As the world economy sinks further into depression, the influence of U.S. 2004 presidential pre-candidate Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. is rapidly growing in Australia, as elsewhere around the globe. There are two, most recent markers of this rising influence downunder, linked to the activity of his co-thinkers in the Citizens Electoral Council (CEC), a national political party: 1) the CEC's successful fight against the Liberal/National party federal government's attempts to pass draconian, police-state laws, and 2) the CEC's campaign for a national bank, and for grand infrastructure projects modeled on the legendary Snowy Mountains hydroelectric scheme, which the American Society of Engineers called "one of the seven engineering wonders of the world."
On August 27, the Australian Labor Party (ALP), the main opposition party to the ruling Liberal/National coalition, announced that it would reject the government's "ASIO bill" in the Senate, the final piece of legislation in the "anti-terrorism" package which had been passed by the House in late March, and then by the Senate (in an altered form, and minus the ASIO bill) in late June. The thus-doomed ASIO bill would have turned the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) into a Gestapo or KGB, with the right to detain anyone indefinitely—even if they were suspected of only having "information" about terrorism—with no lawyer, no right to remain silent, and the threat of a five-year jail sentence for "non-cooperation". Yet, the ALP had voted for precisely this ASIO bill back in March, when it voted up the government's entire "anti-terror" package, comprising the most far-reaching changes to the nation's legal system since World War II, which the government had introduced only the day before! Why the stunning about-face?
Shortly after the House passed the anti-terror package, LaRouche's associates in the CEC began an intensive nationwide mobilization against the bills, notwithstanding an apparently unstoppable government/ALP alliance to push them through the Senate, as well. The CEC issued 500,000 leaflets, which denounced the bills as "identical to Hitler's Notverordnung", the Feb. 28 "emergency decree" the day after the Reichstag fire, which laid the juridical basis for the Nazi seizure of power. The CEC also organized a phone call and email campaign which hammered Liberal/National and ALP senators with 200 calls or emails per day, and sponsored a full-page ad on June 12 in the country's major daily, The Australian, signed by 220 elected officials and other prominent Australians, which denounced the bills as, "in the most literal sense of the term, fascist".
Although the bills could have easily been defeated then, had the nominally pro-civil rights ALP voted against them, the ALP was forced to at least demand that they be watered down significantly before the Senate passed them in late June, including eliminating the power of the Attorney General to unilaterally ban organizations. It later emerged, that the Government had already drawn up a list of organizations to be banned. With the ASIO bill, the worst of the lot, put off until August, a continued CEC mobilisation sparked sufficient resistance that the ALP was forced to withdraw its earlier support, and demand that the bill be consigned to committee in the Senate, a review process which will likely drag on for months. Observers say that the bill in its present form is dead.
The fight for a national bank and infrastructure
In February, 2002, one month before the government rammed its "anti-terror" laws through the House, the CEC issued a 32-page special report, "The Infrastructure Road to Recovery", in its New Citizen newspaper, which carried the headline, "Facing the Depression: A Fascist Police State, or Economic Development?"
The report outlined a bold, inspiring vision for the dry, largely-unpopulated continent. First, it proposed a population of 50 million by the year 2050, harking back to the "Populate or Perish!" slogan of the optimistic, post-war years, when Australia welcomed millions of immigrants from war-torn Europe to its shores. The labor force that built the monumental Snowy Mountains hydroelectric scheme was drawn largely from their ranks. The centerpiece of the report was a proposed series of new, Snowy-style projects to harness a number of Australia's mighty rivers on the northern and eastern coasts, which now flow unutilized into the sea. Such great water projects, the report demonstrated, could almost drought-proof the continent, and provide jobs for Australia's unemployed. The nation already had significant water problems at the time the report was published; since then it has plunged into one of the worst droughts of the past 50 years, with at least one state, Queensland, 80% covered by drought. The report has been read with intense interest around the country.
Besides the water projects, the New Citizen report also proposed to construct a network of maglev trains linking the major cities, in particular Melbourne in the southeast to the port of Darwin on the northern coast, Australia's gateway to the huge population centers of Asia, via high-speed shipping, in which Australia has been a world leader. Other elements of the package included the construction of a new nuclear industry featuring ultra-safe high temperature gas-cooled reactors, a revitalized space program, and a dramatic upgrading of the country's collapsing health and education systems.
Immediately after its late-June success in watering down the government's first package of fascist "anti-terror" laws, the CEC relaunched its infrastructure campaign around the re-establishment of a national bank. The party issued 500,000 leaflets (1 for every 38 Australians) under the title, "A National Bank, for National Sovereignty!", citing LaRouche's forecasts and calls for a New Bretton Woods and national banking. Australia once had a national bank, the Commonwealth Bank, established in 1911 by American immigrant King O'Malley, a federal MP who called himself "the Alexander Hamilton of Australia", but that was privatized in 1995 by ALP Prime Minister Paul Keating. The CEC intends to get one million signatures for the bank, and has already secured the signatures of 700 elected officials and other prominent figures, from all sides of Australian politics.
Australia's political parties: A Potemkin village
The clout which LaRouche's associates are now wielding in Australian politics is seemingly paradoxical, given that the CEC is invariably blacked out of the major press, and that its electoral vote totals have been rather modest, reaching a high of 8% for one CEC candidate in the West Australian state elections of 2001. But, they have LaRouche's ideas in a global crisis, and in a situation where the reality of Australian politics is far different than the media portrays it, or even than most media-influenced Australians themselves believe.
First, the "major" parties, the Liberal/National party coalition, and the ALP, are widely despised for fanatically pushing privatization, deregulation, and free trade, which have savaged Australia's once-vibrant economy. The collapse in these parties is seen in: 1) their falling vote totals, and 2) their plummeting national membership. For decades, the two major parties split almost the entire popular vote between them, with a small slice going to the Democrats, founded as a third-party alternative 25 years ago, and which has held the balance of power in the Senate for many years. But, in the federal election in October 2001, almost 20% of the population voted for someone outside the major parties, with only 5.4% of that going to the Democrats (who are now publicly disintegrating in internecine squabbles), some to the Greens, and a slice to another third-party effort, Pauline Hanson's One Nation party, which had borrowed some policies from the CEC, and which had been pumped up by the major media beginning 1996 in an effort to derail LaRouche's soaring influence in the rural sector. One Nation is also now fast disappearing, leaving the Greens, established as a spin-off of the Prince Philip-founded Australian Conservation Foundation, as the third-party safety valve for popular anger.
But the parties' respective membership figures are a far more accurate gauge of their genuine popular support, than media-manipulated voting patterns. This is where the reality of what the CEC represents, shines through. When Liberal Prime Minister John Howard won the federal election in 1996, his Liberals had 64,000 paid members, and the ALP had 57,000, according to the 1997 edition of Australian Political Facts, leaving aside the Liberals' junior partners, the National Party, which is widely admitted to be heading for oblivion. Those memberships have collapsed dramatically, as the parties have continued to push globalization. Some figures have leaked out over the past months in the media, along with statements by various party members themselves, which document that collapse throughout Australia's six states and two territories (the latter the rough equivalent of the U.S. District of Columbia). The Liberal Party's New South Wales branch, its largest, has only 6000 members, according to political writer Paul Sheehan of the Sydney Morning Herald, and two-thirds of them are aged 65 or older, while its Western Australian (WA) branch has 800 and its Tasmanian branch has only 600, which, with the other states/territories gives a national membership of perhaps 15-20,000, at best. And even many of these members are bogus, according to WA Liberal MP Don Randall, who recently said that 90% of Liberal dues-paying members are "phantom members". As he put it, "As far as phantom members are concerned, 90 per cent of people who become members don't play an active role", he told the August 4 Sunday Times. "And many don't even remember they are members—it doesn't stick in their minds." If you take Randall's 90% phantom members estimate, and multiply that times 20,000 (to be generous), you get 2,000 active members of the ruling party of Australia! Even if they have a few more than that, it is a far, far cry from the popular perception. The ALP is not much better, since, as is frequently reported even in the major media, much of its membership is the result of "branch stacking", where a local ALP honcho will pay for the phantom "memberships" of local party branches, many of whom come from local ethnic communities, who don't even speak English. As former ALP Senator Chris Schacht recently told the Lateline TV show that "You've probably got less than 10,000 genuinely active members" in the Labor Party." In fact, it is probably significantly less, given that the ALP could not even mobilize enough local members to man the polling booths in the Melbourne district of its national leader, Simon Crean, at the last election.
As for the more prominent "third-party" efforts, the Democrats had 2,500 members at the time of their last leadership vote over a year ago, and the Greens, who have no national office nor any significant organizational structure, have perhaps a few more than that. The LaRouche-affiliated CEC, by contrast, has a highly active membership of 2000 (which is growing rapidly, toward a target of 5000), with a fulltime headquarters in Melbourne of 23 people—as large or larger than the national headquarters of the Liberals or the ALP. LaRouche's influence, already evident in the campaign against the "anti-terror" laws, and for the national bank, will rapidly intensify as the depression deepens.
