How Australia failed to destroy communism

The 1951 Referendum to ban the Communist Party was a key moment in Cold War Australia. With the onset of the Cold War, the state was determined to destroy the Party which it saw as the instrument of the Soviet Union, a menace to Australia. From the end of the 1949 Coal Strike until the 1951 Referendum, the forces of the state were deployed in eradicating communism from Australia. The Party endured this onslaught although its existence hung on the results of the 1951 Referendum.