One of the many important stories broken by tenacious reporter , the late John Loizou , recently mentioned in this blog, was the treatment of workers at a jeans manufacturing business , Hangyeng Darwin , a subsidiary of a Hong Kong company , in the Darwin free trade zone .
The zone was set up in 1985 with glowing predictions it would boost the Northern Territory's manufacturing base and stimulate the north.
However, five years later , after expenditure of $45million , it was showing signs of becoming an economic disaster .
A 21-year-old Chinese guest worker, Huang Hanying , from Guangdong province in southern China, flew to Melbourne, blew the whistle , exposed the exploitation of guest workers in the zone .
She claimed they were not allowed to strike ,had no right to ask for higher wages and were told that their "guarantor", usually a family member in China, could be punished if the rules were broken .
The Federal Department of Industrial Relations investigated the situation and found that one employee had received $42.69 net for a 77-hour week. Outside the workplace,"Dickensian conditions " applied.
Company accommodation, a two bedroom flat , was shared by eight people. Their leisure time was subject to a curfew and they were not allowed to gamble and drink alcohol.
In a file kept on the trade zone , it said when the story first broke about conditions , the NT Industries and Development Minister , Barry Coulter, strangely blamed Fretilin ( the East Timor freedom fighter strugglers ) and the left wing of the Labor Party .
He was quoted as saying thus . "Labor is plotting against the government and the trade zone. It is a sordid story of political manipulation."
However, Minister Coulter's press secretary, Neil Dibbs, whose death was recently reported in Little Darwin, later told journalists the company was at fault. "What we've got is factory management who are operating under the most clumsy , mediaeval circumstances : bullying people, intimidating them, behaving in a totally inappropriate manner."
Apart from starting the South East Asian Times in Darwin, still run online by his partner , Christine Pas, in Vietnam , John Loizou , adept at shorthand , spent time in Indonesia , was so highly regarded by the Vietnam government that it gave him a card which allowed him to interview officials . There he was closely involved with up and coming reporters .
