STATE LIBRARY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA - Lynn Arnold - The Don Dunstan Foundation

The May moratorium is going to take place in early May and the state election is going to take place in late May and we are wanting to have the moratorium, the May moratorium and I remember at the time Andrew Dunstan talking to us to say, ‘well, don't rock the boat too much because we don't want public opinion turning against us and costing Don the election’. [...] So, there wasn't the stopping the city that took place in Melbourne on the Friday May the eighth and would take place in Adelaide on September the eighteenth, months later, but this particular one, we followed a very straight down the line sedate kind of approach and Don was quite happy to come publicly out and talk in favour of the march and I met him during that process. [...] The polls for Whitlam were disastrous and the rub on effect for the Dunstan government was also pretty serious and in the seventy- five election, Don Dunstan spoke at the Festival Theatre at a public meeting and repeated virtually the same address at the Shedley Theatre which I heard saying we are hurting by the public's reaction to the Whitlam government. [...] The other seat that was to give them government was a seat that they had expected to win, Port Pirie, but there had been an argument over the preselection of a, somebody from outside the area, and Ted Connolly, the Mayor of Port Pirie, had stood, a former Labor Party member, had stood for the seat in protest of a non-local being preselected and Ted Connolly won the seat and Ted was given the posit. [...] Anyway, so I'm now preselected on the day before my wedding, my wife and I got married on the Queen's birthday Monday on June the 5th, 1978 and five, six, seven, eight and I’m preselected the evening of the Sunday evening, June the fourth and I'm really excited because now I'm going to be elected to Parliament in 1980, when the next election was due and serve under Don Dunstan, who at the time we.