On Nov. 6, Australians will go to the polls to vote on two momentous questions: whether to sever their formal links with the British Crown, to thus create a republic, at least in name, and whether to adopt a recently drafted new preamble to the constitution.
Both questions are designed to cheat Australians out of the possibility of establishing the sort of true republic of which many generations have dreamed, since the First Fleet unloaded its cargo of political prisoners on the shores of a nearly empty continent in 1788.
On the first question, as EIR demonstrated in an exposé ("Australian Battle Royal over Phony 'Republic'," Feb. 5, 1999 issue), the drive for a 'republic' is being run by Australia's financial oligarchy, most of whom are intimately tied to the British Crown. The Australian Republican Movement, for instance, is headed by international merchant banker Malcolm Turnbull, while the key behind-the-scenes orchestrator of the 'republican' drive is multi-billionaire Kerry Packer, a frequent guest of the Queen at the Ascot races. All polls show that the population overwhelmingly favors a directly elected head of state to replace the Queen. Packer, Turnbull, et al. hysterically oppose this, and propose, instead, that the President be appointed by a two-thirds majority of Parliament, and that he can be sacked by the prime minister at any time. The source of their hysteria shone forth in a recent outburst by former High Court chief justice Sir Gerard Brennan, that the direct election of a President would pose 'grave political problems,' and (horror of horrors) 'could even lead to Australia adopting the United States system of an all-powerful President and a less-important Parliament.'
The preamble question, while seemingly a mere symbolic matter, contains much evil as well, as the purpose of a preamble is to help interpret the constitution itself, as the famous anti-oligarchical 'General Welfare' clause in the preamble of the American Constitution has been used by American Presidents such as Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt in periods of great crisis, "to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and to our Posterity."
In contrast to this eloquent statement of natural law, the proposed Australian preamble glorifies 'multiculturalism' and 'the rule of law,' the latter a synonym for British oligarchical law, as EIR Law Editor Edward Spannaus demonstrated, in a speech to a Schiller Institute conference in Washington on Feb. 13, 1999.
In addition to these two obscenities, the preamble also lauds Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, 'the nation's first people, for their deep kinship with their lands and for their ancient and continuing cultures.' The phrase 'deep kinship with their lands' was added by Prime Minister John Howard to his original draft, after much howling by the Aboriginal 'land rights' movement.
Lyndon LaRouche's associates in the Citizens Electoral Council have exposed 'land rights' for the Crown-sponsored fraud that it is, in the CEC's landmark 1997 pamphlet,"Aboriginal 'Land Rights': Prince Philip's Racist Plot to Splinter Australia." Now, in the latest issue of their paper, the New Citizen (August-October 1999), the CEC demolishes the 'land rights' hoax forever, by showing its main cultural/historical premise that Aborigines were the 'first Australians' and have inhabited the continent in an unbroken continuity for the last 50,000 years to be utterly fraudulent. A special, full-color report on the ancient rock art of the northwest corner of Australia, "The Bradshaw Rock Art of the Kimberleys: The Cognitive History of Man," proves that Aborigines have only been in Australia for perhaps 4,000 years, and that there were at least three other, distinct cultures before them, extending back 40,000 years, or more.
The Aborigines themselves acknowledge that the graceful, Egyptian-looking 'Bradshaw' paintings (named after the explorer who first discovered them in 1895) are 'before our time.' Indeed: the Bradshaw paintings, hundreds of thousands of which grace the Kimberley region, have been dated to at least 20,000 years ago, and contain pictures of ancient ocean-going ships the oldest depiction of maritime activity in the world.
Given Prince Philip's sponsorship of Aboriginal 'land rights,' it is no surprise that two of the key figures in trying to suppress the Bradshaw art and its significance, have been Lord Renfrew of Kaimsthorn, Master of Jesus College, Cambridge and mentor to Prince Edward, and the late Sir Laurens Van den Post, who controlled the field of African rock art (some of which bears remarkable resemblances to the Kimberley art), and who was the main tutor of the fruity Prince Charles.
