‘No reversal’ over Games

Press, 17 June 1980, Page 6

‘No reversal’ over Games

NZPA. ; Sydney /‘The S Australian Olympic team’s manager, Mr Phil Coles, said yesterday - there was not the .'“slightest sign" that; the Australian Olympic Federation would reverse its decision to go to the Moscow Games. He said the latest attempt by the Prime; Minister (Mr Malcolm ; Fraser) to change the Federation’s decision ignored bqth the rules which bound the, federation and the fact that.it had made up its mind. / ?We are being treated very shabbily,”Mr Coles said. "The Government told us it would not stand in our way once we made a decision. We made one and they should keep their word. “When I read the Prime Minister’s letter, and when I, watch him say the same things on television, I see-he is calling us un-Australian for.- sticking to our principles and the.Olym-

pic ideal. If that is un-Aust-ralian we will have to live with it.” Mr Coles said two important national Olympic contingents would leave the country this week and there would be no competitors left in Australia by about the end of next week.

The Opposition Leader (Mr Bill Hayden) said Mr Fraser was acting like a bully and a < sulky rich child in his push for an Australian boycott of the Moscow Olympic Games. Mr Hayden told the state convention of the South Australian branch of the Labor Party in Adelaide that the Prime Minister had set out wilfully and deliberately to set one Australian against another on the issue. . ■ He said Mr Fraser’s preoccupation; with the boycott turned the real issue of Russia’s' aggression in Afghanistan /into a.' side-show and a .forgotten issue and has sim-

ply become an exercise in divisiveness.

Suggestions of Cabinet unrest over Mr Fraser’s letter to the A.O.F. were quashed by a spokesman for the Prime Minister in Canberra yesterday. He said Mr Fraser’s letter was consistent with the Cabinet decision taken after the federation decided to attend the Moscow Olympics. In London the head of Britain’s Olympic committed accused the Thatcher government of using Soviet-like tactics to enforce its' bid to i boycott the Games. “There is a great deal of political thuggery going- on . . .” (which) has become quite sickening,” Sir Denis Howell said. “Some of this behaviour bears close resemblance to the very type of intimidation which all of us condemn when it is applied to minorities and dissidents in the East.” ■?'■■■

Pledging anew that his committee would attend the Olympics, he said no British ._ athlete worth his salt was likely to be “bludgeoned , into submission” by’ Mrs Thatcher, especially when the British Government was still conducting trade with the Russians.

In Wellington yesterday two Labour members of Parliament, Mr R. W. Prebble (Auckland Central) and Mr R. K. Maxwell (Waitakere) have sent a telegram to the Olympic and Commonwealth Games Association urging it to resist "Government blackmailand strong-arm tactics” against New Zealanders. ! “We believe that it would be tragedy’ for the New Zealand Olympic Games organisation to give in to the National Government’s blackmail and brute political force which has been used against individual athletes,” they’ said.