Sarah Hanson Young speaks at extremist event. Media stays silent.
In April this year Greens Senator Sarah Hanson Young spoke at a meeting organised by well-known extremists from Australia’s largest left wing extremist organisation. And the media didn’t even bother to report it.
To grasp how truly outrageous this is cast your mind back to the January of this year when (now former) Senator Fraser Anning was attacked by every major media outlet in the country for simply attending a political meeting in St Kilda where some idiots mockingly impersonated Basil Fawlty. The then Senator didn’t even speak at the rally in question, he only attended as part of the crowd. Yet this didn’t stop the nation’s journalists driving themselves into a frenzied lather of sweat coated outrage denouncing him and anyone who defended him.
One of those who attacked him was of course Senator Sarah Hanson Young. Who was quite vocal at the time:
This is the same Senator Hanson Young who only a few months later spoke at the “Climate crisis: a student forum” meeting organised at the University of Adelaide by the Socialist Alternative front group “Uni Students for climate justice”. While she was speaking the sometimes simplistic Senator was sharing a stage with two of South Australia’s most prominent Socialist Alternative organisers; Sage Jupe and Madeleine “Maddy” Edhouse.
This time there was no outrage. No media circus. No denunciations or demands that Ms Hanson Young’s vote be not counted. In fact no news stories at all. Yet there is no doubt that the extremists with which Ms Hanson Young has shown herself happy to stand alongside and implicitly endorse are part of the largest, best organised and fastest growing radical political extremist group in Australia today.
Socialist Alternative are a Marxist group of the Trotskyist tradition. Their ultimate aim is to overthrow the government and implement a totalitarian socialist state. The first line of their Statement of Principles says: “We are a Revolutionary Marxist organisation”. There isn’t a lot of room for subtlety here. They aren’t trying to hide what they are. Socialist Alternative are not normal political actors and they shouldn’t be considered within the pale of normal political discourse. The fact that Senator Hanson Young is so willing to not only associate with them but to help them to build the campaign group they are currently using to recruit impressionable Uni students into their creepy cult like organisation shows just how mainstream they’ve become.
So mainstream in fact that Socialist Alternative organiser “Maddy” Edhouse has been elected South Australian State education officer and Vice President of the SA branch of the National Union of Students. Positions that she was able to exploit to gain funding, premises and an NUS endorsement for the event. Sage Jupe (herself the NUS Campus Representative for University of South Australia) is currently one of the more frenetic Socialist Alternative activists Australia wide. Her bizarre two toned hair is a common sight as she speaks at protests, hawks Red Flag newspapers from a trestle table on Rundle mall or sometimes just harasses random people in the street while screaming about Capitalism.
There is no pushback for Greens politicians when they associate with people who are literally trying to overthrow the government. Journalists have been educated in the same classrooms by the same lecturers as the Marxists and so usually see nothing wrong with supposedly mainstream politicians associating with advocates for the most murderous ideology in human history.
And so we see Greens pollies getting away with it again, and again, and again and again. Because when none of their friends in the media are willing to call them out on it why would they change?