Memories of a political dinosaur aren’t always what they seem: adios, Ms Rhiannon
Greens senator Lee Rhiannon will quit the Senate, The Australian Financial Review laments, Friday:
Senator Rhiannon announced her resignation ... after months of pressure for the veteran senator to vacate the seat early to give her successor the chance to benefit from incumbency ahead of the next federal election.
“Greens senator Lee Rhiannon’s red links exposed”, ran the headline to Troy Bramston’s story in The Australian, October 5 last year:
Lee Rhiannon has long downplayed her communist heritage but a new book about her mother lays bare the history of one of Australia’s leading red families ... It gives an insight into Rhiannon’s upbringing in a subversive political movement, including her involvement in the pro-Moscow Socialist Party of Australia and her trips to eastern European communist dictatorships in the 1970s and 80s.
A biography of Rhiannon’s mother Freda Brown describes her as a globetrotting communist operative, Bramston went on:
In 1977, Rhiannon headed a delegation to Moscow after an invitation was extended from the central government. In the 80s, Brown wrote extensively to her daughter about the planning and organising of her communist activities around the world and advocacy for women and issues such as education and disarmament. In 1985, Rhiannon wrote to her parents gushing about hearing US Communist Party leader Angela Davis speak at a UN conference in Nairobi. “Listening to her must be one of the best assets for the international communist movement,” she wrote.
There is no reason to question Rhiannon’s devotion to the communist cause, but sometimes her memory let her down. The Sydney Morning Herald, August 17 last year:
Controversial Greens senator Lee Rhiannon has been accused of misleading the producers of the ABC’s Four Corners by falsely identifying herself in footage of activists getting arrested at an anti-apartheid protest ... Rhiannon reject(ed) claims she tried to “rewrite history” and saying she simply made an honest mistake.
But former NSW Labor politician Meredith Burgmann told the SMH the footage from a protest against the Springboks at the SCG in 1971 was of her and her sister Verity:
Lee could not recognise herself ... I’m not sure she was even arrested during the campaign. Why has she sought to rewrite her past in this way?
Russia should pay compensation to families of MH17 victims, Julie Bishop told ABC News, Friday:
Bishop said the families of victims want Russia held to account. “They want to see closure but they also deserve justice and we will be seeking reparations for the atrocities caused by this conduct. We hold it responsible under international law for its role in the bringing down of MH17.”
Russian ambassador Grigory Logvinov sent a press release to The Australian. yesterday:
Despite of everything, all our efforts to commence a serious, solid and professional joint work are rejected out of hand. There is a well known style, a rough, clumsy algorithm. Dirty provocations are organised, and the guilty side is determined in advance. The so called “investigation” is conducted almost completely on the basis of information from social networks ... non-governmental organisations, which have tainted themselves long ago by fakes, forgeries, primitive fabrications and so on ... This unworthy style is clearly observed in the so-called “Skripal’s case”, Syrian “chemical dossier”.