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SKETCH

Superglue? Screaming? Call that a protest? Lame. Try a proper riot. And a Pajero

Tony Wright

As a protest, it was pretty lame, if loud and, for the demonstrators, satisfyingly disruptive.

Superglueing your hands to the railings of the House of Representatives suggests you are confident security guards will gently soak you free, rather than having the skin torn from your palms, which would have been vastly more dramatic. And so it turned out. Soft-soaking.

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Still, it wasn't the lamest. You need to go back to the early 1990s for that, when a fellow who may or may not have been smoking bongs wandered into Parliament, found his way to the public gallery during question time . . . and jumped clean off. He broke both ankles when he landed on the chamber floor and startled MPs so thoroughly that several leapt clean out of their own seats.

Sadly, the jumper, who identified himself as a Rastafarian, never got to explain to anyone precisely what he was protesting, if anything. Grievously lamed but apparently feeling no pain, he sat on the flagstones beneath the parliamentary verandah making incomprehensible jokes to journalists until paramedics arrived.

In August, 1992, a 68-year-old part-time teacher made an even less explicable protest.

Having driven all the way from Broken Hill in his four-wheel-drive Pajero, he motored up the gravel drive to the entrance of Parliament House - having politely signalled a left-hand turn - lined up his vehicle and drove carefully between two pillars. Then he hit the gas, rammed two sets of brass and glass double doors and rocketed clean in to the crowded marble foyer, scattering tourists, and on to the Great Hall.

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Parliament wasn't in session - though prime minister Paul Keating was in the building - and the driver, Clifton Courtney Moss, never did explain what he had hoped to achieve.

A sawn-off shotgun and live shells were found in the back of his Pajero, which earned him a jail stretch. He is also responsible for the decision by security guards to erect Pajero-proof bollards outside the doors.

Moss turned out to be determined. He later returned to Parliament and tossed two molotov cocktails against the main doors, causing quite a blaze.

At least two more protesters have since jumped in to the House of Representatives, but the Parliament has never seen anything like the great trade unionists' riot of 1996.

Well fuelled at a boozy barbecue, unionists from an ACTU "Cavalcade to Canberra" rally and others protesting John Howard's industrial relations laws charged in ranks to the front of the building wielding iron stakes, sledgehammers, a wheel brace and varied forms of metal battering rams.

Glass shattered, a line of police was forced to take cover within the building because many were being injured, and looters ripped through the Parliament shop. A bloodied CFMEU member boasted on loudspeaker that 100 unionists had made it in to the Parliament.

All these years later, this proved a handy battering ram for the government's Christopher Pyne. Fresh from the vote that will re-establish the Australian Building and Construction Commission - designed to police rogue unions, particularly the CFMEU - Pyne took some delight reminding Labor of the union riot as he addressed the House in the minutes after the latest protesters had been removed.

"This is the most serious intrusion into the Parliament since the riots organised by the ACTU in 1996 for which I was in the Parliament," he declared.

Amid howls of protest from the Labor benches, Pyne happily continued.

"In 1996, the ACTU organised a barbecue on the lawns of Parliament House, which resulted in a riot and the invasion of the Parliament. Those people who were in the Parliament would remember it very well. A drunken riot."

The latest protesters were demonstrating against offshore detention of asylum seekers, but Pyne had deftly turned it into an attack on Labor's union affilations.

Lame.

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