Sid Spindler - social justice’s brightest spark

Are there still fighters for justice around like former Victorian Democrat Senator Sid Spindler who died recently? It doesn't matter if you didn't know Sid. It's enough to know that if you were down and out, Sid was on your side.

When I look around the political landscape I can see a few champions for social justice: Tim Costello, Julian Burnside QC, Lyn Allison and Bob Brown. I also see young people coming through, often unheralded by the mainstream media, who have achieved more for their communities in five years than some MP's have done in 20 years.

By champions, I mean people who put their ideals and life on the line. You won’t see Rudd or Nelson do much about ending child labour or stopping the exploitation of outworkers in the textile industry, fighting for Aboriginal education or ending workplace sexual discrimination. They just don't appear on the agenda. They did on Sid's.

Rudd and Swan are going to use fiscal policy to stop the inflation demon. They'll cut Government spending on social services to try slow the economy down, when, if they had half a brain between them, as we approach “peak oil”, they'd fill the Federal coffers by taxing petrol guzzling four wheel drives off the road. Don't get me started.

Apart from a handful of people, the Australian political landscape is almost devoid of scrappers. Keating used to call them the “maddies” and we need them more than ever.

There’s “no fire in the belly” in today’s politicians, Sid said. They’re a bland, spineless lot. Whenever I hear the ALP’s Minister for Foreign Affairs Stephen Smith speak, I fall asleep. He's aural Serapax. Rudd's victory speech was one of the worst I've ever heard and I've heard them all since 1975.

Sid fled Germany as a boy. Like all young boys in Nazi Germany, he was a “wolf soldier” or in other words, cannon fodder for the Russian troops. “Stuff this” thought Sid and he hitched a ride on one of the last trains out of Germany heading west.

American fighter planes strafed the train and many people on the train were killed or wounded. Sid said it was ironic that the people he saw as his saviours were trying to kill him. His social democratic politics and strong sense of social justice were forged by war and later by working with Don Chipp.

I got lucky having former Democrat Senator Sid Spindler as my boss. I was juggling tutoring journalism at RMIT and working as a raw media adviser three to eight days a week in his East Melbourne office. There was no such thing as a part time job with Sid. It was total commitment.

The following story is one of many. It is not a comprehensive story but it is indicative of the man I knew.

The story starts on a Saturday in August 1993 at a public demonstration against racism outside the Brunswick Town Hall. About 50 members of the National Front (as we called them) were yelling abuse at the crowd, who comprised church groups, human rights groups, environmental groups and Sid. The demonstration had been called because “skinheads” at the Brunswick Baths were harassing Muslim women.

The National Front had been yelling “show us your tits” and “get out of our country” as the women were leaving the Baths.

It was an overcast day so I bought an umbrella. Sid was standing at the back of the crowd of about 300 people and various taunts were being bandied back and forth. A line of six policemen stood between the two groups.  Sid made a speech about dignity and human rights and was interviewed on SBS TV but as a news event, it looked like a fizzer. We retired to a yiros shop and shared a coffee. Then the rocks started.

I still don't know to this day who brought the rocks but they were raining down on both sides in biblical proportions. They were small and flat, the type landscape gardeners use on garden beds. They whizzed through the air life Frisbees. They cut and bruised at the same time.

Sid borrowed my umbrella and headed out in to the middle of the fray, like a man fighting with a brolly in a storm. I called every news bureau in Melbourne while hiding in a phone box. I'm no Superman. Mounted police arrived and drove a wedge between the protesters who were now fist fighting with the National Front members on the steps of the Town Hall.

It was pandemonium. I fought my way to Sid to give him the mobile phone to do radio interviews when through the scrum, I saw one of the larger and uglier National Front members making his way directly for Sid. By his demeanour, he meant no good. Sid saw him coming, pardoned himself from the interview, and smashed the clearly unsuspecting black shirt across the side of the jaw with my umbrella, felling him to the ground.

I pulled Sid out of the melee and towards the TV crews who'd arrived. He was the only politician at the demonstration so we got good media coverage that day. I asked him why he'd whacked the NF supporter.

He said, “Mate, politics isn't all about legislation. Sometimes you've got to make a stand, even if you cop a few punches along the way.” God I was stupid and I looked at him quizzically. "Malcolm, it's better if you get in first. Remember that." He handed back what was left of my umbrella and said, "Got it?" Got it, mate.

Look around at today’s politicians. Do you think they’ve got the Sid stuff? Threatening to cut pensions! It'll be single mothers soon. It's like the Federal Government is taking its socio-economic policy from the scripts of A Current Affair.

The majority are bland “yes” men and women, hamstrung by their party machines. I want to know that when the going gets tough that they have the guts to get the job done. They're a Sid-less bunch.

But the good news is that a whole new generation of social activists are coming up. Sid liked young people because they had the “fire”. We need to listen more to young people because they will be the inheritors of the future. Sid knew that and you know it too.