Wainer Starts New Political Party

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32216, 7 February 1970, Page 11

Wainer Starts New Political Party

(N.Z. Press Assn. —Copyright) MELBOURNE, Feb. 6. The abortion law reform campaigner, Dr Bertram Wainer, has launched a new political party. About 500 people turned up at the Union Theatre in Melbourne to hear Dr Wainer launch his party—the Progressive Reform Party. Dr Wainer said that the "embryonic” party—“let’s hope it is not abortive”—represented the philosophy that was dying in the West “I mean democracy” he said. Dr Wainer is one of the central figures in the Melbourne inquiry which is hearing charges of alleged police involvement in an abortion protection racket A police officer in Victoria was paid $63 a week gross —“less take-home pay than a tram conductor,” Dr Wainer said.

“He is disliked, detested, beer bottles are thrown at him at the football—he is even likely to be killed. “And people like Bert Wainer expose nasty facts about the force. “Whatever I have said about the police force it was in the hope that honest police—and there are many —will be able to wear their uniforms proudly. “There are practices here that have no parallel, save in totalitarian states.

“It is my sincere hope—it seems almost like a dream—that the Progressive Reform Party will put people back into politics.”

Dr Wainer said it was the day of the Ronald Ryan hanging that his campaign started. (Ronald Ryan was hanged in Pentridge gaol, Melbourne, on February 3, 1967, for the murder of a prison warder during an escape from the gaol.) “I went to Pentridge Gaol and there I saw truncheons, the dogs, the guns and all the trappings of a police State,” he said. “There is something dreadfully wrong with the way we are governed. Whatever I am and whatever people represent me to be, I have a dream—that man to man the world over will brothers be.”