The opt-out line that Steve Jukes, at Canterbury, and the other students' associations are pushing is their strongest point, mainly because its their only one.

The current situation is NOT opt-out it is compulsory.

Calling it opt-out implies that you tick a box and its done.

Here's the process you have to go through for the conscientious objection process:

First, you have to fill out a form to apply.
Second, you have to appear before a panel of student association executive members.
In front of this panel you have to explain your objections - disagreeing with the politics of the student association is not sufficient.
If the association rejects your application, they don't have to tell you why they did.
If they accept it, you don't get your money back, it gets donated to a charity.
You don't get to choose what charity the money goes to, the student association does.

We've also heard stories of people being abused at these panels, by the executive members.

It's actually a legal requirement for student associations to promote this conscientious objection option, but they never do. In fact here's the current Massey President admitting they don't, and that she hadn't even realised they were meant to:

http://mediadarlings.net/2009/09/13/some-validity-to-vsm-lobby-mawsa-pre...

Of course, whenever the issue of VSM comes up in Parliament, students associations go out of their way to make it easy to opt-out (and make it sound like its easy to opt-out) to not give any ammo to supporters of VSM, but if we don't get the VSM bill through, they'll immediately go back to their old tricks.