- F1: Barrichello wins Italian GP, teammate Button extends championship lead
- V8 Supercars: Tander and Davison take Phillip Island 500 for Holden Racing Team
- NASCAR: Hamlin wins in Richmond, Chase For The Sprint Cup positions finalised
- Undie 500: Ends in complete fucking shitfight as usual
Lots of times when me and KG are watchin'
All the fuckin' shit that goes down at City Hall,
We get the feeling we should fuck shit up,
Yeah we should fuckin' start a riot.
A Riot!
We have 'em screaming in the streets,
We have 'em tippin' over shit and breakin' fuckin' windows of small businesses,
And settin' fuckin' fires!
- Tenacious D, 'City Hall'
Dunedin has a problem and the problem is this. Every year the Canterbury Uni Engineering Society organises a car rally down to Dunedin from their Christchurch digs. It's called the Undie 500, the conceit being that every car has to cost less than $500, be roadworthy, and make the 360 kays. So far so good. Except that every year for the last couple of years, it's ended with this sort of shit going down. And it's not the best of looks to have riot police clashing with drunken bottle-throwing students while the main street of Studentville burns like Paris 1968.
As you'd expect, every bastard blames every other bastard. The mayor of Dunedin blames the Canty engineers. The Canty engineers blame the Dunedin students. The Dunedin students blame the cops. The cops blame the liquor licencees. The liquor licencees suggest everyone grow the fuck up and learn to use their product in a responsible manner, which is never going to happen.
However it's pretty clear who's to blame. Whoever came up with the EFTS model of funding NZ universities.
The EFTS, or 'equivalent full time students', model is basically a bums-on-seats model. It rewards throughput. The more capacity you funnel through the front door, the more cash you get. EFTS funding has dominated the 'educational' component of NZ university funding (as distinct from the money doled out for research) for years. There are no caps on enrolment, no prerequisite mark requirements, nothing to sort the wheat from the chaff. For instance, first year health sciences, the course which leads to medicine (as well as the rest of the biological sciences), has an intake of 1500 students. How very egalitarian of them, I hear you say. And yes, it's that. It also means NZ universities end up accepting into enrolment a bunch of ABSOLUTE FUCKING MUPPETS WITH NO PROSPECT OF EVER ATTAINING OR DESERVING A DEGREE. And a higher proportion of rich little white kids with entitlement issues who think that forking out for uni fees is them buying themselves a qualification rather than what it is - nothing more than a the right of entry for the opportunity to gain an education. Who see the riot participants from the previous year getting away largely scot-free - courtesy the difficulty in pinning anything on the little bastards - and conduct themselves accordingly.
Obviously, under a bums-on-seats model, the unis will and do compete viciously for aforementioned bums on aforementioned seats. Otago, either NZ's number one or number two university depending on what metric you use, has until very recently traded on its reputation as a party town in order to attract students. The result is pretty clear. You want students who are here to party, you get burning couches and bottles thrown at cops. You get students who think getting pissed and trashing Castle St is a rite of passage of being a 'Scarfie' rather than something that makes you look like a desperately sad little wannabe. You get the shit Auckland doesn't want - Auckland, interestingly, have introduced Australian-style entry caps, and are reaping the benefits of the perceived exclusivity that brings.
So how to fix the crowd control issue? Obvious. Get rid of the shit students who don't want to be here, judging by their interest in acting like complete fuckwits. But it's not that easy, of course. Not when none of the parties involved wants to take ownership. The council is obsessed with banning the Undie 500 rally, even though it would be both impossible - on what grounds can you make it illegal for citizens to get in their cars and drive into your town? - and irrelevant, as all of the rioters arrested on the first night of festivities on the weekend were Otago students and non-student hangers-on (or 'Toolies' as they are more aptly known at Schoolies time) looking for a stink, rather than Canty rally participants. The cops busted out pepper spray this year and will probably want tear gas and rubber bullets next. I'd personally drive the constabulary's finest down to riot-gear Bunnings and shout them the stuff out of my own pocket, if the rest of Dunedin didn't offer to do so first. The university is yet to make any official statement, three days after this year's flavour of shitfight erupted. However, the student union, forever and a day bleating the case in favour of the rioting students, has this year shifted slightly. The rhetoric has been deriding anyone stupid enough to throw bottles at cops, rather than bush-lawyering the illegality of any move by the university to kick out anyone proven to be doing bad shit off campus.
In truth, though, the biggest problem is that Gen Y are a pack of cunts who needed to be beaten more often when they were growing up.
The Doctor is OUT.
10 comments:
hear fuckin' hear
In truth, though, the biggest problem is that Gen Y are a pack of cunts who needed to be beaten more often when they were growing up.
WORD!
*Standing ovation*
As a local growing up there I saw countless times mates - who were fuck wits and did the wrong thing and got rightly punished - get convicted of stuff that uni students - of the calibre you describe - basically walk away from the same sort of crimes based purely on the fact that they were students. Fix that shit up. I'm sad to see it still hasn't changed.
Dude, agree with everything you said.
I love your moderate tones doc.
Funny thing was this didn't really make the news here. We get footage from a riot in a country no bastard can pronounce, that is 17 hours away on a plane and one happens in NZ and we hear nothing.
funnily enough - it got shown as part of a "look at those Crazy NZ'ers" story here - when it's obviously not. For some strange reason the bit about "wonky cars" overshadowed the "police get wailed on by idiots burning shit down" part.
Personally - it's something the occasionally newsworthy paper needs to push. You'd be amazed the difference it makes at all levels when media rather than reporting it from on high - gets in and says "fuck this shit off" Whoever says media shouldn't have an opinion is a tool. Media should absolutely have an opinion - because if it doesn't - who pressures the people to change things? Certainly not the government, or the people voting in governments.
Gen Y still sucks ass btw - we have officially banned the word "fail" being used as a noun at work.
Lou - either way I agree entirely. First year was a curiosity, second year was annoying, this year it's just fucking embarrassing.
Lerm - you know it. No respect for authoritah. I respected my teachers because they had sticks they could hit me with. And occasionally because they deserved respect, but the threat of violence worked remarkably well too.
Moko - to be fair both the toolies and the students are both heading out to Castle St with the intent of starting shit - they ALL need dealing to. Its time there was actually some payback for what the Pleece Minster has correctly ID'd as a bunch of rich white kids with entitlement issues.
Maybe start tazering the little fuckers. Zap one and the rest would get the hint...
Actually, ranty hyperbole aside, someone at work straight-facedly suggested tear gas. In a built-up residential area. It's a riot, she said, and she'd seen tear-gas used against protests in Wellington marching on parliament house. I think it's a remarkably poor idea but it's an interesting indicator of where average Dunedinites' opinions of the rioters have fallen to.
Beeso - yeah, it's shock-jock ranty. But this is the third year in a row this joke has played out on Castle St and it's not getting any funnier. It's embarrassing for my employer and reflects poorly on everyone associated with it. I'd back anyone's right to protest peacefully, or otherwise, for something they believe in. But this is just snotty kids baiting cops because their mummy and daddy have only ever been a phone call away to sort out all their previous problems and why shouldn't this be the same?
U - was front page of NineMSN's website when I looked. My folks asked me about it (as they did last year and the year before). We're getting an international reputation for this shit.
AJ - the shitbox cars are a lovely tradition, Canty Eng Soc has been running the Undie 500 for nearly 20 years and it's only been the last three that have gone to shit. Obviously the snap response is 'ban the rally' - how??? - but it's not the cause of the problem, although it's clearly co-indicative re giving the fuckwits an excuse to kick off. Most of the Canty students stayed with friends away from Castle St and went out on the piss in town apparently. Clever kids.
The Parochial Voice of the South do give this issue a fair hammering, but because they're so parochial they're only preaching to their own choir of angry old people. Moderate voices aren't heard in the ODT and moderate minds don't really read it - they think newspapers are soooo last century's news providers and are all on teh interwebz.
Gen Y FLAIL.
I agree wholeheartedly, kids today are out of control!
(of course, with that said, I was once caught by the police trying to hit golf balls into the neighboring fraternity house....but, at least I didn't throw beer bottles in retaliation)
Actually, I tried to talk my way out of it...which is surprisingly hard to do when the cop is sitting in the bank parking lot across the street WATCHING you hit golf balls.
Fortunately, a friend talked him out of arresting me.
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