Editorial: The Future is only bleak without you in it

EDITORIAL | ANAMATA / THE FUTURE

Written by Liam Hansen (they/them) | @liamhanse.n | Editor-in-Chief

Illustration by Stella Roper (they/she) | @dodofrenzy | Arts Editor

When I began volunteering across the road at 95bFM in 2021, copies of Debate were strewn across various coffee tables, couches, and desks. They were bought over by various AUT journalism students, to be poured over by a little baby Liam in their last year of college while they poorly wrote the news bulletins. I read through various shitposts in the form of articles, did quizzes, and cut out covers to stick on my walls, before timidly asking if I could start contributing once I began uni the following year. 

Running the magazine by the end of my degree was not the plan. I’m pretty sure I had set out multiple routes of moving to Canada or Europe, doing an exchange, and wiggling my way into some artsy admin job in animation or game design. Instead, I’ve fallen deeper and deeper into the dark, dusty underbelly of Auckland Student Media; rife with backstabbing, funding cuts, and Reddit exposé threads. Your veteran grandad, who has an amputated leg, has nothing on the pain I’ve been through. Every time a typo slips into the mag, rest assured that I have metaphorically stabbed myself 23 times before getting back to my laptop. 

Illustration by Tashi Donnelly (she/her) | @tashi_rd | Feature Editor

I’m taking the piss. Aspects of this role have been difficult, especially alongside completing my degree and other creative projects, but it’s also offered me the incredibly bizarre and fulfilling privilege of seeing young writers and artists building their future through the mahi undertaken as they start contributing to the magazine. It’s incredibly easy and valid to have your degree be the main cause of your labour during tertiary years, especially considering that the whole schtick of uni was marketed to you as a get-out-of-unemployment-free card. However, the work undertaken in between lectures matters far more to future employers than your GPA. Nothing makes a graduate look more hireable than a clear disregard for work-life balance and a willingness to work underpaid and overtime. 

Beyond koha for our contributors and providing a little platform to share their mahi on, I think what’ll keep Debate trucking along for another 25 years at AUT is the slight semblance of otherness we’ve tried our best to embrace over the past couple of years. We’re the strange, youngest sibling of the university family of Aotearoa, stuck as the runt of the litter until Te Pūkenga became the awkward step-sibling there because Dad had an affair. I’ve heard countless stories of students from wealthier colleges being convinced by peers that AUT was the backup choice for students who were too stupid to get into UoA, despite the fact that said students do not exist. The students on our side of Wellesley Street are artists, activists, journalists, filmmakers, athletes, and academics, looking for a place in Tāmaki Makaurau to learn and grow without being tethered to proving their skills through exams and readings. We still have our fair share of the boring bullshit that made me drop out of high school and beg AUT to take me in, but it’s interspersed with hands-on learning and the closest thing you can get to a community-focused kaupapa in the bullshit, individualistic, capitalist metropolis that Auckland desperately wants to be. I need to make it clear that I’m not praising AUT as a corporation, because the suits cutting jobs and leasing out every space on campus for a quick buck don’t give a shit about education. It’s the professors, event organisers, baristas, cleaners, students, and everyone else at this university working their asses off to maintain a space for safe experimentation, expression, and freedom. This university isn’t a block of buildings used for filming locations and corporate hire. This university is nothing but its people. 

Illustration by Maebh LEIGH McCurdy (she/her) | @leighapparently | Social Media Coordinator

So, where does that leave us, the silly little Debate team popping up in print form across campus every couple of weeks or so? What future do we want to build for AUT, Auckland, and Aotearoa? Personally, I want one that’s fucking bizarre. We aren’t exactly living in a stable time for media, and the right path forward for any publication, let alone a print student magazine, is constantly shifting and breaking. Unless everybody miraculously decides to start paying for journalism or the government remembers to fund it properly, publications have the choice of staying in line and clinging to what has worked in the past, or throwing out the playbook altogether and building something completely new. These days, throwing shit at the wall and trying out weird, cheap, and creative projects that push the boundaries of what media is just as risky as trying to stay in line with the status quo. Allowing your car’s tank to run out of gas while puttering along the speedway is safer, sure - but nobody walks away from a car out of fuel as cool as they do from a car about to explode, especially when we don’t know what will arrive in its wake. (This is a metaphor. Please don’t blow up your car.)

If you’re reading this with a few semesters left of your degree, please feel free to kick off 2026 by sending us a kia ora and a pitch. We don’t know what form Debate will take next year, but the only way we can continue curating cutting-edge student journalism is through you. Whether you have sketchbooks that have gone untouched since you started your degree or a notes app stacked to the brim with passages of poetry that have never seen the light of day, use your creativity to grow your skillset and network of artists, writers, and media personnel you’ll continue coming across throughout the rest of your life. Hell, it doesn't even need to be for Debate - simply building something new will teach you more about life than any test you take on the subject. 

Illustration by Hirimaia Eketone (they/them) | @hiri_music | Te Ao Māori Editor

It’s not a secret that this year has been demotivating. The choices of the government have gone from deplorable to downright incomprehensible, and making meaningful contributions to the future feels pointless when the people running it are spinning wheels of misfortune and blaming the consequences on trans people when caught red-handed. Luxon and his cronies don’t want you to have hope for the future, and would rather you fuck off to Australia so he has fewer bottom feeders to deal with. The best way to change our country for the better is by loving it, celebrating all the incredible things about Aotearoa, and contributing to a genuine effort to make things better. Stick around, and do cool shit with as little of a budget as you can. There is nothing in this world that could make Luxon angrier than that. 

We’ll see you around, e hoa mā.