Thirteen Formative Years |
 APARTHEID – The origins of my interest in politics: … in 1996, for example, when I was president of the Tasmania University Union, I organised and led this demonstration urging the South African ambassador to Australia to tell his government to revoke its ban on Ian Robertson, who was at the time the president of the National Union of South African Students, and who had, in effect, lost his civil rights for five years under an edict issued by the Minister of Justice, Balthazar Johannes Vorster. Not surprisingly, this demonstration not only went unheeded, but events in South Africa also soon went from bad to worse when Vorster became Prime Minister after the assassination of Dr Verwoerd in September 1966. |