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

What was done in Education?

What was done in Education?

The Education Commission was only allotted time for two meetings. In addition, there was a National Education Action Committee meeting allocted for the Thursday morning. NEAC is a standing committee of NZUSA and is charged with the task of actioning policy determined by May and August Councils. Quite simply, the two Education Commissions were taken up with the examination of old policy and the introduction of new policy. This process is a facet of all commissions, but in the case of Education, it took up too much time.

The blame for this can be apportioned both to Grant Liddell—who should have known that time was fast running out without great progress being made—and to the fact that it was felt necessary to scrap all the old financial assistance policy and introduce a whole new set. This task was undertaken by Auckland, who introduced a set of about twenty motions. The need for a new set of policy was brought about by the emergence of the TSG scheme and the need for NZUSA to determine a formal attitude towards it. But the 'new' policy amounted to little more than a re-wording of all the old policy, and each motion seemed to require a great, amount of discussion and debate before it was put to the vote. By the time that time allowed for the Education Commission was exhausted, all that had been completed was most of the discussion on the state of NZUSA's Education policy.

Fortunately, delegates could count on the time available in the scheduled NEAC meeting. Unfortunately, because of the non-presence of the chairperson, this meeting started something like 90 minutes late. In something like two and a half hours, policy was finalised, a of priorities were drawn up and some elementary proposals for action against TSG scheme were put forward. Frankly, this is a pitiful amount of time to be spent on points that were probably the most important of the whole Council.

For people concerned with the new developments in Education, and NZUSA's response to them, we will have to rely on the results of further NEAC meetings (there will be at least one in the third term) with the new procedure, instituted at this Council, for the allocation of money and time by National Executive in the first term of every year—we will find ourselves looking to both NEAC and National Exec (rather than NZUSA itself) for direction in the area of Education Fightback.

It is a dangerous precedent to place decision making power in the hand of these committees, rather than those people armed with Students Association policy at May and August Councils. But in this case, it was these people themselves (and the leadership of the Education Commission) who gave this responsibility away. One can only hope that the future success of the Education Fightback is not jeopardised by these failures.

Stephen A'Court.

Photo of Geoff Adams and Rire Scotney

Victoria Education delegates Geoff Adams and Rire Scotney keep an eye or two on the Education Commission.