Kicking off the year of local body elections, on the evening of Monday 17th the Greens hit the quarter-full St Dave’s lecture theatre with a motivational community-building hammer for their hui to “Save Dunedin”. The event included a panel of four local leaders and emphatic evidence-based monologues from Green Party Co-Leader Chlöe Swarbrick (“we’ll solve all of the world’s problems in approximately an hour”), who buttered up the crowd by promising that Dunedin is her “second favourite” city.
Critic Te Ārohi caught wind of the event after Chlöe visited the office earlier in the day to indulge in some (regrettably off the record) hot political takes. Always one to walk the “evidence-based” talk, Chlöe had spent the better part of the day at the Greens’ Tent City site to connect with students about the issues affecting them. The verdict: the cost of living crisis, shit flats, and – in Chlöe’s opinion – a general lack of gumption.
Speaking candidly from the very same office couch where Sam Soppet lived for a week – during which she herself voted on Critic’s Instagram that he should be allowed soap – Chlöe was passionate in her frustration with the “negative feedback loop” that’s led to the political malaise of the country. As a student she said she found it confusing to hear about those who chose to complain about things without doing anything, and in extreme cases just plain leave the country, like the 44,000 who moved to Australia in 2023 according to StatsNZ (Melbourne does seem lovely).
With the energy of Dame Whina Cooper as portrayed in the 2022 film Whina, Chlöe urged to Critic the need to “fight” and “get organised” against the issues facing New Zealanders, and students specifically. At the panel event later on, she said, “We need to congregate around the things that we believe in, because right now we are stuck in a really negative feedback loop whereby so many people are so disengaged and disillusioned and so pissed off at the way things work and the stuff that they see represented in our politics that they don’t engage in that politics. You know what happens then? With fewer engagements, it ends up that there’s less representation on things that we care about.”
Kaia, Marine Studies and Film student and Audio Visual Dropkicks band member, reckoned Chlöe was “bang on” with the negative feedback comment: “I think everyone, students included, are just so exhausted.” The Exec have noticed that political advocacy is not high on students’ priority list when they’re worried about getting a job and paying their rent. Welfare and Equity Rep Amy concluded, “Students are nothing if not time-poor.” Politics Rep Jett added, “Yeah, you’re focusing on the bare essentials to survive more than where you can put your time elsewhere.”
Chlöe told Critic she was a firm believer in the power of the student body as a vehicle for change, hence the event they held on campus to encourage just that. At St Dave’s, Green MP and former OUSA President Francisco Hernandez warmed up the crowd of around 150 (half of which Critic estimates sported greying hair) by saying, “It’s really important that we stand together as a community, because when I look here at the faces of people, I see the solutions to the challenges that we’re facing today.” Aw, stop it.
Amy and Jett agreed with Chlöe’s faith in the power of the student body. “As students, we might just be one person, but on campus there’s actually 20,000 of us, and if we all decide that there’s something we care about enough to fight for, that’s really, really hard for places like the University and the DCC to ignore us,” said Amy. “The sheer number that Otago University students have can absolutely influence things,” agreed Jett.
“At a time when Government cuts to the hospital, our tertiary and science sector and climate projections are putting our community at risk – join us along with community champions to discuss how we can come together and fix these issues,” read the event announcement on the Dunedin Greens’ Instagram. Champs included a multidisciplinary spread of Anne Daniels (NZ Nurses Organisation), Dan Benson-Guiu (Tertiary Education Union), Jonathan Rowe (South Dunedin Future), and Caroline Orchiston (Director of the Centre for Sustainability) and the Campus Greens’ Co-Convenor Harry who announced he was “quite hyped up” after attending OUSA’s Tent City during the day.
Given the diversity of panellists’ areas of expertise and the enormity of “saving Dunedin”, questions from the crowd greatly varied – all laced with that same tone of defeat and disillusionment that Chlöe had identified to Critic earlier that day. Topics on the minds of the audience were trans and disability inclusivity, lack of Otago University staff morale following successive course and job cuts, whether Grant Robertson can be considered an “ally” to students given his salary could pay off a student loan in a month, and anger about the Dunedin Hospital.
Taking back the mic, Chlöe announced her solution (“I’m a nerd and I’ve thought a lot about this”). Taking a beat to survey the speckled crowd, she shouted: “Where is our goddamn fun, guys?!” She empathised with the reality of people’s lives, saying, “We’re worn down and everything’s hard,” which isn’t exactly a “passionate place to work from” – but at the same time expressed frustration at the lack of solution-backed complaints in her email inbox. To her, the problem lies in merely complaining, without pausing to think of a solution. “We seek to outsource those complaints, but what if we as a community realise no one is coming to save us and we have to do that ourselves and that’s the point of democracy?”
And with that, she announced: “I will stop rambling!” Applause. Scene.