Lee Rhiannon
Lee Rhiannon is an Australian Greens Senator. Senator Rhiannon is the leading light of the Left of the Australian Greens and a contender for the leadership of the party.
She is the daughter of Freda Brown and Bill Brow, who were both Communist Party of Australia leaders,
The August 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia precipitated a bitter struggle inside the CPA. The majority condemned Moscow, but a vocal minority supported the invasion.
Soon after the invasion, Lee’s parents formed a clandestine relationship with the Soviet embassy, which directed and financed those who opposed the mainstream CPA’s stand on Czechoslovakia. By late 1971, it was clear they could not seize back control of the CPA. So the dissidents formed a new, pro-Soviet communist party, the Socialist Party of Australia, which uncritically supported and promoted Soviet policies.
Lee joined the SPA, attending its founding congress. 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.
A secret meeting was set up between now Greens Senator Lee Rhiannon and the man identified as the KGB’s Station Chief in Australia before she went on a lengthy 1970 overseas trip, declassified ASIO files reveal.
Although only 18 in 1970, Senator Rhiannon’s activities caused such concern among the intelligence community that the then ASIO Director-General, Peter Barbour, wrote to British authorities alerting them to her visit and asking for information on her activities while in their country.
ASIO officers from that time confirm many in the agency believed the Soviet to be the KGB resident in Australia, the most senior Soviet spy in the country.
Today Rhiannon is still very close to the SEARCH Foundation, which was established to carry on the work of the now defunct Euro-communist faction of the CPA, by working through the Australian Labor Party and the Greens.
At an October 2000 seminar commemorating the CPA’s founding, Rhiannon reportedly “argued that a broad-based left movement is being built already and argued that the Greens is closest to the best of the CPA’s politics and methods.”
In May 2010, she addressed the SEARCH Foundation’s Australian Left Renewal Conference, lamenting her job in keeping the Greens on a left-wing trajectory.
Rhiannon is also a supporter of the communist controlled Agent Orange Justice — Australia Vietnam Solidarity Network” which was established in 2011, as the Australian section of the international campaign to make pay “reparations” the United States government responsible for its 10-year spraying of Agent Orange between 1961 and 1971.
This is part of an international “shakedown operation” orchestrated by the Vietnamese communist government.
(more…)
