Mr Muldoon not prepared to meet banished editor

Press, 1 June 1981, Page 4

Mr Muldoon not prepared to meet banished editor

PA Wellington The Prime Minister (Mr Muldoon) has said he is. not Sired to meet the former African newspaper editor, Donald Woods, who began a two-week speaking tour of New Zealand yesterday. HART, the New Zealand anti-apartheid movement, wrote to Mr Muldoon asking that he meet Mr Woods, who was formerly editor, of the “Daily Dispatch.” Mr Muldoon replied in a letter: "I am not prepared to meet Mr Woods.”

HART’s chairperson, Ms Pauline McKay, said yesterday that she had become aware that Mr Muldoon would be leaving New Zealand for France, Britain, Italy, and West Germany at the time it hoped would be convenient for the meeting. She said HART hoped Mr Muldoon regarded the issue

of the 1981 Springbok rugby tour as important enough for him to arrange for the Acting Prime Minister to riieet Mr Woods.

■ Ms McKay also noted that Mr Muldoon’s trip was one of a number planned for him between now and July, when the Springboks were scheduled to arrive in New Zealand.

“It is extremely disturbing that these trips: are to take place in the next few weeks. It is difficult to imagine a time when the- ..Gleneagles Agreement will be so sorely tested.” she said.

HART said that a meeting with Mr Woods could have assisted the Government in clarifying its position on the rugby tour, and “would have given it an opportunity to explain its failure to date to take any convincing action to ensure -that it does not proceed.” In Phristchurch, “telephone blitz” has prompted the Government member of Parliament for Fendalton (Mr E. S. F. Holland) to express his opinions on the Springbok

tour in a letter to the Riccarton section of the Coalition Against the Tour. “May I at the outset express my very strong objection to my Sunday being disturbed by a succession of telephone calls on this subject,” says Mr Holland in the letter.

“If they have done nothing else they have confirmed the correctness of my decision not to receive a deputation from your group.” A spokesman for the Riccarton section of C.A.T. said last evening that the telephone calls Mr Holland had received were not part of a “blitz” calculated to annoy him but were attemps by a concerned group of constituents to discuss the tour issue with their elected representative. When Mr Holland refused to meet them they felt the only means by which they could discuss the tour with him was via the telephone, said the spokesman.

In his letter to the section, Mr Holland expresses his opinions on the tour, “so that

there is no doubt about them.”

He says that he accepts the Gleneagles Agreement and is satisfied the Government has fulfilled its obligations under it.

While not supporting the policies of the South African Government, Mr Holland says that sports boycotts could make South Africa “turn inwards and much of the good already achieved will be lost.”

“In short, I oppose apartheid,” he says, “but I do not support the concept that sports boycotts are a fair or effective means of expressing that opposition.” Tours by foreign rugby teams to South Africa and the proposed Springbok tour of New Zealand will not affect the position of blacks in South Africa, Mr Holland says.

"I will welcome the Springboks not as South Africans, not as political puppets, not as ambassadors of a Government with which we disagree on some issues but as'sportsmen," he says.