Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

Media Release Thursday, 27 July 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

Prosecute architects of murderous austerity

Policy makers advocating murderous austerity on citizens to prop up parasitical banks need to be brought to account in a court of law and prosecuted for crimes against humanity. Actuarial data proves conclusively how ordinary citizens are dying as a result of their policies through health risks associated with poverty. The predatory bankers in The City of London/Wall Street financial oligarchy and their junior banking partners in Australia’s Big Four et al., who dictate budget austerity policy, must be personally held to account.

Finance is an increasingly degenerate “industry” that encourages predatory, kill-or-be-killed behaviour. Traders boast of taking advantage of their own clients, which they call “ripping their faces off”, and are incentivised to do virtually anything to pocket multimillion dollar bonuses. It’s no wonder that banks have a revolving door with governments through which they deploy key personnel to dictate policies that impoverish people to profit banks. For instance, Australia’s banks are the biggest beneficiaries of the Commonwealth government’s AAA credit rating, because their international creditors know that the government guarantees them; bankers therefore demand the government slash all forms of social spending to “balance the budget”, which imposes real hardship on the poor, but protect the AAA rating from which they are suckling.

Ample evidence exists that many Australians are prematurely dying as a result of brutal government economic policy. So-called “despair deaths”—from alcoholism, drugs, and suicide—are a big part of the problem, which stems from Australia’s rural and industrial shutdown and actual economic collapse, despite the myth peddled about “26 years of uninterrupted economic growth”. There are now well over 100,000 Australians who are homeless, with this number skyrocketing in recent years. Poverty leads to poor lifestyle choices, many of which are forced upon people, such as the choice of whether to skip meals or turn off the heater to reduce the power bill.

Former CEO of Homelessness Australia Glenda Stevens presented some findings in 2014: “For men who experience chronic homelessness across Australia, the average life expectancy is between about 45 and 47 years of age, which is an alarmingly young age for men in a country as wealthy as ours to die”, she said. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) reported the overall number of people accessing homelessness services was more than 279,000 in 2015-16, an increase of 14 per cent on the previous year, and 33 per cent since 2011-12. The 2016 census estimated the number of Australians sleeping out or in improvised shelters to be up by 20 per cent on the 2011 figure.

While overall life expectancy has not yet declined in Australia, warning signs may be seen in the USA and UK. Unless Australia reverses its current economic trajectory, we are not far behind.

For the first time since the 1993 AIDS epidemic, Americans are dying at a faster rate, and they’re dying younger. In 2015 official US statistics report 86,212 more Americans died than in the previous year. A December 2016 National Center for Health Statistics report identified that over this time, “the age-adjusted death rate for the total population increased 1.2 per cent, and life expectancy at birth decreased 0.1 year”.

In the UK, the rise in life expectancy was a constant and increasing trend for a century, but has stalled since 2010. On 18 July Guardian columnist Owen Jones reported how the Cameron-May Tories contributed to such an alarming shift: “They presided over the longest squeeze in wages since the 19th century, and the worst peacetime record of housebuilding since the 1920s. And now we know they have presided over a fall in the rate of increase in life expectancy. And yes, the combined effects of the bankers’ crash and austerity did kill in Britain. Until Lehman Brothers came toppling down, the number of men taking their own lives was steadily falling. Then it began to climb again: hundreds of people died who—if the previous trend had continued—would still be with us today.” Jones noted that at the end of 2015, Britain endured the biggest jump in mortality rates for nearly half a century.

Cuts to the UK health budget drove such programs as the notorious Liverpool Care Pathway for the Dying Patient (LCP) that aimed to increase death rates—hospitals were paid bonuses for meeting LCP targets. Developed by the Prince Charles-sponsored Marie Curie Hospice, LCP clearly caused thousands of unnecessary deaths. British cancer patients, according to a new report, have worse survival rates than their European counterparts for nine out of ten major cancers. The report commissioned by the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry and based on analysis by Swedish researchers, said the UK spends 20 per cent less per person on cancer than other EU economies. And if the UK had the cancer survival rates of Germany, more than 35,000 more people would be alive five years after diagnosis—a great outcome for their families, but one which Britain’s system is geared to measure as a “cost”.

The Tory’s policies are a continuation of Thatcherism, which was philosophically grounded in an attitude that the poor must be killed off, to keep their numbers in check. Thatcher’s two economic gurus, Sir Keith Joseph and Lord Ralph Harris, were raving advocates of eugenics, the British race science that Hitler co-opted for the Holocaust, which has its roots in Charles Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” and, ultimately, the ideas of the economist Darwin credited for inspiring his “natural selection” doctrine, Parson Thomas Malthus. In his fraudulent 1798 Essay on Population, Malthus theorised a formula to prove that the population would outgrow the food supply—which subsequent history has proved to be spectacularly wrong. The Malthusian “solution” to this contrived problem was horrifically genocidal: the poor, he urged, should be forced to live in cramped conditions adjacent to open sewers to “court the return of the plague” so that every generation suffers pandemics that reduce population. It is stunning how many of the leading lights of the British elite have openly embraced this genocidal philosophy, from the East India Company bureaucrats who ruled the British Empire and were trained by Malthus at Haileybury College, to the “great” mathematician and peace advocate Lord Bertrand Russell, to Prince Philip and his co-founders of the World Wildlife Fund, and to Thatcher’s gurus.

By the Nuremberg trial standard that the Nazis faced, that they “knew or should have known” the crimes they were committing, so too, those pushing murderous austerity must be held to account.

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