[1] The Australian Coal and Shale Employees' Federation (often known as the Miners' Federation) was heavily influenced at the time by the Communist Party of Australia (CPA), and the strike is widely seen by the Australian community as the CPA applying Cold War Soviet Union Cominform policy in challenging Labor reformism, and promoting a class conflict to promote communist leadership of the working class struggle, at the expense of the Labor Party.
[3] Two days after the strike began, the Labor government passed legislation that made it illegal to give strikers and their families financial support (including credit from shops).
Chifley told the Labor caucus, "The Reds must be taught a lesson",[6] while Arthur Calwell was reported by the union publication The Australian Worker to have said that communists and their sympathisers were only fit for concentration camps.
[1] At the height of the dispute, Labor senator Donald Grant, a former member of the Industrial Workers of the World imprisoned as part of the Sydney Twelve, told the miners: "I come to Cessnock for one reason.
[citation needed] Chifley received regular reports from the Commonwealth Investigation Service (the forerunner of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation) on the campaigns and policies of the CPA.