Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

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. I will be very interested to see how much new Greens senator Rhiannon chooses to tell us about her political past, because so far she and her supporters have been very reticent. As evidence of this, let me tell the House about a battle which has been going on on the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, where ever since April a number of people have been trying to write a full, honest and properly referenced account of Senator Rhiannon's early career. All of those efforts have been thwarted by a person called Chris Maltby, who has repeatedly deleted any honest account on the grounds that such attention is disproportionate. Maltby lives in Bondi and is the husband of Waverly Greens Councillor Prue Cancian. He is identified on his Facebook page as a member of the New South Wales Greens. I suspect, although I cannot prove, that he is acting on behalf of the New South Wales Greens or perhaps just the Rhiannon faction. He suppresses any version of Wikipedia which might embarrass the senator.

So what are the facts about Senator Rhiannon's past that Mr Maltby is so keen to stop you reading? You cannot find these censored facts on Wikipedia, but at least you will be able to find them in Hansard. At least in Hansard Australians can read a version of the text which Mr Maltby has been repeatedly excising from Wikipedia. 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.

Mark Aarons writes: 'Lee Rhiannon became a senior office bearer of the youth wing of the SPA, the Socialist Party of Australia, serving on the central committee's youth subcommittee, attending the Australia-Soviet Friendship Society and developing close relations with the Soviet, Czechoslovak and East German communist youth groups.' In '77, Rhiannon led an SPA delegation to Moscow at the invitation of Leonid Brezhnev. In 1980-93, Lee O'Gorman, as she was then, was New South Wales Secretary of the Union of Australian Women, founded in 1950 as a CPA front and controlled by the SPA after the 1971 split. In the late 1970s, Bill Brown was the editor of the SPA journal Survey and O'Gorman was a regular contributor to it. Her articles frequently praised the Soviet Union.

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 …

…   …   …

But 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.

So there it is: the text which the friends of Senator Rhiannon do not wish the people of Australia to read. Sources were provided at Wikipedia for most of the statements for the text I have just read. Maybe some of these statements are wrong. If so, Senator Rhiannon should get up and explain in the Senate where the text I have read out is wrong and tell us the truth about her political past.

Senator Rhiannon's case is that she did not grow up as a wild student radical but was a dedicated member of the pro-Soviet Communist Party. When the CPA tried to free itself from Stalinism, she joined 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 far-left politics. She then joined the Greens, which is now the main vehicle for those kinds of politics in Australia.

It may be said that people should not be punished for the follies of the past and we should forgive and forget; but, as Mark Aarons pointed out in the text I quoted, forgiveness must be preceded by repentance. 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 that caused the deaths of tens of millions of people and is still causing oppression and misery in China, Vietnam, North Korea and Cuba. I would like to know what Senator Rhiannon now thinks of those events of the seventies and eighties which took place while she was an enthusiastic supporter of the Soviet Union. What does she think of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan? What does she think of the suppression of Solidarity and the imposition of martial law in Poland? What does she think of the Berlin Wall, the shooting of people trying to escape to freedom? What does she think of the persecution of Andrei Sakharov and the Soviet dissidents? What does she think of the anti-Semitism of the Brezhnev regime? My challenge to Senator Rhiannon as she makes her first speech is to tell us honestly and clearly about her political past, tell us clearly that she has repudiated Communism not just as a tactical convenience but as a matter of conviction. (Time expired)