Letter to My Fellow Australians from Bob Katter

To My Fellow Australians, this last six months ending February 2016 concludes the worst period in Australian History.

1.  Seventy percent of Australia’s manufacturing vanishes with the closure of the Australian Motor Vehicle industry next year.
   “Australia will have made its last motor car.”
   With the closure of Australia’s last Whitegoods Plant at Orange all Whitegood manufacturing is gone.
   “Australia has made its last washing machine.”

 

2.   The only registered Port in the Northern Half of the Australian Coastline has been sold to the Chinese (a) compromising USA defence usage, (b) creating a foreign owned tollgate, which under the China Free Trade Agreement provides the Port owner with the right to an “unlimited” toll charge on all Imports and Exports flowing ‘into and out of’ the North West quadrant of Aust..

Soon after this extraordinary event two members of the Federal Cabinet announced the $5000m North Australia Development Fund. The Australian Financial Review newspaper photographed the “potential investors” (assumed recipients) of the $5000m namely:-

Wilmar the giant foreign sugar Corp., JBS Swift the giant foreign beef Corp. and the Chinese CEO of the Port of Darwin. No Australian’s were mentioned.

3.   It was reported in the media, following government statements that 11% of Australia was foreign owned. Since 52% of Australia is on the World Register of Deserts and over 20% is “Aboriginal Land” for which no Title Deed is available or possible (and therefore no economic development), and 7% is National Park.  In other words 79% of Australia’s lands is ecologically and or legally precluded from any economic activity. So even in the early 2000s more than half of Australia’s usable land was probably foreign owned.

In the last six months:

• Minister Barnaby Joyce announced the Ord Stage 3 as a preferred recipient of Northern Australia $500m Water Fund. The Ord Stage 2 and Stage 3 are both Chinese owned. They will comprise Australia’s Biggest Farming Operation.
• The Van Dieman’s Land Dairy farms Australia’s biggest farming operation purchased by China.
• Cubbie Station Australia’s 2^nd biggest farming operation is China owned.
• Chinese purchase Nicoletti Farms, Australia’s biggest grain grower.
• Terra Firma Australia’s biggest cattle producer disclosed 60% of its operations are to be Indonesian owned.
• Queensland 2^nd biggest cattle station Wulugurang (Wentworth) sold to China.
• Glenrock, reportedly NSW most valuable ($45m) cattle property (Hunter Valley) sold to China.[1]

4.  The decision to continue Interest Rates at a 1000% higher level than our competitor nations pressures upward the price of the Australian dollar (Paul Keating and Peter Costello free floated the dollar. It went down to 49 cents and 51 cents respectively. Their subsequent intervention almost doubled the dollar’s value). Interest rates are set by the Federal government’s Reserve Bank (RBA rate is currently over 2.0%. Overseas rates are around 0.3%). Doubling the price of the Aust. $ effectively doubles the price of exports – pricing us off the world market. Similarly it halves the price of imports pricing us out of the Australian market.[2]

5.  The New South Wales Government has decided to legalise the Uber Corporation’s car hire operations which at present breach the (Taxi Hire) laws of NSW. This is quite extraordinary. An Australian State govt. will enforce Taxi Hire laws against its own people, but won’t enforce those same laws against a Foreign Corporation.

• This decision effectively and ultimately will take some $2000m of licence values off the (NSW) Australian taxi owners (mostly owner drivers), and gives it to the foreign Corp Uber, franchised by Google.
• This will create ultimately a foreign corporate monopoly on Taxi Hire, bad enough in itself, but 15,000 full time jobs will vanish into part time employment (and this employment will be by a foreign corporate monopoly).
• 25% of all taxi hire revenues will now go overseas, taken off the people of New South Wales, off the people of Australia, and given to offshore interests.[3]
• In a deregulated taxi market, services will plummet. Gone will be oversighting and scrutiny of drivers, virtually:- no cameras, no meters, no distress alarm,[4] no base, no taxi ranks, no ‘early hours of the morning’ service, no services for the disabled, no commercial insurance for passengers. But what we will have is variable pricing (ie. sky hi prices at peak hours).

6.  The collapse in the World Market Price for iron ore and coal brings the Ideology Chickens home to roost.
Successive governments have reduced the Australian economy to a single motivating mechanism “Free Marketing”, the most primitive simplistic and supine of principles has been applied to the most highly complex, and most deadly competitive, of all human activities.
After all “there is only so much game at the water hole”.

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[1] Source:  The Australian 18 April 2016

[1] 1a) Much has been made of the fall in the Aust. $ over the last year to 75 cents as at 16 April 2016.

         However, the ave. price of the Aust. $ for the last decade before this was not 95 cents, it was 79 cents.

   1b) On my only overseas trip, our car hire company in Brazil had all Aust. Holden Caprices.  Louiz the owner

        said “Best value for money car in the world.  But I’m not buying anymore.”

I asked ‘why’.  Louiz said “your dollar has doubled so the price of a Caprice in Brazil has doubled.  It’s now double the price of our Brazilian equivalent car”.

[1] Small Australian sharks, like Malcolm Turnbull son’s company, from my experience, sell out to foreign corps.  That’s how they make the big dollars.

[1] Reportedly an Uber driver in the USA committed a number of murders while driving for Uber.
At this juncture we have to buy almost all of our essentials from overseas,[5] but we now have no money to buy these essentials.
The only significant export items we are now left with are iron ore and coal, they comprise $120b of Australia’s exports of $270b.[6] This is bad enough in itself that the country’s economy depends on just two commodities. But worse still, both are facing the most serious long term structural adversity.

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