Getting down with the kids

Nandor and Metiria are on Orientation Tour over the next couple of weeks and have a pretty hectic schedule by the looks of it. I went to the reggae gig at Victoria Uni last night and it was pretty well organised. Nandor got to MC the gig again like he did last year and I was pretty impressed with his performance. Must be cool to be the only MP in Parliament that can get up on stage at an Orientation in front of hundreds of drunk students and get as much of a cheer (if not more) than the bands. He spoke about the music coming out of Aotearoa and how much it is an amazing demonstration of our inique south pacific style identity. And then spoke about the challenges we face as a nation in terms of protecting that identity in the face of globalisation - particularly from the US. Now this is the kind of speech that if delivered by anyone else, they would have been booed off the stage but the Vic crowd went nuts. It was pretty impressive. Nandor certainly knows how to work a crowd. The bands put on a pretty good show as well. I was a bit perplexed by the Katchafire set though. They played a great set, and some great songs but there was stuff all off their new album which I thought was a bit odd. The latest album, Slow Burning, is fantastic and I was looking forward to hearing some of it live. Oh well. Good night had by all. Nandor and Metiria are at Otago today and EIT tomorrow. I am amazed to see how little the other parties are participating in Orientation this year. Usually there are a number of other MPs travelling around too but this year it seems the Greens are the only party making a decent go of it. Guess that would be because the Greens actually have tertiary education high on their agenda all the time, not just once they realise there might be some votes in it. I think it's pretty ironic that United Future are doing the whole 'sensible voice on solving the student debt crisis' considering they only seemed to get interested in it over the last year. And considering most of their suggestions seem to be a rip off of Green Party Tertiary policy. But what I really want to know is where is Labour? Considering that tertiary education has been one of the issues on their pledge cards for the last two elections, and considering they are continuously bragging about how much they've done for students, whay aren't they fronting up to students?