The 1981 Springbok Tour was a controversial tour of New Zealand by the South African Springbok rugby team.

Background

The Springboks are a traditional sporting competitor of New Zealand's All Blacks. In the 1950s and 1960s, the South African apartheid policies had an impact on team selection for the All Blacks, with Maori players not being selected for some South African tours. By the 1970s public protests and political pressure forced the New Zealand Rugby Union to either field a team which wasn't selected by race, or not tour. However, the Springbok players continued to be selected by race. As a result, the Norman Kirk Labour Government prevented the Springboks from touring during the mid 1970s. In response, the Rugby Union protested that politics should not be involved in sport.

In 1976, the then newly-elected prime minister Robert Muldoon allowed the All Blacks to tour South Africa. Twenty-one African nations protested this breach of the Gleneagles Agreement by boycotting the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, due to their view that the All Black tour gave tacit support to the apartheid regime. Once again the All Blacks failed to win a game in South Africa (they would not do so until 1996, after the fall of apartheid).

The Tour

By the early 1980s the pressure from other African countries as well as from internal protest groups, such as HART (Halt All Racist Tours), reached a head when the Rugby Union proposed a Springbok Tour for 1981. This became a topic of political contention due to the issue of the sports boycott by the other African nations. Prime Minister Robert Muldoon was asked to cancel the tour, but he permitted the South African team to come to New Zealand in mid 1981, arguing that New Zealand was a free and democratic country, and that "politics should stay out of sport". Muldoon's critics, however, felt that the real reason for allowing the tour to go ahead was that Muldoon wanted to secure the votes of rural and provincial conservatives in the general election later in the year.

The ensuing public protests polarised the New Zealand population like no other issue has in the nation's history. While rugby fans filled the football grounds, sizeable protest crowds filled the surrounding streets. Security at public facilities was strengthened after telecommunications services were disrupted following vandalism at a TV microwave station. The Police, who had created two special riot squads (the Red and Blue Squads), to control protestors, also required that all spectators be in the grounds at least an hour before kickoff, after protestors surrounded grounds and attempted to invade pitches early in the tour. At Rugby Park, Hamilton about fifty protestors invaded the pitch after pulling down a fence, causing the game to be cancelled and leading to enraged rugby spectators to lash out at the protestors. And in Eden Park, Auckland, the final game of the tour was disrupted by flour bombs dropped on the pitch from a low flying light plane. The scenes that appeared on television made it look as if the country was on the brink of civil war as running battles between helmet-clad protestors, the Police and enraged rugby fans were replayed on the evening news.

Aftermath

For the first time in history, rugby in New Zealand had become a source of embarrassment rather than pride. The sport fell into a six-year decline, which was arrested by the country's victory in the first Rugby World Cup in 1987.

The long term fallout from the 1981 Springbok tour was that the All Blacks did not tour South Africa until after the apartheid regime fell, although an unofficial tour by a team of All Blacks players known as the Cavaliers did take place. Also many African Countries boycotted the 1984 Olympics. While the 1985 Springbok tour saw major rugby fields ringed in barbed wire for Springbok games, there were no protests as political circumstances had changed.

Public respect for the police also took a battering, with a number of high-profile brutality complaints being filed.