DEFEAT OF REBEL WILLIS
Until polling day in the Bulli coalmining electorate, the Willis-Lang split looked somewhat like a defeat for Langism. Mr. . Lang's. exMinister and ex-Agent-General,- when he found that the miners' executive was behind him, but that the centra^ executive in Sydney imposed Mr. Sweeney as candidate against the local choice, • entered the battle with gloves off. Always, dangerous, Mr. Willis never looked more dangerous. In opening his campaign at Helensburgh, he said: "I will never stand for anything crook." Supporting him, the president of the Southern Miners' Federation (Mr. F. Lowden) said more. Referring to the.Sydney machine's imposition of a candidate on Bulli on plea of lack of time, he said he was "forced to fight the cliques and the crooks at the Trades Hall. ... The clique in Sydney know more about crook ballots than we have ever heard of." Instead of having "a walk-over" at the Sydney executive meeting Mr. Willis as candidate got only two votes, and Mr. Sweeney "got 17, and
I guarantee that not four members of the executive would know Sweeney if they saw him." . . . Yet the cablegrams state today that, in Bulli, after being thus spoken of by the miners' executive head, the same Mr. Sweeney polls, on the first count, nearly as many votes as the U.A.P. candidate and Mr. Willis combined. In his speech Mr. Willis said that the Labour rules never contemplated "an inner group," and he himself had taken a prominent part in framing those rules "to make it difficult for some of those things that happened in the sliding-panel days to happen again." Mr. Willis's reward from the electors is to be third on the first count. Have the Southern'miners preferred Lang to their own executive and Willis ? Or has the miner strength in the electorate diminished? The election of Mr. Sweeney will not increase the Lang following in the State Assembly, as he succeeds a deceased Labourite. But it raises the reputation of Mr. Lang as a queller of insurgency.'
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Bibliographic details
Evening Post, Volume CXV, Issue 130, 5 June 1933, Page 8
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335DEFEAT OF REBEL WILLIS Evening Post, Volume CXV, Issue 130, 5 June 1933, Page 8
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