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

Education Falls Short

page 10

Education Falls Short

The Education Commission should have been the most important commission at NZUSA's August Council. The Education Commission should have been the scene of the greatest debate and discussion at Council. It should have discussed the strength and weaknesses of the Education Fightback Campaign. It should have discussed how the campaign could be best carried on. It should have formulated a concrete strategy to oppose the Tertiary Study Grant scheme. The Education Commission should have spent time working out a detailed list of priorities for the work of the Education and Welfare Vice-President in the third term and for the incoming E&WVP in the first term in 1980. The Education Commission failed to complete any of these tasks to a satisfactory degree.

This situation can be fairly described in somewhat stronger terms than "unfortunate". Right at the moment, 39,000 students see NZUSA in terms of work that it does in the field of education. At this year's May Council, it was agreed that the Government's attacks on education were a challenge to the very basis of NZUSA. A great part of that Council was spent working out, in detail, the organisational basis for the second term fightback campaign. A great part of the success of the campaign can be attributed to that organisation.

Obviously, the TSG is going to require a continuation of the Education Fightback campaign on the same sort of scale as we saw in the second term of this year. Basically, these sentiments were those expressed in the Education Commission; but before the theory could be transferred into practice, time ran out. The Education Commission did not spend enough time discussing these important questions.

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.