As a snake-hipped 18-year-old in 1973, Mr McKee rode his motorbike to a year of law lectures at Victoria University before partying got the better of him.

Today, 39 years and four kids later, he will join thousands of other Victoria graduands on a parade through Wellington as the proud holder of a law degree.

“It’s taken a long time, hasn’t it,” Mr McKee, 57, said to wife Nicole, who chuckled at the understatement as she helped him prepare for graduation last night.

“But it was a different world then. When you’re young, you sort of have different ideals, you know. You roll along to law school thinking, `This will be fun,’ and you’ve got a few parties to go to … I failed miserably.”

Determined to give tertiary education another crack, Mr McKee returned to university in the late 70s to complete a bachelor of arts degree and briefly turn his hand to teaching. He then realised he was “more of a tradesman at heart” and trained as a builder.

That’s when he met Nicole, and the pair settled down to have kids.

With the purse strings starting to tighten, Mr McKee decided in 2001 to finish his law degree – until it came time for his final exams.

The morning of the criminal law paper, his wife went into labour and he helped to deliver their youngest daughter, Brereton, now 8, in the living room.

“I just couldn’t go. With childbirth, the world stops, doesn’t it, and everything else is irrelevant,” Mr McKee said. “The law school did say at the time my reasons for not appearing were unusual.”

He made the final attempt at law last year, when he realised he could not work as a builder until his old age to support his children.

“Being on the tools is a good job, but I didn’t want to be there in another 10 years. I figured to go back to my original career choice would position me well – as long as you’ve got your brain, you can do it for ever.”

It was difficult to be back among the “bright, young kids” and he was one of the only students who took notes with pen and paper. At nights, Mrs McKee would bundle the children into the car in their pyjamas to drive them to the university for tea with dad.

“It was like diving in a swimming pool and you can’t swim,” he said. “You walk out of a lecture after 50 minutes and your head’s spinning – this is complex material coming at you.”

His wife and children Jakarna, 14, Kiriahi, 10, Rex, 9, and Brereton accompanied him at graduation. “We’re absolutely stoked, it’s been a long haul for all of us,” Mrs McKee said.

- The Dominion Post

And their work, more than ever aided by new and emerging technology, is often equally out-of-this-world: a scarf that changes colour depending on the electromagnetic field, a bassinet that senses the baby’s movements, new technology used to replicate costumes from 3-D movies.

“It’s the thinking more than the realisation that’s important,” says design school head Simon Fraser. “It’s taking students through the process of market-relevant design ideas, not with the immediate aim of production. They’ll get into that when they graduate. It’s the only opportunity they’re going to have to have the freedom to speculate.”

Speculation has resulted in some hi-tech approaches to a few seemingly frivolous and certainly cutting edge ideas  like the scarf that changes colour in relation to electromagnetic energy.

Graduate school of design student Michelle Tiffin has produced an edgy, angled and probably extremely uncomfortable neckpiece. Tiffin explains that the scarf looks as if it’s reacting to invisible forces, but its chameleon qualities are dependent on electric ink and printed circuitry.

Such a scarf is not just the silliest of ideas, says Fraser. An educational device, it is decorative and functional, “trying to make people more aware of the unseen environment that has significant positive and negative effects”.

So many of the projects, he says, have a large element of “emerging technologies on the brink of being available. Emerging technology, particularly digital technology, is part of the focus of the school. You can design a chair using valid traditional craft methods, but that has not really been the main emphasis since the school started in 2000.”

Niquita Coats-Harrison has used digital technology to design a method for printing costumes from 3-D films, on to paper or fabric. Their appearance and proportions can be altered on screen before they are printed and sent out like a jigsaw, or giant do-it-yourself origami.

“Children can create costumes and models of their favourite characters,” she says.

There’s a big gap between the prototypes and real flat-packs of costumes taken from Tin Tin, Alice in Wonderland or King Kong arriving under the Christmas tree, but the technology is just about there.

“It’s rare for a student to develop a product in isolation without an alliance with a manufacturer and their existing market. It’s a bit of a misconception around product development that you can come up with a good idea in isolation and sell it to a manufacturer. In practice, it hardly ever happens.”

Students are asked to put their projects in a business context, “and there are lots of fascinating ideas I’d like to see [realised] in five years’ time, not necessarily by New Zealand companies”.

Other graduation projects, with various course dictates behind them, include: a cake stand made parsimoniously of old records and waste timber; a boost bra with cups that can be moulded supportively around the chest, useful after breast surgery; an illuminated skateboard; and a jacket sporting a piece of “wearable technology” that fits down the back like a band of lit and moving scales, which trill like an insect when opened.

There’s a project intended as a comment on New Zealand’s drinking culture, using one large glass and one modest one, demonstrating the wishful thinking of drunken drivers as to what they think they have consumed and what they do consume.

No matter how unlikely it seems, some students have faith their final-year projects will see the real light of day.

“I hope so,” says Ruth Sumner of her prototype distillation apparatus, able to be parked on a kitchen bench to turn garden herbs like rosemary, parsley and basil into essential oils for cooking. “I want to get it working. I want one for myself.”

Sumner’s model is an attractive 30-centimetre-tall glass contraption.

“The functions inside are not made and a real one would be twice as high, though the half-size one they think might be a viable option.” She calls her project De Still: The Alchemy of Essence. It relies on a refrigeration concept and a steam-distillation process.

“It’s all contained within its own system. In a lab you need a bunsen burner, hoses and taps, all a big mess.” The real thing would be ideal for “domestic chefs into molecular gastronomy stuff, who have their own garden where they grow their own food”.

Along with a few other graduates, Sumner exhibited her work at last month’s event An Evening of Ideas That Will Shape Our World, hosted by patent attorneys A J Park for their clients and some of Wellington’s business leaders and innovators.

Possibly to their surprise, they were introduced to the idea of refinements like the 2011 design equivalent of a 1960s macrame plant holder  a table cloth made of pressure-sensing fabric able to record the diners’ interaction with each other and the crockery and store them as family stories.

For the advanced pet lover there’s Moochi Poochi, a system based on electroactive fabric technology and designed to allow a man and his dog to interact, give affection, communicate and play together remotely through the internet, all while the owner is concentrating on his day job.

Group infiltration of marketplace representatives is one way of bending the ears of the influential to a youthful invention, but most students will go on to do something completely different after years of hard work.

Craig Bond, Robbie Greig and Stu Barr graduated eight years ago, mucked around in various individual ventures and then got together and set up Goodnature to make something very different, practical and environmentally important. Their Automatic Humane Possum trap, developed in conjunction with the Conservation Department, won gold in the national Best Design Awards  not just for students  announced in October.

There are about 2000 of Goodnature’s traps out there, dispatching the pests as humanely as possible. The possum smells scented syrup, bites and triggers the trap’s piston, which kills it instantly, with no poison involved.

Barr, says Greig, had, as a student, done some voluntary trapping of stoats for DOC, “lugging wooden stoat traps round”.

“They were seven kilograms, and when it rained they doubled in weight. He was thinking there must be a better way, and a re-setting trap would be a major change to conservation in New Zealand.”

DOC traps then were single-action traps  “old, dodgy and inhumane”. The trio devised a trap, using a compressed CO cannister, that would go off 12 times, the number of times DOC re-set the single-action traps each year. The latest version does 20 shots.

Barr is proud that the subsequent award-winning possum trap is the only possum trap to achieve National Animal Welfare Advisory Committee’s Class A standard for humaneness.

Such practical, marketable inventions are in the ideal future of design students.

Vivid imagination rules at graduate level. The stars in this year’s student craft/design awards from The Dowse were good examples. The overall prize went to Victoria University School of Design student Daniel van Polanen, with a tea set made entirely of bamboo.

Dowse senior curator Emma Bugden says the tea set is “beautifully executed and sensitive to the material, a very holistic work, very simple and modest”. Other creations were a cradle chair, with a frame like a big cut-out and padded walnut half, and a “rotary mechanical smartphone”, with brass dials, an old-fashioned take on a digital object.

Less esoterically, modern stools also made the cut at The Dowse. They might end up in real kitchens, but like most student projects, they probably won’t. Even stools have fallen over in the past. A few years ago, Massey collaborated with a Wellington furniture maker and a Lower Hutt manufacturer to run a competition for a stool designed by third or fourth-year design students that would be made and sold.

It never happened, an illustration of the unlikelihood of student work becoming commercially viable. Thirty-five stools evoked such things as a weta, a wine glass and a tractor seat. The manufacturing business has since been sold.

Clem Beck, of participating furniture retailer Portfolio, says the idea of manufacturing student-designed stools “all fell into a hole in the end”.

“It never worked the way we wanted it to. Massey committed to a partnership … they were going through political change. It sort of lapsed. Nothing happened in the end. The young student who won went off and did their own thing. I don’t think he ever marketed it.”

Beck says he still has a few students coming in to ask his advice. One wanted him to critique a screen with lights on top and a solar panel. “You could plant things on it and move it around to give a bit of green and privacy in an apartment. A great concept. That girl got a job in Melbourne from 180 applicants.”

Fraser says Wellington’s strong core of digitally-based creative businesses absorbs many graduates, but for the most part, “we don’t know where the hell our students go”.

“They have to develop their own careers.”

- The Dominion Post

Research shows that if a learner driver has about 120 hours of driving practice in a range of conditions with an experienced driver their crash risk on driving solo is reduced by 40%. Given that 50 young people were killed and 2,579 injured on our roads in 2009, Practice is a good to change those statistics. To find out more go to www.practice.co.nz.

This week Sean Davison will be sentenced for assisting his mother to commit suicide.

It was a charge he pleaded guilty to, albeit reluctantly.

Because Sean Davison doesn’t truly believe he’s guilty. Not of attempted murder, which he was first charged with; nor of inciting his mother to commit suicide.

After starving herself for more than a month, Sean’s mother Patricia Davison was begging her son to end her life. Her body was riddled with cancer. When the disease first took hold, she wrote a living will outlining to her family how she wanted to die. In the end, after 35 days without food, Patricia Davison was in even more pain. Her son Sean crushed morphine tablets into her glass of water, told his mother what he’d done and offered it to her to drink.

There are many countries where assisted suicide is legal. New Zealand is not one of them.

There’ve been two attempts to pass “death with dignity” laws in the past. Both failed but John Key and Phil Goff have said the law needs to be looked at.

Certainly 70 percent of New Zealanders support a law change in favour of euthanasia if performed by a doctor.

The devil of course is in the detail. Writing a good law is difficult at the best of times but to write a good law that allows us to take a life is dangerous territory.

This week on The Court Report we hear from Sean Davison himself, and Roger Laybourn the lawyer who took his case. Joining him, Dr Philippa Malpas, a clinical ethicist who’s conducting research on New Zealanders’ views on euthanasia and the arguments for and against a new law.

Also on The Court Report this week, we go where so few had tread. How much do you know about the referendum and the four alternative electoral voting systems we’ll be voting on this weekend? The Vote for Change group has lobbied hard against MMP and put forward its preferred system, which happens to be the same as the Prime Minister’s first choice.  But there’s been very little information about how any of the four systems work, how each might make our Parliament look, or in fact how the referendum will work. Kate Stone is a Victoria University Law lecturer with a focus on constitutional reform. She’s held public talks on the referendum and she joins us this week to talk us through our options and how the country might look under each voting system.

The show is broadcast on TVNZ7 on Thursday at 9.30pm and replayed several times during the week. The Court Report is broadcast on both Freeview and Sky 77.  It’s also available online at www.tvnz.co.nz/the-court-report

The Court Report also has a Facebook page where you’ll find more content and information about how to be part of the studio audience.

Victoria University of Wellington Students’ Association (VUWSA) is disappointed that the Tertiary Education Commission (TEC) has decided to cut all funding to pre-degree courses previously offered at universities around New Zealand. This decision has already impacted students in the Wellington region through Victoria University of Wellington’s (VUW) decision this week to close its Certificate of University Preparation (CUP) Programme.

Because there are no alternatives on offer in 2012, this now means that students wanting a second chance at higher education in the Wellington region will have no options available to them.

VUWSA submitted both a written submission and a oral submission against the proposed closure of the University’s CUP Programme, and urged the University to consider alternative forms of funding to ensure this valuable programme continues.

VUWSA President Seamus Brady said that Victoria should not assume that creating pathways through special enrolments will mitigate potential adverse effects on students.

“The reality is that Victoria (along with other universities that have cut pre-degree courses) risk creating a negative image amongst New Zealand’s most marginalised groups. These groups should have the right to ‘get amongst the best’ and should not be deterred because of educational inequalities they have experienced that may have been beyond their control.”

VUWSA’s submission was based on feedback gathered from over 70  Class Representatives and students from a number of CUP and degree programme courses. It highlights that the closure of the CUP Programme will significantly deter many students from higher education.

Student feedback focused on four main areas: The advantages of the CUP program as a smooth transition to university requirements for studying; the variety of skills taught; the opportunity to have a ‘second chance’ at education and how this provides fairer access for many people. Finally, there were many comments regarding the emotional benefits of the CUP programme including instilling confidence, a good work ethic, and a desire to contribute back to the university community.

Mr Brady said that whilst VUWSA understands the broader policy constraints limiting the offering of pre-degree programmes, the reality of cutting the CUP Programme altogether ignores the strong student support and need for the CUP Programme that currently exists.

“The closure of the CUP programme clearly signals to prospective students that unless their secondary schooling experience has prepared them for university, or they have a degree already, higher education will simply be out of reach for them.”

“This has the potential of creating an ‘elitist’ conception of university. It also has the potential of denying the many attributes that ‘mature’ students bring to the campus in particular. In many senses it narrows the education path of people to a predefined, rather archaic way of looking at education.”

“It dismisses life experience, wisdom and knowledge gained through other means. Vitally, however, this elitist model assumes that everyone has had equal access to academic knowledge and should be able to adapt ‘overnight’ if they enrol to study.”

“Students for whom education opportunities have been limited (such as people with refugee backgrounds), or English as a second language, or those that are transferring their knowledge from a practical basis to an academic one will find that pursuing a university education much more daunting, and for many, impossible, without the CUP Programme.”

Within its submission, VUWSA encouraged the University to be a more vocal defendant of the right to provide opportunities for learning for everyone in New Zealand.

VUWSA is the official representative body of students at Victoria University of Wellington and has been advocating on their behalf since 1899.

CUP Programme Student Quotes

We would lose a valuable base of students. Some students have trouble at high school and miss UE by very little but still wish to attend universities like VUW. CUP gives these students the chance to further their education with a degree rather than just a certificate or diploma. The same applies to mature students who have been out of the education system, giving them a chance to ease back in. [Closing CUP] creates a stronger divide between haves and have nots. There are plenty of highly capable people who for whatever reason didn’t quite make it through 7th form, who will be left alienated by these changes. Moving these kinds of programmes outside of the university creates a bigger divide and will destroy confidence of university hopefuls — confidence which is buoyed by placing the program within the VUW environment.

The CUP course is a brilliant preliminary or bridge into the academic life of Victoria Uni. If this is too be neglected then Vic will lose a valuable area which attracts those who which to complete the course. This in itself may not be hugely significant, however altogether i believe that it is an incredible ‘resource’ and attraction to those who do attend or consider attending Vic. [CUP] is a bridge which enables people form mixed backgrounds to gain access to university, which is more important now that entrance into university has become closed to those who do not meet criteria. People grow away from a schooling system which may not have suited or been able to support them when they were young. So although they may have failed high school they are still able to realise their potential through university education. it is one bridge which helps to open up social closure in this system and society, which of course has ongoing generational affects for individuals and groups.

[CUP] Provides an additional opportunity for those who didn’t excel at school but decided to try again with University – this is a crucial part of ensuring we have a diverse, educated population and one that encourages learning and second chances. Also, for mature students such as my Mother who has started her first degree at the age of 53 after completing a CUP similar course – she is loving the environment and the new ideas she is learning and I it makes me upset to think others would be denied this experience.

A fantastic and vital bridging program for students who didn’t quite get UE first time round, but are totally capable of being proper university students. I benefited a lot from the program and to have it within the university environment gave me huge confidence that I could continue upwards directly into VUW afterwards. Placing the program in a polytech or other would not be nearly as good, the transfer would not be nearly as easy. I would not be so confident in either making the effort to enrol if the program were at polytech/ITO, and I would be weary of the fact that a polytech/ITO program would be not nearly as good as a VUW one — because VUW is directly aware of what CUP students need to know to function in their (VUW’s) environment, and because these other options are meant to be cheaper… meaning they’ll probably be worse. Surely only a VUW run program within VUW can give students the best preparation and confidence to enter VUW, simple as that. Moving CUP/CUP-like programmes outside of the university environment simply makes no sense.

The university’s Campus Hub project features a new three-level building that integrates the library and improves connections with other parts of the campus.

The project includes the recent revamp of the Student Union Building with new spaces for clubs and representative groups, a dedicated student health area and a new student cafe and bar that doubles as a gig space.

The project is being done in stages, with the new central building scheduled to be ready for the 2013 academic year.

There will be connections to Kelburn Parade through Easterfield Building.

The library is also being refurbished. Some of this work will be ready for the 2013 academic year and some will be completed during the following year.

The university development is being done in partnership with the Victoria University of Wellington Students’ Association Trust, which is contributing $12m.

Of that, $4m has gone towards the Student Union building refurbishment and the remaining $8 million will be contributed over several years.

Associate director of campus development Satish Dahya said the Campus Hub project would improve connections between buildings and provide a range of informal, interactive and group study settings linked to the library at the heart of the campus.

“This builds on work we’ve been doing with our new Alan MacDiarmid Building for teaching and research in the sciences and engineering, the award-winning hall of residence Te Puni Village, and refurbishing Boyd-Wilson Field and the Student Union Building.

“Ultimately, the project is part of delivering a world-class experience for our students. The new central building will be a central gathering space for students to socialise and to learn informally, and the library is being refurbished for the 21st century.”

The design was by Athfield Architects and Architectus. Construction is by Mainzeal.

The new central building will add 4260 square metres of floor space to the campus and a further 10,500sqm of floor area is being refurbished.

The hub will include spaces for student events, socialising and study as well as a new quad. There will be shops in the Easterfield building with street frontages on Kelburn Pde.

The Dominion Post (08/11/2011)