A Freedom of Association Bill could spell disaster for university students' associations, writes Matt Nipert.
New Zealand University campuses have long been a political forge where the passions of youth are tempered in a process that generates more heat than light.
Ever since universities were established, students' associations have existed alongside them.
And barring an era after World War II when returned servicemen dominated the student ranks, these campus hothouses have been bastions of radical liberalism.
During the Vietnam War, while bolstering numbers in marches to Parliament protesting against the conflict, the Victoria University of Wellington Students' Association (VUWSA) donated money to the Viet Cong. The funds were to be used, a public meeting declared, to pay for a tank.
Seasoned political operators for the union movement and the Labour Party have emerged from student politics.
Ross Mountain, who headed the New Zealand University Students' Association (NZUSA) in 1966 and 1967, is now based in Kinshasa as the United Nations Secretary General's special representative to the Democratic Republic of Congo.
And many of the Labour caucus learned the fine art of filibustering, coalition-building and crafting a quotable press releases from students' associations.
Trevor Mallard, Chris Hipkins, Darren Hughes, Ian Lees-Galloway and Grant Robertson are MPs whose politcal careers took root in campus boardrooms. Ditto Steve Maharey, Marian Hobbs and Paul Swain, all of whom have only recently left politics.
All of them learned their trade as elected representatives for students' associations.
Broadly, these organisations require all students attending to become members and pay an annual subscription fee.
In return members are eligible to vote in annual elections and are the beneficiaries of services that range from subsidised booze, student newspapers and radio stations, funding for sports and cultural clubs, representation on academic committee and the party known as Orientation.
These institutional arrangements have remained largely unchanged for almost 100 years - but the younger end of the political landscape is likely to be irrecoverably shaken up by the country's oldest Member of Parliament.
Sir Roger Douglas, an unusually active 72-year-old, last experienced life as a student in the early 1960s, when he studied part-time towards an accountancy degree at the University of Auckland.
Did he have anything to do with the students' association back then?
"Certainly not," he says. But he did make observations then that have stuck with him ever since.
"What I noticed about the people in the union is that they seem to have been at university for 100 years, and it seemed the student union and politics was what it was all about to them."
Douglas is the author of the Freedom of Association Bill working its way through Parliament. The bill will end the compulsory membership of students' associations and likely put an end to their dominant political and social roles on campus.
Douglas argues that compulsory membership violates the right to freedom of association; his opponents argue that allowing students to opt out will financially cripple organisations that provide a public good.
It's telling that Douglas and other advocates of voluntary membership refer to student organisations as "unions", while those plumbing for the compulsory option call them "associations".
The education select committee will hear evidence on Douglas' bill on Tuesday, with a view to delivering a final report to the House on May 28.
With the Act Party and National holding a majority in the committee room and in the House, its passage into law appears to be a foregone conclusion. Even its opponents admit as much - though they do so anonymously, because they don't want to sound defeatist to their colleagues.
It's also hard not to see the bill as, in part, an attempt to raze a breeding ground of Labour Party politicians.
"No, not at all," Douglas says of whether this is a motivating factor, before admitting that "for Labour [student politics is] often seen as a point of entry into the political area".
The record suggests as much: before Robertson was the member for Wellington Central, he was president at the Otago University Students' Association in 1991, and president of NZUSA in 1993. He says the experience, even the cut-throat manoeuvering, was invaluable.
"There are millions of good fun stories about people being knifed. I learned all kinds of things - how to organise, how to lobby, how to advocate, how to work with the media. It was formative for me."
During the 1993 election campaign Roberston oversaw a series of occupations of university buildings up and down the country as part of a push to highlight complaints about student loans and university fees.
He laughs as he recalls being asked by a radio interviewer if the protests were related, and replying: "That's preposterous!"
Robertson is in favour of retaining the compulsory status quo, saying that the decline in the services that associations provide to students - funded by compulsory membership fees - would be devastating. This risk, he says, outweighs Douglas' concern about freedom of association.
"The damage that will be done to the quality of services will be so great that any concern about that will be wiped out completely," he says.
Robertson is aware of the radical edge of student politics where the middle ground often resembles no-man's land, the left is dominated by Trotskyist-Maoist feuds, and the right espouse an Ayn Rand libertarianism that even Act would baulk at.
"It's a hothouse atmosphere. People are coming to their political consciousness, they're experiencing freedoms, and stuff happens fast and quick," he says.
"The notion that students' associations are sitting there debating whether to fund the Viet Cong is probably a little off. Sure there's been plenty of intrigue, but there's been good work done."
THE OPENING salvos in the battle over Douglas' bill have already been fired on campuses.
At Victoria University last October, in a meeting held at the on-campus Mount Street Bar, Peter McCaffrey, fourth-year student and the president of Act on Campus, tried playing hardball politics.
The result was equal measures of filibuster and farce.
McCaffrey and allies planned to stack an association meeting in order to pass a motion that the organisation support Douglas' bill. "We rang around our friends and had about 60 people turn up," says McCaffrey.
The VUWSA executive became aware painfully late of their intent and began to panic, says McCaffrey. "They were stalling for time while the executive ran around trying to find people to oppose us - it ended up taking 40 minutes to vote on one motion."
To set policy the meeting required a quorum of 50, and McCaffrey says his opponents started to game this rule of order too. "They kept calling quorum counts, and everyone opposed to the motion didn't participate in that."
What happened next is disputed, but McCaffrey says his right-wing insurgency triumphed and the motion passed.
"We went away pretty happy, only to find out half an hour later they [the Executive] had posted a notice saying there would be another meeting two days later to discuss the issue again."
At this point, both sides started digging into the finer points of constitutional law. McCaffrey's mob got the second meeting cancelled, citing an insufficient period of notice, while the then VUWSA President Jasmine Freemantle managed to get the first meeting struck from the records.
"I organised a meeting with the VUWSA lawyer and the person I appointed as the quorum counter. It seemed to be an unconstitutional meeting and therefore was invalid," says Freemantle.
Speaking this week about Douglas' bill, Freemantle acknowledges that it could potentially be devastating for organisations like the one she headed: "That really depends. If students' associations are doing their jobs properly they have nothing to be concerned about."
The chaos at the Mount Street Bar is not surprising, given that much of the ammunition for critics of compulsory students'associations over the past decade has come from the offices of VUWSA.
In 2005, Wi Nepia, the treasurer of the local Maori Students' Association, was sentenced to 26 months in prison for defrauding the association of $161,000 to fund a gambling addiction.
And in 2007, VUWSA's women's rights officer, Clelia Opie, racked up a bill of nearly $6000 following calls to 0900 psychic hotlines. Opie was dismissed from her post, and the money eventually repaid, but the damage to reputations was done.
IN PUSHING for voluntary student membership, Douglas joins a decidedly odd list of maverick MPs who have carried torches and tried to burn compulsory unionism to the ground.
A push in Parliament was started by Michael Laws in 1994, and picked up after Laws' resignation by former All Black Tony Steele and then-Act MP Donna Awatere Huata.
The legislation, eventually passed in 1999, resulted in referendums held on campuses around the country to decide on their compulsory or voluntary status.
Auckland and Waikato university students opted for voluntary membership, but the rest of the country stayed with the status quo.
The experience of Waikato University is telling, especially as its students' association swtiched from compulsory to voluntary then back to compulsory between 1999 and 2002.
The local student body, the Waikato Student Union, also wasn't exempt from byzantine alliances between obscure political parties or gerrymandered voting typical of campus politics.
The 2002 vote that restored Waikato to compulsory membership followed two failed referendums. The successful vote was held during a university holiday and though it had a far lower turnout, it delivered the result the organisers wanted.
David Young, editor of the local student newspaper Nexus in 2000, says his first political masters were fundamentalist Christians and those that followed were a "colourful" Mormon-socialist alliance. Notes Young: "This was a stunning blend of well-meaning, inexperienced people who engaged in very complicated political machinations against each other."
The Vice-Chancellor of Waikato University between 1994 and 2004, Bryan Gould, says the decision to allow students to choose whether or not to join - and whether or not to pay a membership subscription - delivered no financial savings because the university had to step in and pick up the tab.
"The net result was simply that students didn't save any money, because instead of paying a sub to the student union they paid a higher fee to the university."
Voluntary membership also complicated management initiatives, such as involving students in budgetary debates or academic committee, says Gould.
"It became very difficult for the university to interact with the students - because there was no body representing all of them."
Not that dealing with student associations was pure civility, he says: "We had one guy who turned up at Waikato - he was what you'd call a Trot. And within three months of being on campus he had the student union occupying the council rooms for no better reason than he was there and he was a professional and skilled political agitator."
(This "agitator", the Herald on Sunday understands, now works as an organiser with the Unite Union.)
But although he comes from a Labour Party background (Gould was an elected member of the British House of Commons), the debate over Douglas' bill hasn't got him fired up.
"It's a fairly minor issue, and I think it's one that appeals mainly to ideologues," he says.
"On the whole no one would go the barricades saying compulsory membership associations are absolute bastions of perfect democracy. It's never perfect, it's always a bit of a hit and miss affair. But someone has to pay for the services they presently deliver."
* Matt Nippert is a former executive officer of VUWSA.
