Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

Media Release Thursday, 16 February 2017

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

Stop the dismantling of Australia!

A version of the following release was the lead editorial in the 15 February 2017 issue of the Australian Alert Service.

In a constantly changing world, just standing still is the equivalent of going backwards. By actively shutting down its productive economy, Australia is on a fast track to a dark age.

There is no doubt that shutting our productive sector is deliberate policy. It has been ever since the major parties signed on to the “post-1983 consensus on economic reform” initiated by Prime Ministers Hawke and Keating and continued by every subsequent government. Ever since the rule of “the market” was put ahead of the welfare of the people, ever since the declaration that governments should have no role in banking, and ever since green ideology became the pretext to not reform industries, but to shut them down.

Over the past three decades, Australian industries have taken hit after hit, each justified by free market or green theory: textiles; the steel and aluminium industries; car manufacturing; whole sectors of agriculture including fruit growing and canning, pig farming, dairy farming, irrigated agriculture in the Murray-Darling Basin, and more; the timber and fishing industries; the utilities sector through mass-privatisation; independent grocers and supermarkets and other retail categories through national competition policy; and so on. Each hit has resulted in either the closure of the industry or its concentration in a handful of corporations, and massive job losses.

At present, thousands of car workers have either just lost their jobs, or soon will when Toyota and Holden close later this year; the town of Morwell and the Latrobe Valley faces devastation when the Hazelwood Power Station is shut down; taxi families all over Australia are facing ruin from the deregulation of their industry; farmers in Queensland and the wheat belt of Western Australia are being picked off by predatory banks; hundreds of timber workers in Northern Victoria face losing their jobs; and irrigators in the Murray-Darling Basin can’t get access to water that is plentiful at the moment. There are many more cases of industrial destruction.

Yet, politicians and economists blame the closing industries for their own demise: power production at Hazelwood is too dirty; car workers’ wages are too high; the taxi service wasn’t good enough; small dairies are inefficient; irrigators are taking water from the environment; and so on. Australians keep getting swayed by these false claims, and then wonder where all of our industries went.

It is the government’s role to foster the appropriate environment, including the necessary infrastructure, to make industries successful. The shutdown of reliable power supply for industry, the confiscation of water from agricultural uses, the strangulation by excessive red and green tape, and the failure to force banks to provide fair services, is nothing but deliberate sabotage.

If our leaders were serious about increasing our productive economy they would be pushing for nuclear power, high-speed rail, and new ports. As the world’s largest exporter of gas we would make it available domestically at virtually cost price, rather than forcing distributors to consider importing from overseas. We would renationalise our vital power and water utilities, along with our raw materials.

We have reached a point where people are no longer willing to let this slide. They know they are being screwed and they know their protests are not being heard. There is a voter revolt growing here like in the UK, USA, Italy and elsewhere. More Australians are looking to alternatives like Pauline Hanson or Cory Bernardi, but which alternatives are genuine? Certainly not those who stand for the same basic principles that people are rebelling against. The population is rejecting policies that are based on the notion that if government stands aside, people acting in their own self-interest will create markets which magically allocate resources and products where they are required. Historically, this was called the British System of economics. It filled the coffers of the British elite with loot, leaving war, poverty and famine in its wake. Its opponents advocated a system in which the government participated in the economy, with investments in infrastructure and services, for the Common Good. This was put in practice in the USA after America’s revolutionary break with the British Empire, and it became known as the American System. Nations including Australia emulated the USA, and such a view of economics became commonplace until the extreme neoliberal ideology unleashed deregulation and industrial destruction in the 1970s and 1980s.

If Australia remains captive to the current system, we will be left behind by the new dynamic emerging in the global economic framework, from the reset in relations among world powers; this reset is exemplified by the BRICS nations’ commitment to cooperative economic development, which is driving the construction of modern rail and other infrastructure right across Asia and Africa. Or, we could have our own reset, and rekindle the vision of our great forbears such as King O’Malley, the American who introduced us to national banking, leading to the creation of the Commonwealth Bank; or Dr John Dunmore Lang, the Scot who led Australia very close to becoming a republic in the 1850s, and planned the development of the nation, including rail links to the north to connect us to the rest of the world and expand our relationships in the region. It’s time to finally bring these visions for our nation into reality.

Click here for a free copy of the 15 February AAS and the CEC’s New Citizen special report, “The Infrastructure Road to Recovery”.

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.