Rowdy rally for P.M. as tickets-only entry fails

Press, 25 November 1981, Page 1

Rowdy rally for P.M. as tickets-only entry fails

PA Dunedin The Prime Minister (Mr Muldoon) last evening walked into one of the rowdiest election meetings of his campaign as hundreds of interjectors in the Dunedin Town Hall kept up a constant barrage of cat-calls.

The arrangements that were supposed to have kept the meeting to the ticketed party faithful went severely astray as about 300 National Party opponents gained entry to the Town Hall, most of them apparently holding tickets issued by the party itself. Dozens of uniformed and plain-clothes police inside the hall removed hecklers -r--often at the direction of the Mayor of Dunedin, Mr, Clifford Skeggs — and Mr Muldoon was forced to stop several times as the police and party stewards wrestled with hecklers. One man, punched by a National Party supporter sitting near him, was removed from the hall by the police. Holding a bloody handkerchief from his bleeding nose he was told by the Prime Minister: "And you deserved it.” Party organisers and the police had expected trouble outside the Town Hall, which was placed under “guard” by up to 100 uniformed police aided by crowd-control barriers. But when Mr Muldoon arrived only about 20 protesters were there, shouting and waving banners. ' ‘ ? The crowd was noisier arid larger when he left, having been swelled by many of the people who had been in the hall earlier.

Mr Muldoon smiled and waved at. his opponents before driving off. Mr Muldoon himself remained largely good hum- . oured during the meeting but elements of the crowd became tense. A radio reporter, Barry Soper, was at one stage manhandled by National Party stewards who tried to prevent him from re-entering the hall after he had gone outside to file a story. Several National ' Party supporters, including a former member of Parliament for Otago Central, Mr Murray Rose, tried to stop television crews from filming hecklers being ejected. Reporters were also warned by Mr Skeggs, who told them that they were provoking the hecklers. Mr Muldoon, who traditionally gets a rough reception in the bedrock Labour city of Dunedin, often from university students, told the crowd: “You have some unruly people here, haven’t you. They tell me they are mostly imports from the North Island, down here to get a free education on the taxpayer.” /Later, his voice growing hoarse from his hour-long struggle to dominate the hecklers, he told the cheering supporters: “What I am saying to you is forget all this nonsense- from these donothings . . . know-nothings, forget all this nonsense from these academic illiterates... get Dunedin on the road to progress again, vote for growth, positive thinking, optimism.” Mr Muldoon drew about the same-sized gathering as that which last week enthusiastically applauded the outright rejection of the Aramoana aluminium smelter project by the Labour leader (Mr Rowling). Mr Muldoon’s message was the exact opposite. But in the turmoil of the evening,

some of his message seemed lost on the audience.

He got one of the biggest cheers of the evening for his message from Fletcher-Chal-lenge that a new partner to replace Alusuisse could be announced before Christmas. He hammered the same line that has dominated his campaigning in the last three weeks — that the growth strategy would produce jobs and security, not just for the areas where big projects are sited but for the whole country through the generation of overseas funds.

In Wellington, the Social Credit Leader (Mr Beetham) last evening told a clapping, cheering crowd of 500 that the National Party was “in urgent need of being taken down several political pegs. "That applies to its rude and abrasive leader as well,” he said.

The Labour Party had been trying to posture as a unified party, Mr Beetham said. .

But it was floundering about in a “policy wilderness” with as rnany policies as it had members of Parliament, and no idea of how much they were going to cost, all of which pointed to more State control and bureaucracy.