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Executive News

The Executive has turned down a request to use the Students' Association as a sub-agent for an insurance company. The scheme was proposed by a Life Insurance salesman who offered part of his commission on all business signed up as a result of publicity generated by the Students' Association.

It was felt that the Students' Association should not favour one insurance company against another, and that the company concerned was not necessarily the best insurance company for the type of insurance it was offering.

Some members of the Executive felt that many students could not afford to invest heavily in life insurance, but said they may be prepared to support any scheme involving other forms of insurance, such as fire or household insurance.

A Series of lectures is to he sponsored by the Students' Association during late March and early April. The overall subject is ''Implications of Political and Economic Union between New Zealand and Australia."

It is anticipated that the series will prove very popular, particularly with the recent resurgence of interest in trans-Tasman unity.

"We hope that this will be the forerunner of a series of annual Association-sponsored autumn lectures on topics of national interest," a Students' Association spokesman told Salient.

The lectures are to be supplemented and later published in book form.

At a meeting of the Executive last year, it was agreed that £100 of Association money be paid into the Coffee Bar account. The then Treasurer, Tony Ashenden, remarked in moving the motion that Nick Bullock (whose House Committee controls the Coffee Bar) did not consider the payment desirable.

When asked if the payment indicated a loss on coffee bar operations. President Tom Robins told Salient that the payment was merely a loan.

He explained that a heavy capital expenditure had been incurred in setting up the coffee bar, and that under normal accounting procedure, this would have been written on over five years.

"Instead," he continued, "we wrote off the capital expenditure over one year, except for the £100 covered by the loan."

It is understood that, given normal operating conditions, the coffee bar will be debt-free well before the end of 1965.

Returning Officer at past elections, Trevor Crawford makes several recommendations in his report to Executive on the conduct of the elections. He notes that constitutional provisions for the withdrawal of nominations are vague and proposes an amendment regulating these.

His report deals at some length with the contentious issue of placing a voter's number on the back of his ballot. While this is a practice followed in the New Zealand general elections, it has proved unpopular with students because it could permit voting to be traced back. While this is not likely to occur, and while numbering of ballot papers is essential to permit invalid papers to be withdrawn (particularly in cases of double voting), it is at present easily possible for scrutineers or others to find the identity of voters who vote facetiously.

Facetious voting, incidently, added interest to vote counting in both elections last year. In the presidential election three "write-in" votes for president occurred—one each for management secretary Ian Boyd, Extravaganza script-writer David Flude, and then returning officer Tony Haas. In the second election one voter was found to have issued a rather irrelevant, and unprintable, instruction to the scrutineers instead of voting!

Trevor Crawford proposes that the voting papers be printed with a number and that this number be written against the voter's name on the roll This would make it just as easy to withdraw votes in cases of double voting (there were nine apparent cases of this in the last elections) without making it easily possible to trace back a voter from a particular ballot paper.

"I'm disgusted with the attitude of students, especially female students, towards sports," Capping controller Dennis Paxie exclaimed at a recent executive meeting. He had heard Murray Boldt's report on Tournament and had Salient's tournament report spread before him.

Other executive members burst into laughter at the ambiguity. This forced Paxie to rephrase his complaint, directed at the performance of women students at Tournament.

Publications Officer, Chris Robertson asked Paxie whether he would be in favour of the introduction of a Women's Drinking Horn. "Yes, yes I am" proclaimed Paxie, but the comment was lost as executive moved to next business.