Audrey Young: The forgotten protests of the 1970s, and how Labour PM Norm Kirk interfered in my arrest

Former Prime Minister Norman Kirk.

Audrey Young is the NZ Herald’s senior political correspondent. But in the 1970s she was a Wellington student passionate about social injustice, to the point she was arrested for her part in a ‘sit-in’ protest. A protest that incensed then Labour PM Norm Kirk, whose subsequent angry actions unwittingly led to Audrey being discharged without conviction.

A message arrived in my private email with the opening line: “Dear fellow protestor from the 70s”.

It was good to be remembered and was enough to pull me in. The note was from a small group of Wellington folk who set out to put together a photographic record of protest activities in the 1970s and make it widely accessible.

It seemed like a good project to support. The 1970s are a bit like the Western Front in World War I: an awful lot happened but they are overlooked for big-name battles like Gallipoli.

The anti-Vietnam War protests of the 1960s and the Springbok Tour protests of 1981 are a well-documented part of New Zealand’s history.

However, the sheer extent and breadth of the 1970s protests was a period of great activism and social change.

For a young school leaver, just over 50 years ago, Wellington was a heady environment in which to arrive in 1974.

The arms race and French nuclear testing in the Pacific led to the anti-nuclear movement, the feminist movement was well established, the anti-racism movement galvanised around proposed rugby tours from and to South Africa, gay liberation was gaining profile, the Māori renaissance was under way, trade unions were a powerful and vocal force, civil liberties were fired up by SIS legislation, the environmental movement was turbo-charged by the Save Manapouri petition and the formation of the Values Party, and the proliferation of dictators around Asia ensured a proliferation of international solidarity groups.

Suffrage Day march in Manners St, Wellington, in September 1973. Photo / Keith Stewart

Three of us from Hawera High School ended up at Victoria University: myself, and Pātea friends Margot Bourke and David Rutherford, who later became the Human Rights Commissioner.

We had been involved in setting up the school newspaper in 1973, Wahi Ngaro, which was forced to close under threat of defamation from a particular teacher.

It was natural then that Margot and I gravitated towards Salient, the student newspaper edited at the time by Roger Steele, now a publisher at Steele Roberts.

We would work well into the night to get it onto the bus to the printers in Whanganui each week in time for it to be vetted by the printers’ lawyers.

Sometimes articles would simply be removed on legal advice.

Salient had its own darkroom and photographer - Keith Stewart, or Grub as he was then known, a long-haired guy from Wairoa who, like Steele, often went around barefoot.

Stewart was Wellington’s equivalent of the Auckland photographer John Miller. If Keith wasn’t there to take photos, it wasn’t really a protest.

He left varsity to work on the troubled BNZ site in Willis St, getting involved in the union and health and safety, before getting a collar and tie job at ACC.

By the time he retired, he was WorkSafe’s chief inspector of investigations and had been through about 20 workplace restructurings.

Keith Stewart, who recorded many protests as photographer for the student newspaper Salient, at his Wellington home. Photo / Mark Mitchell, with inset of Stewart in the 1972

Keith’s name was among the 10 names who sent the email about producing an online repository of 1970s protests and stories and many of his 6500 photos are in the collection, along with some of Miller’s and Ans Westra’s.

“You were in the thick of it all the time,” he recalls.

It formed the basis of an exhibition in downtown Wellington last year and was then produced as a book, 1970s: Decade of Protest.

“We’re not getting any younger and the concern was that the knowledge and stories would disappear.”

So he, Steele, and another 70s photographer, Hilary Watson, got a small group together to organise the project.

The photos that particularly interested me most were the Wellington housing ones, protests by the Tenants’ Protection Association (TPA).

It was not only highly active in the 70s but Margot and I got arrested in one of the protests at Woburn in the Hutt Valley.

It has largely been forgotten but the case received saturation coverage at the time because of the involvement of the Prime Minister, Norm Kirk.

Denis O’Reilly, a life member of Black Power, was a community worker who looked a bit like Che Guevara in those days. He was a leading light in TPA, along with Amanda Russell and lawyer George Rosenberg.

Tenants' Protection Association members sit-in at the Wellington office of the State Advances Corporation in June 1974 to support a solo mother who had been on the waiting list for three years. Photo / Keith Stewart

He had helped to organise a sit-in at State Advances Corporation in Wellington on behalf of a solo mother, Colleen Andrews, and her son Dion, who had been on the state house waiting list for three years. Photos of the sit-in are part of the housing category.

Colleen found an empty State Advances flat at Woburn, Lower Hutt, and five of us occupied it along with her. We were arrested for wilful trespass.

Keith was not there but Denis, who managed to avoid arrest himself, had alerted the television news cameras. During the eviction, in full glare of the cameras, he questioned how this could happen under a Labour Government.

Norm Kirk saw the news and was incensed by the criticism. He had a go at O’Reilly and TPA in a press conference a few days later.

The following evening, O’Reilly was on Brian Edwards’ talkback show on Radio Windy when Kirk made a surprise call to the show. An argument ensued in which Kirk said there was a difference between helping tenants and being the organiser of a political campaign designed to exploit them.

National leader Jack Marshall criticised Kirk for getting involved.

Norm Kirk farewells the HMNZS Otago in 1973 as it sails to the Mururoa atoll to protest against French nuclear testing. Photo / NZ Herald Archive

Meanwhile, my parents and Margot’s were having conniptions about our arrest and had organised a defence lawyer.

We both came from families in South Taranaki connected by politics. Margot’s mother, Betty, was a Pātea identity. The Bourkes had run the pub at Kakaramea for a long time before moving into town to run the TAB.

Betty had chaired the Pātea Health Board which was amalgamated with the Wanganui Health Board in 1968, a move bitterly opposed by herself and other locals.

My father was the local MP for Egmont and the amalgamation presented a crisis in his first term in Parliament. But with Betty’s encouragement, he crossed the floor to vote with the Opposition against National’s amalgamation.

Even as a National MP, he perhaps should not have been too shocked that one of his kids had got caught up with Wellington radicals. My older brother had gone to university and joined the Labour Party, and my older sister had gone to university and joined the Values Party.

Audrey Young, left, and Margot Bourke in Wellington in 1974. Photo / Keith Stewart

But he was not happy with the arrest, nor having to be interviewed by a probation officer about me. Kirk pulled my father aside one day to acknowledge the involvement of his daughter but it was to no one’s advantage that that aspect be highlighted.

Dad organised a lawyer friend and National Party member Barry Brill (later MP for Kāpiti) to represent us in court.

The defence was obvious – the interference of the Prime Minister in a sub judice matter before the courts had made it impossible for a fair hearing. The magistrate agreed and, thankfully, with the recommendation of the probation service, we students were discharged without conviction.

Colleen got a suspended sentence.

The Evening Post ran it as the front-page lead incidentally, next to a story of a protest at Parliament by the gay liberation movement. It was the decade of protest after all.

They were protesting because Kirk had just decided to oppose the introduction of a homosexual law reform bill by any Labour MP, saying it would be damaging to party unity.

The Evening Post front page lead, June 28, 1974.

The next day, the Dominion ran a story saying Brian Edwards, who had stood as Labour’s candidate in Miramar in 1972, had resigned from the party.

Edwards cited two reasons: the party’s “gutlessness” over homosexual law reform and the way Kirk had acted over the recent TPA incident.

“I no longer wish to be remotely associated in the public mind with the party,” he said.

Coincidentally, gay liberation looked to other MPs to sponsor a bill and my father (who retired in 1990) introduced the first homosexual law reform bill in 1974.

It failed at its first vote in 1975 and it was not until 1986 that the law was changed, in Fran Wilde’s bill.

Kirk died two months after our court case. Margot and I were in the NZ Student Association offices in Vivian St when we heard the news, having just returned with others from a protest outside the Malaysian High Commission at Oriental Bay.

The website of 1970s photos is still running, the exhibition has been picked up by other centres, and the book is being reprinted with some additional photos from Manawatu.

Book: “1970s: Decade of Protest” published by Steele Roberts Aotearoa. RRP $40

Audrey Young is the NZ Herald’s senior political correspondent. She was named Political Journalist of the Year at the Voyager Media Awards in 2023, 2020 and 2018. She dropped out of university, trained as a teacher, and taught before shifting careers. She joined the Press Gallery in 1994 and was political editor for 18 years.