(c) Copyright 1998: Graham Strachan
To say John Howard has a problem is an understatement, but it is largely a problem of his own making, and of the two preceding governments of Hawke and Keating. They all seem to have thought that, with the assistance of a thoroughly controlled and media, they could ‘globalise’ Australia without the people waking up and resisting. They appear to have thought that by presenting ‘globalisation’ as ‘trade liberalisation’ and nothing more, that Bill Clinton’s ‘great tide of change which is sweeping the world’ could be achieved without any fuss(1). They appear to have thought that Alexander Downer’s ‘great political dichotomy of our age, as fundamental as the old conflict between capital and labour’ could be resolved without any protest(2). Perhaps they thought pigs might fly.
To dismantle an independent nation and turn it into an interdependent member state of a global order is not an easy task, even with control of the media. To preside over the sell-off of a country’s economic assets and public utilities, and to convert it into a site on the world map open for global exploitation without the people objecting would require a far better statesman than John Howard, someone with the charisma of Bill Clinton perhaps. To understand why, it is instructive to review the whole globalisation programme.
(a) It means the government floating the currency and removing all obstructions to the free flow of money in and out of the country, which facilitates the international exploitation of the country and its resources, including human ‘resources’.
(b) It means the government ensuring global ownership of Australian industries, banks, and farms, by Transnational Corporations (TNCs) and international investors.
(c) It means the government selling all public assets and utlilities to TNCs and international investors.
(d) It means the government signing away the right to control the activities of TNCs and foreign investors in exploiting Australia’s resources and people, including not taxing their profits, through agreements such as the FSIA and MAI.
(e) It means getting the country into debt and keeping it there, operating thereafter on debt finance from international sources, depending on foreign investment for all future development which will be owned by the foreign investors, not Australian nationals.
(f) It means removing all protection for Australian-owned small/medium sized businesses and farms against imports from other countries including those with cheaper labour and producion costs; which in turn means forcing Australian workers to compete with Asian workers for jobs in an unregulated global labour market.
(g) It means the government assisting in the destruction of the union movement so that Australian wage rates and working conditions can be more easily driven down.
(h) It means winding back the welfare state erected since the 1960s, leaving a minimum ‘welfare net’ and leaving Australians largely to fend for themselves in the human ‘market’.
(i) It means the government signing treaties which progressively hand over Australia’s political and legal sovereignty and independence to ‘institutions of global governance’ (world government), which are in no way accountable to the Australian people.
(j) It means the government agreeing under treaties to disarm the country and its citizens making resistance to globalisation by force impossible.
(k) It means the government agreeing to impose on the Australian people globally determined social, cultural and environmental agendas, by having the Governor-General sign treaties at the United Nations using the questionable ‘royal prerogative’, and without recourse to the parliament.
(l) It means the government undertaking to ‘globalise’ the national culture through ‘multiculturalism’.
(m) It means the media lying to the people as to what it’s all about until it is too late for them to stop it.
In short, ‘globalisation’ means handing over the ownership and control of the country’s economy to global Kapital, and the sovereignty and freedom of its people to global government (‘governance’). In other words ‘globalisation’ means Australians having to give up their country.
Those who persist in calling all this a ‘conspiracy theory’ are looking increasingly silly. Every day now the globalist cat crawls further out of the bag, as the above list confirms. In an interview with Dennis Shanahan of The Australian newspaper, published on 13 June 1998, Prime Minister Howard admitted to “the difficulty of being in government in a globalised economy where there is a loss of sovereignty....” (4). Loss of sovereignty? That is precisely what consistently has been denied till now. Mr. Howard means economic sovereignty, but globalisation does not stop at economics and never did.
Former High Court Judge and Governor General (now sitting on the International Court of Justice) Sir Ninian Stephen has stated clearly there will be a loss of political sovereignty as well. In its place will be a thing called ‘subsidiarity’, which Sir Ninian describes as “leaving to local, regional and national institutions those matters which are best dealt with at those levels”(5). What is ‘best dealt with at those levels’ will be determined by the ‘institutions of global governance’, not by the Australian people.
Sir Ninian Stephen also made it clear there is to be a loss of democracy, which he called (euphemistically) a ‘democratic deficit’. In its place the people will have to be content with, “[A]n environment of concern regarding the democratic nature of the decision-making process [which] may....have a healthy effect upon the conduct of the entity [ie. the world government].” In other words there is no intention on the part of globalists to allow measures to be put in place which might protect Australians from the inevitable abuse of power by the ‘institutions of global governance’.
It should not be assumed, however, that there is treason in high places. Perhaps Australia’s politicians really do believe ‘globalisation’ means ‘trade liberalisation’ and nothing more. Perhaps they thought they could throw open the doors so TNCs and foreign investors could buy up the country’ s major industries and much of the rural sector, without Australians losing the control and benefits of their economy. Perhaps they really think a GST ‘will make everybody pay their fair share of tax’, even though they know the TNCs and foreign investors, who now control 80% of the economy (3), pay less than 2% of the tax(6).
Maybe they really do believe Australian labour at over $12.00 an hour can compete in a deregulated global labour market with countries like Indonesia at 39 cents an hour without having to suffer a drastic decline in living and working conditions(7). Perhaps they really do believe they can sell public utilities like Telstra, the electricity grids and water supplies and still be able to guarantee Australians an affordable phone, electricity supply, and enough water to drink. Perhaps they really do think that globally-owned industries and farms are still ‘Australian’, that the stuff they export is still ‘ours’, and that even though they pay nearly no tax here their activities are somehow ‘good for Australia’ beyond the provision of a few dead-end jobs in the service of others.
Perhaps they are infatuated with the mystical notion that all this is ‘human destiny’, the ‘inexorable course of history’, ‘bigger than all of us’, unstoppable, irreversible, and that it is not really the result of their own policies. One might have thought man left those sorts of superstitions behind in the Middle Ages, but no, they seem to be alive and well in Canberra and are portrayed constantly by the media as the ‘thinking of the future’. Whatever they really think, all the evidence now suggests that every move by the present government makes the world a better place for global Kapital and a worse place for Australians, the people it swore on oath to represent. ‘Globalisation’ might be ‘good for Australia’ but it is a disaster for most of the people in it.
Howard and the globaphiles cannot slacken off the ‘pace of change’ now, not even with a ritual Fabianist ‘one step back’. The whole world is watching (not to forget the ‘international community’ which Australia’s politicians seem almost obsessed with pleasing). No other country has sold its national soul so readily. No other country has found politicians apparently so willing to dance the global dance, so ready to sacrifice their country’s autonomy on the altar of globalism, so obliging in the signing of treaties at the UN which hand over political and cultural sovereignty to the emerging ‘institutions of global governance’.
Since all the economic indicators are going to get worse as globalisation proceeds, Mr. Howard has no option now but to rely on propaganda. He must use the media to attack relentlessly the growing numbers of the population who are waking up to what has been done, and want their country back.
Media objectivity (what’s left of it) will be abandoned. Expect blatant propaganda relentlessly pumped at the public, day after day. Expect constant media name-calling, ‘populist’, ‘redneck’, ‘racist’, ‘xenophobe’, ‘simplistic’, ‘turning back the clock’, ‘shutting out the world’ and so on ad nauseam. Expect visits from world globalist figures patting the government on the head for its ‘forward thinking policies’. Expect ridicule, and constant appeals to force, threats of ‘blood in the streets’ unless the people abandon their desire for independence and submit feebly to globalisation. Expect constant exhortations to abandon nationalism in the interests of ‘stability’ and ‘security’. Expect ordinary people who love their country and freedom to be labelled ‘terrorists’, and ‘right wing extremists’. Expect the most scurrilous and cowardly attacks on ordinary defenceless well-meaning citizens ever waged in the history of world media. Expect a campaign intended to so exhaust the public with politics, that hopefully they give up and submit meekly to their fate: obedient serfs in the new global order.
Either way Howard will lose. He has not one shred of right or morality on his side. If globalism requires those sorts of tactics to get it in, it is not a fit system for human beings. It is more like a crime against humanity.
(1) Reuters, October 17, 1997.
(2) Alexander Downer, speech to the Canberra Press Club, 1 December 1997.
(3) Allan Asher of the Competition Commission on an SBS panel discussion
on the MAI.
(4) Article, ‘Fight back’, by Dennis Shanahan, The Australian,
13 June 1998
(5) In his 1994 Earl Page Memorial Trust lecture, reproduced in
‘Quadrant’ magazine, Jan/Feb 1995, at pp.20-4.
(6) Brisbane Courier Mail, 14 January, 1998, article by Michael McKinnon,
“100 Big Firms Paid No Tax”;
Noel Whittaker, Sunday Mail 22 Feb., 1998.
(7) News Weekly, January 13, 1996, p.8.