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Robert Barwick: Which way Australia: To hell with London and Wall Street, or to the heavens with the BRICS?
12
Robert Barwick
Executive Committee member, Citizens Electoral Council of Australia
Audio
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00:00
00:00
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I would like to present to you, two entirely different visions of the future of Australia, and therefore of the role Australia will play on the world stage, for better or for worse.
First I shall sketch my nation’s present trajectory, and then the future to which we in the LaRouche movement in Australia, the Citizens Electoral Council political party, are committed. And I’ll report on some of our exciting progress.
At present, Australia’s ruling layers are committed to the plans of the Anglo-American oligarchy – centred on the British Crown – for endless war, disguised as a so-called “war on terror.†They are deep into confronting China and Russia, even if that threatens a thermonuclear showdown in the near term. They share the agenda of imposing fascist police states to control the population. And all of this is set against the backdrop of the worst financial and economic collapse in history, and the decimation of the world’s population by old and new epidemics.
The British Crown has exploited Australia for its geostrategic goals, especially since our head of state, Queen Elizabeth II, personally sacked the elected, pro-development, pro-sovereignty Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in 1975. I’ll summarize three aspects of this:
In 1995, an infamous position paper by Katherine West of Britain’s Royal Institute of International Affairs, or Chatham House, said that the British Commonwealth had to be the core of a new British Empire – “an informal financial empireâ€, as she put it. Within that, she called for building up Australia as a “bridgehead into Asiaâ€. Accordingly, thousands of major British firms have set up their Asia/Pacific headquarters in Australia, while the city of Sydney has been turned into a major subsidiary of London and Wall Street. Each of our Big Four banks ranks among the world’s top 50 banks in size, and they dominate the country’s economy.
Fifty years ago, agriculture and manufacturing accounted for half of our gross national product; today, they are at less than 10%. Financial services have risen from 10% of GDP in 1980, to over 20% today.
The Big Four banks are largely owned by City of London and Wall Street interests. Our population is only 23.5 million, but the Australian dollar is the fifth most traded currency in the world. And we have the biggest mortgage debt bubble in the world, measured per capita, which is managed by the Big Four banks.
This year, Australia chairs the Group of 20. Prime Minister Tony Abbott and his London- and Wall Street-owned Finance Minister Joe Hockey have declared two priorities for adoption at the Brisbane G20 summit next month. The first is the Anglo-American policy of “bail-in†– confiscation of creditor and depositor funds to rescue bankrupt megabanks, as in the Cyprus model.
Their second G20 emphasis is the so-called Global Infrastructure Initiative (GII), which is actually nothing of the kind. Tony Abbott styles himself “the Infrastructure Prime Ministerâ€, but his initiative is a sneaky counterproposal to the new Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank (AIIB), led by China.
Abbott and Hockey have an extraordinary track record of privatizing and looting federal and state infrastructure on behalf of private financiers. While the AIIB plans to spend $50-$100 billion per year on new infrastructure projects, just initially, the Abbott/Hockey plan is to set up a Global Infrastructure Centre, solely to promote so-called Public Private Partnerships (or PPPs) – a program pioneered worldwide by Australia’s Macquarie Bank.
The PPP model is pushed by the IMF, the World Bank, the OECD and the Long Term Investors Club here in Europe (the latter, the LTIC, is also big in Australia). Their line is that since governments allegedly no longer have any money to build infrastructure, the private sector must do it. And whatever is built, or – much more often – acquired through privatization, is to be run on a “user pays†basis, exemplified by the high tolls on roads around Sydney that are operated by Macquarie Bank.
LaRouche’s science of physical economy teaches that infrastructure produces productivity, boosting the economy as a whole. Governments invest in it, for the public good. But for the PPP promoters, the entire reason for possessing infrastructure is to derive a money income stream from it.
Even an understated estimate from the Asian Development Bank, says that Asia needs $750 billion of infrastructure investment annually. But, as The Australian newspaper reported Oct. 9: “The Australian initiative would not invest in new projects and would instead focus on learning from joint ventures between governments and investors†– that is, PPPs – “how to make it faster and cheaper to raise funds†from the private sector.
The BRICS want to build nations, while Abbott and Hockey demand that the G20 adopt the Crown’s policy of looting them.
On the military side, Australia now serves as headquarters for U.S. President Obama’s infamous “Asia Pivotâ€, the British-directed plan for a military showdown with China. The U.S. and British military presence is expanding rapidly. (Slide 1)This map is from a 2012 issue of our New Citizen newspaper. The gold dots show the relentless Anglo-American military build-up in the Asia-Pacific, with upgrades of existing bases and the creation of new ones. (Slide 2)Here is what our own investigations discovered about the build-up of facilities within Australia. You need to see it up close for the detail, but it includes new and upgraded Navy bases, air bases, signals intelligence, and training grounds.
In the middle of the continent, circled in red because it’s being upgraded, is Pine Gap, the signals intelligence base that helps guide drones in the Middle East and is a crucial link in the American worldwide ballistic-missile defence system, to enable an Anglo-American first strike against China and Russia. Already during the Cold war, Pine Gap was so important in Anglo-American nuclear war planning, that Australia was a target for Soviet nuclear missiles.
Hardly any government leaders on Earth can have outdone Tony Abbott and Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, in their outrageous denunciations of Russia and President Vladimir Putin, as they have defended the Anglo-American provocations in Ukraine.
Regarding Australia’s service as the test tube for creation of the genocidal “environmentalist†movement, suffice it to say that Prince Philip personally, in 1971 to 1976, chaired the Australian Conservation Foundation – a branch of his World Wildlife Fund – and midwifed the creation of the first Green Party in the world, in the Australian state of Tasmania. It became a model for the establishment of the Green Party in Germany. (Slide 3)We published a special issue of the New Citizen to that subject, in 2011, which will soon be reissued as a pamphlet. It includes thorough documentation of how the Crown and its Privy Council created the modern environmentalist movement, out of the British Eugenics Society of the 1930s.
Now let’s shift to happier subjects: first, what we in the CEC in Australia have done to frustrate the enemy’s plans, and – alongside our associates in the Schiller Institute and the LaRouche movement globally, and now the BRICS – to defeat that enemy once and for all; and then word about the role Australia should play in this new, just world economic order.
I shall go in reverse order, through our fights against green fascism, the Asian Pivot, and the build-up of Australia as an Asian branch office of London and Wall Street.
Ever since the CEC opened our national office in Melbourne in October 1992, launching as a national political party, we have been in a direct, personal battle with the Australian lackeys of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, one of whom said way back then, that he feared that “The LaRouche movement will become the most disruptive political force ever seen on the Australian continent.†We have battled against the Crown’s policies, and in favour of a vision of what our nation could become, once freed from its current rulers and from the slavish ideology accepted by far too many Australians even today.
We issue the New Citizen approximately quarterly, usually in several hundred thousand copies, and produce mass-circulation pamphlets on special topics as needed .
(Slide 4) This New Citizen, “Carbon Trading is Hitler-Style Genocide,†came out shortly before the Copenhagen Climate Summit of 2009. Our prime minister at the time, Kevin Rudd, was a leader in the Crown’s international drive to made that meeting adopt radical cutbacks on carbon emissions, further wrecking the world economy. Initially, 60% of Australians believed that carbon emissions cause global warming. We put out 500,000 copies of this newspaper and mobilized our base. Within months, Rudd had been ousted by a revolt within his own party, on this very issue. Shocked Members of Parliament reported that they had been bombarded with over a million phone calls and emails on the matter.
(Slide 5) Let’s turn to the Asia Pivot, which Barack Obama announced in 2011, including a new U.S. base in the northern Australia port of Darwin, as part of the build-up against China. Aware that Obama was continuing the infamous call by Dick Cheney for a pax Americana, under which none would ever be allowed to challenge Anglo-American power again, we named the danger: the world was heading toward nuclear war. We issued 400,000 copies of this New Citizen, to show where the policy really came from. We blanketed every military base, think tank, government office, police station, university and every other key institution we could find.
Until then, almost no one else in Australia was warning about the growing nuclear war danger. Then came a big break, when former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, as well as a handful of academics, also started to raise the alarm. On Sept. 25, 2012, Fraser made a scathing speech against the Asian Pivot. He warned, “Any use of nuclear weapons between the United States and China would be a global humanitarian catastrophe, and any armed conflict between nuclear-armed powers risks nuclear escalation. So conflict – and provocation that might lead to it – must be prevented at all costs.â€
As the war danger increased, at the end of 2012 we issued another New Citizen on the subject (Slide 6). It featured new warnings by Lyndon LaRouche and the continued outspokenness of former Prime Minister Fraser, who had now stated publicly that the march of U.S. BMD systems toward Russian borders was making war more likely. We put this issue out also in Chinese (Slide 7); almost 4 percent of our population, around 1 million people, are Chinese immigrants and their descendants.
(Slide 8) This year Malcolm Fraser released his book, Dangerous Allies. He wrote that Australia must finally establish its own, independent foreign policy, and stop being subservient to foreign powers – whether the British Empire, or a United States under an imperial outlook. He called for previously unthinkable measures for war-avoidance, like shutting down American access to Pine Gap. Such stunning proposals have helped to ignite a serious debate on security issues, in Australia.
Taking on Australia’s role as an outpost of the City of London and Wall Street, is our crucial mission, because it is the certainty of a near-term systemic global financial collapse that drives the confrontation policy against Russia and China. Therefore the LaRouche movement in Australia has waged a relentless fight for the past two years, against bail-in and in favour of Glass-Steagall banking separation.
(Slide 9) In June 2013, a small article appeared in the Australian Financial Review, titled “Shareholders, creditors must pay if banks fail: BISâ€. Hardly any readers understood that Aesopian language for bail-in. We launched an emergency investigation of the plot to impose bail-in, which the government denied was even being considered.
(Slide 10) We published an expose based on our findings – half a million copies of this New Citizen – and escalated our campaign to subject the Big Four banks to Glass-Steagall. We organized a task force beyond anything we had ever done before, to contact every member of each of the 2500 local councils in Australia, along with influentials in many other fields, and call on them to sign on to our campaign for Glass-Steagall. Nearly 500 signed. We took out on a full-page ad on December 13 in the nation’s largest newspaper, The Australian, featuring those signatures and headlined “Don’t seize our bank accounts – Pass Glass-Steagall!â€
(Slide 11) We then escalated with10 thousand copies of a pamphlet called “Glass-Steagall Now!†Our lobbying of the Parliament, from our Melbourne head office and by CEC members around the country, had such an impact that the chief organizer of bail-in, Treasurer Joe Hockey, was forced by a senior member of the Australian Senate to send his top aide to discuss Glass-Steagall and bail-in with two CEC Executive Committee members and a distinguished international visitor, who was our guest at the time!
In the meantime, Hockey in December 2013 had announced a so-called Financial System Inquiry, with the obvious agenda of further deregulating Australia’s banking system for the benefit of the Big Four. This FSI received 280 submissions from the public during a first round of hearings, but after our mobilization, an unprecedented 5000 submissions poured in for the second round. Among them was a blunt statement by former Prime Minister Fraser, saying that Australia should reject “bail-in†and “instead … fully separate retail banking from the speculative activities of investment banks, which the Glass-Steagall law did in the United States so successfully from 1933 until its repeal in 1999.â€
(Slide 12) During two decades, the CEC has written and campaigned for positive proposals on reviving our nation’s physical economy, inspired by the ideas of Lyndon LaRouche. Our program for national recovery is anchored by great infrastructure projects, like the Snowy Mountains Hydroelectric Scheme. Built between 1948 and 1974, it was named by the American Society of Engineers as “one of the seven engineering wonders of the modern world.â€
Our friend and a veteran of the Snowy Scheme, the late Prof. Lance Endersbee helped us draft several programs: one for 18 great water projects to transform Australia, which has the world’s second largest desert after the Sahara, into a land of oases. (Slide 13) We have a nuclear power program, as Australia has the world’s largest reserves of uranium and second largest of thorium. Our plans include further development of high-speed shipping, where we are already a world leader; (Slide 14) a high-speed rail network to unite our vast continent; redevelopment of our formerly world-class machine-tool sector, including so we can export capital goods to Asia; and a program to send Australians into space. Australia already has one of the greatest food-production potentials in the world. (Slide 15) Professor Endersbee’s high-speed Australian Ring Rail program, together with high-speed shipping, be able to deliver Australian agricultural projects or machine-tools to any major port in Asia, in one to four days.
Finally, I would like to say that, like all thinking Australians, I was greatly moved by the landing of China’s Jade Rabbit rover on the Moon and the success of India’s Mars Orbiter Mission. Though we have largely abandoned our space program, Australia was one of the first nations in the world to be involved in space technology, and two Australians have flown in space, through the American space program.
Despite British oppression and frequent sabotage, optimism and a spirit of exploration run throughout the history of Australia. This is reflected in the history of our own organization, which grew out of two sources. One was the efforts of our National Secretary Craig Isherwood and his wife Noelene in organizing a rural political movement in the late 1980s. The second impetus was the CEC’s meeting the American LaRouche organization. And that happened because Australia had the highest level of Fusion magazine subscriptions per capita, of any country in the world except possibly the United States. Australians are great travellers. Throughout the 1980s they had signed up as members of the Fusion Energy Foundation at airports all over the world. By the end of that decade, our future American colleagues said to themselves, “How come all these Aussies are so optimistic? We had better go find out.â€
So, here we are again, with fusion power on the agenda once more. With the BRICS developments of 2014, we are determined to lead Australia to its rightful place in a truly human new world economic order.
RELATED WORK
Robert Barwick: Which way Australia: To hell with London and Wall Street, or to the heavens with the BRICS?
12
Robert Barwick
Executive Committee member, Citizens Electoral Council of Australia
Audio
Audio Player
00:00
00:00
download
I would like to present to you, two entirely different visions of the future of Australia, and therefore of the role Australia will play on the world stage, for better or for worse.
First I shall sketch my nation’s present trajectory, and then the future to which we in the LaRouche movement in Australia, the Citizens Electoral Council political party, are committed. And I’ll report on some of our exciting progress.
At present, Australia’s ruling layers are committed to the plans of the Anglo-American oligarchy – centred on the British Crown – for endless war, disguised as a so-called “war on terror.†They are deep into confronting China and Russia, even if that threatens a thermonuclear showdown in the near term. They share the agenda of imposing fascist police states to control the population. And all of this is set against the backdrop of the worst financial and economic collapse in history, and the decimation of the world’s population by old and new epidemics.
The British Crown has exploited Australia for its geostrategic goals, especially since our head of state, Queen Elizabeth II, personally sacked the elected, pro-development, pro-sovereignty Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in 1975. I’ll summarize three aspects of this:
- Making Australia into a miniature City of London or Wall Street;
- Australia’s role as what a recent prime minister called a “deputy sheriffâ€, for the Anglo-American war build-up in the Asia/Pacific region;
- Serving as the original spawning ground for the now worldwide movement for mass genocide, which masquerades as “environmentalismâ€.
In 1995, an infamous position paper by Katherine West of Britain’s Royal Institute of International Affairs, or Chatham House, said that the British Commonwealth had to be the core of a new British Empire – “an informal financial empireâ€, as she put it. Within that, she called for building up Australia as a “bridgehead into Asiaâ€. Accordingly, thousands of major British firms have set up their Asia/Pacific headquarters in Australia, while the city of Sydney has been turned into a major subsidiary of London and Wall Street. Each of our Big Four banks ranks among the world’s top 50 banks in size, and they dominate the country’s economy.
Fifty years ago, agriculture and manufacturing accounted for half of our gross national product; today, they are at less than 10%. Financial services have risen from 10% of GDP in 1980, to over 20% today.
The Big Four banks are largely owned by City of London and Wall Street interests. Our population is only 23.5 million, but the Australian dollar is the fifth most traded currency in the world. And we have the biggest mortgage debt bubble in the world, measured per capita, which is managed by the Big Four banks.
This year, Australia chairs the Group of 20. Prime Minister Tony Abbott and his London- and Wall Street-owned Finance Minister Joe Hockey have declared two priorities for adoption at the Brisbane G20 summit next month. The first is the Anglo-American policy of “bail-in†– confiscation of creditor and depositor funds to rescue bankrupt megabanks, as in the Cyprus model.
Their second G20 emphasis is the so-called Global Infrastructure Initiative (GII), which is actually nothing of the kind. Tony Abbott styles himself “the Infrastructure Prime Ministerâ€, but his initiative is a sneaky counterproposal to the new Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank (AIIB), led by China.
Abbott and Hockey have an extraordinary track record of privatizing and looting federal and state infrastructure on behalf of private financiers. While the AIIB plans to spend $50-$100 billion per year on new infrastructure projects, just initially, the Abbott/Hockey plan is to set up a Global Infrastructure Centre, solely to promote so-called Public Private Partnerships (or PPPs) – a program pioneered worldwide by Australia’s Macquarie Bank.
The PPP model is pushed by the IMF, the World Bank, the OECD and the Long Term Investors Club here in Europe (the latter, the LTIC, is also big in Australia). Their line is that since governments allegedly no longer have any money to build infrastructure, the private sector must do it. And whatever is built, or – much more often – acquired through privatization, is to be run on a “user pays†basis, exemplified by the high tolls on roads around Sydney that are operated by Macquarie Bank.
LaRouche’s science of physical economy teaches that infrastructure produces productivity, boosting the economy as a whole. Governments invest in it, for the public good. But for the PPP promoters, the entire reason for possessing infrastructure is to derive a money income stream from it.
Even an understated estimate from the Asian Development Bank, says that Asia needs $750 billion of infrastructure investment annually. But, as The Australian newspaper reported Oct. 9: “The Australian initiative would not invest in new projects and would instead focus on learning from joint ventures between governments and investors†– that is, PPPs – “how to make it faster and cheaper to raise funds†from the private sector.
The BRICS want to build nations, while Abbott and Hockey demand that the G20 adopt the Crown’s policy of looting them.
On the military side, Australia now serves as headquarters for U.S. President Obama’s infamous “Asia Pivotâ€, the British-directed plan for a military showdown with China. The U.S. and British military presence is expanding rapidly. (Slide 1)This map is from a 2012 issue of our New Citizen newspaper. The gold dots show the relentless Anglo-American military build-up in the Asia-Pacific, with upgrades of existing bases and the creation of new ones. (Slide 2)Here is what our own investigations discovered about the build-up of facilities within Australia. You need to see it up close for the detail, but it includes new and upgraded Navy bases, air bases, signals intelligence, and training grounds.
In the middle of the continent, circled in red because it’s being upgraded, is Pine Gap, the signals intelligence base that helps guide drones in the Middle East and is a crucial link in the American worldwide ballistic-missile defence system, to enable an Anglo-American first strike against China and Russia. Already during the Cold war, Pine Gap was so important in Anglo-American nuclear war planning, that Australia was a target for Soviet nuclear missiles.
Hardly any government leaders on Earth can have outdone Tony Abbott and Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, in their outrageous denunciations of Russia and President Vladimir Putin, as they have defended the Anglo-American provocations in Ukraine.
Regarding Australia’s service as the test tube for creation of the genocidal “environmentalist†movement, suffice it to say that Prince Philip personally, in 1971 to 1976, chaired the Australian Conservation Foundation – a branch of his World Wildlife Fund – and midwifed the creation of the first Green Party in the world, in the Australian state of Tasmania. It became a model for the establishment of the Green Party in Germany. (Slide 3)We published a special issue of the New Citizen to that subject, in 2011, which will soon be reissued as a pamphlet. It includes thorough documentation of how the Crown and its Privy Council created the modern environmentalist movement, out of the British Eugenics Society of the 1930s.
Now let’s shift to happier subjects: first, what we in the CEC in Australia have done to frustrate the enemy’s plans, and – alongside our associates in the Schiller Institute and the LaRouche movement globally, and now the BRICS – to defeat that enemy once and for all; and then word about the role Australia should play in this new, just world economic order.
I shall go in reverse order, through our fights against green fascism, the Asian Pivot, and the build-up of Australia as an Asian branch office of London and Wall Street.
Ever since the CEC opened our national office in Melbourne in October 1992, launching as a national political party, we have been in a direct, personal battle with the Australian lackeys of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, one of whom said way back then, that he feared that “The LaRouche movement will become the most disruptive political force ever seen on the Australian continent.†We have battled against the Crown’s policies, and in favour of a vision of what our nation could become, once freed from its current rulers and from the slavish ideology accepted by far too many Australians even today.
We issue the New Citizen approximately quarterly, usually in several hundred thousand copies, and produce mass-circulation pamphlets on special topics as needed .
(Slide 4) This New Citizen, “Carbon Trading is Hitler-Style Genocide,†came out shortly before the Copenhagen Climate Summit of 2009. Our prime minister at the time, Kevin Rudd, was a leader in the Crown’s international drive to made that meeting adopt radical cutbacks on carbon emissions, further wrecking the world economy. Initially, 60% of Australians believed that carbon emissions cause global warming. We put out 500,000 copies of this newspaper and mobilized our base. Within months, Rudd had been ousted by a revolt within his own party, on this very issue. Shocked Members of Parliament reported that they had been bombarded with over a million phone calls and emails on the matter.
(Slide 5) Let’s turn to the Asia Pivot, which Barack Obama announced in 2011, including a new U.S. base in the northern Australia port of Darwin, as part of the build-up against China. Aware that Obama was continuing the infamous call by Dick Cheney for a pax Americana, under which none would ever be allowed to challenge Anglo-American power again, we named the danger: the world was heading toward nuclear war. We issued 400,000 copies of this New Citizen, to show where the policy really came from. We blanketed every military base, think tank, government office, police station, university and every other key institution we could find.
Until then, almost no one else in Australia was warning about the growing nuclear war danger. Then came a big break, when former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, as well as a handful of academics, also started to raise the alarm. On Sept. 25, 2012, Fraser made a scathing speech against the Asian Pivot. He warned, “Any use of nuclear weapons between the United States and China would be a global humanitarian catastrophe, and any armed conflict between nuclear-armed powers risks nuclear escalation. So conflict – and provocation that might lead to it – must be prevented at all costs.â€
As the war danger increased, at the end of 2012 we issued another New Citizen on the subject (Slide 6). It featured new warnings by Lyndon LaRouche and the continued outspokenness of former Prime Minister Fraser, who had now stated publicly that the march of U.S. BMD systems toward Russian borders was making war more likely. We put this issue out also in Chinese (Slide 7); almost 4 percent of our population, around 1 million people, are Chinese immigrants and their descendants.
(Slide 8) This year Malcolm Fraser released his book, Dangerous Allies. He wrote that Australia must finally establish its own, independent foreign policy, and stop being subservient to foreign powers – whether the British Empire, or a United States under an imperial outlook. He called for previously unthinkable measures for war-avoidance, like shutting down American access to Pine Gap. Such stunning proposals have helped to ignite a serious debate on security issues, in Australia.
Taking on Australia’s role as an outpost of the City of London and Wall Street, is our crucial mission, because it is the certainty of a near-term systemic global financial collapse that drives the confrontation policy against Russia and China. Therefore the LaRouche movement in Australia has waged a relentless fight for the past two years, against bail-in and in favour of Glass-Steagall banking separation.
(Slide 9) In June 2013, a small article appeared in the Australian Financial Review, titled “Shareholders, creditors must pay if banks fail: BISâ€. Hardly any readers understood that Aesopian language for bail-in. We launched an emergency investigation of the plot to impose bail-in, which the government denied was even being considered.
(Slide 10) We published an expose based on our findings – half a million copies of this New Citizen – and escalated our campaign to subject the Big Four banks to Glass-Steagall. We organized a task force beyond anything we had ever done before, to contact every member of each of the 2500 local councils in Australia, along with influentials in many other fields, and call on them to sign on to our campaign for Glass-Steagall. Nearly 500 signed. We took out on a full-page ad on December 13 in the nation’s largest newspaper, The Australian, featuring those signatures and headlined “Don’t seize our bank accounts – Pass Glass-Steagall!â€
(Slide 11) We then escalated with10 thousand copies of a pamphlet called “Glass-Steagall Now!†Our lobbying of the Parliament, from our Melbourne head office and by CEC members around the country, had such an impact that the chief organizer of bail-in, Treasurer Joe Hockey, was forced by a senior member of the Australian Senate to send his top aide to discuss Glass-Steagall and bail-in with two CEC Executive Committee members and a distinguished international visitor, who was our guest at the time!
In the meantime, Hockey in December 2013 had announced a so-called Financial System Inquiry, with the obvious agenda of further deregulating Australia’s banking system for the benefit of the Big Four. This FSI received 280 submissions from the public during a first round of hearings, but after our mobilization, an unprecedented 5000 submissions poured in for the second round. Among them was a blunt statement by former Prime Minister Fraser, saying that Australia should reject “bail-in†and “instead … fully separate retail banking from the speculative activities of investment banks, which the Glass-Steagall law did in the United States so successfully from 1933 until its repeal in 1999.â€
(Slide 12) During two decades, the CEC has written and campaigned for positive proposals on reviving our nation’s physical economy, inspired by the ideas of Lyndon LaRouche. Our program for national recovery is anchored by great infrastructure projects, like the Snowy Mountains Hydroelectric Scheme. Built between 1948 and 1974, it was named by the American Society of Engineers as “one of the seven engineering wonders of the modern world.â€
Our friend and a veteran of the Snowy Scheme, the late Prof. Lance Endersbee helped us draft several programs: one for 18 great water projects to transform Australia, which has the world’s second largest desert after the Sahara, into a land of oases. (Slide 13) We have a nuclear power program, as Australia has the world’s largest reserves of uranium and second largest of thorium. Our plans include further development of high-speed shipping, where we are already a world leader; (Slide 14) a high-speed rail network to unite our vast continent; redevelopment of our formerly world-class machine-tool sector, including so we can export capital goods to Asia; and a program to send Australians into space. Australia already has one of the greatest food-production potentials in the world. (Slide 15) Professor Endersbee’s high-speed Australian Ring Rail program, together with high-speed shipping, be able to deliver Australian agricultural projects or machine-tools to any major port in Asia, in one to four days.
Finally, I would like to say that, like all thinking Australians, I was greatly moved by the landing of China’s Jade Rabbit rover on the Moon and the success of India’s Mars Orbiter Mission. Though we have largely abandoned our space program, Australia was one of the first nations in the world to be involved in space technology, and two Australians have flown in space, through the American space program.
Despite British oppression and frequent sabotage, optimism and a spirit of exploration run throughout the history of Australia. This is reflected in the history of our own organization, which grew out of two sources. One was the efforts of our National Secretary Craig Isherwood and his wife Noelene in organizing a rural political movement in the late 1980s. The second impetus was the CEC’s meeting the American LaRouche organization. And that happened because Australia had the highest level of Fusion magazine subscriptions per capita, of any country in the world except possibly the United States. Australians are great travellers. Throughout the 1980s they had signed up as members of the Fusion Energy Foundation at airports all over the world. By the end of that decade, our future American colleagues said to themselves, “How come all these Aussies are so optimistic? We had better go find out.â€
So, here we are again, with fusion power on the agenda once more. With the BRICS developments of 2014, we are determined to lead Australia to its rightful place in a truly human new world economic order.
RELATED WORK
