25 Years Ago Today

One of the biggest lecture theatres at Victoria University has a sticker up the front it says "Mobilisation May 1: Stop the Tour". That sticker made me happy every single time I saw it (and mostly I saw it at 7.30am as I was leafletting lecture theatres to let students know about protests). It's been up 25 years now - the first big anti-tour mobilisation was May 1 1981. The second big mobilisation was July 3. It's been 25 years since everyone came out - Auckland to Eltham. The retrospectives have already started.

I'm going to take this opportunity to write about The Tour, and its meaning. We weren't in New Zealand in 1981, but I remember going on the protests of four years later. I remember chanting, and being out late and the excitement of getting food from a place which, in my memory, had bamboo shoots painted on the walls. As I became politically active in my own right, the history of 1981 became something I claimed and took strength from. That time means a lot to me, as an activist now, but it also has a place in our history, that I don't think is written about. I suspect a lot of the retrospectives will be too simple and smug - I want an opportunity to put a view that doesn't see the fourth labour government as the culmination of what people were fighting for.

I also don't write about the power of collective action - they stopped the game at Hamilton - one person couldn't have done that.