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Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

Media Release Thursday, 25 February 2016

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
 

Parasites, Inc.: Infrastructure Australia plans privatisation spree

Infrastructure Australia’s (IA) February report, Australian Infrastructure Plan: Priorities and reforms for our nation’s future is in reality opposed to nation-building infrastructure; it’s a call for a Mussolini-style corporatist, i.e. fascist model of user-pays infrastructure where the public will be bled dry to feed the bloodsucking bankers of the City of London and Wall Street.

Given its corporatist agenda, it is fitting that former Macquarie Bank directors Michael Carapiet and Gerard Blood sit on IA’s board: Macquarie Bank gained notoriety as “the millionaire factory” for fleecing the public by taking over infrastructure once run by the government for the common good. It is therefore no surprise that the IA report calls on government to privatise every last bit of infrastructure that can provide an income stream for the financial oligarchy. It even calls for the government to enforce a captive market for their profits, through “direct user charging for all vehicles within 10 years” and the “implementation of supporting technologies” to achieve this.

Major infrastructure requires enormous quantities of steel and concrete and a lot of energy, which will naturally increase carbon dioxide emissions. But the IA report calls to reduce emissions: “Governments should set long-term reduction targets and maintain consistent regulatory frameworks to encourage industries to innovate and plan for a reduction in emissions.” Carapiet, who until recently was a board member of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, has a record of promoting the “green” alternatives associated with the carbon accounting embraced by investment bankers (see The Great American Bubble Machine on the Goldman Sachs carbon trading scam).

Continuing with the “green” theme, the report states we “should also encourage growth in renewable energy. Technologies such as smart meters [which IA calls to introduce nationwide] and battery storage systems will alter patterns of energy supply.” Rather than build sufficient electricity generation capacity to cater for peak demand, IA calls to introduce “strong price signals to shift consumption patterns” , i.e. expose consumers to energy market speculation that can drive wholesale electricity prices from $30/MWh to $12,500/MWh; and, of course, electricity “generation, network and retail businesses still in public ownership should be transferred to private ownership as soon as practicable.”

IA board member Peter Cornish held the post of Commissioner of the National Water Commission in 2005-08. This is the commission that audited the disastrous Murray-Darling Basin Plan—a plan that has crushed agriculture, diverting water from productive farms into swamps, and out to sea, as so-called “environmental flows”. The IA report calls for a “new national body and water reform plan” to “energise governments and communities to complete water reforms, building on the success of the National Water Initiative.” This is the National Water Initiative behind the Basin Plan; somehow, destroying agriculture and rural communities is judged to be a success.

The IA plan outlines a 15-year reform agenda, by which time IA estimates Australia’s population will be over 30 million, up from the current 24 million. The authors provide no major infrastructure plans to support this growing population. Their priority list of infrastructure mostly addresses transport and urban congestion; they recommend “greater cost recovery from public transport passengers”. They don’t have any high-speed rail proposals other than preserving a Brisbane-Sydney-Melbourne corridor of land for some project to be considered in the distant future. There is no reference to nuclear power in the report. There are no plans to build water diversion schemes such as the Bradfield or Clarence River Schemes. In fact, they have no plans for major dams at all: “In the water sector, supply may be readily expanded without constructing new dams” by means such as “smarter use of stormwater flows”.

IA claims that “funding for public infrastructure is available from only two sources: taxpayers and users.” This is a lie. New infrastructure should be funded with new credit from a government-owned national bank (see “People’s Quantitative Easing”: The principles behind it). A growing economy needs a growing monetary supply and it is government’s responsibility to ensure that there is an increase of money in circulation as production and population increases, along with the additional infrastructure that supports this growth.

Click here for a free copy of the CEC’s vision for Australia’s future economic development, The Infrastructure Road to Recovery, as well as a copy of the latest Australian Alert Service magazine, which exposes the source of the corporatist (fascist) privatisation agenda, the Mont Pelerin Society.

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