During O-Week, many things appear in the otherwise calm streets of Dunedin – short shorts, drunken bellows, vomit, cheery reps bearing vouchers that sound great when sensually pressed into your palm but actually promise nothing more than $1 off a kilo of tomatoes at the farmers’ market. The seasoned student deftly dodges these perils, shrugging them off with the kind of savvy that only this most brutal of environments can teach.
But this year another menace stalks beneath Dunedin’s velvety skies. This new threat targets not the lone strays as would a regular thief or violent psychopath, but seeks out the ambitious prey: the tastemakers, the large crowds, the twin media juggernauts of Critic and Radio One. That’s right, people: this year the politicians are in town.
But politics is a serious business, and New Zealand politicians are serious people, people who take what they do seriously, take themselves seriously, speak in serious tones about serious things with serious words, and want us all to know how serious is this business of theirs that they undertake with such seriousness.
But enough of this frivolity. Let’s get serious.
Grant Robertson, the probably-next-leader- of-Labour-but-shhh-don’t-mention-it, was in town to discuss funding for Polytechnics. For the purposes of Being Visible, Robertson swung by the Critic office. Dunedin North MP David Clark came along for the ride, playing Robin to Grant’s Batman.
Apropos of slightly more, but still not much, was Green MP Holly Walker’s visit. An ex-Critic editor and the second-youngest MP in Parliament, Walker came by to shoot the breeze, slam patriarchy and cast a beady eye over Nietzsche-spouting editorial debutant Callum Fredric.
Three Dunedin-based MPs also found their way onto these pages, requiring only a minimum of coaxing before leaping into view like Tracy Flick in a focus group. Napoleonic National MP Michael Woodhouse is interviewed on page 22, Green MP and co-leader Metiria Turei discusses mud-wrestling and shoot/shag/marry on page 23, and Clark finally gets his day in the sun, basking in the glory that is page 24.
Politicians jump on the O-Week bandwagon
