In the context of the accelerating collapse of the global financial system, the nation of Australia is rapidly moving toward a Nazi-style dictatorial regime. Such a statement, about the famously "laid-back" nation of Crocodile Dundee, sports stars, and exotic vacations, with its outgoing, pro-American population, might seem outrageous, even preposterous, including to many Australians themselves. However, the evidence for such a conclusion is all in plain sight, and only one who is in acute denial that the world has now entered into a depression, which will soon become far, far worse, can deny the accompanying political reality of planned police-state repression.
As U.S. 2004 Democratic Presidential pre-candidate Lyndon LaRouche has repeatedly warned, the Anglo-American establishment is attempting to maintain its power in a collapsing system through dictatorial, crisis management methods, some of which would make Hitler green with envy, such as the Reichstag fire-style Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington. And Australia, which has invoked the ANZUS treaty with the United States and is now on its highest security alert since World War II, is one of the "filthy financier five" (U.K., United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) through which the British monarchy and its American, Wall Street-centered sympathizers have dominated the world for the past 35 years.
For Australia, perhaps the major difference with the Nazi precedent, is that the not-yet-consolidated dictatorship there has not been sprung all at once, as in the emergency laws rammed through the German parliament in the wake of the Nazi-rigged Reichstag fire, but has been enacted piece by piece over a longer period of time, although the pace of this legislation has dramatically intensified this year and last. All of the new legislation has ostensibly been proposed to deal with a string of "crises," beginning with the infamous 1996 Port Arthur massacre of 35 people by a "lone nut"; to the Y2K hysteria; to the danger that Osama bin Laden might target the 2000 Sydney Olympics; to the mass anti-globalization riots in Melbourne in September 2000; to the "anti-terrorist" measures adopted for the cancelled Oct. 3-6 Commonwealth Heads of Government (CHOGM) meeting in Brisbane; to the hysterical actions taken to keep undocumented "boat people" from landing in Australia; to the present witch-hunt for the "associates of Osama bin Laden" over the Sept. 11 attacks, who are alleged to be running all over Australia.
The Emergency Laws
In rough chronological order, the following are some of the major pieces of police-state legislation which have already been enacted. The list represents a preliminary review, and is therefore not necessarily all-inclusive. Some of the worst of these were passed in the state parliament of Victoria, whose capital, Melbourne, is the home base of both Australia's old, Anglophile financial and corporate elite, as well that of LaRouche's associates in the Citizens Electoral Council (CEC), and LaRouche's name has frequently been raised by those pushing the new laws. Most of these laws were passed with bipartisan support from the country's two major parties, the Liberal/National party Coalition, and the Australian Labor Party (ALP).
Draconian federal gun control legislation: This was enacted in the wake of the April 28, 1996 mass slaughter of 35 people at Port Arthur, Tasmania by one Martin Bryant. Bryant was a known security threat, who had been under the care of brainwashing experts from British intelligence's Tavistock Institute from his early youth, and who had either killed, or had threatened to kill, or was suspected of having killed several people before he was unleashed at Port Arthur. On May 16, 1997, EIR released an investigative dossier proving the Tavistock control over Bryant through a legendary Tavistock brainwasher, Dr. Eric Cunningham-Dax, building on earlier investigations circulated throughout Australia in 75,000 copies of the CEC's newspaper, the New Citizen. These exposés hit a raw nerve in Australia's establishment. Then-Deputy Prime Minister Tim Fischer charged LaRouche, whose CEC associates had established a huge presence in rural Australia since 1992, with having personally organized the mass rallies of 150,000 people which were called in outrage at the government's gun-control legislation, which had apparently already been prepared and was just sitting in the hopper, ready to go. The laws would have had no hope of passing without Bryant's bloody mayhem, but were rammed through federal parliament within days of the Port Arthur massacre, to an accompanying threat by Fischer, "There is no place in Australia for the kinds of ideas associated with LaRouche."
Y2K emergency laws: Laws were passed in the state parliament of Victoria in late 1999 to deal with potential "Y2K chaos." The laws were the most sweeping in Australian history, allowing authorities to ration food; to "make a declaration that any service is an essential service" (i.e., water, transport, electricity, health care, and so on) for purposes of the law; to requisition any citizen or any machinery for an indefinite period of time; to impose fines of up to $1 million or imprisonment for three years for anyone not complying with an officer under the law; to give blanket immunity to any official acting under the law, and so on. In short, said the leader of the opposition Liberal Party, Dr. Denis Napthine (whose party wholeheartedly supported the bill), "Clause 5 proposes giving enormous power to the minister, who will be able to do virtually anything. It provides powers that could put the situation on a war footing." Even ALP Minister for Transport Peter Batchelor, when introducing the legislation, admitted that "the powers given to the minister are so broad as to be almost draconian." All of this draconian power was to deal with a crisis which never existed in the first place: as EIR has documented, the "Y2K crisis" was a hoax, concocted in order to create the "New Economy" speculative bubble, to keep the world's financial system afloat for a few more years.
Although the law had a sunset clause which terminated it as of June 2001, a precedent has been established, in particular to deal with "interruptions of essential services," such as electricity; it also added new provisions on such "continuity of services" to the Emergency Management Act 1986, which did not sunset. Such "interruptions of service" have already started to happen, largely caused by the privatization and looting of Victoria's once-proud, state-owned infrastructure system.
Shoot-to-kill legislation: The Defense Legislation Amendment (Aid to Civilian Authorities) Act 2000 was passed in early September 2000. It allows Australian defense forces to enter buildings, cordon off areas, erect barricades, and stop traffic to search and seize people and property, and to use "lethal force" if "domestic violence" flared, or if the "Commonwealth's interests" were threatened.
The bill represents a radical break with all previous Australian legislative history. As Sen. Vicki Bourne of the Australian Democrats party said in the debate shortly before the bill passed, "Let's get clear what we have here. If this bill is passed it will mean Australian troops can be directed, as a lawful order, to shoot dead other Australians under some circumstances." The Coalition/ALP gang rammed the bill through, refusing to even allow a one-line amendment which forbid the army to shoot "people engaged in peaceful protest or civil obedience."
Under the Army's 1964 manual, "Aid To The Civil Power," which has been updated over the years, the following instructions appear under the section, "Prevention of Crime": "The whole of the front section [of the demonstrators] is to be brought into the aim of the platoon. One rifleman by number, and not by name, is to be ordered to fire one round at a selected ringleader. He should aim low and fire for effect, with the object of disabling the ringleader. If this does not have the desired effect, another rifleman is to be ordered to fire one round at another ringleader. Whilst it will be normal for one round to be fired at a time, circumstances may be such that this is insufficient. If he considered it necessary, the commander may increase the rate of fire."
According to Defense Minister John Moore, the impetus for the act "comes from the Hope Commission of 1979," set up to review the 1978 bombing of the Hilton Hotel in Sydney—whose recommendations had been ignored by numerous federal governments over the 21 intervening years! In addition, the Australian Army is being prepared for urban, rather than jungle or other types of warfare more common outside Australia. This was the focus of a presentation by Col. Michael Goodyer, director of future warfare at Australian Defense Headquarters at the Land Warfare Conference in Melbourne in October 2000. "It is inevitable that the Western democracies will be called on to deal with increasing numbers of urban operations," he said.
Racial vilification legislation: The Racial and Religious Tolerance Act was passed by the parliament of Victoria on June 14, 2001, after fierce, unprecedented parliamentary debate. It decrees that no person is 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, politically correct clause which may be interpreted as desired, but which carries fines up to $30,000, six month prison sentences, and authorizes police to use search warrants (heretofore issued in Australia only in the event of serious crimes), and break down doors to seize "evidence." The major intent of the laws, according to their chief sponsor, the Anti-Defamation Commission of B'nai B'rith, is to shut down the presence of Lyndon LaRouche on the Australian continent. In a June 19, 2001 statement, "Australia and Hitler's Dictatorship" (EIR, June 29, 2001) LaRouche charged that the legislation was "1) an intent to violate human rights; and 2) legislation in the same character of law as the February 1933 decrees which first established the Nazi government as a dictatorship."
"Border protection": For about a week in late August and early September of this year, Australia was consumed with a drama on the high seas, as the Coalition government of PM John Howard refused to allow a Norwegian-registered ship, the Tampa, which contained over 400 mostly Afghan asylum seekers, to make the nearest landfall, the Australian territory of Christmas Island. The government sent its elite Special Air Services (SAS) units to board the ship, and ultimately forced it to unload its passengers on the tiny Pacific island of Nauru. In the wake of this event, which Australia's Murdoch-controlled media played up relentlessly, Howard introduced the Border Protection Bill 2001. Ostensibly designed to deal with the Tampa crisis, the bill allowed Australian customs, police, security or defense forces officials to turn back a ship from Australian territorial waters into international waters, and for the Australian military to use "reasonable force" to accomplish those ends. But, that was not all. As noted in a review of the proposed law in the Australian Financial Review of Aug. 31, "The special powers would not be open to challenge or review by the judiciary or by Parliament. The bill was intended to over-ride all other laws, both international laws covering seafaring and Australia's criminal and civil law." (emphasis added) The Coalition's attempt to ram the bill through in an emergency late-night sitting was a little too blatant for even the normally compliant ALP, whose leader Kim Beazley instructed the ALP to reject it, because it involved "the suspension of all Australian law."
However, a new, mildly-watered down form of the bill, but without the provision to override all other laws, was passed on Sept. 26, with the full support of Beazley and his ALP. Senator Natasha Stott Despoja, the leader of the Democrats, denounced the "draconian legislation...the sort of law you might expect in the days of Stalinist Russia."
Meanwhile, even before the new legislation was passed, Howard unleashed an anti-people-smuggling operation using "the full force of the RAN [Royal Australian Navy] and the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] in an exercise unprecedented in peacetime," as the Sunday Herald Sun of Sept. 2 observed. What was also remarkable about the Tampa affair, was the also-unprecedented (in peacetime) news blackout the government imposed, on the pretext that "It was an SAS operation, was the excuse we constantly heard," as one journalist put it. That excuse was absurd, particularly when compared to how the SAS was constantly in the spotlight in the Australian defense forces' East Timor operation in 1999, a far more dangerous deployment than dealing with a bunch of unarmed refugees.
Given the extraordinary disparity between East Timor and the Tampa affair, and that the Tampa incident suddenly catapulted Howard and his Coalition into leadership in the polls for a Nov. 10 national election, where the Coalition had been badly trailing the ALP for months, one is forced to ask if the whole business were a "set-up," as well as an excuse to attempt to ram through new, draconian "national security" laws.
And, even before the Tampa affair unfolded, an unprecedented peacetime censorship over all defense force-related news was established by Defense Minister Allan Hawke and the Chief of the Defense Force, Admiral Chris Barrie. In an eight-page Defense instruction dated August 8, Hawke and Barrie mandated that all defense-related news, including that provided to government ministers or parliamentary secretaries, must be cleared by the Defense Public Affairs and Corporate Communications (PACC) unit of the Defense force. The memo gave the PACC far-ranging censorship control, including over academic conferences, scholarly articles, etc. The Australian major media has been filled with outraged articles against this "draconian peacetime censorship."
Still more police powers
The above is the most egregious legislation, but it is not all. The Newspeak-titled "Peaceful Assemblies Bill" passed in Victoria this year greatly broadens police powers to break up any gathering (including eliminating the earlier requirement that a magistrate "read the Riot Act," before police may do so); the proposed federal Intelligence Services Bill will grant intelligence agents immunity from prosecution if they break the law "in the course of their duties," with additional legislation expected imminently to "provide them [intelligence services] with the opportunity of doing a number of things that they felt unsure of in the past," in the words of Beazley deputy Laurie Brereton; and the Measures to Combat Serious and Organized Crime Bill will extend "controlled operations" (i.e. "stings" and entrapment) to all Commonwealth offences, not just drugs, permit officers to manufacture fake documents and to assume false identities, and increase the use of wiretaps, even where a "suspect" is not known by name.
In addition, almost every major public event in the past couple of years has been used to expand police-state powers, such as the 2000 Sydney Olympics, which established the National Anti-Terrorist Plan for the threat of bin Laden's men launching attacks on the Olympics, or the cancelled Commonwealth Heads of Government (CHOGM) meeting originally scheduled for Brisbane in early October, which saw "an unprecedented widening of special police powers" according to the Courier Mail of Aug 21, 2001. Additionally, to deal with a possible outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, Australian authorities "plan to launch a massive military-style operation to test the adequacy of emergency quarantine measures," in 2002, according to Federal Agriculture Minister Warren Truss on Aug. 13. The exercise will be modeled on the fiasco in Britain, where the military slaughtered millions of animals while militarizing the countryside, instead of running a mass vaccination campaign.
In the wake of the covert operation which hit New York and Washington on Sept. 11, all of this existing legislation will be ratcheted up a few notches. Already, Nacht und Nebel ("night and fog") raids by the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIO—Australia's FBI) are being carried out against Australia's large Islamic population. PM Howard has additionally announced plans to place armed security guards on Australian international and domestic carriers; to double Australian Defense Force special forces capacity; to reinstate the Olympics "special response team" and the National Anti-Terror Plan; to increase ASIO powers still further; and to beef up asset-freezing laws. Further legislation is expected after Australia's Nov. 10 national election, and ALP leader Kim Beazley has proposed setting up a Home Ministry, based on the British Home Office, the same Home Office which has overseen Britain's role as the safehouse for international terrorism, as documented in EIR's new special report, "How to Defeat Global Irregular Warfare," by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
