Under cover of legislating to outlaw "racial vilification," a fascist law has been passed in the state of Victoria, targeted squarely at the Citizens Electoral Council (CEC), the Victoria-based associates of 2004 U.S. Presidential pre-candidate Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. The Racial and Religious Tolerance Bill was passed by the Victorian Legislative Council (Victoria's upper house) on June 14, by a vote of 32-9, following its earlier passage by the lower house.
In a June 19 statement entitled "Australia and Hitler's Dictatorship," Mr. LaRouche excoriated the bill as an intent to violate human rights, and as legislation of the same character as the February 1934 decrees which first established the Nazi government as a dictatorship.
The bill passed only after fierce, almost unprecedented parliamentary debate, which was not reflected in the final votes; most of some 5,500 official submissions opposed it, and at least 10,000 citizens wrote letters of protest.
The bill decrees: 1) that a person is not allowed "to engage in conduct that incites hatred against, serious contempt for, or revulsion or severe ridicule of, that other person or class of persons," an intentionally vague, subjective clause which is capable of being interpreted as desired, while motive is specifically defined as "irrelevant"; 2) fines of $6,000 for individuals, and $30,000 for organizations, and jail sentences of up to six months, for such purely arbitrary "violations"; 3) that employers will be liable for their employees, and may be fined and imprisoned along with them; 4) that a "representative body" may file charges on behalf of someone else—which grants the bill's architects, the Anti-Defamation Commission of B'nai B'rith (ADC), the right to terrorize whomever they choose; 5) that the "offence" can occur inside or outside of Victoria; and 6) that authorities may use search warrants, including breaking down doors, to enforce the new law.
The search and seizure provision is particularly draconian, given that search warrants are used only for the most serious, indictable offences. It was sneaked into the bill, after a storm of protest forced Victorian Premier Steve Bracks to pledge to amend it. However, Bracks, who had originally promised the law to the ADC, in fact made it much worse. Peter Ryan, the leader of the National Party, the only party to oppose the law, commented: "It is like using a sledge-hammer to crack a walnut."
Aimed at LaRouche Co-Thinkers
That "walnut" is the CEC. The bill has been accompanied by a malicious nationwide slander campaign against the CEC, orchestrated by the ADC, which is a front for Queen Elizabeth's Privy Council, the ruling body of the British Commonwealth. Three members of the Privy Council dominate the ADC's Advisory Board: former Governors-General Sir Zelman Cowen and Sir Ninian Stephen, and former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser. In a June 2000 submission on the bill, the ADC listed the CEC alongside the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist organizations, as one of 14 "organized racist groups" to which the bill should apply. Trying to whip up a lynch mob against the CEC, later ADC submissions and media appearances featured concocted, fraudulent "quotes" from LaRouche, in which he is made to appear to be denigrating blacks, Chinese, Jews, Irish-Americans and other minority or ethnic groups. The ADC has repeatedly attacked LaRouche as a "racist, anti-Semitic cult leader."
The anti-LaRouche campaign, in which Rupert Murdoch's media took a leading role (see EIR, June 22, 2001), reached a fever-pitch in the week before the bill was passed, and has continued unabated since.
In part, the Crown-dominated establishment, with the ADC taking the point, was scrambling to head off an intense CEC-led mobilization against the bill, which was so effective that one MP reported, "This office has received a record number of responses." The actual parliamentary debate was dominated by references to the CEC, and at one stage, the debate ground to a halt, as hysterical Liberal Party members interjected repeatedly to stop a CEC press release being read into the public record. The release quoted an angry Liberal MP blasting the bill as the work of the "top end of town," and questioned whether a $200,000 donation from the Liberal Party's biggest donor, ADC-associated billionaire Richard Pratt, was the reason the party sold out and supported the bill.
The real motive for the Privy Council's ADC-run campaign against LaRouche, was revealed on ABC Radio National on June 20, when an ADC spokesman launched an attack on Australian House of Representatives MPs who had endorsed LaRouche's New Bretton Woods policy. "It is one of his economic policies to save the world from the Jewish bankers who are supposedly trying to subjugate the world," the ADC hack lied. In reality, the Anglo-American establishment is terrified of Presidential candidate LaRouche's growing influence worldwide, as the world plunges toward a global financial collapse.
