AUSTRALIAN ELECTION

Press, Volume LXXXII, Issue 24983, 18 September 1946, Page 7

AUSTRALIAN ELECTION

DISTURBANCES AT MEETING

(Rec. 11 pun.) SYDNEY, Sept 17. The most violent demonstration of this electoral campaign greeted the Liberal leader (Mr R. G. Menzies) when he entered a hall at Darlinghurst to address a meeting in Mr E. J. Ward’s East Sydney electorate. The police removed 20 men from the hall and arrested 15 of them. The 15 men were charged in the Central Court to-day with offensive behaviour last night in Darlinghurst The men, who included eight labourers, an accountant, a journalist, a student, a waterside worker, a seaman organiser, and a boilermaker, were subsequently recharged under the Electoral Act, 1918, with “behaving in a disorderly manner for the purpose of preventing the transaction of business for which a meeting was being held.” They were remanded. In the course of an hour chairs, tables, and amplifying equipment were wrecked, the wires connecting the microphone to the loud-speakers outside were cut three times, men in front of the platform threw a bag of nuts and bolts weighing 121 b at Mr Menzies, a woman attacked a police sergeant with a nail file, a man was kicked in the face when he attempted to climb on the stage, and women sitting in the front seats were carried to safety across the platform. Just before Mr Menzies arrived 200 men in working clothes crashed through the doorway and marched down the aisle. Mr Menzies entered by a back door. When he appeared he was greeted with a deafening booing, catcalls, and whistling. Women held aloft pieces of black cardboard cut in the shape of pigs and bearing the words “Pig Iron Bob.” These and several bags of bolts which wer s thrown referred to the export to Japan of pig iron and scrap iron before the war during the Menzies Administration. A bag of nuts and bolts knocked the chairman, Mr A. Hutton, off hit chair. . * . ‘ ‘ Mr Menzies stood his ground until the police had restored some semblance of order and then addressed the demonstrators through an auxiliary broadcast system. “It is the British right that political spokesmen of all kinds and all views are heard,” he said. “The Labour Party would have us believe that it has no common cause with the Communists. This meeting proves conclusively that the Communists are in charge of the Labour Party in East Sydney. This revelation will be worth thousands of votes to the Liberal Party.”