The LaRouche Youth Movement (LYM) and Citizens Electoral Council have launched a nationwide mobilisation to contact every councillor in Australia—all 4,500 of them—to build pressure to force the Federal Parliament to pass the Homeowners and Bank Protection Bill 2008, an Australian version of LaRouche’s HBPA (see p.4). As in the U.S., our politicians at a federal level are more controlled by the “Money Power” than councillors, who are much closer and more responsive to the crisis ravaging their constituents. Dozens of U.S. cities, including such major ones as Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Newark and St. Louis, have already officially called for Congress to enact the HBPA, and it has been introduced into a dozen state legislatures.

The Murdoch/Packer media here has blacked out the true extent of the crisis, but some of its undeniable symptoms portend widespread misery very soon: there are almost two million Australian households now officially “mortgage stressed”, that is, only a job loss or a few paycheques away from eviction, while 800 families are foreclosed on and kicked out on the street every week; Australian homeowners have a debt to annual income ratio of 175%, even worse than the 130% for the U.S.; the Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey cites Australia as the least affordable nation for housing in the world, given that Australian families spend 6.1 times their entire annual household income to buy a typical home compared to 3.6 times in the U.S.; and individual bankruptcies have already risen more than 25% in the past two years.

And, though the U.S. has seen staggering rates of foreclosures, as in the states of Maryland (up 639% on last year), California (600%), and even in wealthy Connecticut (200%), Australia boasts its own shocking figures, with rises in repossession writs by 447% in central western Sydney; 332% in Canberbury- Bankstown; 270% in Fairfield- Liverpool; 203% in outer southwestern Sydney; 351 % in Gosford- Wyong; 287% in Newcastle, and so it goes.