Student politics can be a volatile scene - just ask Madeleine Richards. She's had email threats, assaults, verbal intimidation, and even bizarre stalker letters. "I opened up my PO Box, because I had already taken that precaution, and I found an A4 sheet of paper with newspaper cut out letters glued onto it, like something from out of the movies," she says. "It said, 'you shut up or I'll make you bitch'. It wasn't signed. We had to go to the police over that one." But these days her own politics is being called into question. Last month at Otago University, two queer-friendly motions failed to pass at an open student general meeting. One was in support of the Civil Union Bill, the other would have supported the right of gay and lesbian students to have their relationships recognized equally under law. A two-thirds majority was required for these measures to pass, and the vote fell short by six. Otago University's queer support group UniQ says it was a jack-up by another group called Student Choice, who are opposed to compulsory membership of the student union. Madeleine Richards is one of the core members. "They pretty much stacked that meeting," says UniQ co-ordinator Nathan Brown. "Student Choice being like four people, three of which I have a lot of contact with. They went around and contacted most of the Christian groups on campus and asked them to turn up to make sure that that motion didn't pass." As a result of this meeting, queer students at Otago cannot rely on their student union to support legal recognition of their relationships, despite its mandate to protect and promote the welfare of all its members. The union's President Andrew Cushen says his hands are tied. "The association is just an agent for whatever our members tell us to do," he says. "Sure, we might have gone and spoken about social issues in the past, that was only because the membership at the time said that we should, should that change, the association changes with it." But has the association really changed its mind, or has a group of morally conservative students stacked the political process? "The way our meetings work is that they can be prone to different groups mobilizing the certain element of the student population to ensure the outcome is what they want, whether that occurred in this case or whether it was an actual reflection of the student mood, I wouldn't want to conject," he says. Student unions have been known for championing of liberal causes, and student Kate Wevers doesn't think that's changed one iota. She was at the student general meeting and hadn't planned to speak, but was moved to after listening to the Student Choice speakers espouse the view that a student union had no place taking stands on moral issues. "One of the fundamental roles of a university is to act as a critic and conscience of society," she says. "The student community has a very important role to play in the wider community in terms of taking stances on contentious issues, and if you look to history students have done that in the past. If you look at the 1981 springbok tours, student associations had a very strong and influential role to play there." President Cushen (or "Cush" as his doorplate proclaims) thinks the days of the "long-haired student radical" are over. "There's still some about," he admits, "but there's also the 'new' student who is perhaps a lot more conservative." Perhaps, in Student Choice, fate has managed to combine the two. Although the core members at Otago - and there are three of them - say the goal of their group is merely freedom of association, they also share in common a conservative Christian faith which opposes civil unions. They've referred to UniQ several times as a "radical homosexual interest group", yet they insist Christian beliefs have nothing to do with it. "If that were the case, I would see some inconsistency with a gay person pursuing voluntary membership," says Glenn Peoples, national spokesman for the informal nationwide network that is Student Choice. People from all walks of life campaign for voluntary membership, he says, and that is reflected in the Student Choice movement. "On the contrary, I think freedom of association, if taken consistently, could quite conceivably be seen to support civil unions." Peoples, however, doesn't support civil unions, and neither does Madeleine Richards or Matthew Flannagan, the other two points of the Otago triangle. Up until recently, Peoples ran a website dedicated to theonomy, a Christian belief system espousing the view that Old Testament moral law should be legally enforced today. Richards and Flannagan are members of the Christian Heritage Party. Flannagan was even a justice spokesman for the party in 2003, but he says we should ignore their personal beliefs when they're speaking as Student Choice. "Down here people say because I'm a Christian, it's all about Christianity," he says. "It's a way of looking at an individual person who's in an organization and saying - this individual's in the organization, therefore the organization is this individual; and it's just mistaken." By this time, several references had been made to "queer" supporters (yes, they do use that word in all its well-intentioned post-modern reclaimed glory), and I was introduced to David Bisman. Bisman isn't currently a student, but has been in the past and probably will be again. Some have even described him as a "professional student". He supports voluntary union membership wholeheartedly. "Under a compulsory system, student associations take the money from you in order to fund just certain things, and you don't really get a say as to what those things are," he says. "One of the things that scares me is the prospect that, with the elections coming up, what happens if Destiny Church runs in the elections, takes over OUSA, and says we're not going to fund UniQ anymore, but we're going to fund Destiny Church?" Madeleine Richards would also find such an idea unpalatable. "You do unto others as you have them do unto you," she says. "It may be a biblical term, but I think it has applications for anyone living in a society or a community. If you don't like having people's viewpoints shoved down your throat, don't do it to people." Richards and Flannagan are no strangers to the voluntary student membership (or VSM) push. They were also part of a Student Choice movement at Waikato University, where students voted for VSM in 1998. The following year, they headed up the student executive. Flannagan was president, Richards was vice-president. A number of reforms were instigated over this period, before students voted to go compulsory again for 2001. Not everyone was happy with these reforms, which included a number of asset sales, and a political seachange in the way the union was run. Huhana Hickey, a disabled lesbian student, was one of the unhappy ones. "I actually had a lot to do with Madeleine and Matthew and I considered them friends in the beginning," she says. "I guess you could say they were very good at manipulating people." Membership of the student union numbered only 125 by 1999, a 98% drop from the 10,000-plus members in the days of compulsory. The union's income plummeted as a result. Financially, things were not looking good. Alista Fow is a VSM supporter, and was finance officer at the student union in 2001, after compulsory membership returned. He too was unhappy with how the union was run during its voluntary period. "This I could not count as a good example. Personally looking at it, I cant see how you could do more damage to a student union if you tried intentionally," he says. "Because the students weren't particularly represented, the representation on all the university boards basically vanished, and all the functions of a student union basically ceased except the paying of the executive." With a low membership, there was still plenty of time for politics. In February 1999, Flannagan moved as President that three groups become affiliated to the student union - WUS Christian Fellowship, Student Life, and SOUL - the latter an anti-abortion group that Flannagan and Richards were involved with. Richards several times throughout that year proposed scrapping the executive portfolios, which ensured that minority groups (including queer, disabled and female students) had a representative voice. The proposal was unpopular, and things came to a head at a meeting of the executive in October when two members moved that Madeleine's proposal be "aborted" and not discussed ever again. The minutes of that meeting show Madeleine objected to the tone in which the motion was tabled. Flannagan then moved that the member in question be censured for using the word "aborted". The motion was defeated. Huhana Hickey thinks queer students at Otago have got a lot to worry about, as well as disabled students and any other students who aren't Christian. "What they did is they turned this campus upside down, politically, for the students." To say that Flannagan and Richards left a bad taste in the mouth at Waikato would be an understatement, based on the feelings hanging around campus even now - nearly five years later. What on earth did they do to create this level of animosity? "I can tell you quite simply," Flannagan says. "When I left, some people on the student association made false claims about me, and circulated them out into the student body. There were claims made that I had misappropriated funds, that I had stolen things, and it was taken to the student body at one stage. They were even going to try to have me expelled from membership." The lawyers have had to be called in on several occasions, he says, because of claims disseminated throughout the Waikato campus. Richards even sued a former gay editor of student magazine "Nexus", but says they're friends now. The whole rigmarole has left her and Flannagan wary and sensitive - in fact, when initially approaching them about this article with some emailed questions, they responded with detailed answers, but informed me that a copy of my correspondence had been forwarded to their defamation lawyer. Life on campus at Waikato doesn't sound all sweetness'n'light for Richards. She can detail a litany of nastiness. "I have been assaulted in a student meeting - by a lesbian woman, ironically...I had someone write me a letter after I'd had a miscarriage saying that they hoped the memory of my unborn child's death haunted me forever as I deserved because I was such a horrible person." Like many conservative Christians, Richards says she is not anti-gay. In fact, it was a lesbian woman who comforted her after she received the miscarriage hate letter. Her proposal to scrap the portfolios was not a stealthy move to abolish queer representation, she says. She understands discrimination. "I don't think everyone has a level playing field at all. No way. I came to university as a solo mother, and I frequently had lectures that were on when my daughter started school," she says. "There are lecturers that are biased, racist, homophobic, intolerant of people with religious beliefs. That happens, and that's why the student association has to be there for everyone." Another area of discrimination Richards has encountered is something queer students will certainly identify with - discrimination based on marital status. Richards is actually married to Flannagan, but has taken to using her maiden name because she's found people didn't treat her as an individual. "People would just say, oh she's HIS wife. They were really really negative about it. So it's been with some reluctance that I've switched back to my maiden name, simply to have my own identity so that people think, 'she is a person with her own views, and with her own opinion'." But there's another reason she's swapped names, says Flannagan. "If I said something that people didn't like, Madeleine would often get targeted, because oh, it's Madeleine Flannagan. Immediately she's associated with me, and she would get targeted. We were reluctant to say, well look, I'm Matthew, these are my children, this is my wife, because as soon as you do that, you make your family a target." They've continued to be involved with student politics since their move to Otago, however. They say it's a lot more relaxed, but recent stoushes between Student Choice and queer support group UniQ have been anything but. Next week we continue this GayNZ.com