September 6 1993. The time is 15:50 pm and its just another
day in the life of the boy from Coburg as he attempts to explain
that the Prime Minister of Australia Mr Keating ......
Mr CLEARY (Wills)--Mr Speaker, I
wish to make a personal explanation.
Mr SPEAKER--Does the honourable
member claim to have been misrepresented?
Mr CLEARY--Yes, I do.
Mr SPEAKER--Please proceed.
Mr CLEARY--During Question Time last
Thursday, the Prime Minister (Mr Keating) made a number of assertions concerning
me which are totally untrue. The Prime Minister said: He made a fink of himself
by opposing them--
That is, the true believers--
in the last election and the
by-election before that.
The Prime Minister went on to say:
There are remedies. He can always
apply to come back, but it is a big question whether we would ever have him.
Firstly, I wish to make it clear
that, contrary to the Prime Minister's implication, I have never been a member
of the Labor Party and therefore, by definition, I could not apply to come
back.
Secondly, the Prime Minister's
accusation that I am a fink needs to be corrected. To describe me as a fink as
in a contemptible or undesirable person is a matter of opinion to which the
Prime Minister is entitled. To describe me as a fink as in a strike-breaker or
blackleg is an assertion of fact which is totally unfounded. I wish to go on
record that, as a teacher unionist, I never once blacklegged on my comrades.
Despite a brilliant submission from Dave Nadel and Chris
McConville the Electoral Commission opted for an electoral
redistribution that drove the boundaries north into hardline
ALP territory.
Unfortunately the 1997 electoral redistribution put Wills
beyond our grasp.
Just why drove the boundaries north into unshakeable Labor
territory is a mystery.
Well, at least for some! |
KEATING'S
REPUBLIC? THE BOY FROM GRETA KNEW MORE.
The
Irish-Australian bushranger larrikin from Greta, Ned Kelly, had
drawn a pistol for his assault on the rural citadels of capitalism,
the Jerilderie and Euroa banks.
Faithful to the pounding words of his `Jerilderie Letter',
a treatise so radical the authorities buried it from the public
gaze for a generation, it was the "widows and orphans and poor
of the Greta district" who dined on the proceeds of Kelly's
assault on the State.
Ned
Kelly knew the banks were an agent of the pastoral company and the
`big-wig' urban financiers in their war against the small settler.
For Jack Lang and Frank Anstey and the old guard of the ALP, as
it was for Ned, the banks represented the worst of avaricious capitalism.
By contrast Treasurer Paul Keating, the symbol of new modern Labor,
carried only personal, not ideological, enmity towards the money-lenders.
Curtin and Chifley had wanted to control them, Keating only wanted
to see them squirm under the pressure of market forces.
When
the Kellys from Tipperary and their sympathisers gathered around
Jones' Hotel at Glenrowan on that foggy, fateful night in 1880,
they'd already settled on a Republic.
There was nothing to argue about; the Crown was a symbol
of oppression, pure and simple.
It would take another 115 years before the boy from Tynagh,
County Galway, stormed the Australian Parliament to deliver his
ode to the Australian Republic.
Yet
Kelly's outpourings said far more about national sovereignty and
the source of power and privilege in Australia than did Keating's
offerings. Keating
wanted to change the Head of State, Kelly wanted a just state.
In the heat of battle Keating remembered bank managers.
At Jerilderie the bushranger's words were saved for avaricious
squatters and British tyranny.....
