Point number six calls for:
An immediate moratorium on foreclosures of family farms, given the cartel-rigged low prices for farm products and the lack of access to credit at reasonable rates.
Since the mid-1950s, the number of family farms in Australia has collapsed from more than 300,000, to less than 100,000. A fraction of this decline is due to increased efficiency, but most of it can be attributed to high interest rates and low prices—both of which are not the workings of the so-called "free market", as is claimed, but of the usurious credit policies of the banking system, and the stacked prices set by private food cartels, whose size allows them to manipulate the so-called free market at will. Dwayne Andreas, the head of Archer Daniels Midlands, the 16th largest food company in the world, boasted in August 1995, "There isn't one grain of anything in the world that is sold on a free market. Not one! The only place you see a free market is the speeches of politicians." Since food is a strategic resource, the family farmer must be protected, the first step of which is halting the exodus off the land. Prime Minister John Howard's talk about "regional renewal", is a fraud, so long as he is not willing to take this essential measure.
Again, in his Fremantle speech, John Curtin said:
"The difficulties confronting small woolgrowers and other primary producers in the marketing of their products, because of lack of finance, give the Labor Party concern; and with a view to assisting them the general policy of the re-organised Commonwealth Bank to be laid down by Labor legislation in the next Parliament, will provide for advances to primary producers against their products at low rates of interest, to prevent exploitation of their financial position by private financial interests.
