A Voice for
sanity. (April 16,
1999) By
Allen
Douglas
Led by Lyndon LaRouche’s associates, many Australians are protesting
their government’s support for World War III.
Pushing for World War
III. (April 6,
1999) By Robert Barwick
The government has lined up behind U.S. Vice President Al Gore and his
Principals’ Committee.
Queen's crony cleans
up. (March 26,
1999) By
Allen
Douglas
In a stunning display of cowardice, or worse, the government has allowed
BAC media baron Kerry Packer to take over the nation’s largest newspaper
group.
Big push for Timor
independence.
(March 19, 1999) By
Robert Barwick
Australia has sowed the wind over this Indonesian province, and now it will
reap the whirlwind.
Media barons push
drugs. (March 5,
1999) By Robert Barwick
Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch are driving the campaign to legalize heroin.
Another Privatisation
Scam. (February 26,
1999) By Robert Barwick
Once again, the push is on to privatize New South Wales’s electricity
grid, and the banks are licking their lips.
Murder
by budget cuts.
(January
15, 1999)
By
Allen Douglas
The New Zealand government is systematically, relentlessly murdering its
own citizens.
What
Eurasian Land-Bridge?. (December
20, 1998) By Allen Douglas
The government’s new report on Asian infrastructure carries not a single
mention of the “new Silk Road.”
War on
the Police. (December 4,
1998) By Allen Douglas
George Soros’ stooges are leading the charge for the legalization of
drugs, but they are being aided by a combined federal/state assault against
traditional law enforcement.
The handwriting is on the wall as a nation whose political leadership destroys its own citizenry, is headed for certain doom, warns LaRouche. (November 27, 1998) By Allen Douglas
Cartels
attack national sovereignty.
(November 20, 1998)
By Allen Douglas
The push for “Aboriginal reconciliation” is a racist fraud organized
by Her Majesty’s raw materials firms.
Big
Banks to merge?. (November 13,
1998) By Allen Douglas
Profits are soaring, and the “Big 4” may soon become the “Big
2,” but the derivatives time bomb is ticking.
Murder
by 'Suicide'. (November 6,
1998) By Allen
Douglas
Philip “Dr. Death” Nitschke has opened a euthanasia clinic in Victoria,
a state run by his soul-mate, Jeff Kennett.
'Two bob
each way'. (October 30,
1998) By Allen Douglas
The government will have to make up its mind—either there is a global
financial crisis, or there isn’t.
Leiblers
take a hit. (October 22,
1998) By Allen Douglas
The Australia/Israel Review has been forced to dump its editor, following
its latest political dirty trick.
So far, Her Majesty’s Australian government has stood
foursquare behind the British-American-Commonwealth (BAC) cabal’s insane
assaults on Iraq and Yugoslavia. Australia has supplied ships, troops, and
intelligence for the war against Iraq, while its satellite intelligence facility
at the joint U.S.-Australian base at Pine Gap in central Australia, has been
key for targetting bombs against both nations. On April 12, Yugoslavia arrested
two Australians in Kosovo, and charged them with spying, under cover of working
for the aid agency, Care Australia. Whether the two, one of whom was an
Australian Army major whom the Iraqis had earlier charged with espionage,
are guilty or not, Yugoslavia has de facto recognized Australia’s status
as a belligerent.
However, led by Lyndon LaRouche’s associates in the
Citizens Electoral Council (CEC), many citizens of this Commonwealth nation
have, by signing two CEC petitions which were officially presented to the
federal parliament in Canberra in March, challenged their government’s
support for the BAC’s drive for World War III. The first, signed by
more than 1,500 citizens, and introduced on March 8, “draws the attention
of the House to the fact that thousands of Australian citizens and elected
officials have endorsed the following Appeal to President Clinton,”
to immediately appoint the statesman and economist LaRouche as his economic
adviser. The included Appeal is identical to that being circulated worldwide.
After denouncing the “misuse of the American
Congress” for an “attempted coup d’etat” in the “style
of a British parliamentary system” against the U.S. President, the petition
notes the disastrous failure of the Group of Seven, the Group of 22, and
the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to deal with the “urgently
required reorganization of the international monetary and financial
system.” LaRouche, on the other hand, “has been right,” and
“all of his critics are today fully discredited,” the petition
said. It concluded, “Your petitioners therefore request the House to
approach President Clinton, and ask that he appoint Lyndon LaRouche has his
economic adviser in this period of grave crisis.” After its incorporation
into the parliamentary record, the document was sent to the White House.
The second petition, introduced on an emergency basis
on March 29, with its 479 signatures having been gathered in less than two
weeks, attacked the December 1998 “Operation Desert Fox,” and pointed
to the danger of an upcoming “all-out assault” against Iraq, one
which could involve “the likely use of nuclear weapons.” Furthermore,
the petition said, “that faction which has often been called the British
American Commonwealth grouping associated with Wall Street and the City of
London have contemptuously ignored any objections,” either to their
assaults on Iraq, or to the rewriting of NATO doctrine to enable “out
of area military strikes ... featuring the ‘first use’ of tactical
nuclear weapons.”
The petition continued, “These same circles view
China and Russia as the enemies in a ‘new Cold War’--an outlook
entirely contrary to the foreign policy of President Clinton—and one
which may, given the emphasis on the use of nuclear weapons, quickly escalate
into a global war.”
The petition demands that the Australian government, which
has numerous military agreements with the United States and the U.K., “take
a firm public stand” against the Iraq war and the new NATO doctrine,
and that it “communicate such a stance on these two issues directly
to the relevant officials in the U.S. and U.K. immediately.”
The petitions, part of a campaign by the CEC to educate
the parliament on the nature of the BAC cabal and its chief front-man in
the United States, Vice President Al Gore, have had an impact. The chairman
of the House-Senate Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defense,
and Trade, Sen. David MacGibbon, for example, in response to one CEC
supporter’s lobbying, wrote, “The Committee has taken a great deal
of interest in this matter and is watching developments very carefully.”
However, he said, “You appear to be placing much of the responsibility
for these actions on Vice President Gore. However, there is nothing that
I have seen or read that would lead me to conclude other than that President
Clinton is firmly directing U.S. policy in this matter.”
CEC National Secretary Craig Isherwood told EIR, “Our
relentless campaign to attack and expose this BAC drive for world war to
protect their bankrupt financial system will continue. It is crucial that
the world knows, that even within the bowels of the Commonwealth, there is
widespread opposition to this lunacy.”
Both petitions were introduced into Parliament by senior
Australian Labor Party MP Kelvin Thomson of Melbourne, many of whose constituents
signed them.
Pushing
for World War III. (April 6, 1999)
By Robert Barwick
The government has lined up behind U.S. Vice President Al Gore and his
Principals’ Committee.
In the last two weeks of March, the Australian government
took at least three actions which have pushed the world closer to World War
III. First, it enthusiastically endorsed NATO’s bombardment of Yugoslavia,
with no mention of solving the crisis through collaboration with Russia;
second, it sent a guided missile frigate to the Persian Gulf, to help enforce
the genocidal embargo of Iraq, the unjustified war which has enraged both
Russia and China; and, it officially lent its weight to “Iraq-style”
intrusive inspections of North Korea’s alleged “nuclear
sites”--inspections guaranteed to enrage both the Russians and Chinese
further. These latter two nations understand that it is they, not the alleged
“rogue states” of Serbia, Iraq, or North Korea, which are the real
targets of these undeclared wars being orchestrated by Britain’s Prime
Minister Tony Blair and his sympathizers in the Vice President Al Gore-led
Principals’ Committee, including Secretary of State Madeleine Albright,
Defense Secretary William Cohen, and Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff
Gen. Henry Shelton, which is in almost open insurrection against President
Bill Clinton.
As American statesman Lyndon LaRouche has emphasized,
the world today is comprised of three power blocs: 1) The
British-American-Commonwealth grouping, centered in London and Wall Street,
whose frenzied actions are driven by the ongoing global financial collapse,
2) the Euroland “poor man’s club,” and 3) the Eurasian-based
“Survivors’ Club,” anchored on Russia, China, and India, and
including other nations which want to re-assert national sovereignty and
economic development as a solution to the global financial crisis. The actions
of Australia, a member of the BAC cabal, demonstrate the insanity and stinking
hypocrisy of the BAC crowd.
For example, to take the third of Australia’s above-cited
actions first: In 1997, LaRouche’s Australian associates in the Citizens
Electoral Council campaigned for Australia, one of the world’s leading
food exporters, to provide large-scale food aid to the starving North Koreans.
Under pressure, it finally provided a mere fraction of what it was capable
of. Large-scale aid was equally in Australia’s interest, as it was in
North Korea’s, because South Korea is Australia’s third-largest
trading partner, and peace on the Korean peninsula is critical to
Australia’s security. By choosing not to act then, Australia has allowed
another 1-2 million North Koreans to starve to death, and has made their
government that much more desperate and unpredictable.
Now, Australia is compounding its error, through the recent trip to
Washington of Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs Dr. Ashley Calvert.
There, Calvert strongly recommended to Clinton’s North Korea troubleshooter,
Dr. William Perry, that the United States demand intrusive inspections anywhere
in the country at the drop of a hat. A source inside the Australian Defense
Department told EIR: “It’s a massive miscalculation. North Korea
may be starving, but they’ve still got the military hardware to
fight.” It is precisely such a fight, which Gore et al. would like to
encourage.
On the Balkans crisis, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer
sanctimoniously proclaimed on March 25, “The international community
cannot simply stand by and watch as President [Slobodan] Milosevic’s
forces continue to perpetrate the sort of human rights abuses that have been
perpetrated recently in Kosovo.” Yet, “standing by and watching”
is precisely what the NATO alliance--and Australia--did from the early 1990s
until President Clinton belatedly ordered air strikes in 1995, while Milosevic
slaughtered some 300,000 Bosnians. Even then, the crisis was only
“solved” with the assistance of the Russians, in the Dayton Accords.
Nor did the Australian government say or do anything to stop the genocide
against the Hutus in the Congo in 1997, of which LaRouche’s associates
had made them starkly aware.
In the case of Iraq, Australia has done much to fan the
crisis. It officially paid the salary of the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM)
head, Australian Richard Butler, who issued the phony report which was used
to justify “Operation Desert Fox” in December. It also sent Australian
Special Air Services troops to the Persian Gulf 18 months ago, for possible
“surgical actions” to remove Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, while
the ultra-secret Pine Gap U.S.-Australian communications base in central
Australia has been crucial to the bombing campaigns against Iraq (and, no
doubt, against Yugoslavia as well). In addition, Australia has just sent
another guided missile frigate to the Gulf, the HMAS Melbourne, to help enforce
the genocidal embargo against Iraq, and, according to TV reports, has dispatched
Australian Air Force pilots to train in Arizona, for possible missions in
the Gulf, while other Australian pilots are reportedly training with the
British Air Force, for undisclosed missions.
Queen's
crony cleans up. (March 26, 1999)
By Allen Douglas
In a stunning display of cowardice, or worse, the government has allowed
BAC media baron Kerry Packer to take over the nation’s largest newspaper
group.
On March 12, the Australian Broadcasting Authority, the
nation’s media regulator, shocked the country by clearing media baron
Kerry Packer of violating cross-media ownership rules, in the face of clear
evidence to the contrary. The decision, made under his threat of a
lawsuit, allows Packer, a key figure in the British-American-Commonwealth
(BAC) financial oligarchy and a playmate of Queen Elizabeth II, to take over
Australia’s largest media group, John Fairfax Holdings, the proprietor
of the Sydney Morning Herald, the Melbourne Age, and the Australian Financial
Review, among others.
The ABA began an investigation of Packer in May 1998,
when Brian Powers, the long-time CEO of Packer’s main company, suddenly
resigned, and within hours, joined the board of Fairfax. Australia’s
media laws stipulate that no one may control a major newspaper and television
station in the same city; since Packer owns the country’s largest TV
station, Sydney’s Channel 9, and Fairfax owns the Sydney Morning Herald,
there was prima facie evidence that Packer, through Powers, was breaking
the law. Indeed, it was publicly reported that Packer sent Powers to Fairfax
with a $12 million loan, and instructions to become chairman or deputy chairman.
Powers did become chairman; that triggered the investigation.
To stop Packer’s takeover, the ABA had to prove that
1) Powers had control over Fairfax, and that 2) Powers and Packer were
“associates.” In an interim report, the ABA found that the two
were financial partners in numerous ventures; that Packer had hired Powers
as a “consultant”; and that he continued to pay the lease on
Powers’s house and golf club memberships even after Powers moved to
Fairfax—in short, they were clearly “associates.” After Packer
and Powers threatened to sue the ABA, the panel then concluded, preposterously,
that Powers didn’t really control Fairfax, and that therefore they did
not need to make a finding whether the two were “associates.”
Though outraging many, the decision surprised no one,
because: 1) Packer is worth an estimated $5 billion, and has immense political
clout, and 2) Prime Minister John Howard “owed him one.” In 1995,
with a national election coming up, Packer, on his own Channel 9 TV, gave
a lengthy endorsement of Liberal Party leader John Howard for the next prime
minister. Shortly after defeating Labor in March 1996, Howard called for
a change in media laws which would have given Packer control over Fairfax,
which he had long coveted. An uproar by backbenchers prevented that change,
which has now been granted via the ABA decision.
The ABA’s decision that “2 plus 2 does not equal
4,” was all the more scorned, because of what every Australian knows:
Packer is a bully who dominates all those around him, and thus the idea that
Powers would not be acting for him at Fairfax is absurd. What is less well
known, is Packer’s important role within the BAC cabal currently driving
the world toward financial collapse, and possibly, world war. Packer shares
the Queen’s box at Ascot on racing day, and is an intimate of some of
the dirtiest members of the Crown’s financial oligarchy. These include
World Bank boss, Australian-born Sir James Wolfensohn, Packer’s main
financial adviser and business partner since the 1960s; Wolfensohn’s
mentor, UN Undersecretary Sir Maurice Strong of Canada; BAC media baron Conrad
Black (Canada), owner of the London Daily Telegraph and some 250 other newspapers
globally, with whom Packer was a partner when Black briefly took over the
Fairfax group in the mid-1990s; and Sir Jacob Rothschild (Britain), with
whom he once attempted a $30 billion takeover of British American Tobacco.
But, there is something else which every Australian knows,
which has really fueled the disgust at the government’s capitulation:
Packer was named by an early 1980s royal commission chaired by Francis S.
Costigan as “The Goanna”, allegedly a major player in various criminal
activities relating to pornography, tax evasion, drugs, corporate fraud,
money laundering, and others. Packer fought the commission at every turn;
crucial documents disappeared, and Packer launched waves of legal actions
and other delaying tactics. Even so, his activities filled three volumes
of the Costigan commission’s final report, volumes never made public.
In 1983, a new government under Labor Prime Minister Bob Hawke came to power.
Hawke declared that Packer was a “close personal friend,” and a
“great Australian,” and shut down the commission. Packer later
hired Hawke as a “media consultant.”
Nor is the media the only place BAC kingpin Packer is
consolidating control. On March 4, he took over Melbourne’s Crown Casino,
the largest in the southern hemisphere, and one whose gaming chips have surfaced
in police investigations of drug-money laundering schemes.
Big
push for Timor independence. (March
19, 1999) By Robert Barwick
Australia has sowed the wind over this Indonesian province, and now it will
reap the whirlwind.
With one eye to major troubles in East Timor, the Indonesian
province just a few hundred kilometers to the north, the Australian government
announced on March 11 that it is doubling the percentage of its 32,000-man
defense force which can be deployed for combat within 28 days.
This dramatic shift in Australian Defense Force readiness
is just the latest in a series of fast-moving developments that have followed
Indonesia’s shock announcement in late January, that 24 years after
taking over the former Portuguese colony in 1975, it is prepared to withdraw
its troops and grant the Timorese independence if they reject an offer of
greater autonomy in a vote now scheduled for July. This raised the specter
of a resumption of the civil war which erupted after Portugal’s abrupt
pullout in 1975. However, any threat to Australia’s security is largely
of its own making, because, together with Portugal, it helped force
Jakarta’s policy shift.
Indonesia’s sudden shift on East Timor was preceded
by a dramatic announcement by Australia in December, that it supports East
Timorese “self-determination.” It was a clear break with a 24-year
policy, in which Australia had been one of the only countries in the world
to recognize Indonesia’s claim to sovereignty over East Timor, against
the official position of the UN. This position dated from 1975, when Prime
Minister Gough Whitlam supported the Indonesian takeover of East Timor.
Australia had come under intense criticism for that position,
most notably from the brutal former colonial master of the province, Portugal.
The tension between the two countries reached a high point in 1992, when
Portugal lodged a complaint against Australia at the International Court
in The Hague, the Netherlands, over an oil treaty Australia had just signed
with Indonesia relating to reserves in the oil-rich Timor Gap. Australia
responded by closing down its Lisbon embassy.
However, in 1995, under the government of Socialist Prime
Minister Antonio Guterres, who is very close to British Prime Minister Tony
Blair, Portuguese Foreign Minister Jaime Gama began overtures to Australia,
and expressed his wish that the embassy be reopened. In February 1998, Gama
had a dinner meeting with Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, which,
though fiery, apparently initiated the beginning of a shift in Australia’s
attitude toward the province. Last December, Australian Prime Minister John
Howard wrote to Indonesian President B.J. Habibie pressing for Timorese
self-determination. Howard took personal credit for Indonesia’s subsequent
policy shift: “We are pleased at the change of heart in Jakarta,”
he told Melbourne radio 3AW on Jan. 29. “We played no small role in
that. As you know, I wrote to President Habibie before Christmas indicating
that we thought the time had come for a change in Indonesian policy.”
However, the implications of Timorese independence are
only just beginning to be fully understood. Thousands of non-East Timorese
residents, including a large percentage of the province’s doctors,
engineers, teachers, and businessman, have begun fleeing the territory, while
pro-Indonesian guerrilla forces there have threatened to kill an Australian
diplomat or journalist as a “sacrifice,” to demonstrate that
Australia’s push for independence will inevitably lead to massive bloodshed.
“It is better to sacrifice an Australian diplomat or journalist to save
the lives of 85,000 East Timorese,” two militia leaders wrote Downer
in early March.
Ironically, even longtime independence agitator, Fretelin
resistance leader, and Nobel Prizewinner José Ramos Horta expressed
opposition to independence when Indonesia first mooted it, demanding instead
that Australia play a key role in a UN interim administration. “It is
obvious that the Indonesians are not going to be able to stay on in Timor,
and I would object to immediate independence, so I would prefer to have an
international transition administration in East Timor under the UN flag,
in which Australia would play a major part,” Horta said on Jan. 29.
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan announced on March 13 that a UN peacekeeping
team would be in Timor in April, and Australia has committed
“administrative and technical” (as opposed to military) assistance
to that force.
The British-American-Commonwealth cabal, of which Australia
is a leading member, is on a mad drive to break up nation-states, as the
world plummets deeper into financial and economic collapse. No doubt that
cabal’s cartels also have their eyes on the super-rich oil and gas reserves
in the Timor Gap seabed under the Timor Sea, the exploitation of which is
governed by the complex Timor Gap Treaty between Australia and Indonesia,
and which are expected to be ceded to the newly independent East Timor.
Media
barons push drugs. (March 5,
1999)
By Robert Barwick
Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch are driving the campaign to legalize heroin.
Australian Prime Minister John Howard is, at least at
the moment, resisting intense pressure to allow a trial use of prescribed
heroin to go ahead in Canberra, the nation’s capital, along the lines
of a much-publicized Swiss heroin experiment. The drug crisis, and the raging
debate over legalizing heroin, is presently the single biggest political
issue in the country. However, while Australia is wracked by a drug epidemic,
which claims about 600 lives a year, the present debate was cooked up by
the Packer/Murdoch media magnates, to force through heroin legalization.
In Parliament on Feb 24, Federal Health Minister Dr. Michael
Wooldridge complained, “The fact is, that nothing new has happened in
the past three months other than a couple of tabloid newspapers have put
this on their front page.” Salvation Army Major Brian Watters, the chairman
of the Prime Ministers National Drug Policy Committee, told EIR that the
number of Australians who have used heroin, between 1.5 and 2%, has remained
static for the last 15 years, while only 0.4 to 0.5% have used it in the
past 12 months.
The tabloids Health Minister Wooldridge referred to, were
the Kerry Packer-controlled Sydney Sun Herald, and the Rupert Murdoch-owned
Melbourne Herald Sun. On Jan. 31, Packer’s Sun Herald ran a front-page
photo showing a teenage boy shooting up in a side alley with a
government-supplied syringe. The outrage this photo prompted had two effects:
In New South Wales (N.S.W.), which is facing a state election on March 27,
the government immediately stopped its needle exchange program, and a competition
ensued with the state legislative opposition, over which party could pay
lip-service to being toughest on drugs; on cue, the pro-dope lobby immediately
resurrected the heroin trial idea, which had been shelved in 1997.
A few weeks later, Murdoch’s Herald Sun escalated
the campaign by running a front-page photo showing a young mother shooting
up in a park in front of her baby. The media, notably Packer’s Channel
9, began running drug-related crime stories alongside reports of the heroin
trial debate. Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett, a Mont Pelerin Society stooge
who was defeated in his efforts to decriminalize marijuana in 1996 by a
mobilization of the Citizens Electoral Council, a national political party
allied with Lyndon LaRouche’s movement, immediately placed his considerable
political weight behind the heroin trial, saying that any option should be
looked at.
This issue has divided Australia’s elected political
leaders, most of whom, led by Prime Minister Howard, are standing firm against
the trial, but who are coming under increased pressure from Kennett, Australian
Capital Territory Chief Minister Kate Carnell, the media, and high-profile
pro-drug decriminalization proponents such as N.S.W. Director of Public
Prosecutions Nicolas Cowdery, who called for heroin dealers to be licensed
and taxed. The pressure isn’t all one way: 1960s Australian music icon
Normie Rowe said of Kate Carnell and her proposed heroin trial,
“She’s a drug pusher.”
In the March 9 Bulletin magazine, Packer scribe Laurie
Oakes identified the real goal of the push for a heroin trial: “The
issue of decriminalization is the bottom line.” To this end, the usual
suspects have seized on the heroin trial debate to make their case. Australian
Drug Foundation (ADF) head Bill Stronach, whose organization was responsible
for Australia adopting the insidious “harm minimization” approach
to drugs back in 1986, now demands shooting galleries and a heroin trial.
ADF policy comes directly from the financial establishment:
Stronach is advised by ADF board member Dr. Ethan Nadelman, the head of global
megaspeculator George Soros’s Lindesmith Center, which was founded to
promote dope legalization, while the ADF is funded by Australia’s major
banks and foundations, including the Reserve Bank and the Queen’s Trust,
whose patron Prince Charles caused an uproar in Britain in December, when
he recommended that a patient in a clinic in Cheltenham try marijuana to
ease her pain.
Another ADF patron is Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, the mother
of media tycoon Rupert Murdoch. One welfare organization, Open Family, has
threatened to set up its own illegal private shooting galleries, if the law
isn’t changed. Open Family is one more mouthpiece for the financial
establishment: Its board boasts the director of ANZ Nominees (tied to ANZ
Bank, one of the country’s largest), and Jeanne Pratt, the wife of
multibillionaire businessmen Richard Pratt, whose Pratt Foundation has financed
the drive for legal dope.
Whilst resisting the push for a heroin trial, Prime Minister
Howard has undermined his position by savagely cutting the budgets of the
frontline organizations in the drug war, federal police and customs; the
$80 million Tough on Drugs initiative he announced in 1997 didn’t come
close to making up the losses.
Another
Privatisation Scam. (February 26,
1999)
By Robert Barwick
Once again, the push is on to privatize New South Wales’s electricity
grid, and the banks are licking their lips.
Sixty-seven years after New South Wales premier Jack Lang
stared down the Bank of England’s bailiff, Sir Otto Neimeyer, during
the Great Depression, and declared a debt moratorium against City of London
banks, banks are once again determining NSW state government policy. The
state Liberal/National Party coalition has embraced privatization of the
state’s electricity system as its key election campaign policy, as it
looks to replace the Bob Carr Labor government at the March 27 state election.
The sale of the electricity system is expected to raise $25 billion for the
State, and was first mooted 2 years ago by Carr’s own government, but
proved so unpopular with the traditional elements within his own Labor
Party—especially its trade union constituency—that Carr and his
Treasurer Michael Egan was forced to drop the policy in October 1997. The
Liberal/Nationals, though, under new leader Kerry Chikarovski and without
the same trade union constituency, have resurrected the idea, but with a
new element cynically calculated to make it a vote-getter—a $1000 bribe
for every elector in the state, in the form of either cash or shares, to
be paid from the proceeds of the sale.
If realised, the electricity sale will be the latest in
a series of fire sales that have swept Australia in a privatisation frenzy
in the past decade. Already, Australia’s $66 billion in government asset
sales in the 1990s is second only to Great Britain—a much bigger country
in terms of population—in dollar terms, and second only to New
Zealand—a much smaller country—in terms of per capita privatisations.
Australia will undoubtedly leap to the top of the list in the event of the
NSW privatisation, a planned South Australia electricity sale worth $4 billion,
and the $40 billion sale of the remaining two thirds of Telstra, the
nation’s telecommunications carrier, going ahead.
Setting the pace has been the Liberal/National Party
government of Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett, which has sold $27 billion
worth of state assets since 1992. Kennett’s privatisation program has
been formulated and directed by Melbourne think tanks the Tasman Institute
and the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA), two of the Australian subsidiaries
of the British Crown’s economic warfare unit, the Mont Pelerin Society.
Interestingly, in NSW, the most powerful proponent of privatisation, in spite
of his stated position opposing it, which was forced on him by his party’s
rank and file, is Premier Bob Carr, who is a “proud” member of
the Sydney subsidiary of the Mont Pelerin Society, the Centre for Independent
Studies (CIS).
The selling point for privatisation has always been
“retiring public debt”. In Victoria, Kennett put most of his $27
billion to lowering state debt from $31 billion, to less than $10 billion.
In NSW, the stated aim, from both the Liberal/National’s and Labor when
it was their policy, is to retire $18 billion worth of state debt. Scandalously,
an EIR/New Citizen investigation has revealed that the creditors of the state
of NSW are anonymous. The only information publicly available for NSW is
that, out of the total state sector debt in domestic and foreign borrowings
of $25 billion, $24.7 billion is in bonds, about half of which are denominated
in foreign currency. In the event of the currency fluctuations that have
accompanied the world financial meltdown, that $12 billion in debt can blow
out overnight. Former New Zealand Finance Minister Sir Roger Douglas, after
pioneering his country’s ruthless privatisation program under the direction
of the Mont Pelerin Society, like Kennett and Carr, and which resulted in
the highest per capita rate of asset sale in the world, once admitted,
“I’m not sure we were right to use the argument that we should
privatise to quit debt. We knew it was a poor argument, but we probably felt
it was the easiest to use politically.”
Further, the identity of these bondholders is, according
to an officer of NSW loans facilitator Treasury Corp., “commercially
in confidence, and exempt from freedom of information”. This news was
greeted with outrage by Ann Lawler, the NSW State Coordinator for the Citizens
Electoral Council, the Australian political party allied with American economist
Lyndon LaRouche’s global fight for national sovereignty and a New Bretton
Woods monetary system. “It is a scandal that the citizens of this state
can’t find out who the state’s creditors are,” Mrs Lawler
blasted. “Who is the state indebted to, that is looking forward to this
$18 billion windfall? In 1932, when the Bank of England sent the bailiff,
Sir Otto Neimeyer to collect on NSW’s debt, the bank demanded the imposition
of austerity conditions calculated to make the state and its citizens poor,
and the bank rich. Instead, Lang declared a debt moratorium, and was sacked
by the then British King’s representative, Governor Sir Philip Game,
for his troubles. Lang’s fate demonstrates the enormous power creditors
wield over a state government, yet, in this day of transparency’ and
open government’, the people of NSW can’t find out who their creditors
are.”
Despite their anonymity, it is indisputable that big banks
are the main beneficiaries of privatisations. International merchant bank
CS First Boston, which was implicated in dirty money laundering schemes in
the 1980s, has made $42 million from handling the Victorian privatisations
alone, and was also involved in the sale of Telstra. New Zealand merchant
bank Fay Richwhite, which made millions from its involvement in both selling
and buying NZ’s privatisations, won the appointment from Carr to handle
the electricity sale when it was still Labor policy. Fay Richwhite principal
David Richwhite was heavily involved in the NZ branch of Carr’s beloved
CIS.
Murder
by budget
cuts.
(January 15,
1999)
By
Allen Douglas
The New Zealand government is systematically, relentlessly murdering its
own citizens.
At the outset of World War II, Adolf Hitler issued a
handwritten order, backdated to the first day of the war, in which he stated
that he “considered it to be proper that the ‘life unworthy of
life’ of severely mentally ill persons be eliminated by actions
that bring about death.” In this way, he said, “a certain saving
in hospitals, doctors, and nursing personnel could be brought about.”
Precisely that Nazi policy is now being applied in New
Zealand today, a policy which Vice President Al Gore plans to extend to the
United States. Toward that end, Gore anointed Prime Minister Jenny
Shipley—who, as New Zealand’s Heath Minister, had helped design
the “reforms” of the country’s genocidal health care
system—to keynote his Jan. 14-15 “Reinventing Government”
conference in Washington. And, perhaps related to Gore’s plans, a delegation
from the U.S. Congress’s General Accounting Office spent the month of
September in New Zealand, studying the “New Zealand model,” the
genesis and some details of which EIR exposed last week (“Al Gore’s
New Zealand Model: ‘Reinventing’ Corruption, Genocide”). But,
just since then, EIR has received further data on the latest slashes in overall
medical care there, beginning with mental health.
For instance, a mentally ill man in Christchurch committed
suicide on Jan. 5, as he was awaiting trial for the murder of a young girl.
The man’s family blasted the government for the budget slashes which
had “inevitably” caused both deaths. “The health system is
run down and strapped for cash anyway, but mental health is the poor
cousin,” and their son had not received the sort of treatment he so
clearly needed, they charged.
This relentless elimination of the mentally ill is truly
shocking: New Zealand has the highest youth suicide rate in the world, and
some 25 studies have been carried out since 1989 on the country’s
disastrous mental health situation. One of them, the 1996 “Mason
Report,” found that “in any one year 25-35% of our population have
symptoms that meet criteria for a mental disorder and that approximately
one-third of these people have a disorder which is serious or chronic.”
New Zealand’s response to such studies, has been to further cut mental
health funds. Indicative is the number of mental ward hospital beds: 500
per 100,000 people 50 years ago, which had fallen to 225 per 100,000 by the
time New Zealand’s “reforms” began in 1984, and now stand
at 38 per 100,000.
Maxine Gay, the head of the New Zealand Schizophrenia
Fellowship and president of the Federation of Trade Unions, charged in 1997
that the (often-unreported) suicide rate among the mentally ill had skyrocketted.
“It is a genocide really, of the mentally ill,” she said.
But, that genocide is merely the cutting edge of the New
Zealand “reforms,” whose latest phase is the “reform”
of hospital waiting lists initiated in late 1998. Almost 100,000 people now
languish on such lists, while at least another 100,000 people who need operations
are not even allowed on the lists—this in a total population of only
3.4 million people. So, to “solve” this problem, the government
has just established a new surgical booking system, under which a tiny fraction
of those who had managed to get on the lists will be “guaranteed”
an operation, while the rest will be left to fend for themselves, perhaps
to try to raise tens of thousands of dollars for an operation—this in
a country which, before the “reforms,” had free, high-quality universal
health care.
To see how this new policy will work, look at Waikato
Hospital, the nation’s second largest. Only 406 patients out of 9,536
(4%) on its waiting lists will be guaranteed surgery under the new booking
system. The next tier (4,315) will get a letter stating that they
“may” get an operation, while all the rest will be told they are
“unlikely” to get one. For example, the following patients recently
received a letter which stated, “You have been retained on a waiting
list. Unfortunately, we
cannot guarantee that we will be able to offer you treatment at this time.
You will be reconsidered for treatment within 12 months”:
* Heather Stephenson, 68, who has corneal problems, cataracts in both
eyes, and who is almost blind.
* Brian Mundy, 70, who has been waiting almost two years for a heart
triple bypass.
* Katherine Oliphant, 36, who had cancer of the cervix 18 months ago,
and needs a hysterectomy because of heavy bleeding and pain.
* Francesca Paul, 3, who has severe tonsilitis, who has been on a waiting
list for 18 months, and who is now almost immune to antibiotics.
* Ina Mitchum, 84, whose collapsed bladder hangs outside her vagina.
* Malcolm Read, 10, who has a concave chest which is stunting his heart and
lungs, causing severe pain.
Meanwhile, seven patients have died recently while on the waiting lists
of another major hospital, Palmerston North, while another 30 on its waiting
list have been offered treatment—in Australia.
What
Eurasian Land-Bridge?. (December 20, 1998)
By Allen Douglas
The government’s new report on Asian infrastructure carries not a single
mention of the “new Silk Road.”
Deputy Prime Minister Tim Fischer has outdone him self
this time, in making a laughingstock of himself and his government. Widely
known as “Dim Tim,” because of his imperviousness to reality, Fischer
is also the Minister for Trade and Industry; in that capacity, on Dec. 2,
he launched his government’s definitive new report on Asian infrastructure,
“Asia’s Infrastructure in the Crisis—Harnessing Private
Enterprise.” The report contains not a single mention of the greatest
infrastructure project in the history of mankind, the 11,000 kilometer Eurasian
Land-Bridge, stretching from Lianyungang, China to Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
But, it is not just “Dim Tim’s” usual
blockheadedness, rivalling that of the cigar store Indian himself, fellow
free trader U.S. Vice President Al Gore, which caused his government to overlook
the project around which all global strategic reality is now pivotting. In
fact, Fischer’s government is keenly aware of the Land-Bridge and its
implications. So, to not mention it, can only mean that the government is
bitterly opposed to it, as per the report’s radical free trade axioms.
Two incidents, in particular, prove that the blackout
of the Land-Bridge is intentional. First, in mid-1997, one of Lyndon
LaRouche’s Australian associates had contacted Dr. Frances Perkins,
the head of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade unit which authored
the report, and verbally briefed her on the Land-Bridge, and sent her a copy
of EIR’s 290-page report, “The Eurasian Land-Bridge: The ‘New
Silk Road’—Locomotive for Worldwide Economic Development.”
Second, and more important, the work on the Land-Bridge
by Lyndon LaRouche and his wife Helga Zepp-LaRouche, widely known as the
“Silk Road Lady” for her advocacy of the project, figured prominently
in the wild attack which Fischer launched on LaRouche in early June 1996,
in which Fischer squealed, “There is no place in Australia for the type
of agenda being pursued by the LaRouche organization.” Only hours before
that attack, Fischer had met with European Union Trade Commissioner Sir Leon
Brittan, who had just attended a major conference in Beijing on the Land-Bridge
at which Zepp-LaRouche was a featured speaker. Sir Leon, in his typically
arrogant British fashion, had demanded that the Land-Bridge be built, if
at all, under private auspices, “or else.”
In contrast to Brittan’s insulting behavior,
Zepp-LaRouche’s passionate advocacy of this great project resonated
strongly with her hosts. In other words, Sir Leon had taken a political drubbing
at the hands of Zepp-LaRouche. Clearly “not amused,” Sir Leon whispered
in “Dim Tim’s” ear as soon as he got to Australia, and “Dim
Tim” went up like a skyrocket. His attacks on LaRouche made front-page
news for a week.
Aside from blacking out the biggest infrastructure project
in the world, the report also ignores the deepening global depression, with
such lunatic prognostications as: “The immediate financial crisis stage
appears to be over for most regional [Asian] economies”; and, that
“most economies should recover in the next two to five years.”
Notwithstanding Fischer’s pious proclamations on
Dec. 2 about how “it would be wrong to be simply a fair-weather friend
of Asia,” the report prescribes measures for the further looting of
Asia, through privatization of the region’s infrastructure, to wit:
“Crisis-induced infrastructure asset sales will provide investment
opportunities for Australian infrastructure investment firms.”
Over all these measures hangs the stench of corruption
which invariably accompanies “privatization” scams, in which private
interests loot the infrastructure base built up over decades with public
funds, as has happened in Australia. The report waxes eloquent about two
privatization models in particular: that of the state of Victoria, where
citizens are now dying because of the privatization of infrastructure,
particularly in the health sector, and that of the water supply in Manila.
Both of these were scripted by the Tasman Institute, an Australian front
for the British Crown’s Mont Pelerin Society. Tasman, together with
its fellow Mont Pelerin think-tanks, helped design the federal government’s
privatization program, the world’s second-largest (behind Margaret
Thatcher’s Britain), while at least six members of the federal government
are long-standing associates of these think-tanks. In other words, their
cronies, whom the government has employed as “consultants,” have
made a bundle from government policy!
No wonder, that the report’s executive summary concludes:
“These reforms should provide commercial opportunities for Australian
businesses and consultants. The Australian government should promote and
facilitate such reforms ... and assist Australian business to access these
opportunities.”
War
on the Police. (December 4, 1998)
By Allen Douglas
George Soros’ stooges are leading the charge for the legalization of
drugs, but they are being aided by a combined federal/state assault
against traditional law enforcement.
From November 22-25, the first International Conference on Drugs and Young
People was held in Melbourne, attended by 650 delegates from Australia, New
Zealand, the U.S., England, Sweden, Asia, Africa and the Pacific Islands.
Lead speakers at the conference, including federal Senator Natasha Stott
Despoja of the Australia Democrats and Mike Moore, health minister for the
Australian Capital Territory almost unanimously called for the adoption
of the “harm minimization” strategy designed by George Soros, the
mega-speculator and Daddy Warbucks of the worldwide drive to legalize marijuana,
cocaine and heroin, among other deadly drugs, as a “solution” to
the burgeoning drug trade in Australia, and globally.
The November conference was merely the latest in an unending
stream of conferences, seminars, studies and calls by politicians downunder,
to rip up traditional law enforcement methods, and surrender to the drug
cartels, and their pro-legalization allies in the banks, casinos and other
establishment money-laundering institutions. All of this activity has been
either financed by Soros himself, whose chief Australian representative is
Mike Moore, by establishment firms such as Rio Tinto, or by the Australian
Drug Foundation, a front for the nation’s major banks, who profit from
the over AUS$7 billion laundered annually through the banking system. (see
EIR, June 12, 1998) But, more than anything else, what has energized the
call for legalization, has been the soaring crime rates and numbers of
drug-related deaths, which is the direct result of dismantling the nation’s
federal and state police forces.
No one disputes the extent of the problem: A U.N. report
last year found that Australia’s had one of the highest per capita
consumption rates of marijuana in the world; the nation’s heroin problem
has been regularly described as “worse than Great Britain’s”
(which has exploded due to back-door forms of legalization), and has resulted
in over 600 deaths from heroin overdoses last year alone; and crime rates
across the country have soared. George Pell, the Catholic Archbishop for
Melbourne, recently described the soaring drug/crime problem in the country
as of “epidemic proportions”.
Federal and state governments would of course meet such
an emergency by strengthening police forces, beginning by stepping up funding,
right? Wrong! From the federal government on down, they have done the opposite,
by slashing funding and sanctioning attacks on police and customs forces,
including disbanding the two most effective state anti-drug units in the
country.
In March 1998, with one eye on the approaching federal
elections, Liberal party Prime Minister John Howard responded to the furore
over the exploding drug/crime problem, by pronouncing a new AUS$187 million
“Tough on Drugs” campaign, reversing his government’s previous
support for a “heroin trial” in the ACT, in which the ACT government
proposed to set up “safe injecting rooms”. Howard’s new-found
enthusiasm for fighting drugs, was belied by the fact that, since the Department
of Public Health formally adopted it in 1986, the government’s official
position on drugs is “harm minimization”, and by the fact that
his government had ruthlessly slashed funding for the Customs Department
and the Australian Federal Police (AFP) since it came to power in early 1996,
to the point that both have been almost driven out of existence. The Customs
Department, for instance, in 1997-98 seized a miniscule 38.7 kilograms of
cannabis, compared to 24,546 kg in 1996-97, and has the resources to examine
only 3 of every 10,000 cargo containers entering the country. Customs’
staff union spokesman Stuart Bell charged in October that the number of ship
searches had been slashed because of “dramatic staff cuts”, and
that the “new” federal anti-drug money replaced only one-third
of the funds previously cut by Howard. The AFP, meanwhile, lost 185 agents
last year, and are losing 13 more each month, with two AFP regions covering
the Northern Region (the Northern Territory and Queensland) and the Southern
Region (Victoria and South Australia) set to disband by year’s end.
Australian Federal Police Association spokesman Craig Shannon summed up the
AFP’s situation as “just about bankrupt”, while the government
plans to cut another $50 million in AFP funds!
Meanwhile, fraudulent “anti-corruption”
investigations over the past two years have dismantled the Western Australian
and New South Wales (NSW) anti-drug squads, whose effectiveness was legendary,
and slashed police numbers, while the pro-legalization government of Victoria
has also slashed its police force. Predictably, drug usage has exploded,
as have other crime rates, including a 90% rise in bank robberies in NSW,
and a 35% rise in street robberies in Victoria, often by junkies wielding
blood-filled syringes.
The handwriting is on the wall as a nation whose political leadership destroys its own citizenry, is headed for certain doom, warns LaRouche. (November 27, 1998) By Allen Douglas
In his latest strategic masterwork, “Is Western Europe
Doomed?” (last week’s EIR), Lyndon LaRouche puts forward the
provocative thesis that, given the insanity of the political elites of the
Western “advanced sector” economies, “the most endangered
part of the present world economy, is not, speaking generally, the nations
of Asia, but, rather, those of western Europe, the U.S.A., Canada, Australia,
and a New Zealand which has been already virtually self-destroyed over the
course of the recent ten years.”
Such an analysis will no doubt be greeted with outrage
in Australia in particular, which prides itself on how well it has survived
the so-called “Asian crisis,” a performance which no less an exalted
windbag than Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Paul Krugman,
now visiting Australia, has just pronounced “miraculous.”
However, the very existence of the modern nation-state
is based upon the ability and willingness of its leadership to provide for
the well-being and progress of all of its citizenry, as exemplified by the
“general welfare” clause upon which the American Founding Fathers
anchored the U.S. Constitution. Any political elite which repeatedly violates
that basic premise, will either be overthrown, or that nation will soon
disintegrate. Perhaps the best measure of such an elite’s performance,
is the way in which it treats its most vulnerable citizens--its poor, its
young and old, and its disabled. By this standard, under the shock of a global
financial collapse, Australia will soon cease to exist as a nation, precisely
as LaRouche forecasts.
The fact that a social and psychological holocaust is
under way downunder, has been documented in report after official report,
which both major parties, the ruling Liberal/National Party coalition, and
the Labor Party, have ignored. A book could be written on that
holocaust; here, we mention merely some crucial indicators.
First, take a most basic indicator: the general standard
of living of the population, and whether it is improving or deteriorating.
According to the latest United Nations Human Development
Report, one in eight Australians now lives below the poverty line, and 1.7
million Australians are likely to die before the age of 60 because of
poverty--this in a nation which, until recently, called itself the “Lucky
Country,” because it had one of the world’s highest standards of
living. A recent report from Victoria University’s Center for Strategic
Economic Studies, “Australian Poverty, Then and Now,” documented
that poverty has skyrocketted since a 1973 study, during which time governments
of both major parties embraced the savage free-trade nostrums of the British
Crown’s Mont Pelerin Society, known downunder as “economic
rationalism.” Whereas poverty affected some 20% of the population then,
the report said, now it affects almost one-third of the population--some
5.5 million out of a total population of 18 million!
Another recent report on housing, by The Smith Family,
a welfare group, found that low-income renters pay 40% of their total household
income on rent, and that 30% go without heat, while almost one-half cannot
afford to buy basic groceries. This has produced an explosion of cases involving
elderly people shoplifting food from supermarkets, simply in order to survive.
As the Melbourne Herald Sun reported on July 5, “Special closed sessions
are being held in Melbourne courts to cope with the dramatic increase in
pensioners stealing to feed themselves, their children, and grandchildren.”
In rural areas, with cartel-rigged prices for rural
commodities collapsing, and with the government slashing education, health,
and welfare funds, even the government’s own Federal Human Rights
Commissioner, Chris Sidoti, said in August that “basic human rights
were being eroded.” Furthermore, he told the Radio National AM show
on Aug. 11, “The rural suicide rate is absolutely appalling.” Indeed,
Australia’s suicide rate is just behind New Zealand’s, the world
leader.
Under these circumstances, the traditional family is
disappearing. A recent Monash University study found that 19.4% of all families
are now headed by a sole parent, up from 14.6% in 1986. Unemployment among
youth ranges from 25%, to as high as 60% in rural areas, while slave labor
among children as young as seven has exploded, with more than “1,600
child workers ... being seriously injured or maimed each year,” according
to an investigation by the Age newspaper published in late October. That
investigation found “an estimated 70,000 children working up to 20 hours
a week or more in the clothing industry” alone, where they are
“exposed to hazards including skeletal deformities, asthma and byssinosis,
a potentially fatal lung disease.”
Indeed, one can see the finger inscribing, “Mene, mene...”
Cartels attack national sovereignty. (November
20, 1998) By Allen Douglas
The push for “Aboriginal reconciliation” is a racist fraud organized
by Her Majesty’s raw materials firms.
In Oct. 3, after his Liberal/National Party coalition
had won the federal election, Prime Minister John Howard stunned many people,
when he announced that a major goal of the coalition’s second term would
be “Aboriginal reconciliation,” a code word for Aboriginal land
rights. Howard had generally been viewed as opposed to this scheme; he had
even threatened to call an early federal election, if his program to limit
the most radical “land rights” proposals were not passed through
Parliament.
However, a key factor in Howard’s opposition stemmed
from the enormous political ferment generated by the One Nation party of
former Member of Parliament Pauline Hanson, which (as its name implied) was
unalterably opposed to land rights, and whose arguments were largely informed
by the excellent research and mass propagandizing by Lyndon LaRouche’s
associates in the Citizens Electoral Council (CEC), about who created the
land rights issue and why. But, on Oct. 3, Hanson’s One Nation, which
had been expected to win as many as 15 seats in the House of Representatives
and several in the Senate, had secured, because of Australia’s arcane
“preference system” of voting, only one Senate seat and none in
the House, notwithstanding that the party had received more than 1 million
votes—9% of the total. Hanson even lost her own seat in Queensland.
So, with his political behind less exposed, Howard jumped
on board the next phase of the land rights campaign, which is designed to
create a separate Aboriginal “nation.” The chief protagonist for
this project during the past two decades has been the world’s largest
mining company, the London-centered Rio Tinto, in which the Queen has invested
a chunk of her own private fortune (estimated at more than $25 billion).
The Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation (CAR), the vehicle
for this phase of the land rights campaign, was established by Parliament
in 1991, shortly before the High Court’s 1992 “Mabo decision,”
which opened the door to land rights claims, by overturning the existing
doctrine of terra nullius—that Australia was an “empty land”
when the first European settlers arrived. Energized by a second major High
Court pro-land-rights decision in 1996, the “reconciliation” process
moved into high gear in May 1997, at the CAR-sponsored Australian Reconciliation
Conference in Melbourne.
The two figures who dominated that conference were Robert
Champion de Crespigny, chief executive of the Normandy Mining Co., one of
Australia’s largest, and a founding member of CAR; and Leigh Clifford,
chief of Rio Tinto’s energy division. Such prominence by the
“miners” was lawful, given that Rio Tinto had been the chief financier
of the major sponsor of land rights, Prince Philip’s Australian Conservation
Foundation (ACF), since the ACF’s founding in 1963; that longtime Rio
Tinto board member Sir Gustav Nossal was the deputy chairman and dominant
figure in CAR; and that de Crespigny’s career had been financed by Anglo
American, a British mining giant (the second-largest in the world) with a
history of supporting “liberation” movements in Africa, the better
to grab the continent’s vast raw materials wealth.
According to its literature, CAR backs
“self-determination, self-government and changes to the Constitution”
to favor “indigenous rights,” and plans lobbying campaigns with
federal and state politicians over the next several years, together with
a mass propaganda campaign, to culminate in a “reconciliation
document” to be formally presented to the nation on May 27, 2000.
The contents of that document were foreshadowed in an
Oct. 25 speech by David Buckingham, executive director of the Business Council
of Australia, to a round table of community leaders and businessmen sponsored
by CAR. Buckingham said it is “vital” that Australians understand
that reconciliation ultimately means “having to consider the possibilities
of sovereignty.” “For some,” he said, letting the cat out
of the bag, “the real issue will be whether there is scope for a nation
within a nation.”
Buckingham’s ardor for “reconciliation”
is not surprising; he had once been executive director of the Minerals Council
of Australia, a position controlled by Rio Tinto. However, that post is only
one tiny strand in the far-flung web of Rio Tinto’s control over Australia,
as documented in the CEC’s pamphlet, “Stop the British Crown Plot
to Crush Australia’s Unions.” That breathtaking degree of control
is exercised by current or former Rio Tinto executives, which include the
chairmen or deputy chairmen of three of Australia’s four major banks,
key personnel in most major Australian companies, and the heads of the Australian
Institute for International Affairs and the Australian Academy of Sciences.
All of this will now be deployed to carve one or more
“indigenous nations” out of Australia.
Big
Banks to merge?. (November 13, 1998)
By Allen Douglas
Profits are soaring, and the “Big 4” may soon become the “Big
2,” but the derivatives time bomb is ticking.
In separate, but clearly coordinated statements on Nov.
7, Prime Minister John Howard and Treasurer Peter Costello surprised many,
when they suddenly announced that they might now allow some of the nation’s
“Big Four” banks to merge. Previous to the Oct. 3 national elections,
Howard and Costello had emphasized that it were very unlikely that they would
change the “Four Pillars” policy, which forbade mergers among the
major four banks, in a financial system which is already one of the world’s
most concentrated.
Australia’s banks are widely despised among the general
population, and particularly so in the rural sector, a key part of the political
base of Howard’s ruling Liberal/National Party coalition. This year,
for instance, as three of the four major banks have just announced record
profits of more than AUS$1 billion each, they have simultaneously closed
500 branches; during the 1990s, their profits have soared 440%, while they
have slashed 20,000 jobs and closed 1,000 branches. Entire towns now have
no bank, a situation which will become even more dire, if the four are allowed
to merge. The Financial Sector Union, for instance, which represents bank
employees, has charged that mergers will eliminate a further 40,000 jobs,
and half of all existing branches will be closed.
The logic by which Howard will allow the Big Four to become
the Big Two, would be hilarious, were the results not so devastating: He
has recently announced that he might allow mergers if the Big Four became
“more competitive,” by cutting charges on customer services and
so forth, evidence of which he and Treasurer Costello have apparently, judging
by their Nov. 7 announcements, now discovered. Imagine how much “more
competitive,” then, the banks will be, when only two remain, instead
of four.
But, behind this Alice-in-Wonderland logic, lie some other
possible motives. Informed sources point to two considerations, in particular:
Howard, an asset of Britain’s radical free-trade Mont Pelerin Society,
has always been a financial deregulation fanatic, ever since, as Treasurer
in a coalition government in the early 1980s, he advocated full-scale
deregulation, as per the “Campbell Committee” recommendations of
1981; and, National Australia Bank (NAB), the nation’s largest, has
ferociously beat the drums for years to allow mergers, and it was the NAB
which entirely financed Howard’s Liberal Party election in 1996, when
the party was bankrupt. As Liberal Party treasurer Ron Walker said at the
time, of NAB’s managing director Don Argus, “Argus is the backbone
of this campaign.” Upon deregulation, it is expected that NAB would
quickly bid for ANZ Bank, the most British-tied of all Australia’s banks,
while the Commonwealth and Westpac banks would also merge.
The NAB’s Argus is a fanatic globalist who has argued
that Australia’s banks must get bigger, if they are to survive. Yet,
this trend toward “bigger is better” mirrors the spate of bank
mergers going on in the United States, and like them, will end in disaster,
precisely because of the speculative, globalist axioms upon which they are
premised.
Take, for instance, the derivatives holdings of
Australia’s Big Four, the hyper-leveraged speculative instruments which
almost crashed the global financial system after the Sept. 23 Long Term Capital
Management hedge fund bankruptcy in the United States. As of 1997,
Australia’s “Big Four” held AUS$2 trillion ($1.26 trillion)
of the country’s estimated AUS$3.5 trillion in derivatives. (Sydney
has recently overtaken Hong Kong to become the third-largest over-the-counter
derivatives market in Asia, behind Tokyo and Singapore.) If ANZ Bank, with
the largest derivatives portfolio (AUS$657 billion) were to be taken over
by NAB, the second-largest derivatives holder (AUS$594 billion), then this
much higher concentration of the deadly instruments makes the resulting merger
much more unstable, contrary to Argus’s globalist fantasies. But, it
mirrors the general trend these days, as in the United States, where two
of the world’s largest derivatives dealers, Citicorp and Travelers,
just merged to form Citigroup, with a combined derivatives exposure of $6.8
trillion.
But, it is not only their derivatives portfolios which
make Australia’s banks look decidedly shaky. ANZ, for instance, has
significant exposure in Asia, while much of the Big Four’s profits have
come from a speculative boom in real estate, which saw their residential
mortgages exploded from $63 billion, to $189 billion, over the 1990s. As
the Japanese real estate deflation, and resulting mega-bankruptcies of
Japan’s banks demonstrate, such a market is a “house built upon
sand.” More than 50% of all NAB’s earnings, meanwhile, came from
overseas, mainly from the U.K., a country fast sliding into depression under
the speculative, anti-industry policies of Third Way lunatic Tony Blair.
Murder
by 'Suicide'. (November 6, 1998) By
Allen Douglas
Philip “Dr. Death” Nitschke has opened a euthanasia clinic in Victoria,
a state run by his soul-mate, Jeff Kennett.
What would you do, if a serial killer were running around
loose in your neighborhood? Call the authorities, right? What if, however,
as in some Grade-B horror movie, the authorities were in cahoots with the
murderer?
Residents of the state of Victoria will soon experience
this for themselves, in the wake of the move by Dr. Philip Nitschke,
Australia’s most well-known euthanasia practicitioner, from the rural
Northern Territory to Victoria, the nation’s second-largest state. Although
Nitschke allegedly moved to Melbourne, capital of Victoria, to run for Parliament
in the Oct. 3 federal election against the sponsor of a successful bill against
euthanasia, Liberal MP Kevin Andrews (Nitschke lost), one could surmise that
“Dr. Death,” as he is known, had at least two other motives: the
higher population density, which will afford him a greater number of potential
victims; and, the fact that Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett is an outspoken
proponent of euthanasia.
If you’re going to kill somebody, it were best to
have some political back-up. Perhaps Nitschke also thinks that, since Kennett
has massively cut the state hospital budgets, cuts which have indisputably
killed people, as documented by Lyndon LaRouche’s Citizen Electoral
Council associates in their mass pamphlet “Australia’s Health Care
‘Reforms’: A Nuremberg Crime Against Humanity,” that his own
murders will just sort of blend in with the general mayhem. Nitschke claims
his clinic will just dispense “advice.”
Like his American colleague, Jack Kevorkian, Nitschke
is a homicidal maniac, although he has helped kill four people, as opposed
to Kevorkian’s more than 100. After he described, in a May 1997 address
in Adelaide, South Australia, what he did to kill Esther Wild, the state’s
Director of Public Prosecutions, Paul Rofe, said he had just heard “what
I believe to be technically a confession to the murder.”
Not content with knocking people off one by one, Nitschke
is exploring ways to increase his kill rate, including the use of a “coma
machine,” which even he describes as a “slightly macabre device.”
This would monitor the victim’s brain activity, and pump in more drugs
if the patient showed any sign of waking, until he died. He is also working
on a death machine involving a plastic bag and carbon monoxide. Furthermore,
he delivered a paper on his pet idea of a “suicide pill” to a
conference on “voluntary euthanasia” in Switzerland in mid-October,
where he enthused that it should be possible to invent a cheap pill based
on easily obtainable ingredients from “the immense array of toxic products
on our supermarket, hardware, or agricultural supply shelves.” His efforts
have been boosted by Rupert Murdoch’s Herald Sun, which publishes his
pro-suicide rants.
The debate on euthanasia intensified in late October,
when Melbourne urologist Dr. Rodney Syme, the president of the Voluntary
Euthanasia Society of Victoria, publicly admitted that he had administered
increasing doses of morphine to a cancer patient, knowing that this would
kill the patient, as the patient had allegedly requested. Although
“assisting suicide” is illegal in Australia, Syme’s use of
what is called “pharmacological oblivion” to kill people, falls
into an ostensible gray area which the Australian Medical Association (AMA)
distinguishes from “active euthanasia,” on the grounds that the
intention is to relieve pain and suffering, even if it is clear that the
process will “hasten death.”
Syme would clearly prefer to just kill his victims outright.
As he told the {Age} of Nov. 2, “I find it a rather obnoxious, very
unpleasant process of putting somebody to sleep, keeping them asleep, knowing
they are going to die.... It’s something that is not often discussed,
it is swept under the carpet.”
Syme’s admission, together with his claim that many
other doctors are doing the same thing, provoked enough outrage that even
Kennett warned doctors that they “risked deregistration” by the
AMA for doing what Syme had done. Furthermore, Kennett said, Syme should
realize that although he, Kennett, was definitely pro-euthanasia, “that
is not the government’s position, nor will it be in the future.”
Kennett, it would seem, prefers to eliminate people through
his savage, Mont Pelerin Society-dictated cuts to Victoria’s public
health system, which have closed thousands of beds and slashed thousands
of health care professionals, including cleaning personnel, which has led
to epidemics of golden staph and the highly lethal vancomycin resistant
enterococci in Victorian hospitals. Even his own Health Minister, Rob Knowles,
has admitted that Victoria’s health system will “collapse”
in the near future. One of the many doctors who have quit that system, Australian
Association of Surgeons Victorian chairman Dr. Graeme Brazenor, said recently
that he did so, because the health system “had deteriorated to Third
World standards in Victoria.”
'Two
bob each way'. (October 30, 1998)
By Allen Douglas
The government will have to make up its mind—either there is a global
financial crisis, or there isn’t.
In a speech on Oct. 22 to the World Conference of Banking
Supervisors biannual conference in Sydney, Prime Minister John Howard proclaimed
that the world is facing “an unprecedented degree of instability in
international financial markets”; that his government is committed to
curbing the “worst excesses” of hedge funds; and that it will push
reform of the international financial system to “inhibit capital
excesses.” Further, said Howard, “It was not the case that [Asian]
economies got what they deserved—rather, they got a whole lot more than
they deserved.” He concluded that “the global financial system
failed us.”
While such pronouncements might be tame stuff for a world
leader these days, particularly one in the Asia-Pacific region, for Howard
the speech was a stunning about-face from his stance of as little as two
weeks before, when he was still denouncing any talk of a global economic
recession as “ridiculous”; however, the measures he is proposing
to deal with the crisis, show that he and his government are still in denial
about its awesome, systemic nature.
The following day, Howard told the first meeting of a
special task force which he had established to advise his government on methods
to deal with the crisis, that “it is crucial that we reach practical
conclusions as soon as possible.” However, the leadership, membership,
and announced policy orientation of the task force, all bode no good.
The task force is chaired by a longtime asset of the British
Crown’s Mont Pelerin Society, Treasurer Peter Costello, whose Treasury
Department confidently predicts a 3.5% growth rate for Australia next year.
Costello himself recently told local meetings of his Liberal Party that
“the economy is fine, despite what Lyndon LaRouche says.” His committee
consists of a total of 10 members drawn from high-ranking federal bureaucrats
and from the elite of Australia’s financial sector, the latter include
the managing director of the Commonwealth Bank; the CEO of Australian Mutual
Provident (AMP), the country’s largest insurance company; and the executive
director of the nation’s most elite private bank, Macquarie Bank (raw
materials giant Rio Tinto’s Australian bank).
Howard said that the committee’s first task is to
focus on “maintaining the nation’s growth,” although he announced
no measures which might allow that to happen. For the broader world economy,
he said that the committee would study “transparency and accountability
in the private sector, improved monitoring of the financial sector, and
supervision of, and methods to strengthen international financial
institutions.”
Howard also said that his committee would look at a series
of what he called “crisis management” measures: “These might
include standfast arrangements to prevent lenders from exiting economies
in a destructive stampede, collection action clauses, orderly workouts involving
rollovers, reschedulings, and debt-equity swaps.” Finally, Howard called
for the International Monetary Fund to be the “lender of last resort”
internationally.
Despite his claim that he would “ask my task force
for substantive and imaginative suggestions for Australia to pursue in
appropriate international forums,” all that Howard has referenced so
far, is the standard mumbo-jumbo proposed by the three committees of the
G-22, the “Willard Group,” in order to duck any decisive action
on the crisis. It was the G-22’s inaction in its early October meeting
in Washington, following the Sept. 23 collapse of the Long-Term Capital
Management hedge fund, which economist Lyndon LaRouche evaluated as having
pushed the world “into a new, qualitatively more critical phase of the
ongoing, global plunge” into financial collapse.
As far as the “appropriate international forums”
in which Howard will peddle this pablum—against which Asian nations
are revolting in favor of measures to protect their real, physical
economies—the first of those is the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation
(APEC) meeting in Malaysia in November. At the end of October, Howard dispatched
envoys to lobby China, Japan, and South Korea, among other Asian countries.
However, judging by his speech to the Banking Supervisors in Sydney, in which
he demanded that APEC countries not “backslide” on free trade,
and that “the worst possible response to the crisis would be to put
up the shutters,” his envoys will receive, at best, a rather frosty
welcome.
Thus, although he has belatedly admitted that there is
a global financial crisis, Howard has demonstrated that he has learned absolutely
nothing of importance in recent months, since he told a press conference
on June 16, in response to a question from one of LaRouche’s Australian
supporters on LaRouche’s proposals for global financial and economic
reorganization, “I do not believe we can go back to a Bretton Woods
style of approach to global economic affairs.”
Leiblers
take a hit. (October 22, 1998) By
Allen Douglas
The Australia/Israel Review has been forced to dump its editor, following
its latest political dirty trick.
In mid-October, the editor of the Australia/Israel Review,
Michael Kapel, suddenly resigned after five years. The resignation followed
the decision by the magazine, a right-wing Zionist rag founded by followers
of the 1930s Jewish fascist Vladimir Jabotinsky, to publish (apparently stolen)
membership lists of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation political party in its
July 8-28 issue. It clearly intended to terrorize the members of One Nation,
an insurgent political force in Australia which espouses policies of economic
nationalism.
The magazine’s personnel, including Kapel, stressed
that the resignation was not linked to the uproar over the One Nation list.
The claim was obviously absurd. The Melbourne Age of Oct. 13, for example,
noted that “sources yesterday blamed the fall-out over the list for
Mr. Kapel’s departure.”
Australia/Israel Review’s “outing” of One
Nation had been denounced by numerous Jewish leaders, such as Marika Weinberger,
president of the Australian Jewish Holocaust Survivors, who told the Australian
Jewish News of July 17, that the publication was “irresponsible....
It is not the way Jews operate. Nine members of my mother’s family were
taken away because their names appeared on a list. About 22,000 Hungarian
Jews were taken away because their names were on lists.”
Although the magazine ostensibly attacked One Nation and its leader,
former Member of Parliament Hanson, because they were “anti-semitic,”
Holocaust survivor Walter Dohan told the Australian Jewish News, “I
don’t think Pauline Hanson would have done any damage to the Jews. She
has never said anything anti-semitic.... Why are we attacking someone who’s
never attacked us?”
That question was answered in an exposé of
Australia/Israel Review in the August/September issue of the New Citizen,
published by Lyndon LaRouche’s associates in the Citizens Electoral
Council (CEC). Entitled “The Leibler Brothers and the Australian/Israel
Review: Economic Rationalism, Dope and Land Rights,” it demonstrated
that “despite its high falutin name, AIR represents neither Australia,
nor Israel, nor anyone but the people who set it up”—Mark and Isi
Leibler, who have dominated Australia’s Zionist organizations for 25
years, and their clique of ultrawealthy followers of Jabotinsky, whom Israeli
founding father David Ben Gurion called “Vladimir Hitler.”
The New Citizen charged that, although the Leiblers and
their friends are nominally “Jewish,” they are in fact toadies
for what the old Australian Labor Party used to revile as the London-centered
international “Money Power,” which is pushing free trade, drug
legalization, and the Prince Philip-sponsored scam of “Aboriginal land
rights.” The exposé reported that the Leibler clique had been
sponsored by the two financial organizations in Australia most closely tied
to London, the now-defunct Tricontinental Bank of Victoria, which, before
it collapsed in mid-1989, loaned billions to the Leibler circle, and the
ANZ Bank, which was headquartered in London until 1977, whose name has surfaced
in all sorts of shady matters.
The New Citizen also revealed the names and fortunes of
the Leibler gang behind the Australia/Israel Review: Australia’s second
richest man, Frank Lowy, $2.1 billion; co-founder Isador Magid, $165 million;
the much-investigated Melbourne businessman Solomon Lew, $600 million; and
Isi Leibler, co-chairman of Canadian booze baron Edgar Bronfman’s World
Jewish Congress, who originally called for founding the magazine in 1973,
worth $80 million. Isi’s brother Mark, a lawyer, former head of the
Zionist Federation of Australia, and now chairman of the Australia/Israel
Jewish Affairs Committee (the parent body of Australia/Israel Review), has
deep pockets as well: His tax-dodging schemes for major corporations have
helped cost the government $50-60 billion over the past two decades. No wonder,
then, after meeting with some Leibler associates on a recent visit to Australia,
Israeli journalist Akiva Eldar charged, in the Israeli paper Ha’aretz,
that “the Jews of Australia practically worship money.”
Australia/Israel Review attacked Hanson and her party
for the same reasons that it and the Leiblers have attacked LaRouche’s
associates in the CEC for years: because the LaRouche policies of economic
nationalism are a grave threat to the globalist, free-trade policies of those
in the British and Australian establishment who own the Leiblers.
Asked why the uproar over the list had continued so long,
Mark Leibler told the Age of Oct. 17 that it was due to jealousies among
rival Jewish organizations and “rogue organizations running around creating
trouble”—a euphemism for LaRouche’s friends in the CEC, who
had circulated 100,000 copies of the New Citizen exposé, including
to every federal and state MP, and 10,000 copies into the Jewish communities
in Sydney and Melbourne.