Page 686 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 21 March 1990
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these pass laws. These laws are an instrument of oppression of the Government, one of the tools whereby the majority of South Africans are deprived of dignity and basic human rights.
The Sharpeville massacre marks the beginning of the recognition by the outside world of the evils of apartheid. For the first time we saw the inhumanity and violence of the regime against its innocent victims. After the Sharpeville massacre, the African National Congress and the Pan Africanist Conference were banned and their leaders imprisoned. Victims were blamed.
The intentions of the regime were at last open to the scrutiny of the rest of the world. The Sharpeville Six were charged under the common purpose law, an iniquitous law practised by the racist South African regime, where people who have no part in a crime can be convicted of that crime for having been in the vicinity when the crime was committed. Another group that was charged under the same law was the Uppington Fourteen. Those people were never convicted of carrying out a murder; they were just in the vicinity.
Recently, with the release of Nelson Mandela and the unbanning of the African National Congress and the Pan Africanist Conference, there has been a hope that reform is under way in South Africa. But we must remain vigilant and we should not be seduced by simple cosmetic reforms. The South African Government is keen to have the rest of the world feel that there is change on the way in South Africa. We should not be convinced by mere window-dressing. The rest of the world must be clearly convinced that there is significant change in that country before it drops the sanctions against it. Everybody must stand firm to ensure that those sanctions remain in place until such time as real change takes place.
There are no proposals on the horizon in South Africa for one parliament which houses blacks and whites, and there are certainly no proposals for electoral reform. Until the apartheid system is completely dismantled, as my good friend Maxwell Namidzvahannani would say, root, stem and branch, the oppression suffered by the black people of South Africa will continue; there is little doubt of that.
As responsible Australians, we must lend our support to the oppressed and apply pressure to the regime to dismantle its racist system. A small group of activists in the ACT has carried the campaign forward for a number of years. It has repeatedly manned picket lines and demonstrated outside the South African Embassy, and has been maligned and pushed about because of its work in defence of the African people.
The street in front of the embassy is called Rhodes Place. As a symbol of this continued support, I have placed on notice a motion for this Assembly to support the renaming of Rhodes Place to Mandela Place. In this way we can
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