A special general meeting of the Association has been called to consider giving a portion of your Students' Association fee to Sports Council for administering sport on this campus. At present an ad hoc grant is made to sports committee from executive usually the amount set in the AGM budget. Through a general reluctance to become involved in students' association affairs sportsmen have often been left as the underdogs as far as students' association money is concerned.

Sport on campus at Victoria University is in dire financial straights. Sports Committee which allocate Students' Association funds to clubs has had to cut grant applications to a minimum. In some cases such as cricket less than half the money asked for was given. As most of our teams are students they cannot afford to pay as much in subs as people who have well-paying jobs. Sport is expensive these days and that is why support is needed from the Association.

To help Sports Committee overcome its financial plight, it is proposed that $2.00 be set aside from your fee to be given to Sports Council to allocate more funds to clubs through Sports Committee. The levy would also be used to pay expenses incurred by the Association for the cost of running the New Zealand Universities Sports Union tournaments and hopefully to subsidise travel to them, something competitors from this campus have not had since 1971.

The proposed $2.00 will come from increasing your association fee by $0.50 and transferring $1.50 from the students' association general account. The procedure to do this is a constitutional amendment and a meeting to consider this has been requisitioned by seventy-five members of the association.

Last week criticism of this move was made in 'Salient'. It was claimed "By trying to make the money going to Sports Clubs an invariable amount, this proposal would take from the whole studass budget flexibility to respond to different priorities of students each year." For too long sports people have been relatively left out while the donations go on, executive honoraria go up and organisations like NZUSA and the Students' Arts Council take an increasingly larger portion of your fee. The levy to sports should be a priority each year set at an exact amount per student. The grant for sports would thus be free from executive manipulation.

The claim that "By writing the amount that Sports Council gets into the budget, the students who put their names to the requisition are trying to make students examine the needs of sports clubs in isolation from the rest of VUWSA's activities" is factually incorrect on two counts. First, the motion does not propose to write the amount that Sports Council gets into the budget — it proposes to separate it completely from the general account of the association Second sports clubs are not the only group which will benefit from this extra money going to Sports Council — it will be used to pay levies to NZUSU and hopefully to subsidise travel to tournaments.

Gym extensions

Facilities at the gym are already overtaxed and it is hoped more time will be made available for casual recreation by taking large groups such as karate and fencing out of the main hall into the new small gym. At present nearly everything is set to go except for the financing. At present we are looking to the university to finance the gym extension to the tune of more than $200,000. By making a token increase of $2.00 in our union building fund we will have a better chance of getting this project underway immediately. The contribution to this fund has only been increased by $1.00 since 1971 during which building costs have increased by over 100%. If this building is to be paid for we must have a fee increase as at present inflation may be pushing up the costs by more than the amount that is going into the fund.

Now is the time for sportsmen and women around this campus to act. I will have little sympathy in future for claims of "left-wing domination of student affairs" and "the marxists are stuffing this place up" if more than the usual people do not come out and vote on these important issues. You have got your opportunity and your right. Do something with it

SGM

12 Noon

Wednesday, 8 October