Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

Media Release Friday, 7 June 2013

Craig Isherwood‚ National Secretary
PO Box 376‚ COBURG‚ VIC 3058
Phone: 1800 636 432
Email: cec@cecaust.com.au
Website: http://cec.cecaust.com.au

Labor and Liberals should be afraid—time to bust up their power-sharing arrangement

Just as the truth is revealed about Australia’s commitment to join the new international bail-in regime to save the banks at the expense of the lives of citizens (see “Kill the BIS-APRA bank ‘bail-in’ plan before it kills you!”), it has emerged that the Liberal and Labor parties have moved to prevent those who vehemently oppose such a move from running in the upcoming federal election.

Australians will not keep meekly submitting to policies from both major parties that destroy their lives—such as their allowing foreign authorities to dictate confiscating deposits to save banks—so Labor and the Liberals are stitching up the voting system to deny the public other choices.

The dirty deal between Gillard and Abbott to leach extra public money to fund their despised political parties has blown up in their faces, but it is nothing compared to their quiet scheme to keep other candidates from contesting elections.

In February, the major parties joined forces to quietly double the nomination fee that candidates for House of Representatives seats have to pay, from $500 to $1000 (and from $1000 to $2000 for the Senate).

Their reasoning was blatant: they decreed there were too many candidates contesting elections, so the fee was doubled to block people from running.

(Any party now attempting to contest all 150 seats faces an up-front cost of $150,000, instead of $75,000—an enormous difference to political parties that don’t compete with the Lib/Labs for corrupt corporate donations.)

The Lib/Labs know that what is at stake is their cosy power-sharing arrangement, which PM Julia Gillard called in Parliament in October 2010 “the post-1983 consensus on economic reform”. (Tony Abbott expressed it in a whole new way last week when he blubbered over the retirement of Labor’s Martin Ferguson—good grief!)

Whereas prior to 1983 the Australian Labor Party represented a genuine philosophical difference to the Liberals, since Hawke and Keating took office committed to destroying Labor’s economic principles, both parties have taken turns screwing the Australian people with vicious economic and green policies.

The most glaring irony/hypocrisy is that the most destructive of those reforms were rammed through in the name of “competition”:

skilled industrial workers, such as in the car industry now, have lost their jobs en masse because they had to “compete” with cheap imports—the victims also include the steel industry, the textile, clothing and footwear industry, fruit growers, pork producers and many others;
“competition” dictated the mass-privatisation of public assets, such as the Commonwealth Bank, Qantas, Telstra and various electricity systems;
thousands of dairy farmers went to the wall and many hundreds were driven to suicide when “competition policy” deregulated their industry;
bank deregulation introduced “competition” into the financial system, leading to a banking system concentrated in just four major banks which between them gouge from the blood, sweat and tears of the Australian more than $20 billion per year in profits;
and “competition” from the Coles/Woolworths duopoly has steamrolled almost all independent supermarkets, fuel retailers, hardware stores and bottle shops, and left Coles and Woolworths with an 80 per cent market share.

Citizens Electoral Council leader Craig Isherwood today called on the Australian public to bust up the major parties’ power-sharing arrangement.

“Just like big corporations, the major parties preach competition, but actually suppress it, because it terrifies them,” he stated.

“They and their accomplices in the highly-concentrated media are determined to stop the public from knowing and supporting the CEC’s policies to reindustrialise Australia—Glass-Steagall banking separation, a national bank for public credit, and large-scale infrastructure development.

“Their dirty deal might stop some CEC candidates from running in this election—which is the intention—but it won’t ultimately save them from the public’s rage.

“It’s up to the public to make the Lib/Lab’s nightmares come true by joining the CEC—the nation won’t survive otherwise.”

Join the fight to stop Liberal and Labor signing over our freedoms to a new international bankers’ dictatorship. Click here for a free mobilisation pack.

Read about the history of the CEC as a political party as well as our policies in our book, “What Australia Must Do to Survive the Depression” ($20). Hundreds of small parties come and go at every election, but the CEC has stood firm on principle since its inception 25 years ago.

Click here to join the CEC as a member.

Click here to refer others to receive regular email updates from the Citizens Electoral Council of Australia.