Communist Party of Australia

While at the same time, governments across Australia pushed to evict people who could not pay rent or their mortgage.

It was this that caused the formation of the Unemployed Workers Movement, a socialist organisation initially formed in Melbourne by the Communist Party of Australia, after the Victorian Trades Hold Council refused to represent the interests of unemployed workers, but which quickly spread around Australia and found heavy support in New South Wales.

The unemployed workers movement became a major fixture of the Great Depression landscape.

We'll talk more about them in the state-based episodes, but they were a group which worked to disrupt any evictions taking place, often doing battle with police in neighbourhoods like Redfern and Newtown in the process.

boy? Every little left-wing faction had a speaker's spot in the Sydney domain.

The most cunning and sophisticated was out of the Communist Party of Australia, but there are other groups.

There's the Maoist version.

And to me...

democratic capitalism serving us.

And there was an alternative at that point, right? You had the Communist Party of Australia.

You had the examples of the Soviet Union.

And so Menzies was worried that the housing crisis would cause a political legitimacy crisis.

There were blacklists.

There was a referendum in 1951 to ban the Communist Party of Australia, which Eleanor and Eric actively opposed.

Neither of them were members of the Communist Party, but they were left-wing.

They were outspoken.

Look, this is what they truly, truly believe.

There was, in this country, a Communist Party of Australia from the 1920s to the 1990s.

Now, th- it shut down in 1991.

Now, now, the- these were people who loved Russia.

Loved, loved the government running all businesses, not just supermarkets, everything.

Now, then what happened was, when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the Communist Party of Australia officially shut down about two weeks later.

Great victory, you'd think.

But a w- a year later, all these little wilderness groups across a- the country were putting together a political party.

And very much, you know, Maureen Faruqi would be of that mould.

Don't know if they were ever card-carrying members of the Communist Party of Australia, but that sort of ridiculously left, ridiculously woke.

I mean, the big thing with the Greens now is trans issues and they're just tearing themselves apart.

We remember what they did to the co-founder.

We've now had him for, what, four? So we're halfway there, living on a prayer.

I hope and pray that I'm wrong, but the night he stood up in the 2022 election and said, I'm going to change the nation and the people he had on the podium with him, such as Thomas Mayo of the MUA, WWF and Communist Party of Australia, I just shut it.

Yeah, well, mate, keep shuddering, but keep concentrating.

The air is slightly cleaner in Queensland, but I must admit the smoke around is not a very nice smell.