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Salient: Victoria University of Wellington Students' Newspaper. Vol. 32, No. 13. 1969.

Editorial

page 2

Editorial

Opinions expressed in Salient are not necessarily those of VUWSA.

June 18, 1969

SRC at last

The Student Representation Council is now a reality. It exists in a form which few would have predicted before last week's S.G.M. Here is a body, meeting regularly, which has the power to formulate proposals on any aspect of association policy except finance. It can be attended by, and its deliberations voted upon, any paid-up member of the Students' Association.

It is a body Executive members will ignore at their peril.

Everybody damned the system at the S.G.M. You really should have been there to see it, but judging by the size of the audience you weren't. They implicitly damned the people involved, too. Fine. An S.R.C. doesn't mean a more adequate type of candidate emerges, it means instead of fifteen members elected, we get sixty or so.

One must be forgiven for thinking this hang-up about representation stems from some sort of insecurity or inadequacy. Why must be always be represented by somebody else? Why can't we represent ourselves? in that context, the original S.R.C. was an elitist concept, pure and simple.

Those who generally find themselves opposed to existing practices, have the opportunity they have been waiting for to assist Victoria in leading the way in student self-government. If this experiment fails, they will not dare raise their heads for a long time. But this council must not be a battleground for the left and the right. The dynamic of the system, as Bill Logan said, must be one of growth.

More people, greater involvement. And here the arguments put forward in favour of the S.R.C. are at last legitimate. Without the degree of involvement increasing, we will find we approved a prescription for chaos.

Article not serious

The suggestion has been made to us that an article we ran on an advertisement in the last Focus was a bit rough on some of the people involved.

I would have thought, almost by definition, one could not take a satirical article seriously.

But if the admittedly heavy-handed satire induced anybody, anywhere, to take offence at the article, or read into it any sinister motives or innuendos, they would be well advised to forget them, for they were not intended.

Hugh Rennie, the editor of Focus, has asked me to say that neither the facts nor the allegations in the article were intended to be taken as correct, and I am happy to confirm that this is the case.