Kemira: Diary of a Strike

Clip 2: The storming of parliament

Taken from the documentary Kemira: Diary of a Strike (1984)

Original title classification G – this clip chosen to be G

Curator’s clip description

Striking miners travel from Wollongong to Parliament House, Canberra, to protest the retrenchments. The protestors storm the entrance to Parliament House and break the doors in – a first in Australian history.

Curator’s notes

Dramatic footage of an historic moment, captured from the point of view of the miners, gives the viewer a real sense of being part of the event.

Damien Parer, curator

Teachers’ notes

provided by The Le@rning Federation

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This clip shows colour actuality footage of protesters from the Wollongong area in New South Wales storming the doors of (Old) Parliament House in Canberra on 26 October 1982. The clip opens with the protesters rushing towards Parliament House chanting ‘We want jobs’. Dramatic scenes follow of the protesters forcing the doors, pushing past police and entering King’s Hall. As more protesters struggle to get in and through a line of police inside, the clip concludes with an announcement that Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser would be prepared to meet with a delegation.

Educational value points

The footage in this clip documents the first ‘invasion’ of Parliament House in Canberra by demonstrators. The determination and anger of the protesters are clearly apparent and audible, with the barely edited footage shot from within their surging ranks, giving the viewer a sense of being part of the moment. Equally apparent are the relative ease with which the protesters were able to force the doors and the surprisingly small number of police deployed against them.

The origin of the protest action shown in the clip lay in the world economic recession of 1982 when Australia’s manufacturing capacity declined and GDP fell by 3.8 per cent. Australian Iron and Steel, a subsidiary of BHP, announced in September 1982 that due to a slump in demand for steel it would retrench 250 people from its Wollongong steelworks and 384 miners from six local collieries, with another 500–700 job losses possible.

The protest at Parliament House was held against the emotional background of the Kemira ‘stay-in’, when 31 miners at the Kemira colliery attempted the challenging tactic of holding out underground to try to save miners’ jobs. The miners’ and steelworkers’ unions had earlier responded with strike action but it soon became obvious that traditional industrial action was ineffective as the company was already slowing production and stockpiling resources.

The protesters seen in the clip formed part of one of the largest gatherings of workers mobilised in the 1980s. The Wollongong steelworkers and miners had quickly realised that the joint federal–state industrial legislation of the time meant that the federal government needed to be brought into the dispute. A meeting of over 20,000 at Wollongong Showground carried a resolution to hold a demonstration at Parliament House to force the Prime Minister to intervene.

The protest was intended to be a conventional rally with Bill Hayden, the Leader of the Opposition, agreeing to speak outside Parliament House but the crowd, angered by news that the doors of the House had been locked against them, began a ‘mad surge’ forward. One of the union organisers remembers ‘We thought, stuff this, this is supposed to be the people’s parliament, we have a right to put our case’ (http://www.anu.edu.au).

The meeting with Prime Minister Fraser (1930–), held with the sound of the protesters in the background, failed to save the workers’ jobs or to achieve the ban on imported steel products that the unions wanted. However, it did lead to federal intervention, allowing the workers’ case to be heard before the Coal Industry Tribunal, which ruled that BHP had to make severance and retrenchment payments and that these payments were to become part of the miners’ award.

Kemira: Diary of a Strike was the first Australian film to show a strike from the inside. It was award-winning producer Tom Zubrycki’s second film and, like many of his documentaries, the production concept began with the ‘characters and a situation involving conflict’. Zubrycki sensed that the invasion was ‘an historical turning point… a cornerstone of a film about the [Kemira] strike’ (http://www.arts.nsw.gov.au).

Although he had no funding for production, Zubrycki continued filming the scenes in Parliament House and at the Kemira pithead in the belief that ‘history doesn’t wait and a dramatic re-construction is often not as exciting as the real thing’ (http://www.arts.nsw.gov.au). The documentary was completed in 18 months with the assistance of the Southern District of the Miners’ Federation and the Creative Development Branch of the Australian Film Commission.