THE PHONEY, CHOICELESS, DISHONEST ELECTION

by Jeremy Lee
Prime Minister Howard has been forced to turn his attention away from the 'khaki' election (where Beazley's policies are identical to his) to domestic issues (where Beazley's policies are virtually identical, with minor variations as to where the bribes should be directed). As far as the major parties are concerned, this is a choice between 'cheese' and 'cheese'. Both are advocates of the discredited globalist agenda. Both are advocates of the GST (Labor pretends it isn't, but is not going to abolish it). Both are insistent they can manage the present disastrous situation in Australia better than the other. Both worship at the shrine of the great god Budget Surplus, which means they should not spend all the tax they rip out of the Australian pocket, but keep some to make the books "look better".

The 'Great Debate' was a misnomer – little more than an egotistical clash of personalities which did little to enlighten the electorate, or provide a really genuine change of direction. What is the best we can hope for? Mainly, that whoever ends up 'controlling' the House of Representatives will not 'control' the Senate. Indeed, that is to say that any idea of 'controlling' either House is a denial of the freedom for Members and Senators to say and vote as they think in the Parliament in a way which should reflect the desires of the Australian electors.

We have slipped so far from the democratic ideal, safeguarded by a revered constitution, that we are in danger of accepting the premises on which our tattered system now hang. As if personalities are the only issue in this election, the ABC this time is producing its own "Australian Story" on the personal lives of Howard, Beazley and their respective families. Who really sees any significance in whether Howard's family come into the house in "mucky" shoes? The Opinion Polls, already varying widely from each other, are given much more attention that the voters in each electorate. The most they tell us is which political nag has its nose in front, and where, if you see this as a betting opportunity, you should put your money.

If Liberals or Labor put a horse up for election in a safe seat – as the Romans did in days of old – it would probably get in. So far no horse has been identified, but plenty of donkeys. As far as I'm aware, not one candidate has campaigned on the promise to run regular polls in his or her electorate, with the promise to vote in parliament according to the wishes expressed. Even those independents I have heard from have firm agendas of their own which they intend to pursue if elected. But that is not what they're there for! They are to be called 'representative's – which means they are to "re-present' what the voters in their electorate desire.

Peter Andren, currently the only independent in the Lower House, in an interview reported in The Bulletin (30/10/01) expressed an attitude shared by many ordinary voters: " .... The parties are becoming more and more distant from the grassroots. I'm absolutely passionate about people getting proper representation. But the first loyalty for members is party solidarity. You talk to the likes of [the ALP's] Daryl Melham. He's just horrified at his party's position on refugees but he's not allowed to debate any of this...."

Not only does he advocate true representation, but Andren has been hammering away at the absurdly hedonistic financial benefits that keep the consciences of party members well hidden from view: ".... Andren has launched an attack on the holy of holies: the Parliamentary Superannuation Scheme.... As he said in the House: 'MPs receive an effective employer contribution of 69% of salary. That compares with 8% for the wider community. It's a double standard that's indefensible and more than any other single issue, it's what is disconnecting the parliament from the people. It's also a system that rewards failure ....'"

Peter Andren has done more than talk about it. He's put forward his own private member's bill, seeking to peg back outrageous politicians' benefits. It was, naturally, defeated by the combined votes of all parties (funny how they can get together when they need to!) but his efforts have at least been an indicator to voters which may bear fruit later.

REAL POLICIES NEEDED

The real issues are being carefully screened from public view. For example, should a Prime Minister be able to commit Australian troops to an overseas war without a full debate in Parliament? Or, better still, a national referendum? Should there be a mandatory declaration by all contestants of the percentage limit of the National Disposable Income to be taken in direct and indirect taxation? Should there be a limit to the number of people employed in the Public Service? Should government policies that run counter to the constitution be declared null and void by a non-political watchdog set up to carry out such a policy? Should the GST, which we have now experienced for well over a year, be abolished? Should the Australian people be allowed some say in the racial make-up of the country?
Or do we continue to allow a small and unrepresentative group of social engineers to hog the agenda?

Should the people who pay taxes be allowed a more direct say in the areas their taxes are spent? Should ballot papers contain a square for those who do not feel that existing candidates adequately represent their wishes? And should this vote be published in poll results? Should voting be voluntary? Or compulsory?
Likewise, should preferential voting be voluntary?

Should pensions no longer be subject to a means test? Should the right of the people to veto unwanted legislation be included in the constitution? Should interest rates for borrowers be variable at the whim of lenders? Should there be a limit to the number of laws and regulations passed? One can think of dozens of questions and issues on which electors should have a say that will have no place in the current election. And the parties intend to keep it that way.

THE PRICE OF COMPULSORY COMPETITION

A small article in The Bulletin (30/10/01) said it all: "Deregulation of the dairy industry in NSW has led to lower prices for farmers and higher prices for consumers, a study has found. The research by the Dairy Deregulation Impact and Assessment Committee, set up by the NSW government and the dairy industry, found that the number of dairy farmers in NSW had dropped by 16% in 2000-01. The price paid to farmers fell from 53c. to 28c. per litre as the consumer price rose from $1.16 to $1.50."

In other words, farmers pay almost a gallon of milk for a litre of petrol! This, naturally, has provided those political warriors the National Party with the issue they've been looking for all this time. They intend to "stand or fall" on the future of Australia's remaining family farms! Oh yeah?

THE ONE UNANSWERED QUESTION

As we have noted, the election has been dumbed down to a competition in bribes from the major parties as to where they will allocate the choice crumbs remaining from the tax-table. The choices are determined solely by where the most votes can be won, rather than by any justice or equity. But this is only part of the equation. What about Australia's money supply? It was Meyer Rothschild who is reputed to have said, "Permit me to issue a nation's money and I care not who makes its laws."

In the three years since the last election, Australia's money supply has increased from $335 billion (April 1998, Reserve Bank Bulletin for June 1998 – M3 figures) to $430 billion (April 2001, Reserve Bank Bulletin for June 2001 – M3 figures). Of these totals, the actual cash component – notes and coins – was $21 billion in 1998, and 26 billion in 2001, approximately 5% of the total in each year. Averaged out over the three year period, the Australian Money Supply (Cash and Credit) has increased by an average $87 million per day! All of which is lent into the system, at interest, by the banking system – in the form of millions of loans to public and private sectors alike: mortgages, business loans, loans for public works, car loans etc. Isn't it time we had some sort of debate in Australia as to whether this is the best way of doing things?

Who should create "new" money? What is the formula for deciding how much? Should it be credited into the economy, or continue as an ever-increasing interest-bearing debt? Does this way of doing things mean that Australia's internal debts are always bigger than the amount of money available for repayment of loans?

During the Great 1930s Depression we had a Royal Commission into this question. The final report confirmed that the Government had the power to issue money without interest, or even without the need for repayment. (Section 504) The powers for this function are contained in Section 51 of the Constitution. Isn't it possible that a re-arrangement of our money-creating process just might get Australia out of its poverty-and-debt cycle? And why, in the never-ending analysis of taxation and election bribes, which clog our current affairs programmes, do we never get an intelligent discussion of this all-important start to the argument? It couldn't be, could it, that there's some sort of vested interest in keeping it off the agenda?

HENDY COWAN, NATIONAL PARTY, SLEDGES ONE NATION

by Betty Luks
National Party WA Senate candidate Hendy Cowan would do well to reconsider the tactics he is using to drum up votes in the coming federal election. He has used an event "attended by 120 people from Chinese, Vietnamese, Taiwanese, Indian and Sri Lankan backgrounds" to sledge One Nation describing it as "the most divisive force on the social and political landscape It seems his "main reason for running for the Senate was to deny it (One Nation) a voice in Canberra" – The West Australian, 25/10/01.

I would have expected a candidate for the Senate would want to represent the interests of the whole State from whence he comes. Isn't his stand divisive? It will not go down well with many West Australian voters to learn Mr. Cowan's Senate campaign is being backed by leading members of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce whilst at the same time he is publicly sledging One Nation candidates for being patriotic, wanting a say in the nation's politics and wanting an independent and sovereign nation.
In case Mr. Cowan hasn't noticed, many Australians have had enough of politicians sneering at and criticising them when they protest at their country being divided by political parties, United Nations treaties and the multicultural industry.

Mr. Cowan has obviously not been listening to the talk-back programmes where Australians have been having their say on these issues. What about the polling on the illegal refugees? Can't he understand the people are saying "enough is enough"?

PREFERENTIAL VOTING STRATEGIES

WHY, WHY, WHY, OSAMA BIN LADEN'S JIHAD?

from David Irving's website
Osama bin Laden is on a self-declared holy war against 'Crusaders and Jews,' with a three-fold goal
• 'liberating' Mecca and the rest of Arabia from American 'occupation',
• 'liberating' Al Aqsa in Jerusalem from Jewish 'occupation'
• and lifting the Western embargo on Iraq.

They're always stated in that three-fold form, and usually in that order. The fact is, Osama bin Laden spiked that soup for the White House. He arranged for a video pièce justificative to be broadcast on CNN a few hours after the US attack began. It was ironic that no sooner had CNN broadcast this and allowed Bin Laden his propaganda coup, than the Bush regime, challenging the very freedom which all Americans most cherish, prevailed upon the main news channels never again to show such "enemy" videos (on the very dubious pretext that the Arabic text, even when translated into mediocre English, might contain some hidden-language instructions to more terror-agents on US soil).

So what was the explicit message that Bin Laden presented, in his tortuous and unctuous language?
He offered three answers to the question Why. He stated the same reasons for the assault of September 11th that any highschool boy, properly munitioned with the truth, could immediately have spelt out, even before the blazing Twin Towers had collapsed:
• Muslims are angered by the illegal American and British 10-year blockade of Iraq, which has led to the deaths of half a million innocent children;
• Muslims are frustrated with the blind American support and arming of the bullying Nazi regime in Israel and its terrorising of the long-suffering Palestinian people;
• Muslims are enraged by the American "infidel's" military and commercial presence in Saudi Arabia, home of their holiest shrines.

Until these three basic causes of Muslim anger are confronted, there will be no peace for the Americans, and they will drag much of the rest of the civilized world into a slough of misery.

But none of the American (nor Australian ...Ed) people is being provided with a complete set of facts to ponder on. The media seem to be joined in a silent conspiracy to avoid asking the W-Question. Why did the 19 intelligent and virile young Muslims, with everything to live for, choose to die a violent death instead and tear thousands of innocent strangers into that Moloch along with them? Whatever we may think of the evilness and immorality of the corporate structures that infested the Twin Towers, and indeed, some corridors of the Pentagon, there can be no doubt of the individual innocence of the thousands who died – just as those who were burned alive in Dresden, Wuppertal, and Pforzheim were innocent, or those incinerated in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or blitzed in London and Coventry.

It is eternally the Why that powers the What, the happening. Why did Adolf Hitler invade Poland in 1939? Why did the Japanese turn against the United States and British Empire? Why did the Estonians and Latvians and Lithuanians, and the SS and their cohorts, line up the Jews on the edge of tank ditches in the Baltic States in 1941 and shoot them to death? Why why, why!

To look for an explanation is not the same as seeking a justification. A crime is always fundamentally explicable, even when it is not justifiable. That brings us back to Lower Manhattan, to the unforgettable lifetime-spectacle of the collapsing Twin Towers, and the faces pressed against the windows of the upper floors – the floors above the inferno, the floors from which there could be no escape
(although I still wonder why, in the 90 minutes that the drama lasted, no attempts were made with helicopters to lift people off the viewing platforms on the flat roofs: That too is a Why question, but a Why bound up within a much larger Why: Why did they do it, those 19 young men?)

Nobody seems willing to ask, in case explanation is mistaken for justification. Part of the answer is obvious, as is evident from the guilty speed with which Mayor Rudi Giuliani flung back the 10-million dollar cheque at the Saudi prince who wrote it to benefit the city's victims, before having the audacity to suggest his own answer: US foreign policy was to blame. So the prince tactfully put it. Yes indeed. The Emperor had no clothes. That was it all along. But that was an explanation that stuck in the much-lauded mayor's craw, even at a price tag of 10 million dollars for the needy orphans and widows, and he returned the cheque. He knows where his votes come from.

When I heard of that episode, I ceased to muse on cause and effect, and I began to think about pride, prejudice, and price. How much, what figure, would the Saudi prince have had to write on that cheque to make it irresistible to the City of New York? How many zeroes would have entitled him to suggest that US foreign policy lay behind the crime of September 11th, and to force Rudi to swallow it? Everybody's pride, I mused, even Rudi Giuliani's, even New York City's, has a price – a figure on that cheque which would have caused even His Holiness the Mayor to gulp and say, Well, on balance I guess we're going to have to allow His Royal Highness to make his comment on the reason Why.

Many years ago, I recalled, while staying with my late agent Max Becker in New York (may God rest his soul) I stumbled by accident across a public-access television channel, broadcasting some hours after the midnight watershed – I think it was Channel 49. It had a programme produced by a TV personality called Ugly George, who visibly lived up to his name. The compulsiveness, nay repulsiveness, of that programme lay in its premise that everybody has his (or in this case, her) price. He took a camera team into Fifth Avenue in the evening, as the office girls poured out of the skyscrapers, zeroed in on one of the most comely of them, and then offered her a steadily increasing sum of cash to perform a lewd act for the camera's benefit. At first of course she indignantly refused. But every girl, so it seemed to the camera anyway, had her price. Once the greenbacks had been thumbed out in a thick enough wad in front of her, she willingly enacted whatever Ugly George commanded of her: Once the price was right.

Yes, New York had an ugly side, and it still has, and most of us know what it is, and nobody dares call it by its name. The Americans prefer to take fresh terror into account, on whatever front these obviously fearless, intelligent, and flexible enemies may choose, rather than face up to the reason WHY.

GOOD ONE PAULINE!

by Betty Luks
The B'nai B'rith "Anti-Defamation Commission Inc. Australia/New Zealand" issued a media release naming "Candidates & Parties" whom they consider to have 'racist & anti-Semitic links'. The Board of Advisers to this group consist of well-known republicans – some of whom still cling to their knighthoods, although they have in effect renounced their allegiance to our Queen! Ten persons are named in the media release, including Independents such as John Pasqueralli, standing for the seat of Bendigo in Victoria, Selwyn Johnson, seat of Blair, and Tony Pitt, seat of Wide Bay – both in Queensland, and One Nation candidate, Denis Collins, seat of Bass in Tasmania.

Interviewed by The Chronicle, 26/10/01, Pauline gave the B'nai B'rith Anti-defamation Commission a great 'serve'. Asked about One Nation candidate Denis Collins' links with "racist or anti-Jewish groups," Pauline responded by angrily dismissing the smear attempts. She is quoted as saying the "B'nai B'rith's action was absolutely pathetic... You can't say what you think in this country any more... The thought police were stifling freedom of speech... There shouldn't be any Jewish organisations. There shouldn't be any Chinese organisations... We are all Australians... and that means freedom of speech."

Liblabs: one party two names
Pauline would do well to remind the 'Liblabs' (one party, two names) of the beliefs most Australians still share: Belief in Australia and her national sovereignty; Parliaments deriving their authority from the People; standing positively for the free man and the great human freedoms – to worship, to think, to speak, to choose, to be ambitious, to be independent.

Check out the candidates in your electorate, examine their stand, check out your own conscience, and vote – or don't record a vote – responsibly! We also encourage our readers and supporters to give, wherever possible, help and assistance, to those candidates who stand for those values and traditions in the coming federal election. We know there are many supporters already quietly working away in their own electorates in the political battle for this nation.

BASIC FUND LAUNCHED

BOOKS, JOURNAL

The League has a truly great feast of reading and information for its supporters
SPECIAL CORRECTED PRICE FOR CHURCHILL'S WAR 2-Triumph in Adversity: Please note the special corrected price for Churchill's War Vol. 2. is now $75.00 including GST. The posted price is $80.00. Order from your State book service NOW.
David Irving's "Churchill's War: Volume 2" was launched at The New Times Dinner. The first volume was published in 1987, and after an uneasy birth, the second volume appears 14 years later. The second volume narrates the middle years of World War 2. This work benefits from the release of thousands of secret files. Thus, says Irving, we now know more about Anthony Eden's role in the murder of Admiral Darlan. The human side of Churchill reaches boldly out – lively, incorrigible, sometimes callous – but meek and subservient to Moscow and Washington."

"Vigilance – A Defence of British Liberty" – In his review of the book, Anthony Cooney poses the question, "Why have we not specified the penalties of EU treason which will be exacted from both politicians and high-ranking officials when Great Britain is once more free? Those penalties ought to be plainly specified and it ought to be understood that they will be pursued against both the carcasses and estates of deceased traitors. There is plenty of room where Cromwell's skull stood on Tower Hill!" $45 posted direct from your State bookmailing centre.

"Heritage" Journal: The latest edition of the "Heritage" journal is a must have. In the third federation issue, editor Nancy Lee has lined up such people as Peter Davis, Mayor of Port Lincoln, "Ye Cannot Serve God and Mammon"; Larry Noye, author "A Lesson of Suppression; Ashley Mote, author "Petition to the Queen"; and Nigel Jackson, poet and teacher "State of the Nation". The front cover features a reproduction of the hand-painted tiles by David Byard displayed in the decades-old Commonwealth Bank, Griffiths, NSW. Peter Davis describes the beautiful tiles and the stories they depict, "A tile offers borrowers the following, 'Borrow up to £10,000 for up to 41 years @ 4,5% fixed with half-yearly payments... Another tile states, 'The bank you own reports to you'. Not any more Peter exclaims! Nigel Jackson warns Australians, "The coalition can no longer be relied on to defend traditional Australia or Australian independence. The questions arise as to whether or not One Nation can be developed into a viable conservative party... it cannot be too strongly asserted that no 'third party' of a conservative, nationalist kind is going to have any chance of rallying the Australian people in suffi-cient numbers if it funks the necessary open and frank rejection of current political taboos... Single copy $8 posted; two copies for $15 posted. Or subscribe now $30 pa.
Send to The Australian Heritage Society, PO Box 163, Chidlow, WA, 6556.

MEA TAPES

ADELAIDE CONSERVATIVE SPEAKERS' CLUB

THE LEAGUE'S BOOK SERVICES

As well as the publication of journals for the dissemination of information, the League publishes and distributes a wide range of educational books, videos and cassette tapes. These are available at meetings, at our Melbourne bookshop or by mail order from the following addresses:

Victoria & Tasmania: Heritage Bookshop, 2nd Floor, 145 Russell Street, Melbourne, 3000. (GPO Box 1052J, Melbourne, 3001). Phone: (03) 9650 9749; Fax: (03) 9650 9368.

New South Wales: Heritage Book Service, PO Box 6086, Lake Munmorah, 2259. Phone/Fax: (02) 4358 3634.

Queensland: Conservative Book Mailing Service, P.O. Box 7108, Toowoomba Mail Centre, 4352. Phone (07) 4635 7435.

Western Australia: Heritage Book Mailing Service, PO Box 163, Chidlow, 6556. Phone/Fax: (08) 9574 6042.

South Australia: Heritage Book-Mailing Service, PO Box 208, Ingle Farm, 5098. Phone: (08) 8395 9826; Fax: (08) 8395 9827

Election comment authorised by Betty Luks, 145 Russell Street, Melbourne, 3000.