Who Are The Four Greens Pollies Speaking At The IMARC Riot?
Stalinist and ex-Senator Rhiannon
Who are the four Greens pollies speaking at the IMARC riot?
Not one, not two, but four prominent members of the Australian Greens are due to speak at the Socialist Alternative-organised blockade of the IMARC mining conference in Melbourne over the course of the next few days.
The Australian Greens support for this violent display of organised mass lawbreaking has gone unmentioned by Australia’s mainstream media. You would think the third largest political party in Australia supporting an illegal blockade, organised by a revolutionary Marxist group, might have been newsworthy. But unless you’ve been reading The Unshackled, you wouldn’t have had a clue.
We reported when the Greens on Yarra Council voted in support of a motion put by disgraced socialist and alleged sex pest Stephen Jolly to support the “Blockade IMARC” event. We reported when the Greens councillors on Moreland Council did the same for a motion put by Socialist Alliance co-convenor Sue Bolton. And we reported when the Greens councillors on Darebin Council, lacking an openly Marxist colleague to put the motion of support, made up for this deficiency by putting the motion themselves.
We also reported when the Greens Victorian State Executive, led by co-convenor Colleen Hartland, officially put the support of the entire Victorian Greens branch behind an action whose Marxist organisers openly boasted that they wanted to recreate the S11 riots of 2000, the largest Australian left-wing riots of the 21st century.
And now we’ll point out that all four of the advertised keynote speakers, at this event organised by a violent Trotskyist group, are current or former elected Greens representatives. Because God knows the mainstream media won’t.
Federal Greens MP Adam
Bandt
Co-deputy leader of the Australian Greens Adam Bandt is not normally recognised as being from the extreme wing of the party, but like many of the supposedly moderate “Tree Tory” faction, Adam has associations with Marxist extremists in his past. Back in his uni student days in the early 90s, young Adam was a part of the “Left Alliance” group. Students aligned to the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) formed the Left Alliance in 1983, and by the time Bandt was involved, it also included the Democratic Socialist Party (DSP), the precursor group to the Socialist Alliance.
Adam will be speaking at 10am on Wednesday. His inclusion is an interesting one; despite his radical past, Adam is considered a bit of a careerist these days and speaking at what is clearly an illegal blockade organised by a radical Marxist group seems a bit out of character.
One wonders if the attendant publicity is something Adam has in mind, considering the rumours of instability behind party leader Richard Di Natale. Never hurts to rile up some of the more fanatical amongst the far-left base when you need to make sure your name stays in lights.
Victorian Greens
Leader Samantha Ratnam
Samantha Ratnam first came to prominence as a Greens Councillor and later Mayor of Moreland Council. It was her initiative to dump Australia Day celebrations in 2017 after saying that she was “proud of council for taking this step”. Ratnam took the leadership of the Victorian Greens 15 days after being parachuted into the vacant Legislative Council spot vacated by the disgraced Greg Barber – a remarkable feat that no doubt had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that her husband, Colin Jacobs, was co-convenor of the Victorian party at the time.
Nepotism: it’s a game all the family can play.
The Unshackled readers would know Ms Ratnam for two things: leading her party to a massive electoral defeat in the 2018 State election, and a distressing tendency to show up to Marxist-organised events and speak under an Anarcho-Communist variant of the “Antifa” flag. Samantha will be speaking to her ideological fellow travellers at the IMARC blockade at 8.30am on Tuesday.
Former Greens Member
of the Victorian Legislative Assembly Lidia Thorpe
Lidia Thorpe made a big splash when elected to the Melbourne inner-northern seat of Northcote in a by-election in 2017. She made slightly less of a splash when voted out just over 12 months later. During her short time in Parliament, Ms Thorpe took advantage of her position and her Aboriginal heritage to call lots of people racist. She called for the Australian flag to be lowered to half mast on Australia Day. Said white people weren’t allowed to talk about violence and sexual abuse in Aboriginal communities because of “privilege”. Claimed that Aboriginal family dysfunction would never go away until a “treaty” was signed. And she spoke at a Flemington rally organised by the Trotskyist group Solidarity to celebrate the Marxist-inspired riots that attacked police outside the Milo Yiannopoulos event in 2017.
Considering her previous associations with extremists and her distinct dislike of Australia, her willingness to speak at an illegal blockade organised by a totalitarian socialist group isn’t that surprising.
Former Greens Senator
Lee Rhiannon
Holy crap, where do we start.
Former Senator Rhiannon has a long and colourful history as an outright Stalin-lover. It was something she inherited from her parents who led a split in the Australian Communist Party, when that body started to admit that maybe Stalin murdering 30 million-odd people wasn’t actually a perfidious capitalist lie after all. Both Lee and her parents remained devout advocates for Stalin for decades. Rhiannon’s mother even held the honour of being the only Australian woman to be awarded the Stalin Peace Prize.
Rhiannon wasn’t a passive victim of her parents’ views. In 1977, she travelled to the Soviet Union and studied at the International Lenin School in Moscow. The International Lenin School was specifically designed to educate foreign Marxists in how to undermine the societies they had come from in preparation for the glorious international proletarian revolution.
I think Lee learned her lessons well.
Lee was still editing the only pro-Stalinist newspaper in Australia right up until around the point the Berlin Wall fell. She then led what remained of the old Communist apparatus in Sydney, lock-step into the Greens.
She has never renounced her views and in recent years was even one of the catalysts for a grand civil war inside the NSW Greens that saw both Lee lose her Senate seat and her more moderate rivals driven either out of the party or into submission.
It’s a little weird to say it, but when Rhiannon speaks alongside Samantha Ratnam on Tuesday morning to a crowd of Trotskyists, anarchists, black nationalists and unaffiliated Marxists, she may actually be more ideologically extreme than the nutcases she’s addressing.
What does this mean?
It measn the Greens are no longer even vaguely worried about the optics of cosying up to their Communist comrades anymore. Back when the Greens were founded, Bob Brown organised it so that various Trotskyist groups (specifically the Democratic Socialist Party) were expelled as a condition of the state parties coming together as one federal apparatus. Old Stalinists in the NSW party like Lee Rhiannon were tolerated as they were considered isolated, powerless and, for the most part, irrelevant in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
One of the DSP activists who was expelled by Bob Brown in that purge was Sue Bolton. The same Sue Bolton whose motion to support a Marxist-organised riot, the Greens on Moreland Council unanimously supported.
Despite the best efforts of the more moderate factions, the Australian Greens are getting ever more comfortable associating with people whose stated goal is overthrowing the government and implementing a totalitarian state. The reason for this is simple: their friends in the media have never made an issue of it. Because their friends in the media don’t see anything wrong with it.
And that’s what should terrify us all.
