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Salient. Newspaper of the Victoria University Students' Association. Vol 42 No. 11. May 28 1979

The Crowd Response

The Crowd Response

Throughout Helen's speech, and indeed the speeches of all the supporters of the motion, the large section of the crowd that had come to the meeting with apparently unshakeable ideas of what was right and what was wrong, maintained a barrage of abuse, vilification and missiles. Many people chose to ignore the Chair's requests for order especially a small group of descendents of Attila the Hun who kept braying "Justice not Order".

Apparently these peoples' idea of democracy is to prevent their opponents from speaking — looking through history, there is no shortage of regimes who have paid lip service to the ideal of preserving democracy, while perverting it to their own aims. It was distressing indeed to see this line of reasoning emerging at Victoria University, but the hypocrisy of their attitude did not appear to bother the opponents of the motion.

Next to speak was the seconder of the motion. Debra Montgomery. She concentrated on what she saw as Tees' attempts to undermine the association. She gave as an example the May Council of NZUSA where Tees circulated a report (purporting to be the official report from VUWSA) In this report, Tees repeated his old catch cry that the SRC was dominated by a small group of political heavies, and that the motions these people pushed through were not representative of the real wishes of students. As Debra pointed out, the Presidents job is to represent the Association's policy, no matter what his own views be. In saying what he did, Tees was obviously going against the association policy.

Another example Debra gave was Tees handling of SRC's. She described his chairing as incompetent and biased. SRC is a forum for informed debate, to which every person has a right to go. No-one has a right to stop any one expressing their views, especially not the President, whose job is to chair the meeting in an unbiased manner. Yet Andrew only keeps order when it suits him to, and if the views of the speaker do not coincide with those of Tees, he is just as likely to laugh at the interjections as to quell them.