News

OUSA Finance and Services Officer Dan Stride has brazenly informed Her Majesty’s Government that they have left him with no option but to destroy them, after the Education and Science Select Committee inconsiderately ignored his submission (along with that of a few thousand others) opposing the Bill advocating Voluntary Student Membership (VSM).

The Education (Freedom of Association) Amendment Bill will have its third reading in April this year. The purpose of the Bill is to uphold students' rights to freedom of association by ensuring that no student is compelled to join a student association.
 
OUSA has strenuously opposed the Bill from the beginning, claiming that VSM will cripple vital services provided to students by the Association. In his capacity as an OUSA officer, Stride wrote to the Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage Chris Finlayson in October 2010 about the likely implications of the Bill.
 
Minister for Tertiary Education Steven Joyce responded (as the Bill falls within his area of responsibility), saying that “voluntary students’ association membership is consistent with National Party philosophy” and that if the Bill passes into law, “students will soon be able to choose whether or not to join a students’ association based on the value they would gain from membership”.
 
Joyce also said in his letter to Stride that “no convincing new arguments were presented in support of retaining compulsory student association membership” when the Select Committee received submissions. This went down like a cup of cold sick with Stride, one of the submitters to the Select Committee. In his response to Joyce, Stride says he “might as well not have bothered”, calling the process a “sham.”
 
In the same letter Stride accuses the Government of having no “sense of respect for democracy”, and says that, “appealing to reason and pragmatism has been a futile endeavour…with regards to this legislation.”
 
However Stride saved the good stuff for the end, setting the 2011 General Election alight with a threat that no doubt has the Government shaking in its boots; “if your Government is going to destroy students’ associations, we have absolutely nothing to lose by taking you with us”.
 
Somewhat cryptically, Stride followed this threat with a claim that “by the time we will have finished with you, you will envy Lockwood Smith”. Critic was unable to decode the meaning of this threat, but notes that when replying to Joyce, Stride also quotes Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity: “repeating the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result”. Perhaps an alternative definition might be: “minor student association functionary threatening popular first-term government with destruction”.