Kafka said:
Dunno why. I merely said I was at uni. Got a coffee, got the SMH, drank coffee, had a smoke, watched protest for 20 seconds, had a look at the paper then headed of the Fisher.
Oh, OK. I read it as you were involved.
The students know the government is only going to change its mind if they can get public opinion (as if anyone in the public cares anyway) or a few libs/nats about quesy about the issue. The more publicity they can get for their cause, the greater chance of this happening. By effectively preventing the Education Minister from entering the conference, they were on the news and in the major papers (ie they got publicity).
Given the premise that students do not want VSU (of course debatable, but its the premise the protests are operating under), it is obviously of assistance to uni students
Even assuming that this is all true, you have not accounted for the ideas that:
a) Reduced value of this protest - a small protest like this does not communicate anything about the student body as a whole, thus even if it generates publicity and more publicity -> less probability of VSU, it may not actually generate much publicity. I suggest that it does not.
b) The education summit may be of benefit to university students. By preventing the entry of the Education Minister the summit has reduced value and will not be as beneficial to university students as it otherwise might have been.
I suggest that that detriment of the distruption to the summit is greater than any gain from reduced probability of VSU (assuming VSU is bad etc.) thus students protesting are not actually acting in the best interests of university students. Protesting as the Minister was leaving, or skipping the protest to increase the value of mass protests would be superior options.
I don't mean to be too negative man, but do you really think that I would have missed that line of reasoning? :/
