The cold war and the high court.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)

SIR: The contention in your editorial "Liberty, the Media and National Security" (September 2007), that it is "quite likely" that the High Court of Australia would have held that the Communist Party Dissolution Act 1950 was a valid exercise of the Commonwealth parliament's power to legislate for Australia's defence had the court known that "the [communist] threat was much greater than the then court knew", is unconvincing for at least three interrelated reasons.

First, your reliance on unspecified revelations at the (Petrov) Royal Commission on Espionage (RCE) (1954/1955) and unspecified parts of the so-called Venona decrypts which the United States National Security Agency declassified and publicly released in 1996 is misplaced.

The substance of that part of the conduct recorded in the Venona decrypts which was said to reveal evidence of Soviet espionage in Australia, especially in the Department of External Affairs (DEA) in 1945/1946, had been conveyed to Prime Minister J.B. Chifley in early 1948 by the Director General of MI5, and was probed in cross-examination (without mention being made of its provenance) when the alleged Soviet spies J.F. Hill and Walter Clayton gave evidence in open session at the RCE.

The enduring secrecy surrounding the Venona decrypts had far less to do with the substance of the DEA espionage allegations than with the absolute determination of successive US administrations to conceal from the Soviet Union that its diplomatic ciphers had been decrypted by early 1948.

Second, the high level of anticommunist fear-mongering in the early Cold War years in Australia needs to be recalled.

No person who read a daily newspaper anywhere in Australia in the worsening Cold War years 1947 to 1951 (and for years thereafter) could have missed the claims of its resolute adversaries that the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) was a revolutionary movement poised to seize power on behalf of its Soviet controllers so as to impose a proletarian dictatorship upon Australians.

Part of the case against the CPA was a literal acceptance of its boastful propaganda that history was inevitably on its side in the evolving struggle of the Australian working class to topple capitalism, and, if necessary, forcibly.