National Party tertiary education spokesman Paul Hutchison said students should be able to decide for themselves whether they wanted compulsory membership of student associations.

“I’m aware there are concerns by some that say there isn’t strong accountability for the money they get,” he said.

“All the time, I hear murmurings of there being inappropriate usage of student levies by the unions.”

It was important that accounts were “absolutely transparent” to show that each student dollar was being spent well on students, he said.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/thepress/4707318a6530.html

Dr Hutchison has stated three times this year that he wants to see Students’ Associations become voluntary. Yet it is not a National Party Policy.

For the record Dr Hutchison and National:

• Students’ Associations are incorporated.
• They are required to be externally audited.
• They are required to be registered with the companies office
• They are required to hold AGMs and keep their books open.

So where is this inappropriate use and mismanagement? The reality is there isn’t any. If there was there would be lots more cases of fraud. Which there isn’t.

Now there is absolutely no denying that the storm that has hit us during the last two days has been particularly nasty, however, one thing that is getting to me is the way the media blow it up, and the way in which the general public then go into panic mode. I had a friend telling me that the motorway was closed and they shouldn’t be driving because there are slips and stuff. The irony here is that the motorway was never closed and the person couldn’t explain to me how you could get a slip in the middle of central Auckland where there are no hills to slip.

Coming back to the one in 10 year storm idea. Compare these two police media release pages. The first is for yesterday. The second is for July 10 2007. One year ago. Where we got hit by a very similar storm which took out power up here for two days. 48 hours. Not 3. And that was a year ago, not 10.

26 July 2008:

10 July 2007:

At first I was laughing at this press release by the NZ Police which was released in the middle of yesterday’s storm.

***Urgent Media Release***

There have been reports in the Media about the evacuation of Whangaparaoa.

There is NO Evacuation of Whanagaparaoa.

However, I think I may have no have worked out where the confussion arised from. At 10.30am the Whakapapa Ski Field at Ruapehu was evacuated due to the storm. Reading more about it you can see why:

Between 10am and 10:40am the wind speed went from 0 to 100kph and it’s now sitting at over 200kph. Our extremely hardy road crew are currently out being blasted by wind and snow as they fit chains onto all vehicles to get the public safely down the road.

Now I can imagine that the media would of probably just confussed the word Whakapapa with the word Whangarparaoa quite easily. One is a ski field on Ruapehu which often gets hits by snow storms. The other is a peninsula north of Auckland with lots of homes on it. Given the storm would of been bad at both areas a mix up in words is not supprising at all.

There has been a lot of noise in the media recently about Universal Living Allowances for all students.

I am a strong believer in the fact that you go to University to learn and get an education that will better you and the country. I do not believe that you should have to distract yourself away from studies to do part time work to support yourself financially. If the Government wants an knowledge economy of the future they must first fund it.

What I propose is a Universal Living Allowance for all fulltime students as follows:

• To qualify you must be enrolled as a fulltime student in a course with a minimum length of 6 months.
• The student allowance rate should be set at the same amount as the dole.
• Once you have completed your first year on the USL you can only qualify for subsequent years if and only if you pass 75% of your papers in your previous years.
• USL should only be available to undergraduate and honours students. Any research driven post-graduate qualifications should be paid for through scholarships.
• Only University and Polytech students in a recognised post-secondary course should be eligible.

Now I have no idea of how much this would cost. But this is what this country needs. Hand ups to those who deserve it, not hand outs to those that don’t.