Happenings at Uni SA

This semester my wallet is heavier than it might otherwise be. To the tune of 160 Australian Pesos.

For this splendid occurance I have to thank John W. Howard. In an exceptional case of good policy, he and his posse have made it illegal for a Student Association to extort cash from students.

The association can still exist by all means, and can still charge fees for service and for voluntary membership. This is as it should be.

My student association was not confident that anybody would consider its services worthy of gigantic wads of mad cash, so it has scrapped fees altogether- even for people who become voluntary members.

One of the consequences is that a cash strapped student Association has 'no choice' but to shut down an enterprise that brings in money. I'm talking about the Uni Bar. To encourage us to spend money in this establishment, we were told that the profits would support the Students Association.

In other words, the enterprise could have stood on its own two feet. When the VSU bill became more and more likely to succeed, the story was reversed. Without the Amenities fee, we wouldn't have the bar- or at least we wouldn't have the discount prices.

This makes sense on a superficial level. The fee supposedly subsidised cheap drink prices.

There are a couple of problems with this. First, not too many people knew what the drink prices were. Most students chose the obscene, big bad private enterprise run Worldsend over the happy, warm and cuddly communal Uni Bar in any case.

Second, I suspect that discounts were possible because Uni SA didn't charge the Student Association market rent to occupy the bar. Less overheads = lower prices. I doubt the amenities fee had a damned thing to do with it.

Nevertheless, I will be generous and say that VSU threatened the bar's existence. A challenge was presented by the external environment.

This sounds like a job for a management consultant, or better still, a university full of them.

Reversing the fortunes of the Uni bar could have been broken up into assignments for about half a dozen subjects. Hey presto, about 200 opinions on how to fix the place, 20 of which would have been outstanding.

I have a few observations.

- The bar didn't sell tobacco on a campus full of foreigners who smoke like trains. This doesn't have to be stretched very far to be considered culturally insensitive.

- The bar shut at 6pm. In other words, the bar shut when you were thirsty.

- The bar was never promoted as a place to get tore up.

If this was worth 20% of my grade I think I'd come up with a few more.

The coffee facilities have been replaced by a new ground floor coffee emporium that displays a distinct lack of the requisite skills to produce coffee. The stuff tastes like warm milk that doesn't have coffee in it.

This situation was entirely avoidable, not by the mafia style protection racket we had before, but by the good business sense we were never short of.

If Student Associations run all their affairs with this kind of incompetence, they deserve to be ground into the dirt.

For every action, there's a reaction, and an Israeli reaction is quite a fucking thing.

It occurs to me that Israel is the most ruthless, irritable, ballsy and capable country in the world.

It is incomprehensible that a bunch of nimrods could kidnap two of its soldiers without expecting a massive incendiary response.

My perspective is that Hezbollah has essentially sent Israel a written request to start bombing. Israel has merely honoured the request.

Perhaps Hezbollah is hoping Israel will blow up a bus load of Syrians by mistake. Such an attack may bring Iran into the conflict and give us a substantial war to see out the decade.

I bags sacking Iran when its troops aren't home.

Morality.

Morality

"n 1: concern with the distinction between good and evil or right and wrong; right or good conduct [ant: immorality] 2: motivation based on ideas of right and wrong [syn: ethical motive, ethics, morals]"
Source: WordNet ® 2.0, © 2003 Princeton University

A hornet's nest packed with subjective terms if ever there was one.

Yet there would be few people on earth who would be completely without morals.

Let's hold as self evident that both Donald Rumsfeld and Osama bin Laden both have some pretty well developed ideas about what they think is right and wrong. If they perform acts consistent with those beliefs then - by definition - those acts must be moral.

This won't be the first time you've read something like this, although when you've read it before it was probably from the mouth of some cultural relativist pinko bending over backwards to get Al Quaeda off the hook for 9/11.

This is not my intention.

It appears that my morals crusading local MP (Trish Draper) has succeeded in getting the adults only edition of Big Brother off the air. I won't miss it, as usually at that time of night I am either sleeping or doing financial mathematic nerding in Excel.

It didn't cause any harm to me, or any real and provable harm to anybody else, and accordingly probably should have stayed on as long as Channel 10 wished it to.

Trish Draper and the pentacostal church that lives in her constituency felt differently about this, and so now Big Brother Adults Only is history.

Their version of morality is a rather over simplified one. It seems to think that if there was no tits, arse, or foul language on TV the world would be a much better place. Considering this as the key variable determining the quality of people's lives, Ms. Draper waddles off to Canberra to vote for things like WorkChoices.

That nasty piece of legislation has been condemned by the Catholic and Anglican church, but largely ignored by pentacostals. I mean who needs a real moral crime when you've got shit like weed and television to worry about?

So morality is subjective, I guess we already knew that.

There have been calls to introduce morality into the duties of company directors, and ammend the Corporations Act to crystalise this into law. Currently company directors are only required to return the heaviest possible wad of mad cash to shareholders without breaking any important laws.

Corporate Social Responsiblity (for those that do not believe it is simply a cynical marketing ploy) is the intended vehicle for this morality. Corporate Social Resonsibility (CSR) and its brother 'Triple bottom line accounting' aim to raise the conduct of a company beyond that which is legally required. A company employing these priciples does the right thing, not the legally mandated thing.

OK.

The problem here is that not everybody shares the same educated, socially progressive moral framework that produces things like CSR.

What if a company's shareholders and directors share a predominantly Christian right moral framework?

Corporate resonsibility for them may include not hiring heathen scum, or homosexuals, or women who've had abortions, or women who haven't had abortions (their place is in the kitchen, remember)

What if the company is to be run along a white supremicist moral framework? A community participation initiative may be to sponsor cross burnings and lobby the government to increase the tax benefits that flow to jew hating organisations.

We avoid these problems by codifying in law not that a corporation should be responsible, but that it should not involve itself in racist and otherwise discriminatory behaviour.

Clear and direct rules are established and company directors are asked not to use their imagination about 'Morality' in the same way that Stalin and Pol Pot used theirs.

Directors are asked just to produce the cash, and the shareholders will look after their own cross burnings thank you very much.

Morality can be used to justify heaps of stuff. For example, I think it's right and proper to recover my HECS (and then some) from the Commonwealth Government through barely legitimate tax deductions.

What it cannot do is persuade people who abide by different moral rules.

As organisations such as Al Quaeda cannot be persuaded through moral appeals to stop their dirty business ,we need the next best thing.

Million. Dollar. Bombs.

Long live the crusade. Huzzah.