If there was ever a model for a successful social justice initiative, the Safe Schools Coalition was it. The program has for many years enjoyed bipartisan political support, including state and federal funding under Liberal and Labor governments.

So well received has it been among teachers and parents that the Victorian model was rolled out nationally in 2014, again with bipartisan support. Even the Abbott government, not known for its commitment to social progress, maintained the program’s funding without protest or incident.

Yet, as a result of the deranged whingeing of an extremist fringe Christian group, the Australian Christian Lobby, and its handful of sympathetic Liberal MPs, the program has in a matter of weeks been gutted and its reputation trashed. Federal funding will be cut entirely at the end of 2017, and the program’s content will in the meantime be severely restricted.

This is despite a favourable outcome from the review commissioned by federal education minister Simon Birmingham in response to the ACL’s complaints, in which the program resources were found to be “educationally sound, age-appropriate and aligned to the Australian curriculum”.

Such is the power and influence of the far right.

The Murdoch press has been instrumental in this propaganda war. Not content to see the mere gutting of the program, it is campaigning to bring down the Victorian convener, Roz Ward.

The attacks on Ward, led most aggressively by the Australian, have been unrelenting. In characteristic style, her privacy has been invaded and her personal political beliefs put on trial.

Commonly known as red baiting, this is a tried and true tactic of the right.

In the 1920s, it manifested in a hysterical fear of foreigners and the Communist influence they might import into the workers’ movement.

John Grieg Latham, attorney-general in the conservative governments of Bruce and Lyons, embodied this sentiment. “Whenever industrial trouble struck”, Monash academic Nick Fischer describes, “Latham habitually instructed intelligence services to verify whether any ‘persons’, particularly Russians, had advocated ‘sabotage’ in union meetings, to establish whether there was any evidence of communications between strikers and Russia, and whether troublesome elements might be removed from Australian shores”.

It’s not just conservative figures who have led these attacks. During the miners’ strike of 1949, the Chifley Labor government red baited the miners in an attempt to undermine their public support. Addressing a public meeting in Sydney’s Domain, immigration minister Arthur Calwell declared, “I speak for the 95 percent of the people of Australia … This is a fight between the Labor movement and the Labor government on the one hand and the communist ratbags on the other”.

These ratbags “don’t pay attention or any allegiance to the Labor Council or the ACTU. They take no notice of anybody but the nitwits at Marx House”. This vitriol came despite Chifley himself having been accused of making a “ramp for communism” by Country Party MPs hostile to his plan to nationalise the banks two years earlier.

Academics and intellectuals have been a frequent target of this treatment. In 1952, opposition to the appointment of communist-aligned academics at the Australian National University was sensationally raised on the floor of parliament, with the chief government whip asserting that the ANU had become “more famous for its left wing politics than for its research”.

Anti-communist Labor MP Stan Keon joined in, deriding the ANU as “a nest of communists”. According to the National Archives, Keon “also went on to attack the Commonwealth Literary Fund, of which Menzies was a board member, for funding left wing writers Judah Waten, Eric Lambert and John Morrison”.

In the 1960s, efforts to undermine the Aboriginal rights movement likewise involved decrying it as a communist plot. The minister in charge of Aboriginal affairs in the Liberal government of the time, notorious anti-communist W.C. Wentworth, went to great lengths to combat the influence of communists in the movement, including establishing the anti-communist Foundation for Aboriginal Affairs in opposition to the more radical Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders.

The chairman of the foundation, pastor David Kirk, expressed this sentiment in a 1971 Sydney Morning Herald exposé, writing: “Someone is masterminding the activity. I think communists are using Aborigines to create political unrest”. Academics, such as anthropologist Fred Rose, who promoted Aboriginal rights ,were denied employment and shunned because of their communist connections.

And while the Cold War is over, the trope of disloyal troublemakers in our midst hell bent on manipulating grievances to destroy society is no less useful to the powers that be.

Not even the Australian Greens are immune. A 2010 Quadrant article by the loony right Liberal MP Kevin Andrews argued: “The Greens are Marxist in their philosophy, and display the same totalitarian tendencies of all previous forms of Marxism as a political movement”.

Such attacks have emerged again in the current election campaign, with Greens candidate for Grayndler Jim Casey being attacked for his “Green version of Trotskyism” by conservative Liberal Senator Eric Abetz, and for being a socialist wanting to “use the Green banner to advance an agenda that’s about anything but the environment” by Labor opponent Anthony Albanese.

As always, the purpose of invoking the broader political views of left-aligned public figures is to attempt to drive a wedge between them and their wider supporters or potential supporters. Promoting the idea that these figures are motivated not by immediate demands but by a nefarious unspoken agenda is intended to arouse suspicion and alienate people from the cause.

And it puts left wingers and radicals under pressure to moderate their political approach in a way right wingers never are. The shady influences behind conservative politicians – such as the Catholic Church with its history of abuse or the Institute of Public Affairs with its extremist pro-rich agenda – are rarely if ever invoked to drive individuals out of public life or bludgeon them into silence.

Red baiting is thus an effective means through which reactionaries can bolster the more conservative forces in any struggle. They do this not by arguing openly for their agenda, but by character assassination of the radicals and most determined fighters.

Genuine radicals will always be a target of the right in this way because they should and will always be involved in standing with workers and the oppressed wherever they are resisting. They will be the ones with the greatest determination to win, and who will not give in to demands that that they moderate their aims or tactics.

Those who recognise the need for stronger social justice struggles today need to be prepared to stand up to this intimidation. To refuse is to concede defeat.