The far right in the Coalition

By Norm Dixon

On June 18, the National Party Senate leader, Ron Boswell, rose in parliament to expose Pauline Hanson's links with some of the most extreme far-right and racist elements on the Australian political spectrum — the anti-Semitic League of Rights, the US right-wing militia movement and the murderous Ku Klux Klan, amongst others. However, Boswell's speech did not provide a complete picture of the Australian far right. Glaringly absent was Australia's most successful and influential right-wing group — the far-right wing of the Liberal and National parties.

Boswell knows only too well that the paths from the ratbag right he so carefully traced also lead to the doors of the Coalition and, in some cases, right into Australia's hallowed parliamentary chambers.

Following Hanson's success in the last federal election, Queensland Premier Rob Borbidge warned that the Coalition could be electorally devastated by "Pauline Hansons from one end of Australia to another" if it did not embrace her anti-native title views. Borbidge and Boswell's concern was not that the Australian far right was growing, but that the Coalition's — especially the NP's — far-right wing might desert.

Hanson did not drop from the sky, but emerged from the bowels of the Queensland Liberal Party. Liberal members, knowing her views, chose her as their candidate in Oxley.

Hanson's staff

Despite Hanson being dis-endorsed following her racist public comments, the local Liberal machine continued enthusiastically to back her. Led by the local president, the Liberal rank and file distributed how-to-votes for Hanson even as they handed out for the Liberals in the Senate. Posters proclaiming Hanson the "Liberal for Oxley" surrounded the polling booths on election day.

After her win, Hanson appointed Liberals and Nationals to her staff. John Pasquarelli, from the office of League of Rights sympathiser Graeme Campbell MHR, was a Liberal candidate for Jaga Jaga in Victoria in 1987. In the late 1980s, he was on the staff of Senate NP leader John Stone. Pasquarelli left the Liberal Party only this year.

Pasquarelli wrote Hanson's now infamous maiden speech, with its anti-Aboriginal, anti-Asian tirades and conspiracy theories. He approved, if not authored, Hanson's most outrageous press statements.

When Hanson fell out with Pasquarelli, she replaced him with David Oldfield, a Liberal candidate in the 1995 NSW elections and electoral secretary to Liberal NSW MHR Tony Abbott.

Hanson's preselection was just the latest example of the influence of the Coalition's far-right wing, and the willingness at its highest levels to tolerate and cooperate with it.

During the 1996 election campaign, NP candidate Bob Burgess described citizenship ceremonies as "de-wogging". Federal MP Bob Katter — a former Aboriginal affairs minister in the Bjelke-Petersen government — in three separate interviews called critics of Burgess' racism "slanty-eyed ideologues" and claimed that whites were discriminated against.

The NP did not penalise them. NP leader Tim Fischer defended his colleagues, claiming they were the victims of "politically correct agenda setters".

Lightfoot in mouth

In May, newly elected WA Liberal Senator Ross Lightfoot created an uproar when he told parliament that Aborigines were "the bottom colour of the civilisation spectrum". An article by Michael Kapel in the July 24 Australia/Israel Review (AIR) revealed Lightfoot's long history of racism and associations with the far right.

Lightfoot's vendetta against Aborigines began soon after he entered the WA parliament in 1987. A constant theme in his speeches was that Aborigines are at the bottom of the evolutionary scale and "uncivilised".

"We should not turn back the clock and push these people back to the stone age, to their superstitions, their killings and their dreadful way of life ... The only answer is assimilation", Lightfoot told state parliament.

In a 1993 speech, Lightfoot continued: "No Aborigines in Australia prior to white settlement had ever formed a civilised community ... As a civilised nation, I do not know whether we could accept Aboriginal culture ... I hold no guilt for what happened to the Aboriginal people, and black children can have no guilt for what happened to the early white settlers, who were killed or mutilated."

In the same year, Lightfoot attacked the welcome organised for South Africa's Archbishop Desmond Tutu, condemning the Anglican archbishop of Perth for allowing "pagan Aboriginal dancing in the Anglicans' holiest shrine in WA to appease a black African cleric".

When a 1995 ATSIC report recommended that Aboriginal culture be taught in school, Lightfoot ranted: "We will be forced to study a culture that some people find distasteful in our schools. I find this preposterous!"

He told the AIR that he opposed compensation for the "stolen generation". In fact, he said: "I have been with Aborigines all my life, and they said to me that they would have amounted to nothing had they not been removed from their less than acceptable environment".

League of Rights

Lightfoot has openly associated with the Australian League of Rights (ALR), an avowedly anti-Semitic and racist organisation formed by pro-Hitler elements in the 1940s. The ALR believes the Nazis' mass murder of Jews is a myth, that Asians and Africans are inferior to whites and that land rights for Aborigines is a communist plot.

Responding to charges of ALR influence in the WA Liberal Party, Lightfoot said in 1994: "Let me refer members to the policies of the League, which include adopting an immigration policy that prevents social fragmentation and friction, imposing a limit on non-European immigrants to a rate at which they can be assimilated, and holding a referendum on immigration policy. Many Australians from all sides would agree with that policy."

He has also lent his name to international campaigns by the US neo-fascist cult controlled by convicted fraud Lyndon LaRouche. Local LaRouchites control the Citizens Electoral Councils (CEC), which promote anti-Aboriginal racism and anti-Semitism.

They believe a conspiracy exists between world Jewry, British intelligence and the British royal family to flood the world with drugs and pornography, and to provoke the imminent collapse of the world economic system.

Despite Lightfoot's far-right views being well known, he was selected by the WA Liberal Party for a Senate vacancy in 1995. Incredibly, Lightfoot has just been invited to join the Coalition's Aboriginal affairs backbench committee, which formulates policy.

The WA Liberals seem to have a soft spot for the ALR. The AIR's Michael Kapel discovered that in 1995 the WA state council defeated a motion that would have made association with the ALR "incompatible" with membership of the Liberal Party. The motion's defeat was engineered by leaders of the WA Young Liberals.

Ian Viner, a former Liberal Party president and minister in the Fraser government, told the AIR, "When you consider the number of members on the council who are either associated with or share the views of the League of Rights then it is not so surprising" that the motion lost.

Young Liberals

Mark Mansfield, administration director of the WAYL, was the keynote speaker at the 1994 WA ALR annual conference and addressed an ALR national seminar in 1991. He told the Perth Sunday Times in September 1994 that ALR members are not racists, just "fine, upstanding people with a concern for the future of Australia".

As vice-president of the Moore electorate Liberal Party, Mansfield played a key role in dumping sitting MP Paul Filing (hardly a raving leftie, Filing successfully held the seat in 1996 as an "Independent Liberal" and has since declared his support for Pauline Hanson).

Filing was replaced by prominent Young Liberal Paul Stevenage. Simon Ehrenfeld, WAYL president, became Stevenage's campaign manager. Young Liberal sources told Michael Kapel, writing in the July 1-15 Australia-Israel Review, that Ehrenfeld told a WAYL dinner in May 1994 that the Holocaust was exaggerated and that the "League of Rights was not such a bad body". The AIR has also been told that ALR members have been used to stack WAYL state meetings. Ehrenfeld, in a communication with Green Left Weekly on September 25, 1998, denied he had made remarks suggesting that the Holocaust was exaggerated. He said the sources alleging he had made such remarks were aligned with the "Filing camp".

The WA Liberals' footsies with the ALR don't end there. In July 1995, Premier Richard Court's chief policy adviser, Don Saunders, was guest speaker at an ALR dinner. Later that year, Thomas Robertson, president of the WA Union of Liberal Students and a member of Senator Chris Ellison's staff, got into hot water after his association with the league was reported in the press.

Geoff Prosser, former federal small business minister and MP for the WA seat of Forrest, in 1993 employed Jan Pope on his staff. Jan and Murray Pope own Veritas Publications, the ALR's publishing house. Veritas distributes and publishes racist literature, including the works of Holocaust denier David Irving.

Downer

The Coalition's ties with the far right have involved some big names. In 1987, Alexander Downer addressed an ALR meeting in South Australia at the invitation of a Liberal Party state councillor.

This became public only in 1994, after Downer's elevation to federal opposition leader. An embarrassed Downer claimed he was unaware it was a ALR meeting.

However, in September 1994, AIR reported that a video (on sale from ALR bookshops at $30) showed the hapless Downer looking on as SA ALR director Frank Bawden urges the audience to read the literature "explaining the aims of the league" on their seats.

Soon after the revelations about Downer surfaced, the Canberra Times reported that SA Liberal Senator Nick Minchin — at the time parliamentary secretary to opposition leader Downer and currently Prime Minister Howard's parliamentary secretary — addressed an ALR Adelaide front group.

Not so, insisted Minchin. The organisers of the seminar, the Australian Freedom Foundation, had nothing to do with the ALR, he said. "This is a Christian group. Is it now the case that Christian groups are to be labelled 'far-right winged' and treated by the media as extremist?"

Minchin added that he had known the AFF's executive director, Doug Giddings, "for many years".

Australian Freedom Foundation

David Greason, writing in the October 18, 1994, AIR, revealed that the AFF was a front for the extreme-right US John Birch Society, the main US far-right group during the 1950s and '60s.

While claiming to be a conservative Christian group, it shares many of the far right's pet conspiracy theories, such as the US civil rights movement being directed from Moscow and that "a dedicated elite in the education system, the political parties, the welfare lobby, the media, the churches and the trade unions have been working to a predetermined and unswerving communist plan for many years".

Even though the AFF claims it differs with the ALR over the latter's belief in an international "Zionist" plot to dominate the world, Giddings told the September 17 Canberra Times that he was in regular contact with the ALR, attended its meetings and shared its views on a number of points.

The AFF advertised its seminar through the ALR's Adelaide bookshop. The AFF advertises regularly in the virulently anti-Semitic and racist Strategy newspaper, which has close links with the right-wing US militia movement and the Ku Klux Klan.

Boswell's June 18 speech made much of Strategy's and One Nation organisers' involvement with a tour by KKK-linked US "Christian" militia leader Jack McLamb. Strangely absent from the account was that Giddings, whom Senator Minchin knows so well, was one of the tour organisers.

Another speaker at the AFF seminar was Flinders University academic Joseph Wayne Smith. Smith has since been identified as an author of Pauline Hanson's book, The Truth. He has also co-written pamphlets with Australians Against Further Immigration supremo Denis McCormack

Lyons and LaRouche

Today, Minchin plays a leading role within the Lyons Forum, a secretive fundamentalist Christian faction within the federal parliamentary Coalition. The forum aims to influence government policy on "family" issues such as censorship, gay and lesbian law reform and abortion. It is estimated that as many as 50 MPs, including 15 frontbenchers, are members.

The LaRouchites have also found broader support within the Coalition. In 1991-95, the federal Liberal MHR for the Victorian seat of Deakin, Ken Aldred, actively collaborated with leaders of the CEC. Representatives of the LaRouche organisation flew from the US to meet secretly with him at his home in February 1993.

According to Don Veitch, the president of the Greensborough branch of the Liberal Party in 1984-5, who became one of the CEC's top leaders before he left in 1994, the CEC and the US LaRouchites deliberately fabricated stories about prominent Jewish individuals' involvement in organised crime, drug smuggling and pornography.

The stories were fed to Aldred, as well as Dennis Stevenson, an independent in the ACT parliament, and Denis Collins, an independent in the NT parliament. Once the MPs repeated the allegations under parliamentary privilege, LaRouchite journals were able to publish the claims without fear of legal action.

In 1993, on orders from LaRouche in the US, Veitch told the July 15, 1996, AIR, the CEC threw its resources behind Aldred's bid for the parliamentary Liberal Party leadership. The attempt failed miserably.

The Liberal MHR for Isaacs in Victoria and Coalition whip, Rodney Atkinson, in 1995 signed a petition (as did Graeme Campbell) calling for the exoneration and release of LaRouche, who had been jailed for mail fraud and tricking old people out of their life savings.

Veitch claims to have met with Atkinson several times in his Canberra office to discuss cooperation with the CEC. Veitch told the AIR that Atkinson offered to arrange for LaRouche to address federal parliament if he visited Australia. Atkinson denies this.

Hanson's base

The latest pole of attraction for the Coalition's far right is, of course, Pauline Hanson.

Many Coalition figures have expressed support for Hanson, including a NSW Liberal Party state executive member and Gosford branch president, Malcolm Brooks; a federal vice-president of the NP and Tasmanian branch president, Peter Murray; former NP Senate leader John Stone; Flo and Joh Bjelke-Petersen; the NP's Bob Burgess; and the Goondiwindi branch of the Liberal Party.

That a racist like Hanson could emerge in this region is no accident. Rural Queensland and northern NSW have long been bastions of a "broad far right".

According to University of Queensland academic Richard Brockett, writing in the Electronic Journal of Australian and New Zealand History, in the late 1960s and 1970s the ALR and its front groups — with its anti-Semitic and anti-worker conspiracy theories, involving an international plot by Jewish bankers and "Fabian socialists" to wipe out the family farm — gained a base among Australian Country Party (later NP) supporters.

At the time, Ralph Hunt, later a minister in the Fraser government, said he found the ALR's philosophy "appealing".

Former federal parliamentary NP leader Ian Sinclair reportedly disclosed that he and other ACP leaders subscribed to ALR publications, since they contained 90% of the information they needed.

Even the Country Party's federal parliamentary leader, Doug Anthony, conceded that, in general, the league's philosophy was compatible with that of the ACP. ACP members were attracted to the ALR rather than the ACP being "infiltrated" by it, he conceded.

The ACP parliamentary leadership moved against the ALR in 1971 only after it gained too much organisational influence (it was claimed that the ALR controlled the 1971 NSW state conference).

Anthony and Sinclair suddenly discovered the ALR's anti-Semitism and pro-Nazi sympathies.

In Queensland, 300 members of the ACP Dalby branch overwhelmingly rejected the "scurrilous attacks" on the ALR. Soon after, the state management committee supported a motion from Robert Sparkes, later to be state NP president, to reject Anthony and Sinclair's "allegations".

Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen remained friendly to the ALR throughout his long reign. "They are anti-socialist, and that's what I like", NP Senate candidate Flo Bjelke-Petersen told the Australian in 1980 after speaking at an ALR seminar. "Joh thought it would be nice of me to go along."

Both Joh and Flo today support Hanson. Flo told the May 12 Australian that "so many of [Hanson's] policies are National Party policies, but the Nationals can't always implement them because they are in coalition with the Liberals."