Sid Spindler - social justice’s brightest spark

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.