25th March 1999 - Copyright Antonia Feitz
New South Wales is going to the polls this Saturday, and whether Labor is returned to government, or the Coalition pulls off a miracle won't really matter, because nothing will change. Nothing will change because Australia no longer has a system of representative parliamentary democracy. The people's wishes do not count any more. Many readers might protest that such an opinion is unduly and unnecessarily pessimistic.
Not so. Last year the National Party state MP for the seat of Northern Tablelands, Ray Chappell told me his prime duty was to support the policies of his party, not to represent the wishes of his constituents. He emphasised that he made no apology for that conviction. He said if his constituents were not happy with his performance they could vote him out.
But this is not good enough, because the majority of electors haven't yet twigged to the fact that by voting the Coalition out and Labor in (or vice versa), they are just getting yet another party hack who, despite all his promises, is powerless. Worse, under the party system which is now hopelessly corrupted by collusion as evidenced by the 1998 federal election, Australian parliaments have degenerated into rubber stamps as weak as any that ever existed in the communist countries. Real power now lies with the Executive. It is no exaggeration to say we no longer have a Westminster system of government in this country, it is the stark truth.
Years before the Hanson incandescence lit up the political scene this was recognised. In 1993, the former South Australian Supreme Court judge, Mr Samuel Jacobs QC, said: "To a large extent we've got executive government, parliament is a sham" (Weekend Australian, 30/10/93).
The people's anger and frustration at 'not being listened to' has arisen precisely from this sorry state of affairs. But true to their propagandising mission, the media continue to deliberately misrepresent the mood of the people as one of 'reform fatigue' - weariness at the pace of change. As well, they sternly warn voters about the dangers of 'flirting' with minor parties and independents who only offer 'simplistic' solutions. (The acceptance of the allegedly 'simplistic' notion of a people's bank demands intelligence, integrity, faith and patriotism. The acceptance of the globalist policies promoted by its traitorous acolytes demands mindless submission).
People are routinely brainwashed into believing that voting for minor parties or independents will produce 'instability'. What people don't understand is that in the context of contemporary Australian politics, 'instability', far from being a bad thing, would be the best thing that could happen to Australia. With an unstable parliament, governments could not so blatantly ignore the people's wishes because the minors and independents would be able to frustrate their plans. Governments would be forced to listen, or to show their hand and come down heavy.
What has 'stability' - unfairly keeping minor parties and independents out of the political process - done for Australia under the governments of Hawke, Keating, and now Howard? It has resulted in high voter frustration with consequent cynicism, and it has allowed the major parties to favour the rich and the multinationals, and to ride roughshod over the wishes of the Australian people who increasingly are becoming landless serfs in their own country.
Proof? It is freely acknowledged that the major growth in employment is in the services sector. There are plenty of low paying jobs as cleaners, cooks, nannies, security staff, gardeners and chauffeurs to service globalisation's 'winners'. Meanwhile big business and industry leaders call for increased migration to fill the gaps in skilled tradesmen. What's wrong with us as a nation that we can't, or are unwilling to produce skilled tradesmen? Well, since over 90% of big business is now foreign-owned, business has no interest in contributing to Australia's skills by investing in apprenticeships. Why should company directors in London or New York even contemplate such a thing when Australia can simply import skilled migrants at no cost to their business. When international investor profit is the bottom line, it's a sound commercial decision.
Increasingly, the deregulated workplace demanded by the IMF, and enthusiastically being implemented by Peter Reith, has led not only to reduced wages and conditions, but to more stress and sickness as workers are forced to do shiftwork. Dr Meredith Wallace has documented the phenomenon in a new study which shows that seven-day trading practices have led to more people working irregular hours with consequent high stress, especially for women workers. In fact, ABS figures show that only 60% of Australian workers now work the traditional Monday to Friday work week. (Sun Herald 21/3/99).
Paying tax by the rich and the multinationals is now pretty-well optional in 'stable' Australia. In a keynote address to the International Treaties Conference in Canberra on the 4th September 1995, the then Foreign Affairs Minister, Senator 'Gareth Gareth' Evans is on record as saying: Australia has concluded some thirty-five double taxation agreements which increase our international competitiveness by reducing to fair levels the tax burdens of companies with international operations. It doesn't get clearer than that.
As a result, according to Brian Toohey, 58% of the nation's 560,000 companies paid zero tax. Another 54,000 paid less than $1,000 (Sun Herald 21/3/99). Jim Killaly of the ATO has claimed that multinationals pay little or no tax in Australia. On the third of April 1998 he said on ABC radio: There are 4,300 large foreign corporations that pay no tax in Australia, and there are another 4,000 or so foreign companies that pay little or no tax in Australia by means of transfer pricing and various tax havens.
Toohey also reported that a significant proportion of people on BRW magazine's Rich List shamelessly but successfully claimed to have a taxable income lower than the minimum wage. And it's now an Australian legend that Mr Kerry Packer, one of Australia's richest men, was assessed as owing a whopping $30 odd dollars in income tax - over three years. It is scandalous that the big end of town and the multinationals are the ones braying the loudest for the GST which will result in increased taxation for the poorest of the poor. Our 'stable' government has transformed Australia, the once prosperous and harmonious sovereign nation, into Australia Inc, which it no longer governs, but 'manages' for the benefit of investors under the watchful eye of the IMF.
Successive Australian governments' contempt for their own citizens in not only allowing, but actively promoting this social deterioration and economic injustice is bad enough, but the destruction of Australia's sovereignty is worse because it will affect future generations. Under our 'stable' government, the Executive has managed to subvert our Constitution. How? Through the back door, by signing UN treaties.
They all sounded so noble, didn't they, all those treaties to guarantee human rights, to preserve wilderness, to protect children, to end discrimination, to halt environmental damage. But these treaties were the vehicles by which national sovereignty has been dealt a heavy, perhaps lethal blow.
Exaggeration? In 1983 there was euphoria when the High Court 'saved' Tasmania's Franklin river from the construction of a perfectly legitimate dam. Not many of the muddled-headed greens or their equally muddle-headed sympathisers realised at the time just what the price of 'saving' the Franklin was - the beginning of the undermining of our Constitution.
Section 100 of the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Australia states very clearly that: The Commonwealth shall not, by any law or regulation of trade, abridge the right of a State or of the residents therein to the reasonable use of the waters of rivers for conservation or irrigation. To get around this inconvenience, the then prime minister Bob Hawke invoked the signing of the UN World Heritage Treaty to justify the Commonwealth's interference. The Tasmanian Government took the case to the High Court and the High Court ruled 4-3 against it, thus over-riding the Constitution. Significantly, the Chief Justice voted against, and the new Labor appointee - the notorious Lionel Murphy - voted for.
In his 4th September 1995 address, Evans rejected the claim that governments are signing away sovereignty by signing international treaties. He said: individual countries enter into treaties of their own free will ... Governments negotiate treaties among themselves ... Indeed, becoming party to a treaty is an exercise and an affirmation of a country's sovereignty ...".
It's interesting then, to note the difference in the signing rates between the US and countries such as the UK and Australia where the Executive Government has the power to make treaties. In a lecture at the University of NSW on the 10th May 1995, Justice Michael Kirby said: The introduction of a requirement of Parliamentary approval by the United States Constitution has had the effect of stultifying the ratification of international treaties by that country. Thus, whereas the United Kingdom has ratified 67 of the ILO Conventions, the United States has ratified but 9. In other words, given the choice, people don't want their governments to sign them.
Commenting on the increasing demand in Australia for some sort of public
scrutiny of this power Kirby said:
Much attention was given to the treaty-making power following the Government's
action of depositing in New York the instrument of accession to the First
Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
before notification to the Federal Parliament or the Australian people. This
action was described as "extraordinary", involving as it did no "public debate
or even public awareness of its existence, let alone its scope and
significance."... To a proposal by Senator Rod Kemp (Victoria) that Australia's
ratification of international treaties should henceforth be submitted for
Parliamentary approval, Senator Gareth Evans, responded with characteristic
directness: "No way, José". To Senator Kemp's rhetoric "We could not
have the people at all involved in this', Senator Evans told an Estimates
Committee bluntly: "Dead right".
So, ladies and gentlemen, that's the state of representative parliamentary democracy in Australia. In that spirit - 'we don't trust the people', and 'Government knows best' - they negotiated the MAI.
Evans was at pains to assure delegates that despite claims that Australia was party to over 2,000 treaties, the claim was unfounded owing to a misreading of the Australian Treaty List. He said Australia had really only signed some 920 treaties, the majority of them being bilateral, and that our adherence to multilateral treaties negotiated under the auspices of the UN was about average for an OECD country. Small comfort. Without any qualms he then admitted that the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 and the Sex Discrimination Act 1984, both of which are used for social engineering, were "squarely based on the relevant international treaties." Indeed they are.
Referring to the International Labour Organization Conventions he demonstrated his internationalist credentials when he said: "Treaties such as this allow us to examine ourselves against international standards and see how we measure up". Obviously he is unaware that when Australia was an independent sovereign nation, it led the world both in human rights (franchise for women) and justice for workers (minimum wage) - all achieved internally and co-operatively through the basic decency of its citizens, not through conforming to externally-imposed UN treaties.
And so it came to pass, as I wrote in a previous article, that under our 'stable' government, all Australian Attorneys-General attended a meeting earlier this year to discuss limiting parents to the use of the open hand in chastising their own children. It's hard to imagine anything more grotesque than the various governments' highest legal officers reduced to this kowtowing to the UN. We have been assured that the UN will give us time to conform, but conform we will.
So they say.
Australia has been a test case for globlisation. We were a prosperous and harmonious small nation without the complication of national borders. It was the very stability of our government that made Australia such a perfect experimental test case. To this day many people still do not realise that the major parties, once philosophical opponents, are in fact now bi-partisan and consequently have had something like a 16 year window of opportunity to ruin Australia and so make it ripe for globalisation.
Economically and socially they have succeeded. The evidence is conclusive. On one hand there are high rates of unemployment, foreign ownership, privatisation and debt, as well as high rates of divorce, suicide, drug abuse, illegitimacy and abortion - all indicators of massive social pathology. On the other hand there are record profits, and the newspapers keep triumphing Australia's economic 'growth', while failing to explain that the 'growth' is only in unproductive mergers and acquisitions which, while maybe ensuring good returns for investors, does nothing for the Australian nation.
But politically the globalists will ultimately fail because they have underestimated the spirit of Australia. Australians have allowed things to deteriorate as much as they have because they were politically innocent and naive. But increasingly they are waking up, and like all woken giants, they are irritable. To this day, the globalists still do not understand that Pauline Hanson was only a lightening rod, a catalyst for a pre-existing anger. As I wrote to the chief editor of the Australian after that glorious Queensland shock: "She has converted nobody. Read that sentence three times till it sinks in: she has converted nobody".
The fact that they still do not understand - the fact that they are so stupid - surely gives us hope. It's instructive to remember what that rather large dose of instability Queensland-style did to the politicians and the chattering class. On election night they looked like dazed automatons. They had been so removed from reality they had no idea of the size of dissent. It simply wasn't in the globalists' manual that the people would have the courage to fight back. And until they and the media well and truly demonized her, Pauline Hanson had them running scared.
If we can manage to elect unstable governments we have a chance to regain our country. But to do this we must unite. That is the challenge.
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