Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

Media Release Thursday, 16 January 2014

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

Sir Rod Eddington, a liar and a thief

Infrastructure Australia chairman Sir Rod Eddington is lying through his teeth about how privatisation impacts ordinary people, because he is a leading player in the plot to steal even more public assets off the Australian people.

Jaws dropped all over the state of Victoria on 8 January when Eddington spruiked privatisation to The Australian, saying with a straight face, “The private sector brings a focus on efficiency and productivity, which means the assets are better utilised. Very few people would look back on (former premier) Jeff Kennett’s decision to privatise the electricity assets, for instance, and think that was a bad thing.

“There is nothing to suggest electricity is more expensive in Victoria.” [Emphasis added.]

Eddington is a product of the Rio Tinto “kindergarten”. Rio Tinto is owned by the Queen of England, and is the jewel in the Crown’s raw materials cartel. It is a corporate spawning ground for apparatchiks who go further afield into business and politics, to enforce the British economic policies of radical free trade, financial deregulation and national asset-stripping, aka privatisation. These policies are the way the City of London-based financial oligarchy, including the Crown, extracts loot from the globalised economy, to bolster its power and wealth.

Eddington is also a director of the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS), one of the Australian fronts of the British Crown’s economic warfare unit called the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS), which was formed post-war from among former Nazis and right-wing economists, with funding from the British Crown, to spread Mussolini-style fascist economics repackaged as economic “liberalism”.

It was the Victorian-based sister think tanks of the CIS, the Institute of Public Affairs and the Tasman Institute, which co-wrote the economic blueprint Jeff Kennett followed when he conducted his intensive fire-sale of Victoria’s public assets; the blueprint was called Project Victoria. Kennett sold $30 billion worth of mainly electricity assets in three years. He used the excuse of reducing public debt, but all the sales achieved was the transfer of the public debt onto the various consortia which borrowed heavily to buy up the assets.

From then on, Victoria’s electricity prices had to not just cover production costs, but to also service the massive debts of the private companies, and return a profit. Despite the incredibly cheap and plentiful brown coal reserves that Victoria’s massive LaTrobe Valley power stations use to generate electricity, Victoria now has the third highest electricity prices in Australia, and among the highest in the world. [Click here for a comparison.] The private Victorian power companies are also the most aggressive in demanding so-called smart meters, which allow them to charge households sky-high spot prices for electricity.

When asked about Eddington’s statement that electricity is not more expensive in Victoria, on the weekly TV show The CEC Report on 10 January, Citizens Electoral Council leader Craig Isherwood quipped, “His wife must pay the bills.”

Isherwood said later, “Eddington is lying through his teeth, because he and his fellow corporate privateers are desperate to get their mitts on all the public assets they can, to extract as much wealth as possible for their City of London masters.

“Australians hate privatisation, for good reason. We’ve heard all of the arguments before, and they are all lies. The CEC is fighting to expose and stop this latest plan to steal our public assets. Join the fight!”

Click here for a free literature package, exposing the Mont Pelerin Society’s role in the privatisation policies that have stolen the Australian public’s assets.

Click here to join the CEC as a member.

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