The Communist Party Dissolution Act, the Nazi Salute and the State of Democracy in Australia
So, now we have rushed legislation to cancel the Nazi salute, with Daniel Andrews and Albo seizing the moment to virtue signal and Poodle Dutton waddling along behind in agreement. The hilarious irony of Dictator Dan, the Covid totalitarian’s totalitarian, accusing anyone else of fascism is priceless, though, no doubt, lost on low information Victorians who pride themselves, doubly ironically, on inhabiting “the Education State”. (Check their number plates).
This is all on the back of a few protesters at a trans-thingy rally outside the Parliament in Melbourne waving what may or may not have been a Nazi salute.
These characters may or may not have been paid actors or genuine neo-Nazis, or something else entirely. For all we know, they may have been high spirited, youthfully indiscreet Perrottet-style Nazi imitators doing the equivalent of high spirited, youthfully indiscreet Trudeau-style blackface. Their appearance at the Melbourne rally was certainly convenient. In Covid-world, where democratic politics have morphed seamlessly into psyops and propaganda, one is tempted to believe that our politicians would do literally anything to maintain or increase their power, and conceal their real intentions and motives in the process. Pay some actors to do some Nazi salutes at an otherwise innocent, though controversial, protest? Too easy.
There is no doubt the Nazi salute moment has been a case of convergent opportunism for our political “leaders”, on a grand scale. There was something in it for all of them. For Andrews, it was just something else to ban, like the sanctity of the Catholic confessional and conversion therapy. He just likes banning things, other than infanticide on demand, political police and mercy killings for the infirm. For Albo, well, he didn’t want to miss out on one-upping Daniel Andrews. For the post-Matt Guy Liberal Party in Victoria, it as the perfect opportunity to get rid of the inconvenient Moira Deeming, who believes in things like fixed definitions of women and other conservative things. After all, it was the Victorian Liberals who expelled Bernie Finn just for being exuberantly pro-life.
But it turns out that the embrace of the Nazi salute ban has a bit of history in Australia. It was, after all, that renowned freedom-fighter, Sir Robert Menzies, whose mantle every Liberal leader seeks to emulate, who sought (unsuccessfully) to ban the Communist Party in 1950 and 1951, including through a referendum. The latter didn’t fail by much, on either the popular vote or the vote across the States. There was an Act of Parliament, then a High Court challenge, then the referendum.
As the Museum of Australian Democracy notes:
When Menzies swept into power at the federal election in December 1949, his policy included the banning of the Communist Party. The coalition’s Communist Party Dissolution Act 1950 became law on 20 October 1950. The Act included three measures to deal with communism: 1. The Communist Party was declared to be an unlawful association and, as such, was to be dissolved, its property forfeited without compensation. 2. The Governor-General was authorised to declare bodies (such as trade unions) communist affiliates. The Governor-General could declare these bodies unlawful, satisfied that their existence was prejudicial to Australia’s security and defence. The Governor-General was authorised to declare a person as a communist and engaged, or likely to engage, in activities prejudicial to Australia’s security and defence. Effectively, such a person could not be employed by the Commonwealth. Furthermore, such a person could not hold office in a labour union or industry vital to Australia’s security and defence.
The Communist Party and several unions launched an immediate challenge in the High Court, former attorney-general in the Curtin and Chifley Labor governments, Dr H.V. Evatt, appearing for the Waterside Workers Federation. On 9 March 1951 the High Court, by a majority of 6 to 1, ruled the Communist Party Dissolution Act 1950 unconstitutional. In summary, the High Court decided that because Australia was not in a state of war the government did not have the power to proscribe organisations. Moreover, the Act prevented the Communist Party and its members from disproving allegations made against them. The High Court ruled the threat posed by the party did not warrant the imposition of such peremptory legal penalties.
The Menzies government then put the issue to the people via a constitutional referendum on 22 September 1951, seeking to change the constitution to give Parliament the power to ban the Communist Party. For such a change to the Constitution to succeed the referendum had to pass with a double majority, in accordance with Section 128 of the Australian Constitution. This meant that a majority of all electors nationally would have to vote yes, and a majority of states would have to vote yes, for the change to become law.
The proposed constitutional amendment was rejected by the voters under both requirements, winning the support of 49.44% of the national vote and being approved by only 3 states: Queensland, Tasmania and Western Australia. However, had only 30,000 people in South Australia or Victoria voted Yes rather than No the proposal would have succeeded (emphasis added).
http://static.moadoph.gov.au/ophgovau/media/images/apmc/docs/82-Communist-Party-ban.pdf
Banning a political party in a democracy is a big deal – perhaps unconstitutional, even – whatever it stands for. If you believe in freedom of expression. But then again, we know that standing up for free speech isn’t exactly high on every Aussie’s to-do list. Just look at our tolerance of, and indifference to, the appalling Section 18c of the Racial Discrimination Act, 1975. Just look at the way we get by with cancel culture, with non-platforming deplorables on social media, with shadow banning, with Big Tech censorship, with Google’s tricks with online search, with Barnaby Joyce getting Katie Hopkins (not to mention Johnny Depp’s dogs) deported for crimes against the State.
If we are in the business of banning political views or organisations deemed (by whom?) to be beyond the pale, perhaps we should cast the net a little wider than the poor old neo-Nazi bovver boys in Spring Street.
What about a party that locks up its own citizens and beats grandmothers with batons, that bangs the heads of protesters into the concrete floors at Flinders Street Station, that gets its police to invade the home of a pregnant mother accused of using social media to advertise a protest? That would be the Labor Party. Should we ban them? What about a party that allows its members, in good “conscience”, to make it legal to kill unborn babies, contributing to the slaughter of the innocent that began in earnest after Roe v Wade in the 1970s. That would be, well, just about all of them. What about a party that wilfully seeks to destroy the Australian economy? Should we dissolve the Greens? What about a party that makes it illegal for people who refuse to take an experimental, harmful, unnecessary, useless jab produced by a global drugs cartel to visit their local Kmart or BigW? That would be the Liberal Party (of New South Wales). Ban them as well?
The whole of the political class in Australia, with the media along for the ride, declared a civil war on its own citizens during the Covid plandemic. An illegal war. If anyone needs the Nuremberg Two treatment, it wouldn’t be a tinpot collection of gatecrashing troublemakers in Melbourne.
And it wasn’t only the politicians involved in this. It was Chief Health Officers. It was the CEO and the Board of the Therapeutic Goods Administration. It was all those cops “just following orders”. It was the corporate media and the journalist class. It was the greedy academics who put research grant-making ahead of virus-truth. The perpetrators of indictable offences that directly led to unnecessary deaths, including those of innocent children that were never in the remotest danger from Covid yet were forced or pressured into taking the Covid vaccines. It was the corporate sector that enforced vaccine mandates, that put loyal employees out of work and, in some cases, out of a career. It was the supine churches and their bishop-middle managers, who shut their churches and lost souls. Let’s lock THEM up. Crimes against humanity without a Nazi salute in sight. Every last one of them still has his or her day job.
What about people who sabotage the economy by their actions? Well, I suppose it is illegal to do a climate protest on the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Unless you have a sympathetic judge.
Hal Colebatch wrote a compelling book (Australia’s Secret War) on how unions sabotaged Australia’s war effort in World War Two. It does happen.
https://quadrant.org.au/product/australias-secret-war-unions-sabotaged-troops-world-war-ii/
It is at least plausible to argue that natural disasters like the NSW Northern Rivers floods of February and March 2022 were worsened, perhaps even caused, by wilful acts of green sabotage, including acts of omission in not attending to faulty infrastructure whose poor state of repair contributed directed to deaths, injuries, the destruction of homes and homelessness. (Like blaming it all on climate change gets them off the hook).
Let’s make climate fraudsters, scammers, shysters and charlatans illegal. Lock them all up.
In any event, who gets to decide which political parties, activists and actions (like salutes) should be declared illegal? Menzies himself started having second thoughts about prescribing that the Governor-General would have the power to decide who was and as not a Communist. Some of those identified as Communists were found not to be. Oh dear. All a bit too Joe McCarthy for your average liberal.
We once used to lock up illegal homosexuals. They were deemed to be beyond the pale. Anyone today care to give that one another run?
No, the whole Nazi salute kerfuffle is a barely disguised stunt. Yet another of the political class’s “look over there” strategies to avoid the gaze of the public upon its own rampant failings. More bread and circus gambits. Worse than a mere distraction, though, the idea of banning political parties and actions, is grossly illiberal. Just like all the special hate speech laws that now infect the polity. Just as Menzies’ action back in 1950 to ban the Communist Party was grossly illiberal. And he was the one who invented something called the “Liberal Party”.
And you don’t have to be a Communist to find this approach repugnant. As well as totally counterproductive. Just as banning alcohol in the USA simply created a black market and a whole criminal class, banning Communists in the 1950s and banning Nazi salutes now did and will simply drive such activities underground.
Voltaire (real name Francois-Marie Arouet), much quoted though little followed, famously did not say something that he perhaps should have, and was thought to have, said:
In The Friends of Voltaire, [Evelyn Beatrice] Hall wrote: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" as an illustration of Voltaire's beliefs. This quotation – which is sometimes misattributed to Voltaire himself – is often cited to describe the principle of freedom of speech.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/06/01/defend-say/
Not much Voltaire here in Australia these days, alas. Though, ironically, plenty of fascism, without salutes.
Paul Collits
22 March 2023
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"'
Is now
I disapprove of what you say, and I will cancel you to the death because you said it.
But "The pot calling the kettle black" is as valid as ever.
The sight of Georgie Crozier standing behind that clueless moron, Pesutto was one of the most shocking things that I saw in this sorry saga.Thos "nazis" were a set up. I wonder who sent them.