BY NIKKI ULASOWSKI
SYDNEY — Nuclear Disarmament Party (NDP) Senate candidates Michael Denborough and Yvonne Francis were arrested at Sydney University on October 25 for handing out anti-war information on campus.
Francis told Green Left Weekly that "being a smaller party our campaigning is done through word of mouth. We chose to go to Sydney University to hand out our no war flyer." The flyer declared: "No to war, no to racism, no retaliation, vote NDP in the Senate."
"A security guard approached us claiming that we were not meant to do this sort of thing on campus. He stated that campus was closed to the public and, because we weren't students, we couldn't hand out our leaflets", Francis said.
After the NDP leaders disregarded the guard's warning, the guard returned and issued them with an infringement notice that imposed a fine of $500 and banned them from returning to the campus for a year. Denborough and Francis again refused to leave. The police were called and they were arrested for remaining on the grounds.
"I don't accept that there is less freedom inside a university than outside", Francis told GLW. "I believe people of Australia don't want to go to war... In the end young working-class people will be the cannon fodder", said Francis.
Denborough was among the 10,000 physicians, organised as International Physicians for Prevention of Nuclear War, who were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985. He won an Order of Australia medal for community work in 1999.
Denborough, who is 72 years old, is also a member of the Medical Association for Prevention of Nuclear War. He founded the NDP in 1984, and in December that year the fledgling party shook the ruling ALP government, winning almost 650,000 votes and a seat in the Senate.
Francis is a long-time community activist in Queanbeyan, near Canberra, and was a founder of the Save the Ottways campaign in Victoria.
Anti-nuclear campaigners, Resistance activists and members of the Democratic Socialist Party and the International Socialist Organisation have faced similar threats from Sydney University security in recent months. Their crime has been to hand out political material — an accepted democratic right on universities for decades.
Sydney University Student Representative Council president Moksha Watts said that it "is outrageous that certain regulations can be enforced to discriminate against people and their politics. It is clearly an attack on free speech from an institution that supposedly encourages freedom of thought. [The administration] is manipulating laws and regulations to silence political opposition."
Sydney University Resistance activist Aaron Benedek agreed that the attack on the NDP was an attack on free speech on that campus. "We encountered similar restrictions before the M1 stock exchange blockades this year", he told Green Left Weekly. Resistance will seriously campaign against Sydney University's anti-democratic tactics, Benedek vowed.
"What is the university administration scared of? Is it scared that thousands of students may express their democratic right to oppose the war? Is it scared that thousands may become radicalised by the world's only superpower waging a vicious wage against the people of the Third World?", asked Benedek.
"More and more young people oppose Washington's war, and activists will continue to organise on campuses across the country until we stop this war. Sydney University administration is kidding itself if it thinks it can stop us."