News

The agenda for last week’s Exec meeting totalled 70 pages, with 27 different items listed. The room had been booked for five hours, but thankfully the meeting “only” lasted three. So, what happened?

1. Serious financial discussions devolved into sugar-fuelled gigglings. Fran kept losing his rag and shouting “order!” at his flighty Exec.

2. Fran tried valiantly to feed Critic some lines that would sound good to the Dunedin voting public. Critic wasn’t playing Fran’s game, and will instead print quotes that make him sound like an unhinged terrorist.

3. Campaigns Officer Rachael Davidson was the only one looking vaguely Presidential. Could this be a sign?

4. Admin Vice-President Zac Gawn skulked in the corner contributing little and grumbling about E-Sports, as is his wont.

5. Oh and finally, the Exec fucked up a routine procedural matter and as a result leaked a sizeable quantity of sensitive information to Critic. Read on …

The first substantive item on the agenda was about buses. OUSA and the Otago Regional Council have negotiated a deal to provide free Go Cards to first-years in 2014, in addition to the previously negotiated student bus discount set for a trial period next year. OUSA would pay a discounted 25 per cent rate for these cards. Fran wanted to extend the deal to encompass all students, at an estimated cost of $25,000.

Rachael and Postgrad Rep Keir Russell pointed out that the cards are only part of the story – the ORC’s bus timetables are shit, and unless they are improved, the trial period is unlikely to be successful. (By this point Zac was banging his head against the table and chewing his notes, but the meeting was only a quarter of the way through.)

Fran then threatened to bring “a gun” to his next ORC meeting. “Never go into a meeting without a loaded gun,” he declared, causing Critic to frantically duck under the table to see if Fran was packing heat. He was, but there was no gun in sight. Fran later assured Critic that the gun was “metaphorical.” Clearly impressed by his linguistic talents, the Exec authorised Fran to make the ORC an offer they couldn’t refuse, and conditionally approved the spending.

Next, it was decided that a referendum will be held on whether to accept OUSA’s proposed 2014 budget, just as soon as the Exec figure out what said budget will actually contain.

Some other boring shit happened for a while, and then Ruby tabled a memorandum proposing a PledgeMe campaign to raise funds to reopen the Cook. Ruby had zero details about how the campaign might work, what the target should be, and what OUSA would look to gain from the venture.

With so little thought and effort having gone into it, the proposal was presumably little more than an attempt by Ruby to burnish her “Scarfie” credentials for the upcoming OUSA elections, at which she is expected to stand for President against Zac. While clever in a sense – the venture would require little expenditure on OUSA’s part, allowing Ruby to claim the “fiscal responsibility” tag from Zac, who would buy a pub outright – the move was half-arsed, sloppy, and led directly to what senior OUSA figures would later label a “clusterfuck.”

After the memorandum was tabled, an extensive “filling in the gaps” session took place, given that Ruby had, essentially, presented nothing but gaps.

For those unfamiliar with PledgeMe, it is a system designed to avoid the Prisoners’ Dilemma of individual charity. Someone sets an overall fundraising target, and you pledge a donation to the cause; but you only have to pay if the overall target is actually met. Thus, people can avoid wasting money on charity drives that go nowhere (for instance, half-arsed attempts to buy a failed local pub), and will only pay for causes that actually get enough support to make a difference.

A target of $1 million was floated but quickly rejected as too ambitious, and $500,000 was proposed in its place. God then spoke to the Exec, and pointed out that the asking price for the Cook was $6m when the association had approached its owners earlier in the year. What, God asked, would the Exec do with only $500,000?

Ruby suggested that it would “incentivise” a third party to buy the Cook. “Yeah,” Fran said, “we’ll just donate it to whoever buys the Cook.” (Side note: Fran is running for the Dunedin City Council on a platform of fiscal responsibility.) Thankfully, somebody pointed out how fucking stupid this was – not to mention fucking irresponsible, since it basically amounted to a charitable campaign to get students drunk – and the Exec agreed that OUSA should expect some kind of ownership stake for its 500k (notwithstanding that this 500k a. is purely hypothetical and b. would not really belong to OUSA).

There followed an interesting revelation. It was pointed out that the University was against OUSA owning a pub, and had been using the Service Level Agreement (SLA) – the agreement through which the University funds most of OUSA’s activities – as leverage to prevent them from buying one. The only way the University would countenance such a deal, the Exec were reminded, was if the University itself had a stake and could exercise some (read: total) control over how the bar was managed. Cos, you know, drinking’s more fun when Aunty Harlene is watching you.

This is the first time that anybody from the Executive has openly acknowledged that the University uses the SLA to exert wider strategic and operational control over OUSA, including how OUSA spends its non-SLA money. In short: OUSA has become the University’s bitch.

Education Officer Jordan Taylor pointed out that the Cook was not OUSA’s only option in terms of a student-owned pub, but was cryptic about what other venues might be available. Critic tried to coax some answers from Zac, who ruled out the garage beneath Clubs and Societies but was notably coyer when it came to the Great King Street branch of UBS.

“This is in committee, right?” Ruby suddenly asked. Critic replied in the negative.

There was a sharp intake of breath around the room. “Fuck,” someone observed.

The Exec had forgotten to move into committee of the whole – i.e., a closed session that the media is not allowed to report on. Normally all of this information would be buried deeper than Osama Bin Laden’s corpse. Whoops-a-daisy, Exec!

After hastily tabling a motion “That OUSA cooperate with the Otago University and other interested parties to create a PledgeMe to incentivise the establishment of a student bar in North Dunedin,” the Exec sheepishly moved into committee. Critic cannot report on what was said, but after the Exec came out of committee the motion was withdrawn pending discussions with the University.

Discussion then turned to the DCC’s decision to withdraw its polling booth from campus. The polling booth was to be introduced as part of OUSA’s Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the DCC, but was scrapped (on extremely flimsy grounds) in the wake of Fran’s DCC candidacy. Rachael whipped out her soapbox and made some salty remarks about the DCC. She noted that the MOU included efforts to increase student participation in local body politics, and pointed to the student enrolment drive that OUSA had been running under her guidance. “What are the DCC bringing to the table?” Rachael demanded, not without justification.

The last item on the agenda was E-Sports, with Zac wanting (again) to pull OUSA’s funding for the November E-Sports tournament. This time, his reasoning was that the Exec had not been given sufficient progress reports or justification for how its $15,000 outlay on E-Sports was being spent. (If Zac were this meticulous in chasing up every $15,000 of OUSA expenditure, OUSA would be the most well-run and accountable organisation in the world.)

Zac’s hardly a Grinch – if anything, his heart is three sizes too large – but this makes his efforts to shit in the E-Sports manger even sadder. He clearly thinks that hating on E-Sports is a vote-winner, and maybe he’s right – after all, it’s stigmatised and has a ridiculous name – but the elephant in the room here is anti-Asian racism, so Zac needs to tread carefully. In any case, given that the $15,000 represents just a fraction of a percent of OUSA’s total budget, the constant sabre-rattling is just starting to look petty.

At long last, the meeting ended. The Exec filed out, with a few stragglers hanging back to ask Critic despairing questions like “are you going to report on this?”