In March 1998, the just-founded economic nationalist One Nation party terrified the ruling Liberal Party/National Coalition, and the blueblood oligarchy behind it, by winning 11 seats in the Queensland state elections. Much of the nation, and in particular the country areas where One Nation ran the strongest, were enraged at the Coalition's globalist policies of deregulation, privatization, and slashes in social services. That rage has not abated. With the Coalition hanging onto the federal government by a mere seven seats, and with eight of its ten most marginally held seats in country areas, it is obsessed with pacifying the unrest in "the bush."

For the Coalition, as for the bluebloods behind it, much is at stake. Since it took power in March 1996, the Coalition has poured at least $50 billion from the sale of state assets into the banks and related financial associations, under the guise of "retiring the debt." It has already announced its intent to privatize the second half of Telstra, the national telecommunications company, for $30 billion, to also be turned over to the financial oligarchy.

Therefore, in order to stay in government, and to continue to sell off the nation's assets, the government and its blueblood controllers have set several schemes in motion, to neutralize rural unrest. First, the federal Minister for Employment, the globalist fanatic Tony Abbott, secretly financed a court case against One Nation, which has largely destroyed that party. Second, the government set up a new organization, the "Regional Australia Summit," in October 1999. Shortly thereafter, Prime Minister John Howard took a week-long, widely advertised (and widely ridiculed) "listening tour" of country areas, to shed crocodile tears for the hundreds of towns which are simply disappearing.

The Regional Australia Summit is a farce; its steering committee is composed of touchy-feely one-worldists, and Aboriginal land-rights organizers, whose "indigenist" claims have put the future of many farms completely up in the air. Steering Committee Chairman Prof. John Chudleigh revealed the Summit's real aims, when he proclaimed, "We want a regional, rural, and remote Australia which can compete in a globalized economy."

But perhaps the best indicator of the enormous cynicism behind the government's new-found compassion for the rural sector, is the Foundation for Regional and Rural Renewal (FRRR), into which it is pumping some $13 million, which it has just established in partnership with the Sidney Myer fund, representing some of the wealthiest families in the country, notably the Baillieu and Myer families. On its website, the FRRR states that it is based on the model of the Rural Development and Community Foundation schemes established by the U.S.-based Ford Foundation, in partnership with the Colorado-based Aspen Institute, and similar schemes in Britain. These were set up to co-opt and eliminate rural unrest, as documented in investigations by EIR over the last 15 years. Dr. Charles Knapp, then the head of the Aspen Institute, even visited Australia in October 1998, when the One Nation phenomenon was white-hot, to offer his services.

The FRRR points to the state of Nebraska (where one-third to one-half of all farmers were driven off their land in 1999 alone), as a model for what it would like to do. The FRRR's blather about "partnerships for growth," reveals its real "free market" intentions: "This concept is based on a reduced direct role of national government in community affairs, partly because of monetary policy which allows market forces to determine the fate of rural economic growth and partly because of a growing understanding that prolonged government intervention can dampen initiative.... The expectation that government will fund both community services and rural development agencies tends to let other stakeholders in rural Australia 'off the hook.'" In plain English, "The bush will get little or no money for infrastructure, health, or other vital services from the government."

The nature FRRR's leading personnel also bespeaks its motives: One of its directors is the chairman of the Sidney Myer Fund, Sidney Baillieu Myer, who is a longtime director of N.M. Rothschild, and the founding chairman of the Tasman Institute, one of the main fronts in Australia of the Mont Pelerin Society, the chief economic warfare unit of the British Crown. The FRRR's chairman is the ranking Privy Councillor in Australia, Ian Sinclair, while its Patron is John Anderson, the leader of the National Party, the federal Minister for Transport and Regional Services, and a landed oligarch. Joining these bluebloods on the FRRR board are Bill Kelty, the recently retired head of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, who, during his 13-year reign, did more than any single individual to destroy Australia's trade unions, and Ken Cowley, who for many years was the CEO of multi-billionaire Rupert Murdoch's News Ltd.