People Could Get Hurt Here! If we’d had the same health and safety rules back in 1981 as we have now, then the Springboks wouldn’t have got to play a single game!
IF ONLY the New Zealand of 1981 had possessed health and
safety legislation to match the laws of 2018. It took Pat McQuarrie, at the
controls of the light aircraft he had stolen from Taupo airport, and his threat
to fly it into the grandstand of Hamilton’s Rugby Park, to persuade the Police
Commissioner, Bob Walton, that it might be in the interests of the health and
safety of the spectators gathered to watch the Springbok-Waikato Rugby match on
25 July 1981 to cancel the fixture.
Fast-forward 37 years and just think how easy it would be to
achieve the same result today. No need for the likes of Pat McQuarrie in 2018.
A few hundred raggle-taggle left-wing gypsies threatening to “confront” Rugby
patrons if they attempted to enter the ground is all it would take to convince
the New Zealand Rugby Union that the game would have to be called-off.
Crikey! If we’d had the same health and safety rules back
then as we have now, then the Springboks wouldn’t have got to play a single
game. The anti-tour movement was just so huge in 1981 that its entirely
credible threat to organise major disruptions of air travel, the railways and the
motorways would have been more than enough to induce Rob Muldoon to instruct
the Rugby Union to withdraw their invitation to the South Africans.
Certainly, the state television network would have required
little more than the threat of interference with its super-expensive
transmission equipment to announce its determination to boycott the Springbok
Tour altogether. Of course, without television coverage of the matches it would
hardly have been worth the Rugby Union proceeding.
Such a shame that in 1981 the authorities cared so little
for the health and safety of New Zealanders that they were prepared to deploy
thousands of Police and employ the armed forces to lay thousands of metres of
barbed-wire to ensure that the rights of Rugby players and spectators were not
infringed. Not only that, but if any protester attempted to prevent the Rugby
matches from proceeding then they could expect to be cracked over the head with
a Policeman’s baton.
Yep. The consequences for exercising your right to free
expression back in 1981 could be severe. When the Springbok-Waikato game was called-off,
the protesters who had made it onto the field were lucky to escape with their
lives. Bottles and beer-cans rained down upon their heads leaving many of them
bloodied and bruised. Spectators pouring out of the park then attacked the
first-aid station treating the injured.
New Zealanders back then were horrified at the level of
violence unleashed on the protesters. But that’s only because people were much
less aware in 1981 that if people “talked shit” then they deserved to “get
bashed”. It was nowhere near as well understood in those days that speaking-out
against the prevailing ideas of the day constituted nothing less than an open
invitation to everybody who subscribed to those ideas to have at the dissidents
with fist and boot.
The 1980s were such unenlightened times. The appalling
events of that era could never happen in
the Aotearoa-New Zealand of 2018. Our health and safety laws simply wouldn’t
permit it!
This essay was
originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Thursday, 9 August 2018.
