1081 tour ‘dangerously self-indulgent”

Press, 22 September 1983, Page 3

1081 tour ‘dangerously self-indulgent”

NZPA Staff Correspondent Hong Kong The New Zealand Rugby Union had been not only naive but “dangerously selfindulgent” in issuing an invitation to the Springbok rugby team to tour New Zealand in 1981, the Minister of Justice, Mr Jim McLay, told the seventh Commonwealth Law Conference yesterday. He was responding to a remark by the chairman of the afternoon’s session, Sir Graham Speight, the Cook Islands Chief Justice, who had described the sports body as being naive enough to believe it could organise a sports tour with whomever it liked.

Mr McLay’s paper for the conference, on free assembly versus violent protest, under a general topic of the conflict of society between public order and individual liberty, touched directly on the tour only briefly.

Mr McLay’s reference to the tour in his paper came when he discussed what he described as the civil liberties dilemma of free assembly raised by the

question: whose freedom? “In New Zealand this dilemma was starkly seen during the 1981 Springbok tour when many people demonstrated (in the vast majority of cases peaceably and within the law but in some cases with premeditated violence and lawlessness) against the decision of a sporting group to exercise its freedom to associate with others,” Mr McLay said in his paper. In an interview later, Mr McLay said his remarks on the “self-indulgence” of the N.Z.R.F.U., needed to be taken in conjunction with the closing phrases of the paper. There Mr McLay referred to the balance necessary for a diversity of civil liberties to flourish. These civil liberties could only flourish where there was a general sense of selfrestraint in society; where a government was accustomed to accept a variety of dissent: where the government’s power was accepted as legitimate and where people were essentially at one on at least the fundamentals of public order, he said.