Friday 18th July 1997
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One of the board members of the Reserve Bank is the managing director of Western Mining Corporation (WMC) - one of Australia's largest mining houses. Hugh Morgan has now been embroiled in a controversy because his company sold off a massive amount of gold just before the Reserve Bank decided to sell off two-thirds of Australia's gold holdings. The sale by the Reserve Bank has caused the gold price and effected mining shares to plummet.
Yesterday Morgan said, "I have never used any information which I obtained in my capacity as a Reserve Bank board member to benefit WMC, or passed on such information to any officer of the corporation or member of my staff, or indeed anyone.
"Nor have I used this information to encourage or discourage executives of WMC To do anything that they were not already going to do."
Morgan said that to absent himself from board meeting at WMC would have aroused suspicions - just as if he had done the same at the Reserve Bank.
"I believe that I have correctly taken the view that to excuse myself from normal duties within the company, would have alerted people to the fact that there was something happening."
Tonight the left wing extremists will line up against the guests to a meeting of One Nation at Geelong. I have bad feelings about this meeting and think that is about time that groups like Militant who seem to be at the centre of the growing unrest should be banned from them.
Supermodel and Australian Elle MacPherson has driven 26 year old Michael Mishler to the point of insanity it was claimed in a Los Angeles court yesterday.
Mischler is accused of breaking into the supermodel's Hollywood home and stealing nude photographs of Elle and putting them, like the photo shown here, on the Internet if she did not pay him US$60,000.
Mischler claims that Elle had a relationship with him but Elle denies ever meeting the man and has served him with a defamation writ over his allegations.
The nude photos that Mischler allegedly stole were to be used in a book that Elle was compiling.
An Australian citizen, Cambodian Foreign Minister Ung Huot, has been nominated to replace Prince Norodom Ranariddh who is now in exile from Cambodia after last week's coup.
He was chosen on Wednesday by members of the royalist Funcinpec Party - a move that has not enamoured the US following the recent developments in that country. US State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns said, "We are very concerned about the decision this morning to make the Cambodian foreign minister co-prime minister with Hun Sen".
Pauline Hanson jump station.
Headlines in 'The Australian' today (17 July) announce that the Prime Minister is considering a 'radical new plan' to lower the unemployed: A Free Trade Zone in Newcastle to replace the closed BHP plant.
There is nothing new or radical about Free Trade Zones. Australia HAD a free trade zone in Darwin in the early 1980s and it appears not to have worked. It will be interesting to see if the multinational-owned media remember that.
The real purpose of the zones is well known from the experience in dozens of other countries: to drive down wage rates from within the host country. The idea is that Australian taxpayers will build these zones and all the factories and infrastructure, then the multinationals, with zero investment and zero commitment will come in, occupy them, and employ Australians at Third World wage rates. Because there is no investment involved the transnationals can relocate overnight, which enables them to bargain down the wage rates in the host country. It is being done throughout the Third World right now!
Free Trade Zones are little more than slave labour camps. Howard is obviously no longer running this country, but is a local agent for powerful global money interests. The closing of BHP Newcastle and the erection of a slave labour camp in its place has to be exposed for what it is: the sellout of a country. All Australians should march on Canberra and turf this little weasel out!
Graham Strachan.
Have a great day.
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