“Australia must reject all foreign ownership of raw materials companies, and complete Gough Whitlam’s and Rex Connor’s mission to ‘buy back the farm’ by nationalising our raw materials,” Craig Isherwood, leader of the Citizens Electoral Council said today.

Mr Isherwood responded to the political drama surrounding the attempt by Chinalco, the Chinese government-owned mining company, to buy a $28 billion slab of the Queen’s own mining company, Rio Tinto, by renewing his July 22, 2008 call for Australia to “Nationalise our oil & gas, raw materials.”

He explained: “Since the great mineral booms in the 1960s we have allowed our country’s mineral wealth to be squandered at the behest of a few large, foreign-owned, multi-national companies like Rio Tinto. We have failed to develop the value-adding processing industries that we could have.

“Whilst we don’t support everything the Whitlam government did in the 1970s, his government’s attempt to wrest control of our raw materials wealth from foreign interests was spot on the mark.

Mr Isherwood cited a 1966 address to the University of New South Wales by then Deputy Opposition Leader Gough Whitlam, who said, “The government is condoning and encouraging the sale of our richest resources to overseas interests. Some of the most amazing mineral discoveries in our history are now in foreign hands. Foreigners do Australians the honour of employing them to dig up their own wealth, to be exported overseas… the whole of our production potential in aluminium is controlled by overseas interests. Almost all the new and rich iron ore discoveries, particularly in Western Australia, have been taken out of our hands... The new coal deposits in Queensland are controlled by overseas interests. Three quarters of the mining and treatment of copper is controlled by overseas interests. Already 70 percent of the mining of zinc is outside our control.”

(No company more represented the foreign control of Australia’s resources than Rio Tinto, then Conzinc RioTinto Australia [CRA], in which the Queen of England herself was “the largest non-institutional shareholder”, as reported in The Bulletin of October 19, 1999, “Diamonds are for ER”; it was the Queen’s toady, Governor-General Sir John Kerr, who sacked Whitlam for his “buy back the farm” assault on her own company’s control of Australia’s resources.)

Isherwood said, “Nothing has changed after 42 years, except we now have permanently exported huge volumes of valuable minerals. The so-called wealth the mining industry has brought to Australia over these years, is nothing in comparison to what we have given away to foreign owned corporations.”

“Will we go another 40 years, before actually taking control and responsibility for our God-given resources?”

Mr Isherwood called on the Government to resolve the Chinalco/Rio Tinto issue once and for all by:

• Adopting the CEC’s policy of nationalising Australia’s entire resource sector;
• Reassuring China, and our other trading partners of our intentions by negotiating long-term supply contracts that are fair to both nations, but which remove the price extortioning of the Rio Tinto/BHP cartel, and guarantee supply;
• Expanding resources processing in Australia, to increasingly export only value-added products, as well as supply growing domestic requirements of steel etc. for nation-building infrastructure projects.

For a free copy of the April 2004 New Citizen, including the articles “The Money Power vs. the Whitlam Government” and “Taking on the Queen’s minerals cartel”, click here.

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