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A final email from me as we head toward the end of an exhausting year!
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As mentioned in the previous message, we have written and published on our website a statement responding to the Marsden Fund changes announced last week. The statement has also been forwarded to relevant Ministers and the Prime Minister. As we move into 2025, rest assured that we will continue to look for avenues, as an individual Association and in concert with other affected associations, to exert pressure to have this decision reversed. Thank you to everyone who contributed to the drafting and editing of this statement.
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This morning I was also notified by Nigel Roberts of the death of esteemed New Zealand political scientist Richard Mulgan. Nigel writes:
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"Richard Mulgan was a man of many talents, which the paths of his career well reflected. In the late 1960s he lectured in Political Science at the Victoria University of Wellington (at the same time, incidentally, as another young rising star: Geoffrey Palmer). Richard Mulgan didn’t stay long at VUW. The University of Otago, aware of his expertise in classical political theory and his abilities as an inspiring teacher, boldly appointed Richard to be the chair of its Classics Department. The department thrived under Richard. After about a decade, he was confident Classics could manage without him, so he moved sideways to a chair in the Department of Political Studies. Given that its other chair was held by Jim Flynn, the department in Dunedin was an intellectual powerhouse par excellence. Richard later moved to the chair of Political Studies at the University of Auckland. (Moving from Dunedin to Auckland in the 1980s, he joked, meant he had to sell a house without a garage to be able to buy a garage without a house.) After Auckland, he moved to Canberra and a chair in public policy at the Australian National University.
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Richard was a rigorously honest academic. For instance, in his book Democracy and Power in New Zealand, he argued that the country’s first-past-the-post electoral system meant that governments could have Parliamentary majorities that could deliver on the manifesto pledges made by their parties. He was appointed to be one of the five members of the Royal Commission on the Electoral System, but – appalled by what he saw in the 1980s of governments cynically breaking their election promises – he joined the other four members of the Royal Commission in unanimously recommending that “the Mixed Member Proportional system … should be adopted.” It was a recommendation that proved to be a major turning point in this country’s history.
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As a person, Richard was thoughtful, caring, encouraging, and humorous. Political Studies in Aotearoa New Zealand have lost a giant. A true totara has fallen."
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Finally, as we move into 2025, we will be editing and adding the video recordings and photos from the 50th Anniversary Symposium, updating the new website, and working towards the biennial conference at the University of Otago scheduled for late 2025. You will be receiving one more system-generated message asking you to update your passwords to log in to the new website, so please do that when you can and make sure all your details are correct and that you are subscribed to the right Networks.
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I hope you all have a decent time-out and celebrations with family and friends following a year that was chaotic and frenetic for many of us. I think we're all hoping for a happy, safe, and relatively calm and quiet 2025! Best wishes to you all.
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