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Treasurer Jim Chalmers, a Paul Keating clone, proposes more inflation, more wealth reduction, more unemployment and more misery
from Senator Malcolm Roberts
In a recent economic essay released for weekend newspapers, Australian Treasurer Jim Chalmers has cobbled together some cliches about how best to run the world’s 13th largest economy. To summarise, it is a blueprint on how to destroy a $1.3 trillion dollar economy. Of course, Doctor Chalmers has learnt from a master at economic shrinkage, his PhD dissertation was on the economic and social legacy of Paul Keating.
Unfortunately for the Treasurer, his blueprint was released on a weekend when news hit that his tax on beer is set to rise sending the price of beer towards $12 a schooner. Just for the record though, and I’ll get to details soon, Chalmer’s blue print will surely classify your beer as a ‘bad’ investment, because it is full of carbon. Prices will get even higher.
We have to take our hats off to the spin doctor in the Treasurer’s office who released the essay to coincide with the increase in beer prices.
Schooners of beer are exactly what the Treasurer’s blueprint boils down to. Prices of goods are inflating exponentially, and it is the main topic for discussion at kitchen tables right across Australia. Families are now having to choose between new school shoes or eating; getting the roof fixed or having a holiday at the beach.
A basket of goods that only cost $100 in 1990 set you back $217 in 2022. With sky high inflation, that $100 basket now costs us an eye-watering $234 in 2023, a nearly 8% increase in just one year. Unfortunately, prices will continue to go up. Much of Australia’s price rises in groceries and the bills we can’t avoid are even worse than the headline inflation rate.
Meanwhile in Canberra, the Treasurer is writing new short stories about how to add more pressure to our inflation cooked economy and what he can do to make life even harder for Australians.
Chalmers references the polycrisis of converging pressures. What we really have though in Australia is a pollie-crisis, due to politicians in Canberra making terrible decisions.
Australia’s inflation hasn’t been this high since the Keating days. Families should be terrified, because for those of us who can remember, Paul Keating sent mortgages to 19% and much of the country went broke.
The Treasurer’s neo-Marxist catch-phrase ‘sustainable finance architecture, including a new taxonomy’ to label the climate impact of different investments, has been a topic of much discussion in recent years. Soviet extremists on the left argue that this system is necessary for their fight in the climate change scam and promoting ‘sustainability’. Others, including One Nation, argue that it is misguided and ultimately harmful to economic growth and people’s prosperity.
First and foremost, using a ‘new’ taxonomy to label the climate impact of different investments is the worst and most damaging form imaginable of government intervention in the market. In short, Chalmers says he wants to classify all investments made, including in your superannuation, into ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Ergo, beer full of carbon will be a ‘bad’ investment and need a higher price, while a tree (which is actually made of carbon like much of everything else) will be ‘good’.
This market intervention is the most serious and concerning idea that a government has offered since Ben Chiefly dabbled with communism in the late 1940’s.
The federal government classifying an Aussie family’s assets into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ is a terrifying intervention. Firstly, it creates a level of uncertainty for investors, including you, as they may be unsure of how investments will be classified under the new system. Labor has a track record of changing the goal posts at any minute to suit any Greens, union or factional deal on the table. The classification system is purely subjective and cannot be based on evidence or data.
Secondly, it will lead to market distortions, as certain investments are favoured over others simply because of their classification as good or bad, rather than any economic, financial or productive merit. This will lead to a misallocation of resources, as investments that may not be the most economically efficient or profitable are chosen simply because they are classified as more ‘environmentally’ friendly. For example “this model of car (an Electric Vehicle) is ‘good’, while that diesel 4WD is ‘bad’”, even though Australia is not a country suitable nor ready for the forced uptake of 100% electric vehicles in any way.
The good or bad decisions are made based on the Treasurer’s mood as he gets out of bed in the morning. It is simply a chaotic system that is being proposed. The Soviet-level bureaucracy necessary to write, disseminate and enforce this controlled economy will result in significantly higher taxes and lower economic growth – an inevitable result of bigger government. Higher taxes and debt will continue to be the Labor way.
These plans will trash our economy. When the Government tries to pick winners, the country loses.
All realistic thinkers will reject and debunk the idea that we can accurately classify and label the ‘climate impact’ of different investments . Any policy setting Australia makes with the aim to ‘adjust’ the world temperature will barely be a drop in the ocean, even if you believe we need to do anything, which the science clearly says is neither necessary nor possible.
The emphasis on ‘sustainable finance’ and labelling the climate impact of different investments as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ misses the point that the issue confronting Australians is inflation and a lack of economic advancement. Controlling and directing the economy to favour only climate-friendly projects from ALP donors will not deal with inflation. Instead, concentrating economic power in the hands of a woke few, it will increase inflation.
One Nation proposes, and has always advocated for, systemic economic reform with the primary objective of reducing government waste to reduce the tax burden on families and eliminate government debt.
If Australians think it’s a rough deal that the Treasurer must raise tax on beer this weekend because beer is ‘bad’, they are best reminded that the cost of beer will be small fry compared to other cost of living pressures Chalmers will soon unleash.
The Treasurer can take away one important lesson from this battle, One Nation will fight the Labor party every step of the way. We will fight for lower prices, better working conditions and a safer economy. The Liberals may have abandoned the field to socialism, but we haven’t. When I ran on as a rugby and league halfback as a teenager and young adult, the job was clear; get that ball and drive it up the middle.
So Labor had better realise it won’t get away with trashing the economy just because of a fractious, demoralised Liberal party destined to become totally irrelevant. The Australian political landscape is now far more pluralistic as One Nation’s continuing growth demonstrates.
The Orwellian use of catch phrases like ‘sustainable finance architecture’ and a ‘new taxonomy’ to label the ‘climate impact of different investments’ is designed to hoodwink the public while winning back Labor’s Green voters, who already exist in this world of doublespeak and concocted reality.
Chalmers is proposing an unnecessary and frightening intervention in our economy that has already been screwed over thanks to years of government COVID restrictions. These measures have had questionable impact on our health, and have certainly decimated our economic well-being. Investors can no longer invest with certainty. Banks have introduced their own version of the Treasurer’s “worthiness” index that is forcing the closure of critical industries in mining, agriculture and manufacturing.
Chalmers is promising more of the same. More wealth reduction, more employment loss, more unemployment and more misery for everyday Australians.
One Nation is having none of this Soviet-style economic management. Let businesses get on with what they do best – creating jobs, creating wealth, and creating a future for workers and for all everyday Australians.
In our beautiful country the best method of providing a future for everyone has always been personal enterprise.
Secretive annual talks influence Australian foreign policy
from Alison Ryan
Most Australians would be instinctively suspicious of a forum that, while the event itself is not secret, attracts scant publicity, and the discussions are secret—participants strictly observe rules that prevent them from disclosing the contents of any comments made at the event, even without identifying the speaker; they are only permitted to disclose their own comments.
It would enrage Australians to learn that regular participants in this forum publicly sneer at an Australian journalist imprisoned in China, and that the forum was used to plant a fake “spy” story in the Australian media to undermine Australia’s most beneficial international relationship. Australians can be confident that the politicians in Canberra who are strident in their public defence of Australian sovereignty and have made it their mission to combat foreign interference would use the full power of Parliament and foreign interference laws to scrutinise the working of this operation and expose its agenda.
Australians would indeed have such reactions, if this scenario were about a foreign interference operation by China. Except it’s not a scenario, and it’s not about Australia and China. It’s a very real, 30-year operation influencing Australia and the United States, called the Australian American Leadership Dialogue (AALD). The “dialogue” occurs during an annual junket alternating between the USA and Australia, the latest of which has just wrapped up in Washington DC.
skynews.com.au/world-news/global-affairs/opposition-leader-peter-dutton-says-beijings-aggressive-rise-in-the-pacific-is-a-bigger-threat-than-climate-change/news-story/d9d64d48383b263b293360680132f6d9]
If you were wondering why Australia’s bombastic new opposition leader Peter Dutton has been quiet lately, and why he gave an interview to Sky News on Sunday morning with the Washington Capitol building in the background, it’s because he has been on the latest AALD junket to the USA. Underscoring its political importance, the new CEO of the AALD is Tony Smith, the just-retired former Speaker of Australia’s House of Representatives, and its Advisory Board includes Professor Glynn Davis, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s newly appointed Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, i.e. the head of Australia’s Commonwealth public service.
The above description of how the AALD operates is entirely accurate:
• It involves leading politicians from both countries’ two major parties, government officials, journalists, and business executives, who attend by invitation only;
• It receives little publicity in proportion to the political firepower it attracts, and its attendees strictly observe its non-disclosures rules, as evidenced by the fact there has been very few leaks in its 30-year history;
• A journalist who is a regular AALD attendee didn’t sneer at an Australian journalist imprisoned by China, but at Julian Assange imprisoned by the UK at the demand of the USA—ABC News Breakfast co-presenter Michael Rowland tweeted “A big gold star to Ecuador” when Assange was forcibly removed from Ecuador’s London embassy in 2018, and doubled down by tweeting that people who call Assange a journalist are in “a VERY small camp”;
• Liberal MP Andrew Hastie revealed he was contacted by an intermediary of a self-proclaimed Chinese spy while at the 2019 Australian American Leadership Dialogue event, which led to a sensational 60 Minutes story about a defecting Chinese spy exposing Chinese espionage in Australia, before the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) confirmed the claims were fake.
The AALD is the brainchild of then Coca-Cola Amatil CEO Phil Scanlan, an Australian business executive with an American wife, who also had a background in politics as advisor to leading Liberal Party identity Peter Coleman (a Cold War ideological warrior and the father-in-law of Peter Costello).
In his 2019 book The US Lobby and Australian Defence Policy, author Vince Scappatura reports that Scanlan confessed to a deep-seated fear that following the end of the Cold War, he “would wake up one morning and find that the US has declared independence from Australia”.
Scanlan proposed his idea to US President George H.W. Bush during Bush’s 1991 visit to Australia, and Bush backed it. Scanlan’s goal for AALD was to strengthen the alliance between the two nations, or, more specifically, to strengthen the alliance as the foundation of Australia’s foreign policy, through “relationship management between current and likely future leaders from both countries”, according to the AALD website.
The attendees of the very first dialogue in 1993, held in Washington DC, included future PM Kevin Rudd, journalist Greg Sheridan, Nick Greiner, and then-US Defence Secretary Dick Cheney and his Under Secretary Paul Wolfowitz—the criminal conspirators behind the Iraq war—who the previous year had enunciated the strategic doctrine that America’s post-Cold War foreign and defence policies would focus on stopping the rise of any rival military or economic power, i.e. China. The AALD is committed to supporting this doctrine, by acting as a channel to communicate to Washington decision-makers a supposedly homogeneous Australian desire that America remain “engaged” in the Asia-Pacific.
In a 10 November 2016 ABC 7.30 interview, former Australian PM Paul Keating blamed the AALD for making Australian politicians of both parties subservient to the US alliance:
“We’ve got into this almost sort of crazy position now where the American alliance, instead of simply being a treaty, where the United States is obliged to consult with us in the event of adverse strategic circumstances, it has now taken on a reverential, sacramental quality”, Keating said.
“It’s like a sacrament. I’m not talking about simply the government; I’m talking about some people on the Labor side as well.
“There’s a view, there was a thing called the Australian-American dialogue, which by the way I never attended, which is a sort of a cult thing that’s gone on for years and I don’t know what the Americans put in the drinking water, but whenever the Australians come back, they’re all bowing and scraping and going on.” (Emphasis added.)
What Keating describes goes a long way towards explaining why new PM Anthony Albanese, one of many Labor participants in the AALD, is barely different from his predecessor. Meanwhile, nothing China has been accused of in terms of foreign interference comes close to the influence the AALD has over Australian foreign policy.
Source: 20 July 2022 Australian Alert Service
Albanese has no feathers to fly with
To the Editor
The Featherless Rooster
We watched the debate, Alabanese looked like a featherless rooster that wants to fly but doesn’t have the ability or know how. Crowing a lot does not grow feathers or ability.
His promise to increase wages in line with inflation good intent will only increase inflation upwards every time the increase is made, resulting in all products, food and clothing increasing also (as under Keating), where the increase became a negative liability on families because every product became too expensive to buy — and families suffered. Featherless rooster should not try to lay golden eggs.
Sorry mate, you lost our vote to common sense — we remember Keating’s 17% interest and ‘the recession we had to have’ — and friends who lost their homes and businesses.
Cheers
G J May
Forestdale Qld
Australia the world’s quarry
by Robert J Lee
Quarries across Australia are stripping our non-renewable resources and our national heritage enabling our emerging enemy to make more steel and aluminium for its armaments which will eventually be used on us.
It’s somewhat ironical that Australians when ultimately forced into protecting our shores and the few resources we have left, will be killed by tanks, ships, munitions and explosives made from Australian iron ore and bauxite.
The political party duopoly has been beholden to China for decades and the basket case of Victoria is an outstanding example of Chinese influence over state governments and individual politicians from all parties. Bribes are a way of life.
Bribes paid to politicians and their parties are considered as an operating expense for the Communist Chinese government and is a normal business practice as we have seen in Victoria with Premier Dan Andrews’ Belt and Road project.
It begs the question as to the whereabouts of Premier ’Dangerous’ Dan Andrews, a communist sycophant who it is believed was bashed senseless and is supposedly in a Melbourne hospital.
Cairnsnews was told by a Victorian reporter it was strongly suspected Chinese interests gave him a touch up for not delivering on their invasive project designed to turn the state into a CCP satellite.
Recently, a nest of Chinese military operatives was flushed off Yam Island in the Torres Strait before they could get well established.
Cairnsnews has been told the brother of a Labor member of State Parliament was involved in the deal with the Chinese.
They had bribed an island inhabitant with a new boat, a car and other incentives in exchange for a house which they turned into a grocery shop and a base for 9 Oceans Fisheries, a shelf company owned by Chinese Nationals. The local council was unaware of the planned outpost.
None of the four Chinese men of military appearance and behavior, all being aged under 35 seemed to have any fishing experience and as none could speak English or the local language, had little chance of buying crayfish from local fishermen.
After federal MP Bob Katter in Parliament, exposed the plan to establish a CCP spy post right under the noses of authorities, the operatives were gone by the next day.
Treacherous Australian politicians and their political parties sold the country out long ago and one worrying deal involved former Prime Minister Bob Hawke in 2012.
As Prime MInister and in retirement Hawke became another Chinese asset with close ties to Australian governments. He brokered a deal between the West Australian government and the Chinese government to buy Stage 2 of the Ord River Irrigation Scheme.
“In 2012 the Chinese Shanghai Zhongfu group wanted to grow its own irrigated sugar cane in the $311m second-stage expansion of the Ord irrigation project.
To top off this farmer coup-de-grace, former Prime Minister Bob Hawke is acting as gigolo for a Chinese conglomerate offering to buy 15,000 hectares of prime farming country east of Kunnunurra in Western Australia.” (Cairnsnews April 2012)
The WA government accepted the Chinese deal in deference to 13 Australian companies and individual farmers who tendered for the project. Hawke’s commission on the Ord River sale was a reported $11 million.
It was widely suggested at the time WA politicians did extremely well. It seems since 2012 not much has changed while the LNP Federal Government falls over itself to sell China more of Australia and more of our non-renewable mineral resources.
The Queensland Labor Party allowed Anglo-Swiss mining giant Glencore to take over a former Chinese-owned mining lease several years ago and the miner has just done a deal with Mitsibushi Development to extract 357 million tonnes of bauxite from its Aurukun, Cape York site for sale on the international market.
The headlines resonated with 650 jobs in the offing as the $500m deal was done.
Why is Australia not developing our own non-renewable iron ore and bauxite deposits to make alumina and manufacture motor vehicles, aircraft, building materials and many other goods?
Rio Tinto has been mining bauxite at Weipa for 50 years but has not got the show to itself anymore. A new neighbour at Mapoon is Brisbane company Metro Mining which is about to restart its operation after the wet season.
Metro is a fly-in-fly out operation that provides a limited number of jobs for local indigenous workers and has most of its supplies shipped in by barge from the south. Like the Metro operation Glencore will provide little return for an economically ailing Cape York.
Federal and State Governments should be legislating for all miners on Cape York to contribute towards an entire new value-adding refining and smelting installation to be built near Weipa producing alumina ingots.
Instead of sending ingots to China from its Boyne Island smelter, which is under threat of closure, Rio should be restricting output and selling their entire production onshore to Australian industry for manufacturing vehicles, boats, aircraft and every other item that Australians pay through the nose from overseas factories.
Unfortunately senior politicians and their parties have become so compromised, as we have seen recent evidence of in federal and state parliaments, that the Deep State has prevented any sovereign manufacturing industry from starting again.
Australia the quarry, was confirmed by the compromised, alleged pedophile, PM Paul Keating when he said in 1994, “Australia is to become a service country only, and I can’t understand why anyone would want to live more than 100 klms inland from our shores….”
The China – Jesuit partnership. Who owns China?
by Bob Thompson* (first published CN April 11, 2020)
Back in the mid-nineties I had occasion to meet a man who had a close connection to the Order of Jesuits and the Vatican.
As circumstances evolved I saved the man’s life. We developed a friendship and this led to him opening up to me about his strange life and history. I will call him Max.
One day he reacted to a comment I made that maybe the communist Chinese regime wasn’t held in serfdom to the financial and political power of the old Satanist families of Europe which the Jesuit order represented.
His response was, “I am disappointed in you. I thought you were smarter than that! I thought you knew more than most people!”
So I asked him to enlighten me, knowing that he had spent many years in China but what he confided in me was unexpected.
Chairman of Chinese Communist Party Deng Xiaoping partnered with wealthy European Jesuit families to relocate western manufacturing
During the later years of the Mao Zedong dictatorship the Jesuits sent Max into China to offer a partnership between the corrupt, wealthy European Jesuit families and the Chinese Communist Party.
Mao responded to this offer by throwing Max into jail. He remained there for quite a while until the Chinese leadership changed when Deng Xiaoping became Chairman in 1978 until retirement in 1992.
The Vatican again sent Jesuit emissaries into China with a renewed offer and Max was released from jail.
The business deal was finally put into place and today has changed the world.
Socialist China had become an impoverished, backward country with a massive military and police force.
The Jesuits offered to use their power over western nations through front organisations like the Masonic Lodge, banking industry, Catholic politicians and the various socialist assets such as environmental groups which they owned in Western Europe, America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom to transfer western industries to China.
These undercover organisations, some holding tax-free status in Commonwealth nations, pushed the free trade agenda upon the west to allow slave labour manufacturing of Chinese goods.
In exchange the Chinese communists were to agree to share the profits from this trade deal with the same old Jesuit families in Europe.
This deal has been kept secret for decades. Free trade was forced upon the western nations by the fifth column members of their political parties.
China was open for business.
Business and industry in the west had more and more taxes and environmental regulations imposed upon them, then the unions forced unsustainable wage increases allowed under China sycophants and closet Marxists PM Bob Hawke and PM Paul Keating.
Meanwhile in China it was business and manufacturing at all costs. There was no harsh and unworkable green and red tape holding it up.
Manufacturing in Australia and the US could not compete with China’s slave labour wages of $2 a day and eventually were forced to relocate their factories to China and along with their valuable, state-of-the-art equipment and patents.
Hawke’s ATO emissary shut down a Sydney manufacturing business
I met with a Sydney manufacturer at the time who made high quality fittings for gas and water installations. He was visited by a representative of PM Hawke’s office.
The businessman was given an ultimatum, “shift your plant to China or you will be destroyed,” the government agent told him. “All costs will be paid by the government.”
He refused the treacherous offer and a few weeks later had a visit from the Australian Tax Office. He was accused of tax fraud. His bank accounts were closed while the ATO conducted an investigation.
Consequently the businessman was unable to pay staff or suppliers. The ATO kept up the charade until he was made bankrupt. The business was sold and the plant and equipment went to a Chinese buyer.
One of the most destructive parts of the Jesuit – China deal was how China’s much touted economic “miracle’ was funded.
China was allowed to establish a two-tiered monetary system. Their banks did not borrow from the global banksters and did not have to accept so-called foreign investment.
Just as the Australian Treasury created $130 billion by adding extra noughts in their computers a week ago, and how Donald Trump created $2 Trillion interest-free by merging the Federal Reserve with Treasury.
Australia funded large infrastructure projects such as the Snowy River Scheme and the Nullabor Railway in the same manner. Debt-free, no extra taxes, no user pay and no foreign ownership.
After the Chinese deal there were no howls from the Jesuit-controlled media about ‘funny money’.
China went from a third world cesspit into a massive economic powerhouse in a few decades thanks to the crushing economic loss to Australia and the US.
President Trump has begun to claw back America’s former status as a manufacturing giant usurping China but the party duopoly of Australia continues to drag its feet under the weight of cash-backs, foreign bank accounts of politicians and bureaucrats and compromise on a scale that would make Indonesian politicians blush.
Now we are confronted by the Wuhan virus disaster and we have to manage with the loss of our own medical manufacturing industries which were shifted to China.
The cost of this treasonous transfer of our industrial capacity to the police state of China is clear. This was the ultimate aim of the Jesuits in partnership with Communist China.
Max is long dead but we owe him thanks for revealing the truth about a very evil venture in which Australian politicians played a part.
I am remiss that I ought to have shared this story much sooner. Please pass it on.
* Bob Thompson is a NSW writer and psychologist
Katter and Hanson table bank reform bill initiating another inquiry
The Senate Economics Legislation Committee on 14 February initiated an inquiry into the Banking System Reform (Separation of Banks) Bill 2019.
This landmark senate inquiry was ignored by big media which preferred sensationalising the dust-up between One Nation’s James Ashby and its former senator Brian Burston in the halls of the senate.
from Citizens Electoral Council
This is a major blow for the banks, which had assumed that the Hayne Report from the banking royal commission, which did not recommended structural separation, would be the final word on the issue—bank shares soared on the news they wouldn’t be broken up. They celebrated too early, however.
Pauline Hanson joins forces with Bob Katter to separate bank industry superannuation and insurance from banking
On 12 February, a week after Hayne’s report became public, Senator Pauline Hanson introduced into the Senate the same bill that Bob Katter had introduced into the House of Representatives in June 2018. This bill was carefully drafted by the Citizens Electoral Council based on the USA’s successful Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 and the updated “21st Century Glass-Steagall Act” bill currently before Congress, adapted for Australia’s financial system.
The bill separates traditional commercial banks that take deposits and make loans from all other financial activities. This solves the problems of both vertical integration—the gross conflict of interests involving banks advising their customers to buy products from other businesses the banks also own; and horizontal integration—banks mixing commercial banking with risky investment banking that puts customer deposits, and the whole economy, in danger. The bill also brings the failed bank regulator APRA (Australian Prudential Regulation Authority) under much tighter parliamentary control.
Support
Bob Katter joins forces with Pauline Hanson to separate bank industry superannuation and insurance from banking
Bank separation has the support of most cross-bench politicians in Parliament, including the Greens, Centre Alliance, One Nation and independents. It is also supported by key backbenchers in all of the major parties. The Labor Party had said they would support it if recommended by the royal commission; however, sticking with that position is untenable. They know that Commissioner Hayne’s terms of reference forbade the investigation of “structure”, which Labor had intended a royal commission would have looked at. Also, even Labor’s senior statesman Paul Keating has strongly criticised Hayne for not recommending structural separation.
(Hayne’s recommendation against structural separation is a scandal: that section in his report includes a blatant lie, and experts familiar with public inquiries have accused Treasury of a “dirty trick” to rig the outcome in favour of the banks.)
Opposition
The opposition to separation comes from the big banks, the discredited regulators which are captured by the banks, and the leadership of the major parties who take huge donations from the banks. The banks wish to keep the parasitical structure that has enabled them to amass huge profits, not only through gouging their customers but also through gambling with their deposits, which they use to underwrite their huge derivatives bets that collectively amount to more than $40 trillion. There is a revolving door between the banks and regulators: high-powered executives from banks take key positions in the regulators, such as ex-UBS chief John Fraser taking over as Treasury Secretary in 2013-18 and former senior investment bankers holding six of the nine positions on the executive of bank regulator APRA; and regulators retire to plum banking positions, such as former Treasury Secretary Ken Henry becoming chairman of NAB and former RBA governor Glenn Stevens joining the board of Macquarie Bank. And not only do the big banks donate to the major parties, but so does the Australian Banking Association which lobbies for them, as do the Big Four global accounting firms which audit the major banks and have a track record of covering up dodgy bookkeeping by banks all over the world.
Make a submission
This inquiry is the chance for the Australian public to force the debate on banking separation that the royal commission was not allowed to have. The Senate Economics Legislation Committee is taking submissions from the public, so every concerned Australian should make a submission.
Here are some points to note about the Glass-Steagall principle of full banking separation:
- It works, as proved by its success for almost 70 years (1933-99) in America;
- It ends the conflicts of interests of vertical integration, which is the only way to ensure the misconduct exposed by the royal commission can’t happen again;
- It protects deposits from the dangers of speculation, which boosts confidence in the banking system;
- It stops banks from diverting credit into unproductive financial speculation, thus making more credit available for lending to neglected sectors such as small business, industry and farming.
The submissions deadline is 12 April, but don’t delay—make your submission today!
How to make a submission
Written submissions can be delivered to the Committee in two ways: 1) by physical post; 2) online.
- Post your written submission to: Senate Standing Committees on Economics
PO Box 6100
Parliament House
Canberra ACT 2600
Phone: +61 2 6277 3540
Fax: +61 2 6277 5719
Email: economics.sen@aph.gov.au
Rabobank carves up Australia
from Robert J Lee
How did Rabobank get into Australia to take the place of the Commonwealth Development Bank?
The Netherlands-based Rabobank has its origins in Australia thanks to former Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating and his then wife Annita, a Dutch-born Australian.
Reputedly the world’s largest rural bank, Rabobank reportedly was asked to hang up its shingle in Australia by the Keatings when he was Prime Minister in 1995.
Several years before the Keatings were involved with Danish interests in setting up a string of large piggeries in NSW.
“Nice to be KING KEATING”
Eventually the business failed and the Keatings were left holding the bag with the Commonwealth Development Bank reportedly for about $4million however according to then Senator Michael Baume, who doggedly pursued Keating over his debts at the time, it could have been much more.
To get out of debt in one foul swoop, Keating wound up the CDB in 1995, and put Rabobank in its place. Senator Baume said at the time the CDB debt was not ever repaid by Keating.
Most Rabobank profits go back to European shareholders. Paul Keating today drip feeds hundreds of thousands of dollars each year from the public purse, his reward for destroying Australian manufacturing and opening up Australia to the rapacious foreign banks.
Even today Keating still maintains Australia should be a ‘service country’, an ideology carried on by Malcolm Turnbull and the Liberal Party.
Cairns News 