EDITORIAL | WHAKAKĀINGA / HOME
Editorial by Liam Hansen (they/them) | @liamhanse.n | EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Illustration by Stella Roper (they/she) | @dodofrenzy | ARTS EDITOR
March is hellish. The university calendar resets just as the sky turns grey and shorts go back into retirement at the back of the wardrobe, getting replaced by a dingy old pair of jeans and a hoodie mere days after the silly season comes to a close. The weeknight drinks enjoyed throughout summer turn into daily crams of coursework, part-time employment, and holding onto any morsel of sleep you can muster out of your caffeine-fuelled body. If you’re lucky, you’ll be able to squeeze in a couple nights out on the town and house parties with academic comrades new and old during the first few weeks of the semester. Give it time, and you’ll realise that an assessment is due in ten hours — yet you haven’t done a single reading since your first lecture. Congratulations, you’re officially a uni student!
Apologies if you’re a new student who is picking up Debate for the first time - I don’t mean to sound discouraging! The chaos, stress, and moments of despair in your tertiary journey are just as inevitable as the joy, pride, and satisfaction of submitting your final assignment and immediately forgetting everything you just learnt as soon as you close the Canvas tab. There’s no way around the fuckery you will have to endure throughout your degree - but there’s power in community, solidarity, and accountability, which is where we come in.
Debate is your student voice at AUT. Whether we’re reporting on issues within the university and city as a whole, yapping about our favourite early 2010s telly twinks, or talking about the political and economic state of the world right now - our kaupapa is centred on you and your rights as a student in Tāmaki Makaurau. You can find us scattered across all AUT campuses, online at debatemag.com, and on socials @debate_mag where we post giveaways and other cool stuff.
To bring you into 2025, we’re covering Whakakāinga / Home, as you’ve likely spent the last few weeks hunting for, settling into, or finding a new home in Tāmaki Makaurau. At the best of times, it’s been difficult to find a flat in Auckland - I shudder thinking back to my first flat viewings when I moved out of home a couple years ago, seeing a line of similarly aged students with printed-out flat CVs, ill-fitting formalwear and a hint of desperation in their eyes at the front of a mouldy Kingsland villa. Naturally, none of us got the place. We kept looking, dragging our soulless bodies from house to house in search of some semblance of livability.
Much like the most difficult parts of university, this process is demoralising. You’re entirely at the will of the landlord - more so now than ever, as the coalition government recently repealed changes made to the Residential Tenancies Act in 2020, bringing back no-cause evictions and cutting back the amount of time tenants have to vacate properties if the landlord suddenly decides they or a family member want to live in the property. The ability for young people to live in Aotearoa is getting consistently strained by increasing landlord power and a lack of rights for tenants. Considering how the prime minister cares more about his investment properties than anyone who makes less than six figures, we won’t be seeing things get better any time soon.
If stable housing remains a commodity under capitalism, we need to cling to anything else that feels like home for dear life. Whether it’s the people around you, the community you’re a part of, the art you consume, the food you make, or anything else that gives you joy and comfort. Throughout this issue, we find home in all sorts of places - our returning arts editor, Stella, mourns their second home of Geoff’s Emporium, Sara McKoy talks about people from overseas finding community in Aotearoa, and Ricky Lai has a variety of stellar film recommendations as per - you’ll be seeing a bunch more of those from him this year!
Personally, the aptly titled 2014 LP “Home, Like Noplace is There” by Massachusetts emo band The Hotelier has cemented itself as a central piece of comfort for my silly little brain this past summer (along with the rest of their discography, but the other albums don’t have the issue theme in their title). The record is considered a classic of the early-mid 2010’s emo revival movement, placing them alongside bands like Modern Baseball and The Front Bottoms as pioneers of bringing emo music back to its roots after mainstream emo fizzled out when 2009 passed. Every track on the record is masterfully crafted, from heart-wrenching lyrics to experimental, build-and-release song structures that burrow themselves into your brain until you can’t let them go. It’s a strange take on home, given how harrowingly brutal the album can be in discussing its subject matter of suicidal ideation and relationships stunted by ill mental health - but the emotional throughline of each track is begging you to continue existing, and persevering to hold onto anything you can while the world around you is plunged into chaos. Just keep holding on, e hoa mā. I’m already so proud of you all.
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