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Salient. Newspaper of the Victoria University Students' Association. Vol 42 No. 20. August 27 1979

A Poor Salesman

A Poor Salesman

It was the generaly feeling that Brian would have worked as hard as he could at the job, but it was also the feeling that Brian had not been able to convince us he could do the job well enough. Quite frankly. Brian showed us only a basic understanding of NZUSA policy, gave only skimpy outlines of his qualities and failed to persuade, on the basis of his hour in front of us, that he could make an adequate national officer.

However once he had left the room and discussion was started, people were faced with a dilemma. It came in the form of several people from his home campus (especially Paul Gourlie and Roger Tobin) claiming that Brian was, in fact, much more suited for the job than he was able to show. Paul Gourlie cited Brian's excellent work on the Education Fightback campaign (he took over the job only three weeks before the day of action and had to do everything himself), he has great enthusiasm and he is a very good public speaker. Gourlie claimed that Brian is not good at selling himself, he is too modest, but he is very able when it comes to speaking to students about policy. Roger Tobin said he had every confidence in Brian to do extremely well; that when he says he will do something, he always delivers.

But still there were doubts raised: for example, how would Brian deal with politicians — Merv and others would "run rings around him".

So, delegates were left up in the air — should they rely on Brian's poor performance before them, or should they believe those who have seen him work.

But the matter was more or less scaled when Denese Black rose to speak. From Otago, Denese claimed that in the Education Fightback Campaign "we carried him a lot of the time", saying Brian lacked leadership and urged people not to vote for him. I cannot say what prompted Denese to say this but I know that I was disturbed to find someone standing for another National Officer's job (WRAC) willing to take such a stand against a fellow candidate. If both Brian and Denese had been elected, one would imagine that this episode would fairly much prevent a good working relationship developing.