JULIA Gillard wants to blame Tony Abbott for her minority government’s dysfunctionality but that is a huge stretch. Body She, her Green partners and the independent MPs Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor are responsible for the diabolical mess that has paralysed Canberra and left Australians disgusted. The support Gillard relies on is her biggest weakness. This was driven home to this writer when Greens Senator Lee Rhiannon sent a message to this newspaper via her media adviser Jemma Bailey seeking to correct a statement made in this column that Rhiannon had once been a member of the Australian Association of Communist Unity—a claim previously published and still unchallenged by the Sydney Institute’s Gerard Henderson in his September 9 edition of Media Watch Dog. If she was never a member of the ACU, I stand corrected. It is difficult to nail down the facts in this senator’s past. Ms Rhiannon, nee Lee Brown and for a period Lee O’Gorman, did not dispute the statement that she had been a member of the Soviet-funded Socialist Party of Australia. Her denial of membership in the ACU, of which her father was a founder, is something of a first for Rhiannon who has been singularly reticent to disclose details of her long association with the extreme Left. There is not a mention of her support for Communist organisations in her parliamentary biography, yet the record, from her birth to two of Australia’s most prominent Communists, Bill and Freda Brown, in 1951, shows she had an unbroken association with Communist groups till she joined the Greens. Lee Brown-O’Gorman-Rhiannon was a supporter of communist regimes in Eastern Europe until the Berlin Wall came down. She even succeeded her father as editor of the Soviet-sponsored magazine Survey, and wrote the editorial in its last edition, published in July-August 1990. Encouraged by the senator’s contact with The Sunday Telegraph, she was asked whether she had ever accepted money or travel benefits from any arm of the Soviet government? She was also asked whether Survey accepted Soviet funding when she was editor, whether she attended the Broad Left Conference in March 1985, (which her father wrote about in his book The Communist Movement and Australia) and, if so, who was she representing at that conference. The pro-Soviet ACU, which Rhiannon says she did not join, was formed by her father and another communist, Pat Clancy, at that meeting. She was asked too whether she was ever a member of the Search Foundation, a Soviet-backed organisation and whether she or Survey ever received money from the Search Foundation? No response was received from the Greens senator. It must be noted here that Gillard also does not encourage exploration of her political past, particularly with extreme Left groups like the Socialist Forum, but while Rhiannon’s reluctance to acknowledge her former support for the repressive regimes of Eastern bloc communism may be fascinating to scholars of Soviet influence, it is the influence of the Greens upon the Gillard government which is of greatest relevance today. As a new armada of people-smuggler vessels has begun arriving at Christmas Island, Gillard has singled out the Opposition leader Tony Abbott for her vituperative claims that he is responsible for encouraging this resurgence in people trafficking. Whether this ludicrous charge is the first from her new spin doctor John McTernan, formerly principal spin merchant to former UK PM Tony Blair, is not clear but Australians may not be as dumb as this Scot believes. Most readers would be well aware that the revival in the illegal boat traffic began as soon as the Rudd-Gillard government weakened Australia’s border protection laws—laws which had seen the number of asylum seekers in detention reduced to four. The failure of East Timor, Malaysia and other hare-brained solutions had nothing to do with Abbott, either, and if she is looking for someone to blame for the rejection of her current amendments to the Migration Act she need look no further than her partners in the minority government, the Greens. While she will not highlight the Greens rejection of her failed border protection program, she has embraced the Greens campaign against free speech and, through Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, introduced a retrogressive attack on press freedom. Her government’s assault on the media under the guise of its independent media inquiry contains three phrases in the terms of reference which, if the issues were not so serious, would be considered farcical. The first deals with the notion of print media regulation—an idea which was rejected in medieval times. The second has to do with the inquiry examining a media business model when the government, and specifically Conroy, cannot produce a business model for the expensive, and monopolistic NBN; and the third is the exploration of publication in “the national interest”. Just as Gillard maliciously seeks to blame Abbott for her border protection policy she, with the feverish backing of the Greens and Oakeshott, seeks to punish the print media and News Ltd—the publishers of this newspaper—with her own crash in popularity. Having a government determine the content of newspapers and decide what should or should not be published in the “national interest” was key to the Soviet regime’s stranglehold on power. It is as if the Berlin Wall did not come down in 1990. That Gillard and her minority Green and independent partners have salvaged this disgraceful concept of media control from the sewer of history demonstrates their desperation to cling to power. Labor and friends long for 1984 | Daily Telegraph Piers Akerman Blog
