(c) Copyright 1999: Graham L. Strachan
I am frequently asked the question, “What are your thoughts on the Republic?” My answer is probably not what people expect. I remind them of the record of the last three Australian governments, including this one, and ask them to give me one good reason why they should cooperate with this government on any matter at all, short of breaking the law -- the Republic or anything else. I have not had one good argument yet. The following is just some of that record.
(1) To get himself elected, John Howard swore there was never going to be
a GST, never never, never. Now there is one, and all sorts of deals were
done to get it in.
(2) Australia was supposed to need a GST so ‘everybody will pay their
fair share of tax’. The country has to have a GST because foreign
multinationals (MNCs) and global investors avoid tax with the acquiscence
of the federal government.
(3) Mr. Howard claimed he was introducing a GST because the people gave him
a mandate. The people are getting a GST because the IMF told the Australian
government it had to introduce one [see ‘Globalisation: Demise of the
Australian Nation’ (1998), pp. 68-69, available from the author].
(4) The government refers to the GST as comprehensive tax reform. It is an
additional tax. Anybody who believes the taxes being abolished will stay
abolished misunderstands the nature and purpose of taxation. Everything that
can be taxed, will be taxed, except multinational corporate profits, the
tax on which (if it is not avoided) has already been reduced twice during
the term of this government.
(5) Howard says the GST rate will never rise above 10%, never, never, never.
Anybody who believes that, isn’t paying attention.
(6) The government claims that alternatives like the debit tax and the 2%
easy tax were ‘thoroughly looked at and they don’t work’.
In fact they were thoroughly ignored because they tax big business, and the
Australian government represents foreign big business.
(7) While talking about a ‘level playing field’ and abolishing
concessions for Australian business, the government transferred those concessions
to foreign MNCs. It allows them to avoid tax, allows them R&D concessions,
and even gives them cash payments (direct inducements) of taxpayers’
money to set up or keep operating. The result has been the wholesale foreign
takeover of Australian business -- globalisation.
(8) When in opposition, the Howard government promised it would nor reduce
the sugar tariff if elected. When elected it abolished it altogether, boosting
the profits of MNC soft drink and lolly makers at the expense of
Australia’s producers. The Australian sugar industry is now the only
one in the world without some form of government subsidy or protection.
(9) The Australian government, more than any other government in the world,
has honoured agreements such as the Lima Agreement and the GATT (General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), presiding over the deliberate destruction
of more than 40% of Australian farms in the last 15 years. Its response --
allocate taxpayers’ money to help farmers to leave the land faster.
(10) No more than a third of Telstra was to be sold. Now the government is
pushing for the sale of all of it. Selling a third was a ploy -- the thin
edge of the wedge.
(11) The government claims that after Telstra is completely sold it can still
guarantee services to the bush. There is no way it can make that guarantee.
Such conditions cannot be imposed on an outright sale. Even if they could,
the government intends signing the Multilateral Investment Agreement which
will make such a condition illegal.
(12) The government claims it is ‘selling Telstra to the Australian
people’. Telstra already belonged to the Australian people. It now belongs
to only 5% of them. The rest belongs to Wall Street.
(13) The government claims it has to sell the people’s assets to
‘retire government debt’. The government incurred that debt in
the first place, now it is selling the people’s assets to retire it.
If anybody else did that they would be in gaol -- which is arguably where
Australia’s politicians deserve to be.
(14) When it was trying to get elected the Howard opposition constructed
a ‘debt truck’ and drove it all around the country saying how bad
foreign debt was for Australia. Under the Howard government foreign debt
has risen 25% to from $145 billion to $250 billion.
(15) The government is quick to explain that not all of that is government
debt. Some of it private sector debt. So what is private sector debt doing
lumped in with government debt and called ‘national debt’? Have
Australia’s taxpayers been made guarantors for private sector debt?
They were made guarantors for private debt in Asia, why not Australia? Australian
taxpayers were forced to bail out the private banks in Asian countries to
the tune of $5 billion.
(16) The government keeps saying ‘globalisation’ is ‘good
for Australia’. Good for whom, and in what way? It has not been good
for the 90% of major businesses bought up or bankrupted by globalisation,
or the 3 million workers in industries closed down or driven offshore who
were sacked and had to find replacement jobs, or the 26% of them whose
replacement jobs are now only casual or part time, or the university students
who now have to take out loans to pay for their education.
(17) The government claims the economy is healthy. It is over 80% foreign
owned and controlled, nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars in debt, and
has a trade deficit of $1.5 billion a month every month.
(18) The government boasts that the country has ‘economic growth’,
even though it is closing down its industries and its citrus growers are
bulldozing their fruit trees. How can that be? Because economic growth measures
spending in the domestic economy, ‘strong domestic demand’ -- in
other words, the consumer spending of credit. A country living increasingly
on borrowed money and selling public assets to pay for it, is lauded as having
‘economic growth’, the ‘best performing economy in the
world’. Best performing according to whose interests?
(19) The government says unemployment is 7.4%. That’s the level of
‘unemployed job seekers’. There is another 37% of people of working
age who aren’t ‘job seekers’ because they’ ve given up
looking for work. They’re hidden in a thing called the ‘participation
rate’. Real unemployment is closer to 16%.
(20) The government has been saying (until recently) the average wage is
$35,000/year. That was the average full-time adult wage. Factoring in part
time and junior jobs and the the real average wage is something under
$30,000/year and falling.
(21) While talking about ‘transparency in government’, the federal
government has signed dozens of so-called ‘multilateral treaties’
without proper debate in the parliament, handing over control of
Australia’s affairs and natural resources to the United Nations and
its agencies, and turning the federal government into a slave government
according to the bogus principle of ‘subsidiarity’.
(22) The parliament is now little more than a theatrical performance, put
on for busloads of school children in the public gallery. The real decisions
affecting Australia are made behind closed doors.
(23) The government was caught trying to sign the Multilateral Agreement
on Investment (MAI) in secret at the OECD, handing over Australia’s
right to control its economy. Caught in the act, the government appointed
a ‘committee’ to take public submissions, then ignored the lot
because nearly all were opposed. A resumption of negotiations on that very
same treaty is about to begin at the World Trade Organisation.
(24) While the people were preparing submissions against the MAI, the government
(without proper debate in the parliament) signed the Financial Services Industry
Agreement (FSIA), permitting greater foreign ownership of Australia’s
financial institutions, insurance companies and stock brokers.
(25) While the people were preparing submissions against the MAI, the government
signed (without proper debate in the parliament) the Fifth Protocol to the
GATS, which allowed foreign takeovers of Australian banks.
(26) While the people were preparing submissions against the MAI, the government
signed the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency Agreement (MIGA), which
set up a fund of taxpayers’ money to guarantee MNCs reimbursement for
losses incurred through ‘non-commercial risks’-- in other words,
losses of profits
caused by the actions of governments opposed to globalism.
(27) In 1992 at the so-called Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, and without
proper debate in the parliament, the government committed Australia to Agenda
21, an 800 page, forty Chapter programme designed to make virtually every
aspect of life in the twenty-first century subject to UN planning, oversight
and control.
World totalitarian socialist government, in other words.
(28) Implementing that Agenda, and without proper debate in the parliament,
the Australian government has embarked upon a whole series of programmes
designed to limit access to rivers, limit access to areas declared biosphere
reserves, and to introduce land use controls on Australian freehold
property.
(29) Pursuant to that Agreement the Australian government has allowed the
United Nations to dictate that Australians must now pay for rain that falls
on the Australian continent, including rainwater caught in private tanks
and dams. Owners of city suburban blocks will not only pay for water, but
also a drainage tax for runoff.
(30) Pursuant to the globalist requirement that national pride be destroyed,
Australia’s youth are being encouraged to be ashamed of their flag,
their history, and their cultural heritage and to apologise for them all.
With the full knowledge and support of the government, children are taught
that the settlement of Australia is a cause for ‘unutterable shame’,
that they should feel ‘guilt for the past’, and turn their national
day into a National Sorry Day.
(31) Mishandling by successive governments of the Native Title issue has
resulted in 85% of the continent now being subject to native title claims.
(32) Children in school, with the full knowledge and support of federal and
state governments, learn how to put condoms on bananas and ‘explore
sexual choices’, while 30% of them emerge from the system unable read
or write properly, or do simple arithmetic, and full of globalist propaganda
force fed to them as historical and scientific fact.
(33) Children line up at school daily for mind-suppressant drugs like Ritalin
for ‘Attention Deficit Syndrome’, as many as 10% of the students
in some schools. Australia now has one of the highest youth suicide rates
in the world.
(34) While ignoring and abolishing the basic individual rights of all
Australians, the government has signed treaties agreeing to create special
rights for groups favoured by the United Nations -- women, children, indigenous
people and homosexuals. Offences against those groups are about to be classed
as ‘hate crimes’ -- thought crimes, attracting extra penalties.
(35) While most people can no longer afford access to the legal system, the
government, pursuant again to UN treaties, has allowed minority groups to
hijack parts of the legal system -- such as the Family Court -- and turn
them into instruments of radical social change.
(36) The government in the preamble to the Women’s Treaty committed
the country to total and complete civilian disarmament. It has now made the
possession of a weapon for self defence illegal, while criminals run around
armed to the teeth, confident of meeting no resistance.
(37) While claiming this is still a free country, the government is moving
to clamp down on the Internet, with controls comparable only with those of
communist China.
(38) While claiming this is still a free country, the government’s new
ASIO Act will give that organisation sweeping new powers to invade privacy
and increase government surveillance of potential critics of the
government.
(39) The Australian government (again secretly until recently) is a participant
in an international surveillance ring called Echelon which monitors all private
phonecalls and e-mails.
(40) While charged with the protection of our shores, the government has
neglected its responsibilies to such an extent that boatloads of illegal
immigrants now disembark on Australia’s beaches in broad daylight.
(41) While calling people who want Australia for Australians
‘racists’, the federal government itself sponsors a blatantly racist
immigration policy which discriminates against migrants of British background
in favour of Asians, and refuses to heed the wishes of the Australian people
regarding immigration policy.
(42) Successive federal governments, including this one, have scaled back
Australia’s defence forces to where the country is not adequately defended,
yet have consistently given taxpayers’ money in military aid to Indonesia,
knowing full well some of that aid may have been going to fund special units
conducting genocide in East Timor.
(43) The federal government came to an agreement with the international community
to globalise Australia without the consent of the Australian people, and
without even having the decency to inform them. Having done so it now quashes
debate by accusing potential critics of suffering from ‘globophobia’,
or ‘reform fatigue’, or of failing to accept that globalisation
has to have its ‘losers ’ as well as its ‘winners’.
(44) People trying to become ‘winners’ by relocating their affairs
offshore and learning how to take advantages of the global market are now
being harassed by government agencies. It would appear this government’s
job is to see that the benefits of globalisation are reserved exclusively
for the Big End of Town, and to selectively apply tax and other laws to keep
its own citizens poor and small.
(45) The federal government and all major political parties have conspired
to destroy Australian democracy. When the One Nation Party began to gain
support, the corrupt Australian media were permitted to conduct the most
cowardly campaign of lies, distortion and propaganda in Australia’ s,
possibly the world’s media history. Prime minister Howard called her
‘deranged’ and National Party leader Tim Fischer said she had to
be ‘dealt out once and for all’. What was ‘dealt out once
and for all’ was Australian democracy,and both men should answer for
it.
(46) The entrenched parties colluded in the swapping of electoral preferences,
electoral boundaries were hastily re-drawn, and electoral Acts were changed
overnight to make voting other than for the major parties virtually impossible.
Ultimately, despite the fact that One Nation got nearly one million votes
and out-polled both the Nationals and the Democrats, those parties got a
swag of seats, while One Nation got one.
(47) A High Court challenge was then mounted to prevent that one representative
from taking her seat in the Senate. The High Court upheld the challenge,
holding, in the course of deciding, that Great Britain was a foreign power.
(48) Since the Australian Constitution is Section 9 of the Commonwealth of
Australia Constitution Act (1900), an Act of the British parliament, it follows
that the Australian Constitution has no legal effect in this country, and
the federal government, and the High Court have no legitimacy. The Australian
government and High court continue to function despite the legal effect of
that decision.
(49) None of the other 31 politicians who hold dual citizenships with foreign
powers has been disqualified from sitting in the parliament.
It is clear from the above events that they had nothing to do with dual citizenship or the Constitution. They had to do with keeping an honest representative of the people out of the parliament. Nothing was to be spared, not the truth, not the law, not legitimate government, not the constitution, not democracy, not even the highest court in the land. Everything was to be sacrificed, if need be, to keep her out. That is the depth to which the Howard government has allowed this country to sink. Why?
Because One Nation is a nationalist party -- it wants to keep Australia for Australians -- and that is now forbidden -- the globalists have decided. Everything has to be owned by Wall Street, and administered by the United Nations and its agencies. It’s called globalism, The Third Way, an incestuous marriage of monopoly capitalism (a tool of totalitarian economic control), and totalitarian socialism, once called communism, which is a sick, proven failure, which leads to poverty, oppression, and mass murder wherever it has been applied). THAT is what the Australian government has committed this country to. One Nation looked like getting in the way.
As for the Republic, the government is saying that changes to the Constitution are going to be minimal only. But there are Wall Street bankers lurking among the people in the Republican camp, and big money behind the Republican cause, interfering in what should be strictly a matter for the Australian people. They should get out of the way, and take their government with them.
In view of the above, I challenge anybody to put forward one good reason why the Australian people should cooperate with this government on the Republic, or anything else for that matter, short of breaking the law. Or why Australians shouldn’t all send a clear message to Canberra through their political representatives (who might as well do something useful), that until this government starts respecting the existing law, and gets back to representing the interests of all Australians -- the people it took an oath to represent -- it will get absolutely no cooperation whatsoever from the Australian people. There is no principle in political science or law for that matter, which says people must cooperate with, or fund, their own destroyers. If the only argument is that they’ll get the Kosovo treatment, then let’s get on with it. At least then the true nature of globalism will be out in the open. Vote ‘no’ -- to everything.