Page 655 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 4 July 1989
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a group of citizens who would amply and truly reflect the great traditions mentioned by my colleague and friend Dr Kinloch.
One incident during the election campaign also needs to be looked at in relation to the clause dealing hopefully with the responsibility for future electoral arrangements. That was when the manager of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation informed me that 10 minutes of media time, I think it was, a day could be given to established political parties. So, throughout the campaign, by virtue of a ruling that had been in the ABC for many years, added time was given to those who were fortunate enough to organise themselves.
Of course, one remembers that the ALP was formed after the great shearers strike of the 1890s, and there was A.W. Spence's great book on the formation and the right to form groups. The great shearers strike was a beacon for the Labor movement until it went out a few years ago. Of course it is an established party, but a party of self-interest now, and it had 10 minutes free time to run its own self-interested thing, above the interests of the community.
That was a very sad, very undemocratic and most frustrating time for the Residents Rally, which, at one stage, took to the footpath and demonstrated outside the National Press Club when the Press Club put on a function, to the great shame of the National Press Club, to hear a speech by the contestants in the election, ignoring again the community. Mr Speaker, today we heard elements of the Building Workers Industrial Union try to shout down me and my colleague when we sought to speak on an issue before this Assembly. Let no-one have any doubts as to where we will go in our freedom if we allow mob sentiment to prevail.
Dr Kinloch indicated that there were many ancient documents at the National Library tonight, but I pointed out to the French ambassador, to some certain slight embarrassment to him, perhaps, that one of the documents, if you read it in French, prescribed to all French persons that they could no longer use their patois and had to speak French.
We saw the russification of Poland once, and that stemmed from the great French Revolution. Revolutions and democratic movements sometimes also produce inequities and injustice. When I lived in France for five years, in the 1970s, still the Breton and other people in France were fighting to use their given names that come from their language and not all of the hyphenated French names that stem from the 13 names that people could call their children. That lived through to the 1970s in France, and of course subjugation of dialects and languages was one aspect of the so-called right to democratic protest and movement.
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