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Spirited and successful
demonstration against
John Howard' 10-year anniversary dinner
By Bob Gould
The Australian Liberal-National government is in a deep crisis over an
enormous scandal about millions of dollars worth of bribes paid to the
Saddam Hussein regime to secure sales of Australian wheat to Iraq.
The right-wing media have been trying to bury this government crisis
behind a sickening celebration of Howard's 10 years in government.
This evening was the much ballyhooed ceremonial dinner for Howard,
organised by the big end of Sydney at the Westin Hotel in Pitt Street,
almost adjacent to Martin Place, the centre of Sydney.
An official Unions NSW trade union demonstration was called to replace
the usual Thursday evening Unions NSW meeting.
The 1000 or so demonstrators gathered in Martin Place to hear a number
of speakers. They then marched around to the main entrance to the
Westin in Pitt St, where the they outnumbered the guests inside. They
chanted slogans about the Howard Government's reactionary industrial
relations laws for about an hour.
They gave a hot reception to the reactionary guests as they drove into
the dinner.
Howard was whisked in the back door, giving rise to a chant of
“back-door Johnny”.
This event official trade union protest organised by Unions NSW had a
very militant spirit.
Of the 1000 or so protesters, perhaps 100 or so were full-time union
officials, another group nudging 100 were members of various socialist
groups, and there were perhaps 50 Greens with their own placards, which
means that the other 700-800 were fairly ordinary but militant trade
union activists. The overwhelming majority of this group supports Labor.
There were several significant historical overtones to this
demonstration. The major part of the Westin Hotel occupies the site of
the old Sydney Mail Exchange, which in from the 1940s to the early
1960s was the highly industrialised and centralised hub of the postal
service, with about 4000 staff.
It was the site of a number of industrial disputes. Eventually, a
right-wing federal government closed it down and divided it into local
mail centres, the ostensible aim of which was greater efficiency, but
the real aim of which was to disperse the industrial militancy
associated with the site.
As serendipity would have it, I worked there from 1957-63 as a young
man, and I was active in the postal union and acquired quite a lot of
industrial experience there.
A few years later, in 1965, the Vietnam Action Committee, of which I
was the secretary, kicked off its effective public agitation by
marching up Pitt Street from Martin Place towards Central Station, with
about 1000 people (about the same number as demonstrated this evening).
Just after the intersection of King Street, about 150 metres from
tonight's protest, in a very calculated way we staged a sitdown, which
threw the coppers into great confusion, because Pitt St was one-way and
it took them quite a while to get in front of us.
Fifty of us were arrested, and the sitdown got massive nationwide
newspaper and television publicity, which effectively kicked off the
mass Vietnam antiwar campaign in Australia. This demonstration was
described in an article by Helen
Palmer.
Let's hope that tonight's protest outside Howard's dinner is the
beginning of the beginning of the necessary popular agitation against
Howard's industrial laws, including the legal case in the High Court,
and the widest possible industrial and community agitation against the
Howard's reactionary new laws.
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