Columns

I’ve never voted in the OUSA elections before, I didn’t vote in the last one, and I am not alone. “Why?” you ask. “What about democracy and students’ rights and StudyLink and our ability to freely write chalk messages on the asphalt?” I don’t know what the answer is. Perhaps it’s because I like to reserve my democratic right not to give a shit. Perhaps it’s because I have syphilis and have lost the use of my arms. But perhaps it’s because OUSA has no real power.

Y’see, kids, at the end of the day OUSA is a union, like the NZEI or the PPTA or the USSR. The great power unions have always wielded is the threat of strike action. If Mr. Next-President (It will be mister, won’t it? There are no chicks running right? Jesus, feminists what happened?) was to call a student strike in protest of varsity fees or something, how many students would take up the cause? I predict somewhere in the vicinity of: “precisely dick” to quote a famous alien killer. And thus, poof, there goes all OUSA’s power.

Politics is, at the end of the cliché-spewing day, a popularity contest; and student politics are an unpopular popularity contest. There are too many assholes like me for it to “work” in the way national politics “work”. It doesn’t help people’s perceptions when the candidates and OUSA are aiming way too high in their aspirations and it comes across like promises intentionally constructed to be broken (and to get whoever elected).

I skim read the pledges of the candidates in Critic, and boy did they restore my faith in politics. A more sustainable campus, hell yes, but...uh…how? Fixing the standard of flats? With what, the OUSA fortune? Or do you plan to capitalise on the legendary relationship between students and landlords and call in a favour from the NZPIF? Faster internet, I can’t say I disagree with that one, but if the university hasn’t noticed how rat-ass their internet is by now, chances are they will stick to the “Fuck you” line when the issue is brought to them.

One inane, recurring idea was “A more politically active OUSA”. This isn’t the 60s. The best student protests can hope for nowadays is to cause congestion and get on the lunchtime traffic report. Remember when the last president (whose name escapes me at this time) locked himself in some sort of giant chicken coup in protest of VSM. Damn that was effective.

Isaac Newton, the philosopher-prince of 17th century physics, once said: “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Well, the only way the incoming Pres is going to see further is if he stands on his tippy-toes.