Students to consider policy focus

What do advocating the creation of a "gilded statue" of comedian Woody Allen, introducing a "Drugs Bomb and Festival of Speed" and even building a $250,000 sky tower have in common?

And what about pressuring the Government to oppose all European immigration to New Zealand until the governments of Europe and North America "stamp on their neo-Nazi fascism groups"?

These are all policy motions approved over the years, the latter in 1993, by the Otago University Students' Association's student general meeting (SGM), the association's key policy-forming body.

This grab-bag of sometimes weird and wonderful policies from the past may be consigned to the dustbin of history at an SGM meeting to be held outside the University Union building at noon today.

Association president Harriet Geoghegan wants to rescind a mass of the policy motions, including those which are "silly", no longer relevant, not "student issues" or too obscure.

"We should be more focused on the core business - education and student-related on-campus issues," Ms Geoghegan said in an interview.

She also wants to introduce internet voting among the wider Otago University student body, instead of restricting the voting to those people who turn up to form a quorum at each general meeting.

SGMs could be filmed, with the video images and a written transcript of what was said made available via the internet, enabling the wider student body to review the material later.

All students would then have several days to consider the issues and to vote on them via the internet, she said.

OUSA elections are already conducted via the internet.

Some of the proposed changes would not only remove most of the association's "external" policy, but could result in the rescinding of pro-cannabis policy, such as favouring cannabis law reform and declaring the university grounds a "cannabis prohibition-free zone".

In her latest column in the association magazine Critic, she said the SGMs involved a "pretty archaic process".

She was also concerned that OUSA had motions on the books about political issues that were not of "direct concern to students".

- john.gibb@odt.co.nz