and has those huge bugging out eyes and the misshapen hot rods. It makes me feel sick, and I love it.

But this comes at a cost. The entire album feels like this and, while I usually applaud cohesiveness and a dedication to style, I just feel kinda sick. And not in that “woah wicked sick far out dude” kinda way, in the “oh christ where’s the nearest toilet” way. It’s an exhausting experience trying to listen to the album from start to finish. Despite the fact only one song is longer than four minutes the album feels like it lasts a lifetime. There’s no breather on the album, no nice change of pace before bringing you back. This is Danny’s wild ride and there’s no getting off.

If you can stomach it this is an excellent album. This is what Rocky wanted At.Long.Last.A$AP to be, this is what Chance wished Acid Rap was. But it’s one of those albums that you’ll either love the first time you hear it or you’ll hate forever and ever, and it’s difficult to say which is the right opinion. In any case give it a listen, make yourself feel just a little bit ill, and decide if you like it or not.

I’m hyperventilating in the back room of the office, doing my best to hold it together despite the fact I’m pretty sure I just saw a goblin staring at me through the window. I’m on the 14th floor. I peek out from behind the cupboard, and the goblin stares at me and lets out a cackle.

Someone’s outside, I snap around to meet their gaze, they’re asking if I want anything? I’m pretty sure they mean like coffee or something, but I figure it’s worth a shot and I ask him for a gun instead. I can barely contain my surprise when he slips me one. Armed with both the weapon and a newfound confidence, I point the gun at the goblin out the window and fire. Its smile disappears, I can hear its panicked screams as it slips from the windowsill.

I’m triumphant, the beast is dead. I let out a war cry, my victory is assured. My mortal enemy vanquished.

My colleague leans over and asks why in the name of christ I just threw my coffee mug at a pidgeon.

I think I might be losing it.

Nothing is quite right. People’s mouths move without sounds forming, shadows don’t line up uniformly. The ground feels like it’s constantly moving, not enough to be seriously worrying, but enough so that if you stop paying attention you’ll end up face down on the floor missing a tooth.

This is Danny Brown’s Atrocity Exhibition. I haven’t heard such an off-putting album from such a popular artist in a very long time. Horns are blasted out of time, the drummer can’t seem to keep the beat, and I’m pretty sure I heard a guitar riff from that episode of the Mighty

42

Law & Order: Special Victims Unit 3.5/5 Review by Katie Meadows TV Mariska Hargitay (daughter of ill-fated 50s bombshell Jayne Mansfield), rapper Ice-T, Hannibal’s Raúl Esparza and Jurassic Park’s B.D. Wong. All up, it can make a great drinking game.

Joking aside, it seems a little frightening to call the gritty and dark world of SVU idealistic but it still is—while not every case ends positively the squad still has a high success rate, and it’s cathartic to see greasy bug-eyed rapists thrown in jail. All the pedophiles look like Kevin Spacey and suck at choosing passwords for their exploitative websites and they all get life sentences.

It’s nice to think everything is that easy and that good will always triumph over evil. Sadly the reality for most victims of sexual assault is a long and drawn out ordeal in a legal system that would rather victim blame survivors than help them and that’s if they even get to reporting the crime, something that requires a ton of emotional labour on behalf of the victim. Seeing Olivia Benson kick deadbeat ass and work so hard to help victims of sexual assault makes me feel good and when I watch SVU I can suspend my disbelief enough to think maybe this is real and there is justice for those who have had their power taken so cruelly from them. While Olivia Benson isn’t real, Mariska Hargitay does a lot of real-life charity work, including founding the Joyful Heart Foundation in 2004 to provide support for victims of sexual assault, domestic violence, and child abuse. As someone with PTSD the content of the show can be triggering but I seek a strange comfort in it, and with eighteen seasons you’re in luck if you’ve run out of shows to watch. DUN DUN.

On September 21, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit premiered the first episode of its eighteenth season.

Created by television powerhouse Dick Wolf, SVU is a procedural crime show focusing on the law enforcement officials and attorneys involved in the prosecution of crimes of sexual and domestic violence and child abuse.

While originally just a show I sometimes watched at home with my mom during high school, I’ve come to enjoy SVU a lot in a way I never thought I would. For all of its soap opera glamour, ripped-from-the-headlines stories and cringe-worthy one liners, the show has a lot of heart and can be both thrilling and deeply moving, not to mention it boasts the best theme song of all time.

A show starting its eighteenth season is pretty daunting if you want to start watching, but the majority of SVU episodes are self contained and have conclusive endings and don’t need to be watched consecutively. The human brain loves puzzles and patterns and finishing them (that’s why you have Young Thug in your head all the time, because you’re trying to figure out what he’s saying) and SVU is the perfect 40 minute puzzle for you to dissect. It’s fun trying to solve the crimes while also factoring in at least one or two insane out-of-left-field plot twists. There are a bunch of amazing cameos: Robin Williams, Hilary Duff, Ludacris, Martin Short, John Stamos, 2Chainz, the list goes on. Then there’s the episodes that are based on and cash in on real life events: the Casey Anthony trial, the Duggar family, JonBenet Ramsey. Sometimes they throw a bunch together, like the episode where Paula Deen shoots Trayvon Martin. I never said it was smart. The main cast are equally endearing and scandalous, starring 43

Nutshell

Mimicry 1

Author: Ian McEwan Publisher: Jonathan Cape 3/5

Editor: Holly Hunter 4/5 Review by Cassie Richards

Books

Review by Cassie Richards

Mimicry is a new, nifty little Wellington-based literary and arts journal, packed with poetry, fiction, nonfiction, visual art (and even music!), all packaged sweetly in confectionery colours. On the first page, under the heading “NEPOTISM”, editor Holly Hunter declares the contributors to be her “incredibly talented and creatively driven friends.” But if the initial reception has been anything to go by, there will soon be a much larger pool of submissions to select from (and a second issue is already in the works.)

Personal highlights of the collection are Nina Powles’ brilliant essay on being half Malaysian-Chinese and discovering her heritage through food—from eating mooncakes and sesame pancakes in Shanghai to cooking fragrant meals in her small Kelburn kitchen. Celine Soyer’s piece on tracking down a man in a Fijian village from a friend’s old photograph poignantly observes the nature of friendship and memory, and is accompanied by her own drawings. Poetry ‘It Girl’ Hera Lindsay Bird shares her Post-It notes with us. Freya Daly-Sadgrove’s poems, two of which are included in the journal, are eclectic and lively, riffing on chaotic relationships.

It’s exciting to see the launch of a new journal in New Zealand, especially one that aims to be inclusive of all mediums and accessible to everyone. Mimicry 1 is available in two formats: a hardcopy, which can be found in good Wellington bookstores such as your local Vic Books, or an e-version from gumroad.com/mimicryjournal if paper isn’t your thing. What a treat.

With 2016 the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death (sad), we’ve been assailed with a slew of retellings and tributes to the Bard in the literary world. Novelists Anne Tyler, Jeanette Winterson, and Howard Jacobson have already published their Shakespeare-inspired novels, with Margaret Atwood set to release her retelling of The Tempest. Joining the ranks is Ian McEwan with Nutshell, his homage to Hamlet.

This is a story with perhaps the most unlikely of narrators—a third-trimester fetus. As might be expected, this is no average fetus drifting serenely in amniotic fluid—this is a fetus with a formidable intelligence, educated on podcasts, and up-to-date on current events, biding its time until it will enter the world and claim its destiny. Not only that, but this fetus possesses an alarming knowledge of wine, thanks to its negligent carrier.

Trudy is heavily pregnant and separated from her husband John, a lovesick, mildly successful poet. Residing in the dilapidated yet valuable marital home she’s taken up with John’s witless brother Claude, and together the callous and greedy pair hatch a shonky plan to sell the house and earn a cool few million. Their only witness to this villainy is, of course, the aforementioned fetus, who hears all from the womb.

If you’re thinking it all sounds a bit ridiculous, that’s because it is—but it has to be, and McEwan is clearly enjoying the absurdity of it all. It’s his most ludicrous plot yet, but once your disbelief is suspended it’s an entertaining, playful read. Unfortunately, and perhaps not surprisingly, McEwan is getting crustier with age, using the fetus as a mouthpiece for his views on civilisation and, most bizarrely, transgender people. Did you really have to enforce your own bigotry on an innocent unborn baby, even one so educated? For that, I’m knocking off a star.

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Review: THEA304’s A Series of Sticky Events Review by Corey Spence

THEA304—Directing It is a limited entry course offered in trimester two of 2017. If you want to gain experience and learn the basics of directing, or have always wanted to produce that one scene of that one particular play, consider THEA304 as a choice for your third year.

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Theatre

and chilling. Rory Hammond’s excerpt from Loveplay was delightfully mischievous; it required a single set piece that found (and needed) use just once amongst the fumbling of his actors through a missed sexual encounter.

Choreography was strong across the board. Specific mention is warranted for Adeline Shaddick’s passage from Lifetime due to her entertaining tango interludes and energetic clowning. Matthew Staijen’s Honey and Abi Merson’s Lovesong also incorporated elegant dance choreography.

Liam Kelly’s segment from Skin Tight and Adele Louise Tunnicliff’s extract from the musical [Title of Show] [yes this is the actual title of the show—meta] were major standouts from their respective seasons. Kelly’s highly physical piece was choreographed excellently with the right balance of the playful, the sinister, and the sexual.

His actors, George Fenn and Ania Upstill, commanded total attention the second they stepped on stage.

Tunnicliff’s piece created an eruption of laughter and joy within the audience. Her crafting helped her lead, Yasmin Golding, own the spotlight, and the rest of her actors (Helen Mackenzie, Jack Henderson, and Brodie Taurima) were reminiscent of the Muses from Disney’s Hercules—it was all the better for it too. All scenes contributed to an entertaining night and, while some could do with another week’s rehearsal, it is a pleasure to witness the rise of new directing (and acting) talent.

“THEA304—Directing” is one of the courses on offer for a third year theatre major, and one of the options a theatre degree builds toward. So what exactly will you get into?

It is a twelve-week intensive course where you, with the support of mentors, produce ten minute pieces of theatre: lights, costumes, the whole shebang. Students also adopt production roles to assist other directors, creating a collaborative environment which explores various avenues of theatre simultaneously.

In the rehearsal period of about four to six weeks, eighteen budding directors created eighteen highly diverse pieces of theatre: you will never experience nor be a part of something like THEA304 without experiencing or being a part of THEA304.

The pieces were partitioned into Seasons A and B and played on alternate nights for a four-night period dubbed A Series of Sticky Events. For many of these students, it was their first time directing. All made admirable efforts and should be proud of their achievements and growth.

Both seasons had their strengths, but I found Season B more consistent overall. The tone for both evenings was largely sombre, with sprinklings of comedy (well-placed and well-needed) throughout, which made the comical pieces shine brighter. Each piece used the space creatively and Nino Raphael’s excerpt of Angels in America deserves special mention; it transformed the actor’s dressing room downstairs into a Valium-induced depiction of a drag queen’s den. This not only provided a journey for the audience that effectively accompanied his excerpt, but also helped to mitigate the sometimes lengthy transitions between the showings. Sarah Burton’s Carmen Dick: Feminist Private Eye also effectively used its transition time and helped the prior scene shift their set off-stage by distracting the audience with a highly entertaining pre-show skit. Season B, however, lacked this inter-show synergy.

Some scenes used minimal set to great efficiency, standing out from their set-heavy counterparts. Jules Forde’s scene from Wairoa used a line of water as a symbol for the encroaching tide—it was both beautiful

Puzzles

Crossword: 'Colour Chart'

Made by Puck Some symmetrically-placed entries in this grid will lead studious solvers to a particular colour.

When you think you've got it, email colourchartcrossword@gmail.com, with your answer in the subject line.

One winner, drawn on Wednesday the 5th of October at 11:59 p.m., will receive a $20 VicBooks voucher.

Easy Last week's crossword solution

Target goals Good: 12 words Great: 15 words Impressive: 17 words

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ACROSS 1. Set of language rules (7) 5. Leaf associated with Canadians (5) 8. Cursed jewel named after Philippe II, which Napoleon used as his sword hilt (6,7) 9. Gain unfair control of (10) 15. 2008 punctuation-related Vampire Weekend song, with a music video directed by Richard Ayoade (6,5) 17. Old-school alternatives to satnav (6,4) 23. Famous Fleming introduction (4,5,4) 24. Some dolphins have over 100 of these (5) 25. Get rid of (4,3) DOWN 1. Bacterium (4) 2. Prefix commonly before 'Saxon' (5) 3. Tropical fruit (5) 4. Place to listen to hams, maybe (5) 5. Location for the first 'C.S.I' spinoff (YEEEEEEAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!) (5) 6. Device used in 'phreaking' (5) 7. With 14-Down, 1999 apocalypse film where Arnold Schwarzenegger throws Satan through a window (3,2,4) 9. Destination in a Jules Verne novel (4) 10. Line on some diet products (2,3) 11. 'The ____: Election Year' (2016 film with the tagline 'Keep America Great') (5) 12. Legal (5) 13. Character whose father is killed by wildebeest (and is kinda Hamlet? I dunno) (5) 14. See 7-Down 16. 'Mr. ____' (TV series that Rami Malek won an Emmy for this year) (5) 17. Word that can follow common or spider (5) 18. Indian royal (5) 19. 'The Lego Movie' protagonist (5) 20. He had the law laid down for him in the desert (5) 21. Snapshot (5) 22. Microsoft Office menu heading (4)

Contributors

About Us Salient is published by, but remains editorially independent from, the Victoria University of Wellington Students’ Association (VUWSA). Salient is a member of the Aotearoa Student Press Association (ASPA). Salient is funded in part by Victoria University of Wellington students through the Student Services Levy. The views expressed in Salient do not necessarily reflect those of the Editor, VUWSA, or the University.

Salient is printed on environmentally sustainable paper, and with vegetable ink, and is completely FSC approved.

Complaints People with a complaint against the magazine should complain in writing to the Editor at editor@salient.org.nz and then, if not satisfied with the response, to VUWSA.

Editors Emma Hurley and Jayne Mulligan editor@salient.org.nz Design and Illustration Ella Bates-Hermans designer@salient.org.nz News Editor Kate Robertson news@salient.org.nz Chief Sub Editor Tim Manktelow Sub Editors Ali Kaye Bronwyn Curtis Georgia Smith Matty Reeves Distributor Joe Morris

Read Salient online at salient.org.nz

Feature Writers Finnius Teppett Alex Feinson Tessa Cullen Section Editors Cassie Richards (Books) Dana Williams (Film) Ophelia Wass (Theatre) Ruby Joy Eade, Lucy Wardle, Louise Rutledge, Robbie Whyte (Visual Arts) Katie Meadows (TV) Contributors James Churchill, Uni-Q, Salote Cama, Tamatha Paul, Matt Plummer, Renee Petero, Tessa Cullen, Corey Spence, Jonathan Gee, Ian Anderson, Mathew Watkins, Rob Barratt, Rory Lenihan-Ikin, Puck, Harry Boyd, Isaac Laughton.

News Reporters Alex Feinson Charlie Prout Mckenzie Collins Meriana Johnson Alexa Zelensky Olly Clifton Thomas Croskery 47

Contact Level 2 Student Union Building Victoria University PO Box 600, Wellington 04 463 6766 Printed by SMP, Wellington.

Advertising Jason Sutton advertising@vuwsa.org.nz 04 463 6982 Social Media fb.com/salientmagazine T: @salientmagazine I: @salientgram S: salientmag

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2 October–22 December 2016

BAD VISUAL SYSTEMS

Adam Art Gallery – your gallery on Kelburn campus FREE ENTRY Tuesday–Sunday, 11am–5pm The entrance to the gallery is beside the Student Union building adamartgallery.org.nz