Vale Jonathan Ogden, 1970 – 2014
Jonathan Ogden, former member of the International Socialist Organisation and Socialist Alternative, died on 5 February of a stroke at the young age of 44.
Jono, as he was known to friends and comrades, had a long standing commitment to socialist politics and trade unionism.
That commitment stretched back to 1988 when, as a student at The University of Queensland, he joined the fight against the National Party, which was then running the student union under president Victoria Brazil. One of Jono’s first actions was to join the occupation of the UQ radio station, 4ZZZ, to save it from Brazil’s axe. In the end, the station was forced to move off campus but survives to this day as an independent community radio broadcaster.
With the Nationals’ defeat at the 1989 state elections, some of the sting went out of politics in Queensland. But that didn’t mean that there weren’t important causes. Jono, by now a member of the International Socialist Organisation, helped to mobilise street demonstrations against the 1991 Gulf War.
In 1993, Jono was again in the thick of tussles with the cops – one of his favourite occupations – when Brisbane socialists had to defend our right to hold peaceful assemblies in the Queen Street Mall. Labor Lord Mayor Jim Soorley, formerly an adversary of Joh, tried to drive dissident politics out of the city.
Every Friday night, as dozens of free speech supporters showed up to defy the Council, large numbers of cops wrestled them into the back of waiting police vans. Jono was arrested during one of these battles for calling a plain clothes cop an “undercover pig”. We won that fight due in no small part because of the courage of people like him.
In the years that followed Jono was involved as an activist in all the struggles of the Brisbane left, in particular the fight against Pauline Hanson and the 1998 waterfront dispute.
When Socialist Alternative got off the ground in Brisbane in the early 2000s, Jono joined and remained an active member for eight years. His contribution to building the Brisbane branch will always be remembered by his comrades – in particular when he stuck with the branch in 2004 when we lost a large number of members who walked out of the organisation. He played an important role in putting the branch back on its feet and rebuilding in the years that followed.
Jono always stood up for the underdog at work. Jaimie Byrne, a friend and one of his former ISO comrades, said at his funeral: “Everyone saw him as a big hearted comrade who would do anything for his fellow comrades”. During the 1990s he worked at the Yellow Cabs call centre and was always agitating for a better deal for the workers.
In the early 2000s he got a job as a car park attendant at the Mount Olivet Hospital in Kangaroo Point where again he fought for better conditions against the penny pinching hospital administration.
Jono’s last job, at Cochlear Implants, where he worked on the factory floor for nearly ten years, saw him fight tirelessly to build the union (AMWU) among his blue collar, overwhelmingly migrant workmates. As a result of their efforts, Cochlear management for the first time had to listen to the workers and were forced to raise pay and improve conditions. More than a dozen of Jono’s workmates showed their respect for his contribution when they attended his funeral.
Jono’s personal circumstances were difficult. He joined his mother in caring for his brother Kenneth, who had an intellectual disability. And when his mother Daphne also suffered poor health, Jono helped to look after her as well, spending every weekend at her home.
The challenge of combining work, family responsibilities and political activism became too much after several years and Jono left organised politics in 2009. But he still hated the Liberals with a passion and he wasn’t going to sit at home alone crying into his beer when Tony Abbott won last year’s election. The last time we saw Jono was at the branch’s election night party in September where Jono joined us in booing the bastard every time he came on screen.
Even though Jono has now left us, his life was well lived and the working class movement is that bit better for his personal contribution. Jaimie Byrne’s tribute is fitting: “No-one’s going to remember us in the history books. But it’s the little people that make change. Jono fought the good fight and stood up for his fellow workers. He believed that a better world was possible. And that’s what we should all take from him: that together we can build a better world”.
