In 1972, Murray and some other Sydney activists launched the Australian Commonwealth Party,[8]: 144–145 and authored its unusually idealistic campaign manifesto. During the 1970s he opposed the New Poetry or "literary modernism" which emerged in Australia at that time, and was a major contributor to what is known in Australian poetry circles as "the poetry wars". "One of his complaints against post-modernism was that it removed poetry from widespread, popular readership, leaving it the domain of a small intellectual clique."[7] As American reviewer Albert Mobilio describes it, Murray "waged a campaign for accessibility".[19]
In 1995, Murray became involved in the Demidenko/Darville affair. Helen Darville, an Australian writer who had won several major literary awards for her novel The Hand That Signed the Paper, had claimed to be the daughter of a Ukrainian immigrant, though her parents were in fact English migrants. Murray said of Darville that
"She was a young girl, and her book mightn't have been the best in the world, but it was pretty damn good for a girl of her age [20 when she wrote it]. And her marketing strategy of pretending to be a Ukrainian might have been unwise, but it sure did expose the pretensions of the multicultural industry".[8]: 281
Biographer Alexander writes that in his poem "A Deployment of Fashion", Murray linked "the attack on Darville with the wider phenomenon of attacks on those judged outcasts (from Lindy Chamberlain to Pauline Hanson) by society’s fashion police, the journalists, academics and others who form opinion.[8]: 282
In 1996, Murray became involved in a controversy about whether Australian historian Manning Clark had received and regularly worn the medal of the Order of Lenin.[8]: 276
