EVICTION RIOT.

Star (Christchurch), Volume XLIV, Issue 492, 29 June 1932, Page 5

EVICTION RIOT.

Serious Disturbance at Newcastle. LANDLORD “ON THE DOLE.” (Special to the “ Star.”) SYDNEY, June 24. The other day there was a serious riot at Newcastle over an eviction for non-payment of rent. The tenant, one of the unfortunate unemployed, says that he paid rent for ten months after he had lost his last job (that is, till November, 1931), but since then he has been unable to pay anything. Hearing that the tenants were to be turned out, about 200 men armed themselves with garden forks, razor blades, iron bars, brickbats and loaded batons and prepared to resist the officers of the law. There was a desperate and sanguinary fracas, and the police were reinforced to the number of sixty before they got the upper hand. The mob behaved with brutal violence, kicking and bludgeoning the police when they fell, and eventually twelve policemen and seventeen others had to be removed for first aid or hospital treatment. Many arrests were made and charges of rioting were preferred against nineteen men, who have been remanded. Meantime an attempt is . being made by the Labour extremists at Newcastle—always a centre of “ red ” agitation—to organise a oneday strike by way of protest against 1 the action of the authorities. The Communists have seized upon the incident as providing a good illustration of the evils of private owner- j ship and capitalism. But poor Mrs ( Franklin, the owner of the house, j laughs at the idea that anyone should 3 call her a “ capitalist.” She lives in a slab hut, gets the dole, wears charity - clothes, and can’t afford to get coals 1 in winter. She is sixty and her hus- ] band is sixty-three, and so crippled by : rheumatism that he cannot now even dig the garden to grow the vegetables ( that they need for food. They have depended on the rent of this house to 1 eke out their scantv resources, and they waited for it till they could wait < no longer. So that, whether this riot t was worked up by the Communists or / not, it certainly did not originate in evtortionate and tyrannical “ capital- i ism.”