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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume. 33, Number 7. 27 May, 1970

Mandel: — 'Insufficient grounds' for exclusion

Mandel:

'Insufficient grounds' for exclusion

"There are insufficient grounds under the Immigration Act to exclude him."

This was the reply of Mr K. Coveny, Director of Employment and Immigration in the Department of Labour, when asked whether Dr Ernest Mandel would be permitted to enter New Zealand.

Dr Mandel, a Belgian Marxist economist, has been invited to New Zealand to deliver addresses and take part in panel discussions in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. The visit is s/bponsored by the New Zealand Socialist Action League and the Victoria University Socialist Club.

Mr Coveny said that his statement that there were insufficient grounds to exclude Dr Mandel should not be taken to imply that the Labour Department had sought pretexts for refusing him permission to enter the country. "This is not the case at all," he said. Mr Coveny said that Dr Mandel did not need a visa to enter New Zealand anyway as Belgium and New Zealand have an agreement waiving this formality.

The Private Secretary in the Minister of Immigration's (Mr Marshall) Office, Mr B. Bremner, reported the Ministerr as saying "it is not an issue" when asked by Salient about Dr Mandel's case. When asked whether the matter had been considered by the Cabinet, Mr Bremner would not answer the question nor would he say whether the Minister had considered the case.

Both George Tyson, a member of the New Zealand Socialist Action League, and Hector McNeil, the League's legal adviser, believe that the matter of Dr Mandel's application for permission to enter New Zealand was referred to the Cabinet for discussion. Mr Fyson said that when he rang Mr Marshall's office a spokesman told him that "the Cabinet is discussing the matter and I cannot make any statements until Mr Marshall has reported the decision to me." Mr McNeil said that it was his understanding that the Cabinet did discuss the matter. "Mr Marshall most certainly did," he said. He said that Mr Coveny had told him that the Minister was looking into the case.

Speculation about the action which the Government might take in the case of Dr Mandel's application for permission to enter New Zealand arose from a decision of the Australian Government to refuse to grant Dr Mandel an entry visa to that country. Dr Mandel was to have attended a five-day socialist scholars conference in Sydney at the end of May and given lectures in Melbourne and Adelaide. An Opposition Labour senator, Mr John Wheeldon, said there could be no reason for the Government's refusal to issue Dr Mandel a visa other than to "inhibit free discussion in this country and stop the dissemination of ideas which do not agree with those of this Government."

Dr Mandel has also been barred from entry into France and the United States of America. The ban on entry into France was imposed after Dr Mandel's activities during the May 1968 disturbances in Paris. In September 1968, Dr Mandel visited the United States and spoke at 33 colleges. In October, his application for a four-day entry visa was refused and he was unable to return to the United States for a scheduled debate with Professor John Kenneth Galbraith at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. The debate proceeded with Dr Mandel participating via transatlantic telephone. The New York Times said in an editorial on 27 November: "The empty chair and the electronic circumvention of the travel ban will add to the embarrassment suffered by this country as a result of this triumph of police over diplomacy, of fear over freedom, and of ideological rigidity over democratic commonsense."

Photograph of Dr Ernest Mandel

In an earlier editorial, The New York Times said that Dr Mandel's exclusion "can only prove that the old days of censorship by visa are not yet over." A petition protesting against the Justice Department's action was initiated by a number of prominent American intellectuals—among them Dr Salvador Luria, 1969 Nobel Prize winner in biochemistry, Susan Sontag and Noam Chomsky—and the State Department publicly dissociated itself from the decision of the Justice Department.

Dr Mandel is the author of Marxist Economic Theory. He has contributed numerous articles to Socialist Register, New Left Review, Intercontinental Press and Quatrieme Internationale. He is the editor of the Belgian socialist weekly paper La Gauche and is leader of the Fourth International, a 'World Party of Socialist Revolution' founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938.