Welfare Vice-President
Great protest in Wellington today
Today we had a march to parliament from Victoria University, demanding more money for tertiary education. This was supported by AUS who are demanding more pay, and students who have faced fee increases and are now receiving less allowances than in 2001.
According to the Dominion Post we got around 500 people at Parliament for today’s protest. We had about 350 people leaving Kelburn campus, about 100 at Pipitea (by the Wellington Train station) so we probably picked up about 50 others along the way.
Prior to marching Chris Knox played in support of the protest at the Kelburn quad, he even wrote us a song called ‘pick up that placard’ with the great end line “pick up the placard and stick it up Mallard”.
Chants including things like “study should not make us poor”, “no more fees” and similar ones about fees, loans and allowances. Protest got quite a bit of interest and support from workers down on the terrace, got a couple of cheers from construction workers and the like.
At parliament we had a few speakers, including Mallard who was heckled and booed.
All up it would be the biggest protest march from Victoria to parliament since the 1990s – probably the 1997 one against the white paper. This is the result of the work over the last couple of years raising awareness of debt and increasing fees since the Fee Maxima scheme was introduced in 2003. Also considerable work over the last couple of weeks by a number of people to make this event a success! It also showed the power of having Staff and Student unity, something that wasn’t so strong in the past including the 1990s. All in all this is a great start and something important to build on for the rest of 2005.
Nick Kelly
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Comments
Re: Welfare Vice-President
curses, i wanted to be involved in this but i was in bed nursing a nasty evil cold.
Re: Welfare Vice-President
kia ora koutou
eemm....yeah great work students BUT when low income people want support where are you people?? Students tend to be a one interest group. Their own. Most of these students will go on to be middle class drolls controling the working class poor. So is this some thing for low income to crow about? Yes in some small ways. Free education is a thing of the past for sure and the working class would support a reurn to that. But what needs support right now as well is the many struggling to survive on benefits and very low wages. How many of you student have/would march to suport increases wages ans benefits??? From my experience very very few. It is good to se large corwds protesting but until there is support for all groups struggling in the community instead of going back to your heads in the sands stance then we wont be saying hurrah to the students. Quite simply students and their leadership are middle class and dont give a shit about us. I look forward to the day when there is a protest organised to support the raising of wages ans benefits for the low income and the students unions have a strong presence at them. I wont hold my breath folks.
The pain is long and the struggle hard but in the end the working class understand the hurt of others.