Rabid extremist: LEE Rhiannon - last month elevated to the Senate and sharing the balance of power in the Upper House - once had a different surname: Brown.
Who knows? She may be distantly related to Bob Brown, the Greens' leader. If their bloodlines match it would explain quite a bit.
Rhiannon is not her real name. It's just one the Senator plucked out, presumably having watched one too many episodes of Countdown.
Scroll down to replay Alan Howe's chat
She grew up in a communist household at the time the Soviet Union was held in the grip of perhaps the 20th century's greatest murderer - Joseph Stalin, who also changed his name - whose mass executions, purges of colleagues, collectivised farms, and terrorist security forces became symptomatic of Marxist doctrine.
Like the Greens in 2011, everyone knew it was madness at the time, but too few spoke out. Those who dared do so back then were killed. These days the enemies of the Greens' fictions are threatened with Stalinist press controls by the likes of Christine Milne.
Rhiannon is proof that not every well-educated person is smart. Bob Brown, who trained as a doctor, obviously springs to mind. Rhiannon majored in zoology at university - a handy discipline given the oddballs with whom she cohabits under the Greens' umbrella.
While she was quarantined in the opulently impotent quarters of the NSW Legislative Council, Rhiannon's rants mattered little. There, she kept company with another Green, Ian Cohen, a legendary environmental activist.
Cohen has his good points and has bravely highlighted disgraceful cases of wilful pollution. But, the gullible Green in him is regularly on show: in Parliament once, he contributed to a debate on the need for a drugs summit by describing a war on drugs as "a war on people, particularly the young", and quoting a persuasive man from the "Nimbin Hemp Embassy".
Rhiannon is six days older than Cohen, but equally naive. Her maiden speech in that state upper chamber was an attack on a planned dockside development and she pointed out that her two uncles had been wharfies in the 1950s and, back then, "often vilified as selfish and lazy". Nonetheless, she had learnt from them. "Selfish and lazy" sounds a bit harsh, but I wonder if it might have been because Australian wharfies had, only a few years earlier, humiliated their government and shamed their country during World War II.
They are reported to have pillaged from incoming supplies - do you mean those dockside "fringe benefits" were around all those years ago? - and to have deliberately damaged US war equipment, and also to have demanded "danger money" before loading vital ammunition for Australia's defence efforts.
At one point, Australian soldiers were sent to do the job the wartime wharfies would not, and given instructions to "shoot the bastards" if they didn't make way. The wharfies stepped aside, but perhaps learnt that day about the influence of a gun. Years later, many wharfside conversations involved a persuasive gun to work out disputes in what was, for many decades, a lawless, murderous subculture of criminals.
As Rhiannon learnt from her uncles, the painters and dockers taught the rest of us much as well.
When violent rioters attacked police, politicians and businessmen attending the World Economic Conference at Crown casino in 2000, Rhiannon, who was there, spoke out in support of them.
It pays to remember how those days unfolded. On the first day, Victoria police tactics were tested when an out-of-control mob of thousands hurled rocks, urine, ball-bearings, and bolts - at least one protester was armed with a syringe - outside Crown casino. Police cars and horses were attacked with nails and marbles. The then Premier of WA, Richard Court, was trapped in his car 100m away and the swarming mob which, realising it had caught a big fish, slashed the car's tyres, spray painted slogans over it, and pounded on its roof, windscreen and bonnet in scenes that must have terrified those inside. Cops were injured and spat upon as they tried to rescue Court.
Police tactics hardened the next day, to the relief of most Victorians; sometimes force is needed to achieve public order.
Even the union movement described some of the protesters as rogue.
Rhiannon reacted differently.
Two years later, just before a World Trade Organisation meeting in Sydney, she hosted a seminar - Civil Disobedience Today - and in a welcoming statement wrote "the time to meet to defend free speech is now when free speech is under intense attack".
So what of free speech for those attending the forum in Melbourne two years earlier? Had England's police acted last week as Victoria's did when the mob's violence looked like spreading beyond control, lives might have been saved. The softly, softly approach doesn't work when mobs are bent on violence. Mobs drain you of your identity and can be easily manipulated by smart organisers. If only Rhiannon were worldly enough to know this.
Rhiannon also supports the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) group that targets Jewish companies doing business with Israel. The idea is to economically cripple the only democracy in the Middle East and the one country in which the region's Arabs are guaranteed safety.
Rhiannon has boasted that South African cleric Desmond Tutu had written to support the boycotts.
Crikey, Tutu must have some time on his hands. You'd reckon the famed campaigner for freedom and democracy, and opponent of homophobia, would have been busy sorting out Zimbabwe, right next door.
Robert Mugabe has destroyed that country, kills his opponents and persecutes gays, who are described by their president as repugnant and repulsive - "I don't believe they have any rights at all". They are "lower than pigs and dogs", he adds, fearful deputies nodding in agreement.
Tutu has criticised Mugabe in the past, but it's more bark than bite.
Those Jewish dogs are different, though. Tutu and Rhiannon will sort them out.
Last month, as part of the campaign against Israel in those violent protests outside the Max Brenner chocolate shop in Melbourne, 19 demonstrators and three police were injured.
Some prominent Australians met to drink hot chocolate outside the Brenner shop some days later in a counter protest against the violence.
Smarter than Rhiannon, they know about the 1930s and where violent protests against Jewish traders may end. It was a colourful time of brownshirts, blackshirts, and yellow Stars of David. The streets ran red. The Green Senator should read up on it.
LYC Price at posting:
$1.18 Sentiment: LT Buy Disclosure: Held
(20min delay)