Australian National


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Monday 21st September 1998

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Today's Headlines
an Aussie's viewpoint on Australia's first daily Internet newspaper.
Since October 1995

Between the One Nation lines

Today's Courier Mail carries an article headed "Soorley calls for 40 Million population."

But of more interest to me is the claim by The Courier Mail that "More than 300 people attended the forum..." The image on the right was taken during the debate and it is quite clear that the auditorium in which the debate was held is practically empty.

Yesterday we put up our coverage of the event... our title says it all: "The great immigration debate, where the Politically Correct gather".

The Fairfax threat:

On advice received by me I am putting up scanned images of the fax sent to me by Fairfax lawyers last Thursday night.

In the fax Fairfax's lawyers accuse me of breach of copyright.

I have included my response to their fax.

Sydney Morning Herald's "Good Weekend magazine" quotes on Jeff Knuth

The article about One Nation in "The Good Weekend" continues to have repercussions with Queensland One Nation MP Jeff Knuth saying that he is happy to explain to One Nation leader Pauline Hanson why "he wanted Aborigines to return to working without pay".

Miss Hanson labelled the comments as stupid after reading them.

The report quoted Mr Knuth as saying Aborigines would be happier working for rations under a pastoralist and returning to a traditional way of life. Yesterday Mr Knuth denied he said anything wrong and said the comments were taken out of context.

"Why don't they just print the truth?" he said. "You know, I believe the truth will set you free.

"You should should be able to print the truth and write the truth and interview the truth, and if we all just said the truth in this country I think a lot of confusion that's going on at the moment between indigenous and white Australians would be solved."

Prime Minister John Howard launches Liberal campaign

An invitation only audience full of career politicians heard John Howard deliver his vision for Australia's future yesterday.

The large crowd heard that the Liberal party were depending entirely on their tax package to deliver them government.

Attached to the 10% GST being proposed by the Coalition was a grab bag full of promises aimed at attracting the forgotten children - the rural voters - who have now flocked around One Nation.

The main points of Howard's promises were:

Packer's great tax dodge

When I hear about Packer and tax I think of that old song "Wouldn't it be luverly...." It takes buckets of money to take on the Australian Tax Office and Australia's richest man, Mr Kerry Packer, has lots of that. In 1994 he was found to be shortchanging Australian taxes by Au$143 million - it is only today that the case will be heard in the Federal Court in Sydney with disputed tax assessments now approaching $190 million.

The case, which is expected to last a month, will provide the first inside view of the private business dealings of Mr Packer and his Consolidated Press Holdings group, controlled through a series of Packer family trusts in the Bahamas. (Nice little tax dodge in itself). Mr Packer's lawyers are appealing against 35 separate tax assessments on Cons Press companies and on Mr Packer himself over a six year period up until 1994, after a lengthy audit.

The largest of these relate to a series of complex transactions by Consolidated Press which Mr Packer's lawyers say the tax office disallowed. According to court filings, the revised assessments on Mr Packer's companies total $53.6 million in the 1991 financial year; a further $81.8 million for fiscal 1992; $28.9 million for 1993; and $23.3 million for 1994.

Consolidated Press has vehemently denied the tax office claims, saying that it has made no write-off of the assessment in the group accounts. A total of $187.6 million is under dispute, though the final figure after penalties may well be much higher.

The Consolidated Press filings say that an agreement has been reached with the tax office over how both sides will calculate interest payments on some matters. Now I wonder if the average Aussie would be given such discretion?

The largest matters relate to Swiss franc bonds taken out by Consolidated Press International Ltd in the Bahamas in 1984, and a recapitalisation by the Consolidated Press companies after Mr Packer joined Sir James Goldsmith's unsuccessful bid for BAT Industries Plc in 1989.

The bid required Consolidated Press to set up a substantial holding company in Britain through a series of preference share issues totalling $430 million. The tax office disallowed interest payment by Consolidated Press companies in Australia to the new British holding company totalling $81 million.

After tax changes in Britain, the British company was liquidated. The tax office challenged a $US100 million dividend which was paid to a new holding company set up in the Bahamas and a loan or distribution of $US33.3 million made to the new Bahamas company.

Mr Packer is challenging amounts of $13,627 and $8,933 claimed against his personal income tax assessments.

Howard's rural vote catcher.

Here is an extract from the Australian Financial review article:

The Howard Government announced yesterday a $70 million plan to establish up to 500 rural banking transaction centres.

Labor steps up fight on the Internet

Here is an extract from the Australian Financial review article:

Pauline Hanson's One Nation is claiming 30,000 hits each day after a peak of more than 60,000 daily hits on the launch of its tax policy, while Labor said on Friday that it had been up around and over 70,000 hits per day.

....

More important than the statistics, however, may be the power to appeal to voters directly through a computer screen.

"We believe we are winning lots of votes, mainly because people can get the truth, unedited by the mainstream media here," said Ms Hanson's webmaster, Mr Scott Balson.

I challenge Labor to post up its daily hits - talk means nothing. Its only facts that count. We put up One Nation's hits daily- as extracted from our statistics. Figures of over 38,500 hits per day which are ratified - unlike the Labor party.

The Way out of the meltdown

See also the Global Conference

So now President Clinton and hedge-fund titan George Soros have weighed in on the global meltdown of emerging economics. The president addressed the venerable Council of Foreign Relations in New York, Mr. Soros testified before Congress in Washington. Welcome to fantasyland, or what now passes for the new world order global economy.

Mr. Clinton's diagnosis actually had the story mostly right. He asserted, "For most of the last 30 years the U.S. and the rest of the world has been preoccupied by inflation, .., But clearly the balance of risks has now shifted. Therefore, I believe the industrial world's chief priority today plainly is to spur growth."

Growth in this case does not mean supply-side marginal tax-rate reduction, which is exactly what the United States, Europe, Canada, Latin America, Japan and the Asian tigers could use. Instead, it means that Alan Greenspan may be ready to lower the Fed's overnight federal funds rate (maybe the discount rate, too) to unlock the provision of newly created dollars. Japan has already begun easing, and Europe is expected to follow suit. This would be a perfect match with tax cuts, but it's a positive stand-alone measure as well.

Mr. Clinton also acknowledged that precipitous currency drops are a bad idea. This is more than we've gotten out of Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin and his deputy Lawrence Summers, who, along with IMF head Michel Camdessus and his deputy Stanley Fischer, were the architects of the emerging world currency implosion. (While on the topic of IMF personnel, how about firing these two and replacing them with Dominic Cavallo and Pedro Aspe?) Mr. Clinton also stated: "If a nation chooses to print money indiscriminately ... then investors, foreign and domestic, sooner or later will withdraw their investments, with consequences both swift and severe."

That "swift and severe" line is pretty good. It's Mr. Clinton at his New Democrat best, a real man of the market. He is admitting that international credit markets provide the transmission mechanism for global capital flows in search of the highest rate of return. But government policies that devalue local currencies, generate inflation, raise tax rates, instill command and control regulations or impose protectionist trade practices will block capital returns and send international investors, and their money, quickly toward the exit doors.

Think of the world credit market as both a kind uncle and a rapacious creditor. Free market policies that permit high capital returns pull in smart money and smart people. Beneficiary nations prosper. But anti-market policies that inhibit capital returns repel liquidity flows and sink recalcitrant nations. Do it right, and we'll flock to your shores. Do it wrong, and we'll rip your face off. As Friedrich Hayek wrote, the market is a discovery process. Capitalism is about success and failure. Mn Soros, however, took a position much to the left of Mr. Clinton. He argued that markets, not government policies, are the problem. "There is an urgent need to recognize that financial markets, far from trending towards equilibrium, are inherently unstable " This from a guy who made his fortune in financial markets, arbitraging currencies, stocks, bonds and their underlying derivatives across national boundaries.

Indeed, the advent of nanosecond information-age financial markets provided Mr. Soros the opportunity to become the biggest foreign currency bounty hunter in the global Dodge City environment that passes for modern currency exchanges, the least regulated area of world finance. Moving his hedge fund money at the speed of light, Mr. Soros is always a step ahead of the local sheriffs, be they central bankers, finance ministers or bank supervisors.

Talk about rapacious creditors. A few years back, he made a couple of billion dollars betting against the English pound, thereby bringing down the long reign of Margaret Thatcher, and the British economy, in the process. Just recently, however, he lost of couple of billion betting on Boris Yeltsin. Apparently, Mr. Soros does not agree with Mr. Hayek that free markets allow for success and failure.

So he wants to establish yet another IMF, called an International Credit Insurance Corporation, which will somehow "maintain stability in financial markets." Stability? Sounds a lot like a potential guarantee for Mr. Soros' investments. Call it a safety net for billionaires. This way there'll be no risk of losing money when heads of state like Mr. Yeltsin or Indonesia's Suharto break their currency promises and devalue. Now Mr. Soros can really play with other people's money. Just set up a worldwide government backed and taxpayer-funded insurance firm to protect currency traders from risk. And then shield the afore-mentioned rogues gallery of global leaders from the discipline of international credit marts.

But there's one policy agenda item where Mr. Soros and Mr. Clinton fully agree: Throw more money at the world currency crisis. Create a massive new Great Society government spending plan, a global antipoverty welfare program, sort of an aid to countries with dependent finance ministers and central bankers.

First, refinance the IMF with a new congressional tranche of $18 billion, and bolster this with a Group of Seven (a group of leading industrial nations, including the United States) release of an additional $15 billion in the General Arrangements to Borrow against IMF reserves to help Latin America. Never mind that the IMF has already spent $141 billion in bailouts for Thailand, South Korea, Indonesia and Russia, with virtually nothing positive to show from it.

Mother Russia just blew out $9 billion in three weeks, and all we got for that was a massive ruble devaluation that cut into world stock markets like a hot knife through butter. And of course a new Russian government led by former communist spy master Yevgeny Primakov, ex-Gosplan director of Soviet central planning Yuri Maslyukov and the old head of central bank pump-priming Viktor Gerashchenko. All the free-market reformers are gone. Then Mr. Clinton wants to expand his global welfare safety net vision by doubling World Bank financial support for Asia and mandating a big increase in U.S. government subsidized Ex-Im Bank lending. The only Great Society outlet not proposed was a new international division for the Department of Health and Human Services, presumably because Secretary Donna Shalala is in the presidential woodshed for having questioned Mr. Clinton's morality at a recent Cabinet meeting. Then again, we could always turn to the United Nations for a stepup in world social spending.

Instead of promoting worldwide government spending programs that merely enable delinquent nations to continue their wrongheaded policies, the president should begin with a worldwide currency stabilization plan. Without this, no progress will be made. With great clarity we have again learned over the past year that emerging nations must not devalue. Their currencies don't float, they sink. And sinking currencies, the enemy of wealth creation and growth, are the root of today's problems. So Mr, Clinton's call for a world financial conference is a hopeful sign. "Today, I have asked Secretary Rubin and Federal Reserve Board Chairman [Alan] Greenspan to convene a major meeting .. to recommend ways to adopt the international financial architecture to the 21st century." This is good. It should have been done eight years ago when the Cold War ended. Just as the Bretton Woods conference following World War II set up a gold-backed, dollar-based currency and free-trade system for post-war recovery, so must we create a modernized version today.

Europe has already set up a successful currency union, really a regional currency board, based on a common Euro that is to be linked to the dollar at a one-to-one exchange rate beginning Jan. 1. Their stock markets are outperforming ours, and their economies are recovering.

A version of the Euro model can be used in Latin America and the Pacific rim. Set up cooperative currency unions for each region. Member nations would agree to hold money creation to a fixed percentage backing of foreign reserves and gold, essentially a dollar cover for money-supply growth. Individual currencies would be fully convertible to the dollar at a fixed exchange rate. The Latin area would effectively become the 13th Federal Reserve district, the Asian tigers the 14th. Alternatively, the Japanese yen could be the unit of account for Asia, though most of the tigers are already dollarized.

So let's hope Mr. Rubin and Mr. Greenspan follow through on world currency reform. This will provide the basis for recovery in the emerging nations. With King Dollar as the anchor, American-style economic freedom - including lower taxes, deregulation, price stability, free trade, property rights and the rule of law - will nurture wealth and prosperity worldwide. Right now, about two-thirds of the world's economies are expanding and one third are contracting. This is a decent record, better than some hysterical people believe, but we can do even better. Reject Great Society welfare and promote entrepreneurial freedom. That's the war, out.

By Lawrence Kudlow, chief economist at American Skandia Life Assurance Corp., a Connecticut-based life insurance and financial services company.

Making the news" -
an indepth exposé of media and political collusion at the highest possible levels in Australia.

email the editor

You say:

Birrell and the PC response

Oh dear. What are the cafe latte and chardonay sets going to do about Dr. Bob Birrell? His report, "Sydney's Ethnic Underclass", has documented the existence of what everybody but they knew all along - that there is a migrant underclass concentrated in certain Sydney suburbs, and that this has massive welfare and social implications.

Perhaps now the unspeakable has been spoken by an academic - as opposed to THAT woman from Queensland whose name never sullies the lips of the elites - it will become a respectable topic of debate. Or will Birrell be named by Racewatch? Isn't it exciting!

Our pc crowd are actually in a bit of a moral pickle now. Just as feminists have been shown to be without any moral or intellectual coherence in their defence of that sleaze Clinton, our elites will now be exposed as the total hypocrites they are if they do not turn upon Dr. Birrell.

Antonia Feitz

Stupidity, Misquoting and Vacuous Threats

Dear Sir,

The (by now) somewhat bemused Australian electorate has been treated over the weekend to something resembling the old 'three card trick'. The more perceptive will realise that they are being 'had', the rest will certainly suspect it!

First cab off the rank was Democrat 'leader' Smeg Lies, boldly proclaiming that her 'party' would "Stop One Nation" and "stop them getting the balance of power in the Senate". Is this their entire raison d'être? Have they no more substantial policy direction than this? "Stop One Nation"? Translation: deliberately frustrate and obstruct the hopes and support of the 25+% of the Australian people who put their trust in One Nation Party. Perhaps MS Lies should have a good, long think about how the representatives of her 'party' were received the other day at the Yass showgrounds, and start tailoring her rhetoric accordingly!

One Nation Party has so far released a detailed: taxation policy(which, despite the media smear campaign, is patently reasonable, logical and workable[certainly. more workable than that top-heavy, confused and unstable edifice, the GST, which the Laborals are trying to forcibly impose on a wary electorate]), an immigration policy, a Family Court policy, a small business policy and a firearms policy, amongst others. What have the Democrats released except hot air and empty diatribes, courtesy of MS Smeg Lies?

"One Nation MP says aboriginals should live on pastoralists' handouts, the same as 100 years ago!" (or words to that effect) screamed the Murdoch/Packer mouthpieces! Hmmm: with _their_ history of distortions, inaccuracies and downright lies, do they seriously expect anyone(_least of all_ Mrs Pauline Hanson) to take this crap seriously? I can just imagine what the much-missed Mr Stuart Littlemore would have made of all this! Perhaps the Queensland State Hansard, or a relevant audio recording, should be carefully perused to see if:[a]Mr Knuth actually made those comments and [b]in what context he made them?! These multinational/media stooges must be getting increasingly despe rate, and increasingly worried that the _real_ level of support for One Nation Party(about _triple_ their paltry estimates) will be revealed! Can't let that one out of the bag!

The piece de resistance has to be Johnny Coward's admonition that it would be 'unpatriotic' [treasonable?] to oppose the GST. Fair dinkum, Johnny! You can't think of any more convincing argument than a veiled threat? How about carefully going through the long list of countries that have adopted a GST/VAT over the years and listing the plusses and minuses for us? Or don't you think us 'peasants' can figure it out for ourselves?(that the _minuses_ mightily outweigh the pluses!) Perhaps you can please explain how not having a GST will affect social security payments/entitlements? Would we be correct in assuming that if your government ceased and desisted from distributing multi-billion dollar larges se to various _unworthy_ causes(exmpl: ATSIC bureaucrats, corrupt Third World governments and 'foreign aid') and/or started effectively taxing the _zillions_ of dollars that multinational corporations regularly siphon out of this country, then there wou ld be _PLENTY_ of money to fund all sorts of social security arrangements well into the 22nd century! And _this_ from a 'government' that came within a whisker of imposing an abomination called MAI on the people of this nation that would have seen its wealth and resources reduced to the sum total of _ZERO_.

In this particular case, patriotism is indeed the last refuge of scoundrels!

James Patrick Hughes

Commonwealth Electoral Reform

Hi its me again, after yesterday discussing the possibility of a One Nation Electoral Reform policy with Vanessa and Richard. Thats when I learnt that Canberra removed the option of "neither" optional preferences last July, apparently by regulation, a tried and proven way to by-pass democratic safe-guards.

The following notes are suggested as a basis from which to start reforming the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918, which made it an offence to publish "any matter or thing that is likely to mislead or deceive an elector in relation to the casting of a vote" during election campaigns. Because the two points raised below are together so fundamental, it is too early to raise other, more obvious reforms, except perhaps in the context of the Qld electoral laws and the Mansfield disputed returns case, in which optional preferences were 'stolen'.

Misleading and deceiving electors
Although the law (Sec 329 (1) of Electoral Offences Regulations) still stands unchanged, such offensive and anti-democratic behaviour has been legal since 1972. Thats when the High Court decision in Evans vs Crighton-Brown make it legal to mislead and deceive electors even as they enter polling booths. Instead of the new Labor government undoing the High Court's ratification of (Liberal Senator) Crighton-Brown's subversion of democracy, by simply changing the regulation, both Labor and the Coalition proceeded to exploit this perversion of justice to further subvert our democracy.

The results of this became clear to the ALP seven years later, when Rod Cameron of ANOP, in a candid, private research report for the ALP, said of the swinging voter: They believe politicians are irrelevant charlatans, and that the country survives despite them. (Paul Kelly, The Hawke Ascendancy, Angus & Robertson 1984, p.86) Despite this ominous evidence, which was presumably reflected in Liberal polling, the bi-partisan subversion of democracy not only continued, but became more outrageous. Misleading and deceiving electors has become year-round propaganda, particularly about 'mandates'.

By 1998 (and perhaps since the Constitutional Convention's anti-democratic outcome) the number of swinging voters was increasing dramatically, and now includes millions of 'protest' voters. Most significantly, the recent Queensland State election showed that swinging voters were refusing to give preferences to candidates of parties with proven and public history of betraying voters and nominating charlatans. This growing refusal to give preferences to professional political 'misleaders', who have made careers of misleading and deceiving electors, and their loyal supporters, is seen as such a threat that action was at last taken in July 1998.

Compulsory preferences to parties with proven and public history of betraying voters
Instead of undoing the High Court's 1972 ratification of subversion of democracy, (by removing the words "in relation to the casting of a vote'" from Sec 329 (1) of Electoral Offenses Regulations) the Howard government, through Senator Minchin as 'responsible' minister, used its 1996 'mandate' to extend . Among others, the most anti-democratic is one which makes it compulsory for voters to give preferences to candidates of parties with proven and public history of betraying voters. Until July 1998, it was possible and legal to prevent any number of such candidates getting preferences by default.

The new voting regulations, made by the coalition's champion of non-compulsory voting, mean such votes will be 'informal' in the October elections. Instead of exercising their informed democratic freedom to 'reject the rest', millions of voters, the 'battlers' Mr Howard conned in 1996, have been effectively disenfranchised.

Of course our political 'misleaders' will deny this, but their opinions are hardly relevant to the millions of betrayed voters. Most of these voters have been so loyal for so long that they are still struggling to accept the enormity of the the betrayal by Messrs Howard and Beazley, specially as the national media are censoring any such criticisms and intimidating people who try to speak out.

Regards, and hoping you'll respond quickly so One Nation can develop its Electoral Reform policy & strategy

Jim Stewart

Reply to Rowena Walker

Dear Rowena,

If you really believe that ancestry has a very strong correlation with social status and social need then you subscribe to Social Darwinism. It also logically follows from your assertion that no amount of social help would be effective, ever, since one cannot change ones ancestry. And so I suspect that you simply got carried away by your own rhetoric and did not notice the implications.

Warmest Regards
Jerzy Wawro

Assimilationist Aborigines

Like many critics of One Nation, Melanie Thewlis would do well to get her facts right. It is very fashionable these days to say: "We (white australians) destroyed the aborigines culture". It is a glib and simple-minded response to a complex matter.

For a start there is extensive documentation of Aborigines voluntarily leaving traditional life to enjoy the benefits of Western civilisation from the earliest days of white contact. To suggest otherwise is to deny them the humanity to make choices.

It is also offensive to suggest they should have remained in their traditional culture rather than join the dominant mainstream (no apology for the use of the word). Rousseau's idea of 'the noble savage' was always patronizing rubbish. The Maori writer Duff Cooper has given very short shrift to whites who romanticise indigenous dancing and basket-weaving. As far as he is concerned it is far better for Maori children to be accountants or teachers.

Ms Thewlis might find it surprising that Aboriginal activists in the thirties were strongly assimilationist. William Cooper, an initiator of the Aboriginal Day of Mourning in 1938 wrote: "Whether the white man likes it or not, every native is headed towards the culture of the white man".

And in a letter to the Prime Minister he wrote: "the British were once as we are now. The conquering power of Rome, whatever else it did, lifted the British to culture and civilisation. We want that same uplift. ... We want the right to full education, academic and cultural and industrial, and to be able to take our place beside the white race in full equality and responsibility. We ask the right to be fully British".

Admitedly this stuff does not get much of an airing these days. Nevertheless the facts are there, and are available to anybody with the honesty to do his or her own research. But I suppose it is easier to uncritically swallow the pc propaganda churned out by the media and the Aboriginal industry than to think for yourself.

Antonia Feitz

Personal trivia, from the global office:

Another perfect day in paradise.

Have a good one.

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Recent stories exclusive to  (how to) subscribe/rs of the Australian National News of the Day:

Where the politically correct hang out - 20th September 1998
A brief lunch time controntation with Jeff Kennett- 8th September 1998
One Nation's Primary Industry Policy- 7th September 1998
One Nation's Tax Policy- 4th September 1998
One Nation "Media Adviser" shows true colours- 1st September 1998
One Nation Federal Fund Raiser - 21st August 1998
B'nai B'rith's discriminatory and un-Australian "Racewatch" - 18th August 1998
Four Corners become "Flawed" Corners - 11th August 1998
The Nicholas Street Rally - 4th August 1998
Their first day in Parliament - 28th July 1998
The 60 Minutes debate/debacle - 26th July 1998

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