Anti-VSM Own Goal

The Greens are against voluntary student membership. In the very first sentence of a press release about their stance, they set themselves up for an own goal.

The decision of John Key’s Government to a bill to introduce Voluntary Student Membership ignores public opinion, the Green Party said today.

The so called anti-smacking bill was passed despite overwhelming public opposition to it. That didn’t stop the Greens from supporting it.

Voluntary Student Membership

I will watch Young Labour’s opposition to Roger Douglas’ Voluntary Student Membership (VSM) bill with great interest. This will not affect the Auckland University Student Association (AUSA) as they already have voluntary membership. What makes this interesting is that Young Labour has many high profile members in the AUSA, for example David Do. It is rather ironic that Young Labour probably has the most influence with AUSA, the largest and voluntary student union, when they are advocating against the VSM bill. In fact I think that this influence is so strong I have often referred to AUSA as a de facto branch of Young Labour.

Young Labour is one of many groups that strongly advocate for human rights. Douglas’ rationale for the bill is the human right to freedom of association (or non-association). They will have to explain well how their position is consistent with their strong advocacy to have any credible opposition to the bill.

Predictably the executives of student unions will be against is that they will actually have to offer something compelling to get politically apathetic students to join their association. It will be interesting to see the official response by AUSA to this bill, given their executive are dominated by Young Labour.

The thing is AUSA is that there is no fee to join, and offer all sorts of O-week freebies to entice people to join. I’ve heard in recent times that the quality of freebies have been in decline for some time. It makes no financial difference to students whether they join or not because the tuition fees are the same, as the university pays the association for various services rendered to students.

But AUSA hasn’t fallen over because it is voluntary. I read something by them (or a national student association) that they say that taking away compulsion to be part of a student association takes away their voice. I say that is a whole lot of rubbish. Joining Young Labour isn’t compulsory and they can get themselves plenty of attention!