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Yes, we did beat "Truth" to the news. Avid readers of "Outside Left" will have observed that "Truth's" lead story on Alister Taylor's financial relations with the Committee on Vietnam had been hinted at in our first column this year, and dwelt on in detail last year. So you can save yourself a year's sub to "Truth" simply by reading this space - the only real alternative to the yellow press.

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Notice that History of Philosophy as a B.A. unit had been dropped by the administration this year, allegedly for lack of staff to teach it? Notice, too, that the History of Western Philosophy is being offered this year as a University Extension course? Kind of contradictory, no? Perhaps the real reason for the disappearance of the unit was that the people teaching the unit couldn't be persuaded to lower their standards sufficiently to allow the normal 60-70%. pass rate.

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Which, by progression of ideas (sometimes known as logic) brings us to point out that the Muldoon anti-university campaign must already have the effect of lowering academic standards in a not-so-obvious way - that university authorities will be scared to fail too many students for any unit, no matter how justified this may be, because the failure rate will be used as political blackmail against them. But, of course, you can't really expect Stud. Ass. to object to this-it has a rested interest in lower academic standards.

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Is the Head of the Security Police above politics? While I haven't noticed law-students rushing round discussing this fine point of constitutional law, it would seem to me that this personage should at any rate avoid too close association with foreign powers, if only because part of his job is supposed to be stopping other people having intimate relationships with undesirable embassies. Which makes it very odd that Brigadier Gilbert was at the welcome party for the new South African consul-general last week.

Also present, for the record, were Sir Francis Kitts, Mr Ralph Love, Mr C. S. Hogg. Ron Jarden, Mr T. C Morrison and John Reid.

Makes you think twice before getting involved in protests about the All Black tour of South Africa, doesn't it?

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But it's not only the people you'd imagine who are racists. While organised racism in New Zealand may perhaps start in the Security Police, and branch out, via Mr Kelly, into the External Affairs Department, it has gained a popular basis in the Gisborne Trades Council which is objecting to the entry of Pacific Islanders into the Gisborne area as a "menace to health, ethnic and employment standards of the whole district" (New Zealand Herald, 22/2/69). But this statement is to be referred to the Federation of Labour, who will of course reject if. Out of hand. Or will it?

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While the licensed trusts were asking for a lower drinking age, did you notice that the Auckland Trades Council (chairman, Tom Skinner) had approved a Hotel Workers Union call for stricter enforcement of the under-age drinking law.