Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

Media Release Friday, 29 January 2016

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

Turnbull pimps Australia to the ‘Money Power’

Forget “democracy”—the real power that controls Australia will be assembled today at Sydney’s Opera House, where Prime Minister Turnbull and his leading ministers and department heads will kiss up to the world’s biggest investment funds.

The mostly British and American funds, including BlackRock, Capital Group, First State, Standard Life, Templeton, T. Rowe Price and Wellington Management, will be wined and dined in the hope that they bless Australia with foreign investment.

The heads of Australia’s “independent” financial regulators APRA and the Reserve Bank—Wayne Byres and Glenn Stevens—will also be there, presumably to reassure the investors that Australia will comply with any conditions that they place on any investments they make.

Australians should feel embarrassed and offended by what our nation’s leaders are doing today in Sydney (although not surprised, given that Malcolm Turnbull is “Mr Goldman Sachs”). This is because this cringe-worthy event is the “Money Power”, as it was labeled by the patriots of the “old” Labor Party, in operation: the collective of financial institutions centred in the City of London and Wall Street investing in nations based on their “competitiveness”, for which investment those institutions gain power over and above the democratic system of those nations, as governments submit to the economic policies they demand.

In his infamous 2012 speech to the City of London’s leading Thatcherite think tank the Institute of Economic Affairs, former Treasurer Joe Hockey lauded this undemocratic power: “In today’s global financial system it is the financial markets, both domestic and international, which impose fiscal discipline on countries,” he said. “Lenders have a more active role to play in policing public policy and ensuring that countries do not exceed their capacity to service and repay debt.” (Emphasis added.) A case in point is Treasury Secretary John Fraser, who yesterday demanded mandatory limits on Commonwealth public spending—i.e. a rule that cannot be changed by democratic decision; for more than a decade before taking over Treasury, Fraser headed up UBS Global Asset Management.

Foreign investment myth

To fully appreciate the insidious nature of this system, Australians must understand that none of this kissing up to financial institutions is necessary, as the claim that Australia depends upon foreign investment is a complete myth. Here’s why:

In both world wars, Australia was cut off from foreign investment, and yet not only survived, but flourished. This was because of one institution: the Commonwealth Bank, our national bank, owned and controlled by the government. In WWI the Commonwealth Bank under the great Denison Miller was able to harness and direct financial resources into productive activity for the war effort; in WWII, under Australia’s greatest Prime Minister John Curtin, the Commonwealth Bank was able to create from nothing—as the recent Quantitative Easing (QE) issues from the world’s central banks prove they have the power to do—enormous volumes of credit to fuel Australia’s miraculous war-time economic mobilisation which was instrumental to victory in the Pacific.

If Australia were to return to the original Commonwealth Bank model of national banking, we have a wealth of manpower and resources against which to create whatever credit is necessary to build great water projects, as well as power, transportation and communications infrastructure that would become the platform for a new era of full employment and prosperity. UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn is campaigning for his country to establish a national investment bank to do precisely this, which he is calling “People’s Quantitative Easing”.

Frank Anstey, the mentor of John Curtin, described in his 1921 book The Money Power the essential nature of this power, unchanged to this day, which we must defeat to realise this vision. Anstey wrote: “London is, so far, the web centre of international finance. In London are assembled the actual chiefs or the representatives of the great financial houses of the world. The Money Power is something more than capitalism… These men constitute the Financial Oligarchy. No nation can be really free where this financial oligarchy is permitted to hold dominion, and no ‘democracy’ can be aught but a name that does not shake it from its throne.”

Click here for a free copy of the proceedings of the CEC’s March 2015 international conference, featuring detailed explanations of national banking and Australia’s successful deployment of the Commonwealth Bank during both world wars, including “The Australian Precedents for a Hamiltonian Credit System”, by Craig Isherwood.

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