The current spate of State and Federal calls for “electoral reform” are a sham, with but one purpose: to negate the rising popular support for the pro-national sovereignty Citizens Electoral Council, and to entrench the existing, private financier-owned “major” parties (including the Greens) in power, as the world and Australia along with it plunge into the greatest economic/financial collapse since the Black Death of the mid-14^th Century.

Unlike the rapidly-growing CEC, the ALP, the Liberals and the Nationals have all collapsed in party membership (i.e. actual popular support) over the past couple of decades, because they have sponsored precisely the free trade, economic rationalist, “globalist” policies which have ruined our economy; the proposed “public funding” scam is a way to keep them in power, while forcing the taxpayer to put up the funds to do so, saving the corporate cartels who own these parties (ideologically, as well as otherwise) hundreds of millions of dollars. The initiating role of NSW Premier Morris Iemma in the present “electoral reform” hysteria, bespeaks its sponsorship: the infinitely-corrupt Iemma government is a puppet of the City of London’s Macquarie Bank and related entities, which have looted and destroyed hundreds of billions of dollars in public infrastructure via “public-private partnerships” (PPPs) and similar scams.

Real electoral reform would mean dumping entirely the scam of “parliamentary government” foisted on our nation by the British Empire in its Constitution Act of 1853, to forestall the establishment of a republic in Australia, for which the great John Dunmore Lang and his associates had mobilised immense support. European-style “parliamentary democracies” such as ours, in which the executive is part of the legislature rather than a popularly-elected presidency as in the United States, are designed to allow any particular government to be easily destabilised and overthrown, if it poses a threat to the financial oligarchy.

The purpose of elections is to determine the actual degree of popular support for parties and/or individual candidates, and so to allow a citizenry to govern itself. Thus, pending the establishment of a true republic as proposed by Lang, and then by key leaders of the ALP in the 1890s against the British Colonial Office’s scam of “parliamentary government under the Crown”, the Citizens Electoral Council calls for the following points of actual electoral reform toward that end of actual self-government, under severe criminal penalties for their violation:

1. Public funding should be abolished, and only individual citizens should be allowed to contribute to political parties, or to individual candidates, i.e. no corporations, unions, or similar bodies, or “third parties” may make such contributions. These individual contributions (including loans) should be capped at $20,000 per annum, with disclosures of cumulative contributions and/or loans over $5,000.

2. Preferential voting should be scrapped. It was established in the first place in 1918 in order to stop the pro-national banking, pro-sovereignty ALP of that era, by allowing the two conservative parties to swap votes and therefore to effectively vote as one, and worked to the same effect during the Menzies era, when the DLP’s preferences were always anti-ALP. The preferential system is immensely confusing; the citizen often has no idea where his or her vote will wind up; and it is invariably rigged in the first place. Instead, we should have a simple first past the post, winner-takes-all voting system, as in the U.S., Canada, India and the UK.

3. The private financier-owned (e.g. Murdoch) media rigging of elections via biased coverage or by blackouts, must be prevented. Therefore, Federal and State “Media Directorates” must be established to ensure equal and fair coverage to all candidates and registered political parties, both at elections, and between elections.

4. Compulsory voting should be dumped, in favour of letting elections be determined by those who have actually thought about the issues and the candidates, and who are therefore motivated to vote.

5. All advertising by Governments (which totalled $2.1 billion over the period 1996 to 2003!) must be banned. All necessary public notices or information bulletins should be carried by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Finally, “electoral reform” maven Morris Iemma is a longtime, bitter enemy of the CEC, the Australian associates of American physical economist Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. The financiers who own Iemma are terrified that, under the present conditions of ever-deepening economic collapse, popular support will soar for the LaRouche/CEC policies of a “New Bretton Woods” return to fixed exchange rates, national banking, tariff protection and associated measures for the Common Good, to pull this country out of disaster.

CEC National Secretary Craig Isherwood and Victorian State Chairman Jeremy Beck will testify on this policy before the Victorian Parliament’s Electoral Matters Committee at 2.15pm on 23^rd July.

CEC's Electoral Reform policy document (PDF)