2014-08-25
Jo Vallentine
Back in the early eighties, the Cold War was raging and the American President, Ronald Reagan, was heard joking, when he thought the microphones were off, “Let's nuke the Russkies!”
It was very worrying when, in the latter days of his presidency he often got confused about what was real, and what had been a scenario from a B-grade movie (in which he played many roles in his younger days). He was in charge of the nuclear button, carrying the little red case with him wherever he went! Not just because of this, but mainly due to the huge build-up of nuclear weapons, east and west, the situation was viewed as extremely dangerous. Nuclear weapons could be triggered easily by accident or by design, and there were several very close calls. Consequently, disarmament groups intensified their activities around the globe.
As soon as people recovered somewhat from WW2, “Ban the Bomb” movements sprang up, as the reality of what had happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki sank in to the collective consciousness. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the UK was well known to activists in Perth, so when we formed a specific group to challenge the insanity of nuclear weapons here in 1982, we called ourselves People for Nuclear Disarmament, adopting the well-known CND logo, and modelling our activities on theirs, always invoking nonviolence, and running workshops to practice the skills involved in peaceful protest.
There were some memorable weekends honing skills emanating from the Movement for A New Society in the US, often based on experience of resistance to the Vietnam War. There were faith-based groups involved in those early days, especially Quakers, by whom I'd been inspired during the Moratorium Movement, and people who'd worked hard to promote the ideals of the United Nations, and members of small political parties as well. It was a popular movement, but always outside the mainstream, whose mouthpieces accused us of being communist stooges, despite our proclamation that we were promoting disarmament east and west in our publications, education seminars, and public rallies.
The Palm Sunday events were huge — about twenty thousand people marching in 1984 — and superbly organised, without the help of the internet or social media. We thought we were very grand when we got our first golfball typewriters, then a telex machine so that we could send messages out to the media without the hard copy being bicycled around the city. (There were several competing media outlets then!)
Alongside PND, another group specifically dedicated to direct action was formed, mainly to protest the visits of warships to Fremantle. This was Project Iceberg, people prepared to be arrested, after undertaking nonviolent direct action training. The biggest event was in 1983, when PND co-ordinated a rally of 11,000 people holding hands all the way over the railway bridges to the port side, while the Project Iceberg crew went on board and dropped banners over the side of the warship, facing the huge crowd gathered on the wharf below. There was good cooperation between the groups, and it helped that people like me were heavily involved with both groups, with lots of adrenalin kicking in. Heady days!
One of the offshoots of Project Iceberg was the Pacific Peacemaker adventure, sailing right across the Pacific to Seattle where the new US Trident submarines were based. It was a huge undertaking, and although I wasn't on board, PND followed closely its progress and raised money to keep the ship afloat. We were inspired by the great nonviolence exponents of the twentieth century, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day, and the Berrigan brothers, whose multiple arrests were extremely courageous.
The PND in WA grew rapidly, with many locality groups served by a city office staffed, of course, by volunteers. So keen were we that we had to update our constitution after only a couple of years, to accommodate the democratic rights of new groups, to ensure that our structure was not too centralist.
In early 1984 the Australian Labor Party threatened to change its antiuranium mining position into a threemines policy, with Bob Hawke, Prime Minister for only a year at that stage, leading the charge. ALP members were distraught, and there were tearful scenes at their national conference in Canberra in July, after the motion went through.
As people left the building a respectable doctor invited them to join a brand new political formation, the Nuclear Disarmament Party, which had a very simple, single-issue platform: no uranium mining, no foreign military bases, and no visits of nuclear armed/powered warships. The NDP would run Senate candidates in every state whenever the next federal election was held.
Michael Denborough (the Canberra doctor) made it his business to find candidates everywhere for the fastgrowing NDP. The invitation to join was very open – a person who was already a member of another political party wouldn't have to relinquish membership to join this new party – therein sowing seeds of its own destruction. The idea was that it would be open to absolutely everyone who agreed with its aims. People flocked to the NDP for 50c apiece. By December that year, when the federal election was held, there were more than 8,000 members across the nation. It was the fastest growing political party in Australia's short history.
Here in WA the NDP didn't get as much traction as elsewhere, partly because PND (with the same aims, but more policies) felt that there was bound to be confusion with the names. More importantly, we felt that if our members went into the political party sphere, PND would lose its grassroots, community orientation, which had been working very well for us. So when we were approached to find candidates and set up a party structure, we were very cautious. In fact,we decided against running candidates, thinking that a “write-on” campaign, which had been so successful nationally at the previous election on the matter of the Franklin River, would be more appropriate here. People would be invited to write “No Nukes” on their ballot papers, without invalidating them, and we would work hard to promote that, thus sending a strong message to the Hawke government.
However, we changed our collective mind, partly because we didn't want to be left behind other states, but mostly because the more we cogitated on it, the more we realised that perhaps here was a bold opportunity to make a real difference. So the NDP and PND cohabited the nuclear disarmament space in WA for about a year. We chose a team of candidates (I wasn't the first choice, but the well-known anti-nuclear activist doctor whom we first approached declined to be nominated), consisting of a young mother (the only time in my life I think it was an advantage being female and a mother — a combination which appealed strongly to people worried about the threat of nuclear war), Dr Lindsay Matthews, second on the Senate ticket, and an anaesthetist, David Nourish, as candidate for the Lower House seat of Kalgoorlie.
We were keen, and we were focused! An office was found, and energy for the campaign flowed readily. People who'd never been involved with a political party came out of the woodwork, and some unexpected donations were received from political party hacks, especially from the disenchanted ALP ranks. Seeing we were all new to running candidates, we were in fresh territory but not without heaps of ideas and enthusiasm. Many of our new volunteers were dubbed Caldicott converts, because earlier that year, we'd filled the Perth Concert Hall to hear Dr Helen Caldicott whose film, If You Love This Planet, was making absolute sense, especially to women.
Amazingly, we covered over 80% of polling booths on the day, with our clean-looking green and white imaging, and a party slogan “Take Heart - Vote Vallentine.” We were giving people an alternative to old style politicking, with no negativity, no slanging matches. In this we differed from the NDP in other states, which went to the election with raised fists, mushroom clouds and yellow and black colours. It wasn't the first time that the Nullabor has protected us from the vagaries of the east! However, one campaign slogan we liked from the other side of the country was “There are millions of us! Vote NDP”.
And there were millions of us — enough in WA to win a Senate spot, which was unexpected by most commentators. The primary vote was 6.2%, but with the help of ALP preferences, and a seventh spot being available due to an increase in the size of Senate representation in that particular election, it did the trick. Peter Garrett in NSW had been spotted as the most likely contender for NDP success, having rated 17% in preelection polls. The ALP in NSW was so worried that they directed preferences to the Liberal National Coalition ahead of the NDP, which didn't happen here in the west. Supreme irony! A local casualty was that the Australian Democrats, who were solid on disarmament issues, lost their WA Senate spot. Generally, however, I was able to work co-operatively with the Democrats in the Senate, without whom I wouldn't even have a seconder for any motion I wanted to put forward.