Mackays fight Grassby statue

THE family of murdered anti-drugs campaigner Donald Mackay has written to ACT ministers to oppose the plan to erect a statue to Al Grassby.

THE family of murdered anti-drugs campaigner Donald Mackay has written to ACT ministers to oppose the plan to erect a statue to Al Grassby.

Canberra's Labor administration, led by Chief Minister Jon Stanhope, commissioned the $72,325 life-size bronze tribute to the former Whitlam government immigration minister to "honour the father of multiculturalism".

Critics have attacked the plan as extravagant and in poor taste because of Grassby's links to the Calabrian mafia and his intervention in the Mackay murder investigation.

Mr Mackay said he and his family supported efforts to promote multiculturalism but remained opposed to a statue commemorating Grassby.

He said his family had written to the Government to voice their opposition to the move but had not dissuaded them.

"We've done that over the last week or so and we have heard back from the minister and they seem keen to do it and they think its a good way to promote multiculturalism.

"But it is quite divisive ... and in fact doesn't promote an inclusive open philosophy, which is what multiculturalism is all about, which goes beyond our family's personal point of view."

Mr Mackay said he urged proponents of the statue to examine Mr Grassby's history and that claims his family's opposition to the statue were racist were incorrect. "Its got nothing to do with that at all."

A spokeswoman for ACT Multiculturalism Minister John Hargreave said the statue would go ahead.

Donald Mackay, whose whistleblowing resulted in drug convictions of four men of Italian descent, was murdered in July 1977 by a hitman working for The Honoured Society, a Griffith-based cell of the Calabrian mafia.

In 1980, Grassby was charged with criminal defamation after allegedly asking a NSW state MP to read out a document in parliament that implied Mackay's wife Barbara and her family solicitor were responsible for his disappearance. He was acquitted.

But after Grassby's death in 2005, former National Crime Authority investigator Bruce Provost said Grassby had used political pressure to stop an investigation of his mafia links.

Grassby also faced criticism over a 1974 trip he made, while he was immigration minister, to Plati, an Italian town controlled by the Calabrian mafia, where he used his ministerial discretion to grant Australian entry visas to three men deported from Australia or refused entry because of their criminal records.