It is customary for new Members and Senators to use part of their first speech to give some account of their careers before their election. Despite my entreaties that new Greens Senator Lee Rhiannon address her past, she used the usual dodge of whinging that critics were reviving a ‘new McCarthyism’.
Prior to her speech, there has been a battle going on at Wikipedia about her political history. Ever since April a number of people have been trying to write a full, honest and properly referenced account of Senator Rhiannon’s political career prior to 1990 when she joined the Greens. All those efforts have been thwarted by a person called Chris Maltby, who has systematically deleted her political history prior to 1990, by suppressing any version of the Wikipedia article which might be embarrassing to Senator Rhiannon.
So what are the facts about Senator Rhiannon’s past that the NSW Greens and Mr Maltby are so keen to stop you reading?
You won’t find out at Wikipedia, but at least you will be able to find out at Hansard, which is beyond Mr Maltby’s reach.
In 1971 the Communist Party split over attitudes to the Soviet Union, particularly the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. Senator Rhiannon’s parents, Bill and Freda Brown, left the CPA and joined the Socialist Party of Australia, which was loyal to the Soviet Union and supported the invasion. The Browns joined the CPA at a time when it was totally loyal to the Soviet Union and Stalin’s leadership. They could not have remained in the CPA if they did not share this belief. Brown was the editor of the CPA paper Tribune, which strongly supported the Soviet invasion of Hungary.
By her own account, she joined the SPA in the early ‘70s, at a time when the SPA was an outspokenly pro-Soviet party. Mark Aarons, at that time himself an active communist, says she joined the SPA at its founding conference in 1971. He writes: “She became a senior office-bearer of the youth wing, serving on the central committee’s youth subcommittee; attended Australia–Soviet Friendship Society meetings; and developed close relations with Soviet, Czechoslovak and East German communist youth groups. In 1977, Rhiannon led an SPA delegation to Moscow at the invitation of Leonid Brezhnev’s neo-Stalinist regime.”
In 1972 Brian Aarons, brother of Mark, son of the CPA leader Laurie Aarons and a critic of the Soviet Union, had an exchange of letters with Lee Brown in the University of New South Wales student newspaper Tharunka. Aarons wrote: “She [Brown] might like to tell us whether she supports the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the shooting of the Polish workers and the suppression of socialist democracy in the Soviet Union. Then we can have an honest debate about revolutionary principles.” In reply, Brown did not answer this question. Instead she wrote: “Socialist countries naturally do make errors and therefore criticism and self-criticism will be forthcoming. However, I feel that Brian uses his criticism of socialist [countries] in an opportunist respectability-seeking fashion, not for constructive improvement.” This exchange has recently been used by Gerard Henderson as evidence that Rhiannon was in fact a defender of the Soviet Union’s repressive actions in the 1960s and ‘70s, something she has denied…
In 1980-83 Lee O’Gorman (as she then was) was NSW secretary of the Union of Australian Women, founded in 1950 as a CPA front organisation and controlled by the SPA after the 1971 split. In the late 1970s Bill Brown was editor of the SPA journal Survey and O’Gorman was a regular contributor to it. Her articles frequently praised the Soviet Union (then ruled by Leonid Brezhnev’s regime).
Mark Aarons wrote of Rhiannon’s past in May 2011: “This would be simply history if Rhiannon had admitted her youthful errors and moved on. But, in a lengthy blog posted last August, she defended her parents’ and her own political records… Nowhere does she acknowledge how dreadfully wrong she was about the Soviet Union, nor express regrets for her gullible admiration of this abominable system. In failing to deal with her history honestly, Rhiannon places a question mark over her suitability for any leadership role, especially in a party supposedly built on integrity.
This is part of the Wikipedia entry which the friends of Senator Rhiannon don’t wish the people of Australia to read. Sources were provided at Wikipedia for most of the statements made in the text I read into Hansard. Nevertheless, I don’t vouch for accuracy of every statement in it. Maybe some of those statements are wrong. Senator Rhiannon did not get up in the Senate and explain where the text I reproduced was wrong, or tell us the truth about her political past. Strangely, for the furthest-left person in Parliament, she made a faux appeal to tradition, “It seems that for Mr Danby nothing is sacred, even the tradition of allowing a politician to deliver their inaugural speech without comment or interference from others.”(‘Danby tells Rhiannon to reject Stalin ahead of her maiden speech’, Crikey, 24 August 2011)
Now, some people will say that it’s hypocritical for me to criticise Senator Rhiannon’s when there are people in the Labor Party who have similar pasts. It’s true that many people who grew up in the Vietnam War era were radicalised as students and joined Maoist, Trotskyist or anarchist student groups. But most of them rapidly grew out this youthful phase and became moderate social democrats – some, such as Christopher Pearson, who supported the Khmer Rouge in his youth, have even become conservatives!
Senator Rhiannon’s case is different. She grew up not as a wild student radical, but as a dedicated member of a pro-Soviet Communist Party. When the CPA tried to free itself from Stalinism, she followed her parents into the breakaway pro-Soviet SPA. She loyally supported all the crimes of the Soviet Union during that time. And this was not a passing phase for her. She remained a senior and active member of the SPA until well into her 30s. She only abandoned communism when it had visibly failed as a useful vehicle for left-wing politics. She then joined the Greens, which is now the main vehicle for left-wing politics in Australia.
People should not be punished for the follies of their past. We should forgive and forget. But as Mark Aarons pointed out in the text I quoted, forgiveness must be preceded by repentance. Christopher Pearson has expressed his shame over his support for the Khmer Rouge, and that should be accepted. Labor figures such as Michael Costa have made similar statements. But Senator Rhiannon has expressed no such regrets. She says she is no longer a communist, and I accept that. But she has not said that communism is and always was a false and pernicious doctrine which caused the deaths of tens of millions of people, and is still causing oppression and misery in China, Vietnam, North Korea and Cuba.
Australians would have liked to have known what Senator Rhiannon now thinks about certain events of the 1970s and ‘80s which took place while she was an enthusiastic supporter of the Soviet Union. What does she now think of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan? What does she now think of the suppression of Solidarity and the imposition of martial law in Poland? What does she now think of the Berlin Wall, and the shooting of people trying to escape across it to freedom? What does she now think of the persecution of Andrei Sakharov, Nathan Sharansky and Yelena Bonner? What does she now think of the anti-Semitism of the Brezhnev regime? I’m sure I’m not the only person who’d like to know.
My challenge to Senator Rhiannon was to tell us clearly and honestly about her political past. This went unanswered. Her brief, emotional reference to all the criticism of her determination to tear out the pages of her history, like they used to from the Great Soviet Encyclopedia in the 1930s after Bukharin or Zinoviev were purged:
She said: “Over the recent months there has been a revival of cold-war rhetoric and McCarthyism-style politics with the intent to discredit my work and, in turn, that of thousands of Australians who have joined socialist and communist parties. By far, the majority of these people were motivated by altruistic values and a desire to serve the best interests of Australia and all humanity.”
What Australians wanted to hear Senator Rhiannon say was that she had repudiated communism, not just as a tactical convenience but as a matter of conviction; and that she regretted the harm caused by her years of advocacy and activism for the Soviet Union. Senator Rhiannon did none of these things and the Australian people will judge her accordingly.
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