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Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

Media Release  6th of September 2012

Craig Isherwood‚ National Secretary
PO Box 376‚ COBURG‚ VIC 3058
Phone: 1800 636 432
Email: cec@cecaust.com.au
Website: http://cec.cecaust.com.au
 

Isherwood: Shrinking billionaires are the canaries in the mine

Australia’s incredible shrinking mining billionaires are a harbinger of the economic catastrophe Australia faces due to our economy’s total dependence on resource exports, warned Citizens Electoral Council leader Craig Isherwood today.

“Our economy is a house built on sand,” Isherwood declared. “Australia will cease to function unless we return the economy to a strong foundation of major public investment in great infrastructure developments, and domestic manufacturing of capital and consumer goods for domestic consumption.

“We need new Snowy Mountains-style projects, and new factories to manufacture the equipment to build them,” he said.

Isherwood emphasised that the billions of dollars in wealth which the Australian Financial Review estimated the mining billionaires lost in the past four months—Gina Rinehart $9.5 billion, Twiggy Forrest $2.2 billion, Ivan Glasenberg $1.3 billion, Kerry Stokes $493 million, and Nathan Tinkler $400 million—was never real in the first place.

“Their wealth was a myth, just as the entire so-called ‘boom’ was a myth,” he said. “It was always dependent upon the impossible fantasy that China would continue buying our resources at inflated prices. Of course, Rio Tinto and BHP made a killing—in one decade Rio Tinto extracted $74 billion in profits, and BHP-Billiton $103 billion—from operations such as Rio’s Hammersley mine, where iron ore dug out for $40 per tonne was sold to Chinese steel mills for $140-$180 per tonne.

“But now iron ore is $90 per tonne, and falling back to reality. China used our resources to fuel its export boom to consumers in the US and Europe, but those economies are now bankrupt, because when they were buying Chinese goods, it was all on debt! (For example, between 2001 and 2005 Americans borrowed more than $5 trillion against the equity in their overvalued homes to pay for consumer spending. Mining profits and government revenues in Australia were being fattened, via China, by debt-binging in the sub-prime bubble in America!) After the GFC erupted in 2008, China only kept itself—and us—going by launching a trillion dollar infrastructure program in 2009. Now, however, Chinese factories are stockpiling manufactured goods, and Chinese ports are stockpiling our resources.”

Isherwood said Australia would only survive if it returned to developing the continent with grand infrastructure projects, and manufacturing for domestic household and industry needs.

“There are many, many more jobs in manufacturing for ourselves, than in exporting raw materials,” he declared. “There are more jobs in developing Australia through great water projects, high-speed rail networks, and a nuclear power grid than there are people in Australia to fill them.

“Those kinds of jobs don’t depend upon artificially-inflated foreign markets; they meet our needs as a growing nation. The CEC mapped out our vision for Australia’s future in our landmark New Citizen special report, The Infrastructure Road to Recovery, prepared in close collaboration with the great engineering visionary, the late Emeritus Professor Lance Endersbee, which details 18 major water projects, national railway projects, development ideas for high-speed shipping, and a plan to capitalise on our enormous national reserves of uranium and thorium by developing our own domestic nuclear power industry, all of which will support population growth that should be aimed at 50 million people by 2050.”

Isherwood concluded, “Australia will only develop this way, if we ditch free trade and every other globalist policy started under Hawke and Keating and continued by their successors that destroyed our industrial capacity and turned us into a quarry. The CEC is leading this fight, and recently escalated by issuing our national resolution on ‘The future of Australia: Develop or Die’. To fight for our national survival, join the CEC.

Click here for a free copy of the CEC’s blueprint for economic development, The Infrastructure Road to Recovery.

If you have already received a free offer, click here to purchase a copy ($10).

Click here to purchase Professor Lance Endersbee’s 263-page, colour-illustrated hardcover book, A Voyage of Discovery, featuring a scientific analysis of water resources, a new understanding of petroleum resources, and a history of scientific ideas, $30 plus p/h.

Click here to join the CEC as a member.

Click here to refer others to receive regular email updates from the Citizens Electoral Council of Australia.



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