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Lee Rhiannon

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Intelligent Mr Toad (talk | contribs) at 12:40, 23 May 2011 (Oh no you don't. I'm sorry if Greens don't like this history, but trying to suppress just makes it more prominent. You wanted a fully sourced section and now you've got one. Deleting it is just partisan vandalism.). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Lee Rhiannon
Senator-elect for New South Wales
Incumbent
Assumed office
1 July 2011
Member of the New South Wales Legislative Council
In office
27 March 1999 – 19 July 2010
Personal details
Born (1951-05-30) 30 May 1951 (age 73)
NationalityAustralian Australia
Political partyAustralian Greens
WebsiteLeeRhiannon.org.au

Lee Rhiannon (born 30 May 1951) is an Australian politician and member of the Australian Greens. Rhiannon was elected to the New South Wales Legislative Council at the 1999 state election for the Australian Greens, and subsequently re-elected at the 2007 state election. She stood down after being elected as a Greens Senator for New South Wales at the 2010 federal election.

Early political activities

Rhiannon was born Lee Brown, the daughter of Bill and Freda Brown, who were both lifelong members of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) - Freda joined in 1936 and Bill in 1940. Rhiannon asserts that she was never a party member.[1] She obtained a Bachelor of Science, majoring in botany and zoology, with honours in botany at the University of New South Wales, graduating in 1975.[2] Her parents' membership of the CPA led to documentation of Brown's life by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) from an early age.[3] During the 1970s she was arrested during anti-apartheid protestsm and in the 1980s she helped organise the "peace camp" protest outside the joint US-Australian defence facility at Pine Gap, central Australia.[4]

In 1971 the CPA split over attitudes to the Soviet Union, and particulary the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Bill and Freda Brown left the CPA and joined the Socialist Party of Australia (SPA), which was loyal to the Soviet Union and supported the invasion. Today Rhiannon asserts of her parents "They were not Stalinists."[5] However, they joined the CPA in the 1930s, at a time when it was totally loyal to the Soviet Union and Stalin's leadership of it: they could not have remained in the CPA if they did not share this belief.[6] In 1956 Bill Brown was the editor of the CPA newspaper, Tribune, which strongly supported the Soviet invasion of Hungary.

Rhiannon has stated that she did not support the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, which took place when she was 17.[7] Nevertheless, by her own account, she joined the SPA "about five years later", in the early '70s, at a time the SPA was an outspokenly pro-Soviet party. Mark Aarons, at that time himself an active communist, says she joined the SPA at its founding conference in 1971.[8]. He writes: "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."[9]

In 1972 Brian Aarons, son of the CPA leader Laurie Aarons and a critic of the Soviet Union, had an exchange of letters with Lee Brown in the University of New South Wales student newspaper Tharunka. Aarons wrote: "She [Brown] might like to tell us whether she supports the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the shooting of the Polish workers and the suppression of socialist democracy in the Soviet Union. Then we can have an honest debate about revolutionary principles." In reply, Brown did not answer this question. Instead she wrote: "Socialist countries naturally do make errors and therefore criticism and self-criticism will be forthcoming. However, I feel that Brian uses his criticism of socialist [countries] in an opportunist respectibility-seeking fashion, not for constructive improvement."[10] This exchange has recently been used by Gerard Henderson as evidence that Rhiannon was in fact a defender of the Soviet Union's repressive actions in the 1960s and '70s, something she has denied.

Lee Brown married Paddy O'Gorman, from whom she separated in 1987. They had three children. Following her separation, she adopted the surname "Rhiannon", which is the name of a figure from Welsh mythology.

In 1980-83 Lee O'Gorman (as she then was) was NSW secretary of the Union of Australian Women, founded in 1950 as a CPA front organisation[11] and controlled by the SPA after the 1971 split. In the late 1970s Bill Brown was editor of the SPA journal Survey and O'Gorman was a regular contributor to it. Her articles frequently praised the Soviet Union (then ruled by Leonid Brezhnev's regime).[12]

Mark Aarons (brother of Brian) 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... 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."[13] Rhiannon has accused Henderson, Aarons and other critics of bias against her. She writes of Aarons's article: "He goes on to make a series of other baseless allegations. The best that can be said for this article is that his extreme bias is clearly revealed."[14]

It is not known when Rhiannon left the SPA. Gerard Henderson suggests: "Lee Rhiannon (nee Brown) remained a member of the SPA until the eve of the collapse of Soviet communism in the late 1980s," but provides no source for this assertion.[15] Rhiannon joined the Greens in 1990.

Parliamentary career

New South Wales

Lee Rhiannon at a press briefing in 2007

Rhiannon contested the New South Wales Legislative Council at the 1999 state election for the Australian Greens. She was elected with three percent of the statewide vote (more than 100,000 votes), joining fellow Green Ian Cohen in the state's upper house of parliament.[16] She was re-elected with over nine percent of the vote (more than 300,000 votes) at the 2007 state election, taking her seat with three other Greens MLCs.[17]

Rhiannon used her New South Wales Parliamentary maiden speech in 1999 to announce her opposition to a development proposal by the Carr Labor Government for Walsh Bay, Sydney. Rhiannon called on the Australian Labor Party to advance instead the Party's constitutional ideals for "redistribution of political and economic power" and "the development of public enterprises based upon... forms of social ownership". Rhiannon also spoke against Australia's British Colonial Legacy and announced that she was the first MLC to sit in the NSW Parliament without the title "honourable". She spoke of her family's involvement in the labour movement and acknowledged her parents' membership of the Communist Party of Australia and said she was proud of their tradition of "optimistic social activism". She reiterated Greens opposition to privatisation of public assets and to the Howard Government's Goods and Services Tax.[18]

Rhiannon served on the following Committees in state parliament: General Purpose Standing Committees, Joint Select Committees on the Cross City Tunnel, a Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, a Standing Committee on Law and Justice, a Select Committee on the NSW Taxi Industry, a Select Committee on the Increase in Prisoner Population, and a Committee on the Office of the Ombudsman and Police Integrity Commission.[18]

In November 2002, in the week prior to protests against the World Trade Organisation in Sydney, Rhiannon spoke in support of the protesters and organised a public conference on Civil Disobedience at NSW Parliament.[19] Rhiannon spoke against police actions during the S11 Protests, which violently protested against meetings of the World Economic Forum in Melbourne in 2000. Rhiannon called on Police Minister Michael Costa to guarantee that police violence would not be used against protesters in Sydney.[20] Costa in return called on Rhiannon to resign for hosting the civil disobedience seminar.[21] Rhiannon was critical of Michael Costa's policies in his subsequent term as Labor's treasurer, and described him in 2005 as a "liability".[22] Rhiannon lobbied the Vatican against considering the Archbishop of Sydney, George Pell, for the position of Pope because of his conservative views.[23] In 2007 she referred him to the to the parliamentary privileges committee, alleging "contempt of parliament" for comments he made in opposition to embryonic stem cell research legislation.[24][25]

Federal parliament

Rhiannon contested and won a seat in the Australian Senate for New South Wales at the 2010 federal election for the Australian Greens. She resigned from the New South Wales Legislative Council when the federal election was called,[26] with a ballot of party members selecting Cate Faehrmann to fill the casual vacancy.[27][28]

Rhiannon was elected with 10.7 percent of the statewide vote (more than 400,000 votes), a swing to the Greens in New South Wales of 2.3 percent since the previous federal election.[29] She will share the balance of power with eight other Greens Senators from July 2011.[30]

The NSW Greens State Conference prior to the 2011 NSW State Election adopted of a resolution in support of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel.[31] In support of the statement, Rhiannon said it was "motivated by the universal principles of freedom, justice and equal rights".[31] Following the election, Federal leader Bob Brown said that he had conveyed his disapproval of this policy emphasis to Rhiannon.[32]

As a senator-elect, Rhiannon toured the Hunter Region of New South Wales to build a campaign to halt open cut and coal seam gas expansion in the area.[33]

References

  1. ^ http://www.leerhiannon.org.au/blog/responding-to-attacks-on-my-family-and-political-background
  2. ^ http://www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/prod/parlment/members.nsf/0/32b725a7516e9802ca256be2002535a5?OpenDocument
  3. ^ http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/asio-spooks-spied-on-little-girls/story-e6freuy9-1225843222541
  4. ^ http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/im-no-watermelon-rhiannon/story-e6frg6nf-1226032286731
  5. ^ http://www.leerhiannon.org.au/blog/responding-to-attacks-on-my-family-and-political-background
  6. ^ Stuart Macintyre, the leading historian of the CPA, writes: "From 1930 the Communist Party of Australia adopted an iron discipline... that subordinated it to a nominally international organisation [the Comintern] that was itself subjected to the control of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union under the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin." (Stuart Macintyre, The Reds, 240)
  7. ^ http://www.leerhiannon.org.au/blog/responding-to-attacks-on-my-family-and-political-background
  8. ^ http://kurtrudder.blogspot.com/2011/05/greens-and-fundamentalism.html
  9. ^ http://kurtrudder.blogspot.com/2011/05/greens-and-fundamentalism.html
  10. ^ The correspondence is reproduced here: http://www.thesydneyinstitute.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Tharunka-Lee-Brown-and-Brian-Aarons.pdf
  11. ^ http://arts.anu.edu.au/sss/mariansawer/IWD2011.pdf
  12. ^ The journalist Gerard Henderson has documented Lee O'Gorman's contributions to Survey: http://www.thesydneyinstitute.com.au/media-watch-dog-issue-65/
  13. ^ http://kurtrudder.blogspot.com/2011/05/greens-and-fundamentalism.html
  14. ^ http://www.leerhiannon.org.au/blog/responding-to-attacks-on-my-family-and-political-background
  15. ^ http://www.thesydneyinstitute.com.au/issue-90/
  16. ^ NSW 1999 state election upper house results: NSWEC
  17. ^ NSW 2007 state election upper house results: NSWEC
  18. ^ a b Cite error: The named reference NSW Parliament was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  19. ^ "Labor's new crime: Civil disobedience". The Sydney Morning Herald. 1 November 2002.
  20. ^ "Hey Joh: Costa's the new demon along the watchtower". The Sydney Morning Herald. 14 November 2002.
  21. ^ http://www.cpa.org.au/z-archive/g2002/1118wto.html
  22. ^ http://www.cpa.org.au/z-archive/g2005/1223dingo.html
  23. ^ "Greens lobby Vatican to reject Pell". Greens NSW. 13 April 2005. Retrieved 12 May 2011. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
  24. ^ "Inquiry into comments made by Cardinal George Pell". Parliament of NSW. 29 September 2007. Retrieved 12 May 2011. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
  25. ^ "Pell slams "stalinist" parliamentary contempt probe". Catholic News. 18 June 2007. Retrieved 12 May 2011. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
  26. ^ "Greens' Rhiannon quits for federal bid". Australian Broadcasting Corporation. 6 February 2009. Retrieved 21 August 2009. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
  27. ^ "Greens announce new team for NSW Parliament". 29 November 2009. Retrieved 4 December 2009.
  28. ^ "NSW Greens plot political merry-go-round". The Sydney Morning Herald. 29 November 2009. Retrieved 4 January 2010.
  29. ^ 2010 NSW Senate results: AEC
  30. ^ Greens' Rhiannon gets Senate spot: SMH 15 September 2010
  31. ^ a b "Israel boycotts now official NSW Greens policy". Australian Jewish News. 9 December 2010. Retrieved 9 May 2011. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
  32. ^ ""Greens leader Bob Brown slaps down Lee Rhiannon on Israel boycott policy"". The Australian. 1 April 2011. Retrieved 9 May 2011. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)'
  33. ^ http://www.cpa.org.au/guardian/2011/1488/07-greens-tour-hunter

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