Glenda Fryer-Billboard Banning Bolshevik?

Auckland’s left dominated City Council wants to ban billboards in the centre city.

They say it is for aesthetic reasons.

Could it really be because advertising is the lifeblood of capitalism and Auckland’s socialist councillors want to make a political statement?

From the NZ Herald

Words like “arrogant“, “draconian” and “disgusted” were directed at a centre-left City Vision-dominated panel on the first day of hearings into a plan to ban billboards in central Auckland and reduce signs across the city.

The nine days of hearings on the bylaw changes began in dramatic style when the only centre-right Citizens & Ratepayers Now representative on the six-member panel, Graeme Mulholland, resigned, saying City Vision councillor Glenda Fryer had made unwise statements that “could be prejudicial to the process“.

Glenda Fryer has been under fire from the billboard industry and business groups over her role chairing the bylaw panel.

She has slammed “really big, ugly billboards” in the city but denied holding anti-billboard and anti-sign views.

Who is this Glenda Fryer character anyway?

Fryer has been a Labour Party member for decades. However she has flirted with some even more extreme forms of socialism at times.

In June 1972, Fryer was joint secretary of the Eden LRC of the Labour Party. A young lefty called Mike Moore was Labour’s candidate that year and Fryer was one of his organisers.

There was a small scandal when it was revealed in “Truth” that two of Moore’s Mike LRC delegates, Matt Robson and Mike Treen, were members of the Trotsyist Socialist Action League.

Most SAL members worked inside Labour at the time and after a few scandals the party made half-hearted and little enforced moves to ban the Trots.

Fryer was one of several Labour Party members who signed a petition against the party’s proscription of the SAL.

In July 1973 Fryer attended, with Norman Tuiasau, Marilyn Tucker and others, the 10th International Festival of Democratic Youth in East Berlin. The organiser, the World Federation of Democratic Youth was the Soviet Union’s key youth front and the NZ delegation was organised by the pro-Soviet, Socialist Unity Party. The happy delegates were pictured in the SUP’s Tribune of August 1973.

In 1980 Fryer became an organiser for the Northern Hotel Workers Union.

In October 1986 she travelled to Latin America for three weeks as part of Mike Moore’s Latin America Trade Mission. She was the first female trade unionist to go on one of Moore’s missions and they visited unions in Peru, Chile, Venezuela and Mexico.

Fryer told her union’s journal “Shift” of Oct/Nov 1986…

“I will be talking to them about the common problems we face and exchanging information. . . I have personally always been opposed to the fascist dictatorship in Chile. . . I have always followed the course of those opposing the fascist regime and I hope to contact those worker and political organisations that have been struggling for the past 12 years to bring back a democratically run Chile.”

Fryer admitted in New Outlook, December 1986 that the trip was in part reward for devoted loyalty to Moore since Eden 1972 days.

In December 16th 1987, the SUP’s “Tribune” pubished two articles by Fryer, one on Cuba, one on Chile.


I wonder if Fryer would be so opposed to billboards if they looked like this?

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