Media Release

12 March 2018: There has been a crackdown on the Eureka Flag – New building laws introduced by Malcolm Turnbull’s Coalition Government – and supported by One Nation – means workers for any construction company seeking Government work are forbidden from displaying any union stickers, symbols, logos or motto - including the Eureka Flag!

The irony of this initiative is the people trying to ban the flag and bag any union presence don’t seem to realise the flag they’re banning was not the flag of the employed and the downtrodden working class - it was the flag of the owner/operator class - the hands on risk takers. The Eureka rebellion was against Government taxation of the mine owners, who worked their own mines themselves.
Having been a mine owner who also worked my own mine, I have always carried great reference for the Eureka Flag. Another little history lesson was Eureka Stockade Leader Peter Lalor became a conservative speaker of the house in the Victorian Parliament.
I would suggest they read my History of Australia, An Incredible Race of People, so they know a little bit about the history of their own country instead of shooting their mouth off and demonstrating a colossal ignorance of their own nation’s history.
Every mine and every industry in this country was initiated by the people who manned the barricades of Eureka and what it stands for. Essington Lewis - who created BHP and the steel industry, started work with a pick and shovel. Les Thiess, who left school at 5th grade, created the coal industry out of nothing and built Snowy Mountains and the Gold Coast. The Holden family were saddlers, Kidman was a stockman. Every single person who manned the barricades at Eureka was out of the same stable - owner/operators, risk takers, hands on. I doubt whether there is a single bludgerigar in the Qld or Fed Government that would fit into any one of those three categories – let alone all three.
On a final note, I will remind my fellow Australians that written below the flag at Eureka was, ‘When oppression becomes law then resistance becomes duty’. The other great aphorism written on a sign beside the Eureka Flag at the Eureka Stockade (where 26 men bravely died while fighting excessive taxation, Government bureaucracy and a corrupt judicial and political system) was written ‘Everybody dies, but not everybody lives’.