At a dozen press conferences all over the country on May 19, the Australian associates of Lyndon LaRouche in the Citizens Electoral Council (CEC) launched their campaigns for the Federal elections expected in October. Numerous media attended the conferences, along with well over 200 Australian citizens supporting CEC. Some of these latter were members of the CEC, but many were not, reflecting the widespread disgust with the two "major" parties—the Liberals and the Australian Labor Party (ALP)—and the desire for real national leadership. The Liberal/ALP policies of deregulation, privatization, and globalization over the last three decades have done much to wreck what used to be called the "Lucky Country"; now, with a global financial crash fast approaching, the two are collaborating to ram through police-state measures identical to those of Hitler in 1933.

The day before the press conferences, the CEC ran a full-page ad in the country's only national newspaper, The Australian, which featured a sharp attack on Australian fascist police-state laws (see EIR May 14 and May 21), and pictures of all 88 CEC candidates around the center-piece of the ad—the cover of the CEC's just-released New Citizen newspaper. Both the paper's banner headline, "Defeat the Synarchists—Fight for a National Bank!", and its second lead, "Fate of U.S.A, World Hangs on Lyndon LaRouche," almost jumped out at the reader; and the text of the NC's whole front page was clearly legible. The same day, the CEC took out quarter-page ads in another 15 newspapers covering all major population centers in Australia. All of the ads featured a toll-free phone number at the CEC national office in Melbourne, and a clip-out coupon to send for a free copy of the New Citizen; over the following week, the CEC received 600 calls and 300 coupons, and 1,300 people downloaded the entire 72-page paper from the CEC website; 16,000 others read part of the issue on the site.

The CEC candidates emphasized four themes to the press: 1) that the LaRouche-affiliated CEC was launching its largest-ever slate of candidates, with a presence in all eight Australian states and territories, in a campaign amid an extraordinary period of crisis internationally, for which only U.S. 2004 Democratic Party Presidential pre-candidate Lyndon LaRouche had the necessary solutions; 2) that the party was determined to stop the latest of a seemingly-endless barrage of police-state bills, the Anti-Terrorism Bill 2004; 3) that the CEC was releasing its most powerful piece of literature ever, the latest New Citizen with its extraordinary expose of the Synarchy's drive for fascism in Australia in the 1930s, and that the same pro-fascist families and corporations of that era are behind the current push for police-state laws; and, 4) that the party was denouncing the ruling Liberal Party government of Prime Minister John Howard as a "beast-man" entity, both for its commitment to a fascist police state and for its systematic torture of children, as revealed in the just-released report of the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission's (HREOC) on "Immigration Detention Centers" (IDCs) around Australia (see EIR, May 28, 2004). To clarify the last point, the candidates released information—for the first time publicly in Australia—that the father of current PM John Howard had been a member of the 1930s Synarchist/fascist army known as the New Guard. "Like father, like son," the candidates charged.

Although most major media blacked out the conferences, some good coverage was garnered on local radio and regional papers and television. Notwithstanding the blackout, the establishment was stung, as revealed in a hysterical article appearing on May 23 in Rupert Murdoch's Sunday Mail in Brisbane, Queensland. Columnist Terry Sweetman featured a prominent picture of Howard's New Guardsman father, Lyall Howard, in his World War I army uniform, under the title "'Citizens' take cowardly way."

Sweetman was apoplectic at the CEC's exposure of Prime Minister Howard. After claiming that he, too, had been a long-time, fierce opponent of Howard, Sweetman fulminated, "However, I will defend Mr. Howard to my last breath against the scurrilous, cowardly and irrelevant charges of the seriously deranged Citizens Electoral Council." Furthermore, he spluttered, "Maybe Lyall was a 1930s fascist, maybe he wasn't; but what the hell does that have to do with John Howard?"

Sweetman desperately attempted to dismiss the CEC's extraordinary documentation of the continuity of Australia's Synarchist/fascist networks of the 1930s through today, of which the Howard family is only one egregious example. Another, is the Murdoch family—who employ Sweetman himself.