News

As reported in last week’s Critic, OUSA President Logan Edgar has landed himself in hot water over derogatory comments on the Facebook page of ACT MP Sir Roger Douglas. ACT on Campus called for Edgar’s resignation over the incident, a proposition that received piss-poor support in a highly unscientific poll conducted by Critic.

Edgar posted the message, regarding the ACT-sponsored VSM Bill currently before Parliament, on 73-year-old Douglas’ Facebook wall on the evening of Wednesday August 3. The message read “Get fucked you dinosaur. just trying to give yourself a legacy because you know you’re getting too old. You should actually debate the Bill with Pete or Grant… you’d get torn to shreds. Cunt.”
 
Edgar deleted the post, but a copy of the message was emailed to the page administrator and subsequently publicised by David Farrar of Kiwiblog. Edgar sent a message to Douglas apologising for his actions, and received a reply from Douglas saying “All good mate. I have been called worse in my time.” Critic’s attempts to find out what exactly Sir Roger has been called in his time that is worse than a “dinosaur cunt” were less than fruitful. We suspect Douglas was too busy formulating some cracker-jack economic policy to reply to us.
 
ACT on Campus President Peter McCaffrey was the loudest voice calling for Edgar to resign after the comment, describing the behaviour as “obscene.” McCaffrey claimed to have been “flooded with calls from angry students who feel their views are being misrepresented by Mr Edgar.” In an interview with Critic, McCaffrey elaborated on the number of calls that constitutes a “flooding” in his book, saying he had received “ten, fifteen, twenty messages… they weren’t all phone calls, but emails, Facebook messages, texts.”
 
That is some seriously Noah-type biblical shit right there.
 
McCaffrey is not a University of Otago student, and Critic is unaware of how many of the twenty complainants are actually Otago students. TV3 originally posted an article on their website claiming that students generally were calling for Edgar’s resignation, but have since removed the piece. McCaffrey said that some of the people he spoke to were “ACT on Campus, others were Young Nats, but there were also regular students who aren’t interested in the politics of what goes on in OUSA.”
 
It seems strange to Critic that anyone not affiliated with a political party took time out from stalking people on Facebook to complain to the President of ACT on Campus about some misguided comments by their Scarfie President, but who are we to judge.?
 
With the current state of the OUSA Constitution, there is no mechanism by which an Executive member can be forced to resign, and Edgar would have to do so voluntarily. Edgar says it is “inappropriate for McCaffrey to be calling for my resignation when he isn’t even an Otago student. I’ve apologised to Roger, and we are tight like a duck’s arsehole now.”
 
McCaffrey also called into question the genuineness of Edgar’s apology, saying that “the next day he was encouraging people to rip up photos of another ACT member” at the VSM protest outside the Robertson Library, when photos of Heather Roy, the sponsor of the VSM Bill, were being carried by protestors. Critic understands that Heather Roy had been in contact with OUSA prior to the protest, and her office had offered to send down the most recent photo of Roy to be used in the demonstration.
 
Edgar says of McCaffrey, “his legitimacy dried up a long time ago. Captain McCaffrey and his leaky ship, the HMS Credibility, have sailed.”
 
This is not the first clash between Edgar and ACT on Campus. When Edgar locked himself in a cage on the Union Lawn to protest VSM, an ACT on Campus member attacked him. McCaffrey refused to comment on this, which Edgar says is “ironic”. “McCaffrey has stayed tight-lipped on the time I was assaulted, but is quite vocal on this. Sticks and stones mate.”
 
Critic conducted a Facebook poll on the incident, even producing a slick looking infographic with the results, which indicates that the majority of Otago students still think “Logan is a GC.”