“SHOWING UP HUMBUGS”

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32235, 2 March 1970, Page 15

“SHOWING UP HUMBUGS”

(N Z Press Assn—Copyright) LONDON. A London banker who has started a . campaign to stop the M.C.C. touring Australia next summer said that he would be shocked if it succeeded. “I am only doing it to show up the humbug involved in the attempts to stop the South African tour here on racialist grounds,” said Mr Laurence Weidberg, aged 45, a member of the M.C.C. Mr Weidberg announced in an advertisement in “The Times” yesterday that he | would move a resolution “to prevent our club from going ahead with its plans for the tour on the grounds of Australia’s racialism.” {“Australia’s hands are not clean when it comes to racialism—and neither, of course, are Britain’s,” the Lancashire-born Mr i Weidberg said.

“You go to Australia House in the Strand and see all those delightful pdsters telling everyone to migrate to Australia. Beside each one is an invisible sign, ‘No Blacks? “We know Australia solved its Aborigine problem by shooting many of them and now confining them to small areas in the north of Australia. The survivors are treated worse than the Bantus in South Africa.’’ Mr Weidberg said he would be making the point in his resolution that the first Australian cricket team to visit England 100 years ago consisted of all Aborigines. “Are there any Aborigines in your team today?,” he asked. Then added: “Come to think of it, they could probably do with some the way they are going.”