RIOTOUS SCENES AT ELECTION MEETING

Greymouth Evening Star, 17 September 1946, Page 7

RIOTOUS SCENES AT ELECTION MEETING

Ugly Demonstration Develops Menzies Claims Right of Free Speech (Rec. 11.45 a.tn.) SYDNEY, Sept. 17. The most violent demonstration of this electoral campaign greeted the Liberal leader, Mr R. G. Menzies, when he entered a hall at Darlinghurst to address a meeting in Mr E. J. Ward’s East Sydney electorate. The police removed 20 men from the hall and arrested 15 of them on charges of offensive behaviour. In the course of an hour, chairs, tables and amplifying equipment were wrecked. The wires connecting fhe microphone / to loud-speakers were cut three times. Men in front of the platform threw a bag o f nuts and bolts weighing 121bs at Mr Menzies ' A woman attacked a police sergeant whh a nail file A man was kicked in the face when he at-

tempted to climb on the stage, and women sitting in the front seats were carried to safety across the platform. Just before Mr Menzies arrived, 200 men in working clothes crashed through the doorway and marched down the aisle. Mr Menzies entered by a back door. When he appeared he was greeted with deafening booing, cat-calls and whistling. Women held aloft pieces of black cardboard cut in the shape of pigs and bearing the words “Pigiron Bob.” These and several bags of bolts which were thrown referred to the export to Japan of pig iron and scrap iron before the war during the Menzies Administration. The bag of nuts and bolts knocked the chairman, Mr A. Hutton, off his chair. Mr Menzies stood his ground until the police had restored some semblance of order, and then addressed the demonstrators through an auxiliary broadcast system. “It is a British right that political spokesmen- of all kinds and all views are heard,” he said. “The Labour Party would have us believe that it has no common cause with the Communists. This meeting proves conclusively that the Comunists are in charge of the Labour Party in East Sydney. This revelation will be worth thousands of votes to the Liberal Party.”