Jonathan Sri to Lead Marxist March in Brisbane
Tomorrow morning outside Parliament House in Brisbane Greens Councillor Jonathan Sri will be leading a march organised by “Refugee Action Collective”, a front group for the revolutionary Trotskyist organisation “Solidarity”.
Unshackled readers may recall that the Brisbane branch of the Refugee Action Collective was founded by veteran Marxist and “Solidarity” member Mark Gillespie as a northern offshoot of the Sydney based “Refugee Action Coalition”. The latter group was of course founded in 1999 by Ian Rintoul, one of Australia’s most fanatical Marxist militants. Rintoul grew up in Ipswich and was a member of the infamous Anarchist “Self management Group” in the mid 1970’s before converting to Trotskyism and splitting to form the Brisbane branch of the “International Socialists”. Since then he’s been a leader in several organisations devoted to overthrowing the government and is the founder and current leader of “Solidarity”.
Tomorrow’s event intends to march through the Brisbane CBD along George St and Adelaide St to the offices of the immigration department to protest the continued detention of illegal immigrants in Australia and the planned re-opening of the Christmas island detention centre.
It’s not Jonathan Sri’s first time addressing extremist organised protests (not by a long shot). Back in June last year he was a featured speaker at a “climate” rally organised by two activists from the revolutionary Trotskyist group Socialist Alternative. In The Unshackled’s excellent expose of Brisbane Anarchist leader Kathleen McLeod we showed that Ms McLeod had been boasting of her ability to use the printing resources of Green politicians such as Larrisa Waters and Jonathan Sri to promote the cause of the cowardly Anarchist murderer Jock Palfreeman. And it wasn’t it a particularly large surprise to learn that the Extinction Rebellion group that caused so much disruption to Brisbane commuters was holding its organising meetings out of Councillor Sri’s offices.
In fact a brief examination of Jonathan Sri’s recent history would indicate that he seems not to have many non-extremist friends at all.
Of course (as usual) these extremist associations seem not to have been noticed by the newshounds of the Australian media. And while normally such deliberate blindness is to be deplored in the case of Jonathan Sri perhaps it can be excused. After all the fact that houseboat living, spandex wearing, multi-coloured scarf adorned Jonathan hangs around with spittle flecked nutcases still dreaming of the Soviet Union is probably one of the least weird things about him.
He’s an odd one alright.
