THE PARLIAMENT OF THE COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES NOTICE PAPER No. 45 WEDNESDAY, 10 AUGUST 2005 The House meets at 9 a.m.

PRIVATE MEMBERS’ BUSINESS

Mr Danby: To move—That this House:

(1) notes that 31 August 2005 is the 25th anniversary of the foundation of the first independent trade union in a Communist country, the Solidarity Free Trade Union Movement in Poland, under the leadership of the Gdansk electrician Lech Walesa, on 31 August 1980;

(2) notes that under the leadership of Solidarity, and inspired by the visit to Poland of His Holiness Pope John Paul II, the Polish working class carried on a nine-year struggle for democracy and the restoration of Polish independence, defying martial law and the threat of Soviet invasion, a struggle which culminated in Tadeusz Mazowiecki’s election as Poland’s first postwar non-Communist Prime Minister in August 1989;

(3) notes that the peaceful Polish revolution under Solidarity’s leadership inspired similar revolutions in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania and Mongolia, and led ultimately to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the dismantling of the Communist system throughout Europe and the end of the Cold War;

(4) notes that since 1989 Poland has become a stable and increasingly prosperous democracy, guaranteeing political and religious freedom to all its citizens, and committed to the values of freedom and democracy, as shown by its membership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and the European Union;

(5) notes the great contribution that migrants from Poland, including many who fought in the Polish armed forces in exile alongside Australian forces during World War II and who were unable to return to their homeland after the war, have made to Australian society; and

(6) congratulates the people of Poland on the anniversary of Solidarity's establishment, and extends to them, and to the many Australians of Polish birth and descent, the House’s best wishes for a peaceful and prosperous future. (Notice given 9 August 2005.)

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11 August, 2005 Senate Hansard

Speaker Humphries, Sen Gary (LP, Australian Capital Territory, Government) Interjector Abetz, Sen Eric -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ADJOURNMENT Solidarity
Speech
Senator HUMPHRIES (Australian Capital Territory) (7.44 p.m.)—I rise tonight to commemorate the 25th anniversary of a very important strike. The strike was organised by blue-collar workers and it began on 14 August 1980. It led to an official strike committee being formed on 16 August. Strangely, the trade union which the strike gave rise to was not actually formed until September of that year and was not recognised by the government of the day until October 1980. The location of this strike was a shipyard in the north of Poland and the trade union, of course, was Solidarity.

In the 25 years since the famous strike in the Gdansk shipyard in Poland and the founding of the Polish Solidarity union, the actions to which it gave rise have resonated all around the world. Australians are very proud of the freedoms and liberties that we enjoy, but it is worth remembering that those liberties were not then, and are not now, enjoyed universally.

When Australians and many others saw what was taking place in Poland, their sense of empathy with people seeking the opportunity to express and use those freedoms that we take for granted was truly an inspiring phenomenon. Solidarity was a brief and too rare moment in time. Other democratic efforts by oppressed people around the world have achieved something of Solidarity’s success—the recent orange revolution in the Ukraine is one example of that. But unfortunately we do not have to look too hard or too far from Australia’s shores to find examples of where such movements have failed. The movement in Burma in recent years is one such example.

However, in August 1980 the iron gates of the shipyard in the Baltic port of Gdansk were festooned with flowers, Polish flags and posters. Pictures of Pope John Paul II were held up by those non-conformists in overalls. The once dull iron gates had been transformed by a small band of ordinary men and women into an expression of a sentiment that was soon to sweep across all of Eastern Europe.

With a double chin, a bit of a paunch and of middle height, their leader, Lech Walesa, did not have an imposing physical presence. But 25 years ago he found the character required to lead millions of people—workers and intellectuals alike—in a peaceful protest against their country’s communist dictatorship.

The aim was the reform of their country’s archaic political and economic structures, and to gain recognition of the basic rights of workers. It was less than a month before the actions of Solidarity and the workers there led to the decision by the Polish government to give in to the demands that Solidarity had placed before them.

There had been strikes in communist Poland before that point. In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s there had been a number of uprisings and other disturbances, over food prices, workers’ rights and intellectual and personal freedoms.

The Polish secret police, while possibly not as cruel and merciless as some of their counterparts elsewhere in Eastern Europe, wasted no time in brutally enforcing the will of the communist leadership. But the Polish people were able to maintain hope. Perhaps the fact that the Poles maintained hope during those long dark years came from an inbuilt resilience based on faith.

This is an opportunity to recognise a number of important characters at that time—people like Jacek Kuron—who were in a sense the serious brains behind Solidarity. Their role was to provide a sort of intellectual brute force and an educated and calculated recklessness. They had an inside knowledge of the workings of the Communist Party, its personnel and its intentions. This gave them the capability to assess realistic possibilities for political action in Poland.

We remember people like Bujak the electrician. Solidarity would not have succeeded without the support of ordinary Poles like him. In the beginning, they would organise strike committees at the factories.

When martial law was imposed in 1981, they were forced underground where they organised underground committees including press and radio activities. Because of the overwhelming popular support for Solidarity, its underground leaders were able to evade the Polish secret police for many years before they were eventually captured.

We also remember more high profile public figures who offered them support—people like Cardinal Karol Wojtyla who said to his fellow Poles: ‘You are men. You have dignity. Don’t crawl on your bellies.’ Of course, after being a strong advocate of human rights for many years in the 1970s, Cardinal Wojtyla returned to Poland for a nine day visit in June 1979 as Pope John Paul II.

At that time, the Soviet grip on Eastern Europe was as tight as ever. But something was different: the windows and balconies of the normally grim, Stalin-era apartment blocks were decorated with jubilant shrines to the Pope. Officially, the country was atheistic, but huge, adoring crowds met the Pope wherever he went. The attention given to the Pope was an intense source of embarrassment to the communist government.

He added to the authorities’ discomfort by reminding his fellow Poles of their human rights. The pilgrimage ended on 10 June in his beloved Krakow, where he had been archbishop for many years. One million people gathered there to hear his sermon, which was also the first religious ceremony ever carried over Poland’s state-controlled television network. He told them:

You must be strong, dear brothers and sisters ... You must be strong with the strength of faith ... When we are strong with the spirit of God, we are also strong with faith in man ... There is therefore no need to fear.

Many people, including the government in the Soviet Union, initially underestimated the effect that such movements would have, not only in Poland but also elsewhere. Stalin’s mocking question, ‘How many divisions does the Pope command?’ was later to be replaced by the observation of Mikhail Gorbachev, who gave the Kremlin’s long-term enemy his due: the fall of communism, he said, would not have been possible without the Pope. Lech Walesa, the founder of the Solidarity movement, also acknowledged the important role the Pope had played in this development.

That glimmer of hope that was begun by the movement in August 1980 shone briefly across Poland and the world. The darkness of course fell again not too long after that. In December 1981, under pressure from the government in Moscow and with the threat of 20,000 Red Army troops on the Polish border, the Polish government imposed martial law in a bid to crush the Solidarity movement. Solidarity was declared an illegal organisation and Lech Walesa and his trade union leaders were arrested and imprisoned. The union itself was dissolved officially in October 1982.

However, over the ensuing years the regime again relaxed its grip and, in 1988, a new wave of strikes and labour unrest spread across Poland. Prominent among the strikers’ demands was government recognition of Solidarity. In April 1989, with the Russians themselves receding into their own problems, the government in Poland had no choice but to agree to legalise Solidarity and allow it to take part in free elections to a bicameral Polish parliament. In the elections of June of that year, candidates endorsed by Solidarity won all 161 seats in the lower house of the Polish parliament and 99 out of 100 seats in the newly formed Polish Senate. That is what I call a whopping majority!

Interjection Senator Abetz—We’ve still got a way to go, haven’t we?

Continue Senator HUMPHRIES—Yes, we look tame compared to that, don’t we, Minister? Lech Walesa was elected President of Poland in December 1990 and of course the face of Poland was changed by these events. The rest is history, as they say. The tremor in Poland led to a worldwide earthquake which dislodged many totalitarian regimes in eastern Europe and set the world on a very different path.

It is, I think, an appropriate time to pay tribute to the brave men and women who scaled the gates of the shipyard in Gdansk at that time and set an example of non-violent activity to bring about substantial political change. The values of principle, liberty and democracy, which they stood for at that time, are values that we continue to treasure today and that have an important resonance throughout the world.