CRITICAL MASS IPHONE ARTS REVUE ODD FUTURE NEW POETRY SWIM CLUB CHINALOVE INSIDE: ELECTIONS AROUND THE WORLD BROKEBACK KATTER FLORIADE BOLT SINGAPORE WHAT'S ON
13 OCT 2011
Vol.63 VOLUME 63, NOno. 14 9
11 AUGUST 2011
The Australian National University Newspaper Since 1948
COWBOY METALHEADS OF BOTSWANA
ROLLER DERBY (P.22)
( P.15)
www.woroni.com.au
GOLDEN SHOWER Fleur Hawes elected President of ANUSA; Golden Ticket sweep all executive positions. THE EDITORS Fleur Hawes has been overwhelmingly elected President of the ANU Students’ Association (ANUSA), with her ticket (Golden Ticket) taking all positions on the executive. Alice McAvoy will be Vice-President and Tara Mulholland will be General Secretary, while Dallas Proctor, Phoebe Malcolm and Tom Barrington-Smith were elected as Treasurer, Social Officer and Education Officer respectively. The fourteen general representative positions were split between the major tickets, with nine candidates from the independent Golden Ticket elected, three from the Labor Right-aligned Stimulate ticket and two from the Labor Left-aligned Activate! ticket. Independent candidate Renee Jones won a tight contest for the position of Women’s Officer, edging out Activate’s Raveena Toor by 22 votes. Golden Ticket’s Sean Munro will be the new Environment Officer. In some ways, however, the most hotly contested positions were those for five delegates to the National
Cosmic Schmidt TOM WESTLAND UMA PATEL
Union of Students (NUS), with four tickets and two independents fielding candidates. Stimulate’s Michael Petterson, Activate’s Isobel Morphy-Walsh and Ryan Turner, the independent Jared Mitchell and Stood Up’s Alice Crawford were all elected to represent ANUSA at the national conference of Australia’s peak student advocacy body. Faculty Representatives, the Queer* Officer and Disabilities Officer were all elected unopposed. It took more than two full days of counting before the results
SAVING THE WORLD WITH A WELDING TORCH
could be finalised. After a relatively quiet year for student politics, 2011 saw fierce campaigning in Union Court and accusations of electoral regulation breaches and incivility. Ten complaints were received by the Returning Officer, Alick Dodd, during the course of the week of polling. However, none were deemed to be breaches of ANUSA’s electoral regulations. Questions have, however, also been raised about the need to change ANUSA’s electoral
Government changes visa rules for internationals MARIE NGIAM NEWS SUBEDITOR
Photo supplied by Nic Welbourn
JESS MILLEN CULTURE SUBEDITOR
On any given day in Union Court, there are some among us who rise above the crowd. They sail past, perched on towering, oddly-shaped bikes that have been welded together from parts
of broken frames and waste steel, leaving a rustle of intrigued whispers in their wake. The first time I saw one of these towering super-bikes, I thought it must be the bizarre workings of an eccentric, lone operator... CONTINUED P.15
regulations. It has been suggested that the Association should increase the powers of the Probity Officer to investigate and act upon allegations of electoral regulation breaches. Current ANUSA president Leah Ginnivan told Woroni that she thinks that the regulations need “substantial revision, especially to give power to punish bad behaviour.” “We would definitely encourage next year’s team to review the regulations carefully,” she said.
The Federal Government has announced that it will loosen visa requirements for international students, in an effort to boost Australia’s competitiveness in the international education sector and encourage more international students to study at Australian universities. The announcement comes as the Government released a report by former New South Wales Government minister, Michael Knight. It will accept the report’s
41 recommendations with some amendments. These changes will enable students wanting to apply for a tertiary degree in Australia to go through a ‘’streamlined visa processing’’. This means that all international students planning to study in Australia will be treated as though they are unlikely to stay illegally and are low-risk, regardless of what country they come from. The government is also planning to reduce the amount of money students must have in their CONTINUED P.2
Professor Brian Schmidt, 2011 Nobel Laureate and Distinguished Professor at the ANU, says he was “excited and bewildered” by the news that he had won a Nobel Prize in Physics. Professor Schmidt shares the prize with American scientists Adam Riess and Saul Perlmutter. “I got a call at about 8.30,” Professor Schmidt told Woroni just hours after he received the news, “from someone with a Swedish voice, who said it was a very important call.” Did he think it might have been a prank? “The accent was very convincing”. Professor Schmidt won the prize for his work on the rate of the expansion of the universe. By comparing the distances from earth and rate of expansion between exploding stars, Professor Schmidt and his team discovered that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. “This means that something other than gravity as we know it rules the cosmos,” said Professor Schmidt. This result, which Professor Schmidt says was predicted by Albert Einstein but then abandoned, came as a “big surprise” to most people, who had assumed that the acceleration of the universe was slowing. How did Professor Schmidt decide to research the expansion of the Universe? “I always like to ask big questions that I can explain to my grandmother – measuring the ultimate state of the universe is something I could explain to my grandmother.” Woroni spoke to Professor Schmidt again several days after CONTINUED P.2