Bank Fraud in Australia Is  a Step Toward Controlling the Economy and the People

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As tragic and unjust as bank fraud is and the number of people who have suffered at the hands of corrupt banking institutions and a corrupt government, the stakes are still higher and will affect even more Australians causing even more suffering. The bank frauds that have been an endemic plague for nearly a generation or more have been directed at small businesses and family farmers so that corporations and the corporate state can obtain total control of the people. Too many family farmers would make difficult the corporatization of the food and fiber industry. Before the Australian government can take control of water. food and fiber they must whittle down the number of privately held farms and businesses. Bank Fraud has been their weapon of choice against free enterprise and freedom. Tested on Australians, the project can be readily expanded to the rest of the world."

Prime Minister John Howard has presented legislation to the Parliament, authorising the Federal Government to seize control of all of the water of the Murray-Darling Basin from the states, and to put it under a new Federal agency with dictatorial powers. Just before Victorian Premier Steve Bracks and his Water Minister John Thwaites suddenly resigned on Friday, July 27, Bracks charged that Howard's actual intent was to privatise all of the Basin's water. Caught, Howard bellowed that Bracks was "desperate, stupid, inaccurate and just totally wrong."

It is Howard who is desperate. The global financial system is now crashing down, and the financial oligarchy which owns Howard is attempting to grab control over such vital assets as raw materials, food, and water, so as maintain their political power when their paper, and even their banks vaporise. Howard's legislation will give his owners control over the Basin's water for which they will charge whatever they want, and, by bankrupting most of the farmers there, in Australia's food bowl as this legislation assuredly will make us dependent on multinational agribusiness for our food.

Howard lied that he had no secret plan to privatise the Basin's water, but the plot is hardly a secret: it has been underway since another rabid privatiser, Prime Minister Paul Keating, initiated it in 1994 through an agreement of the Council of Australian Governments (COAG), and as part of the same National Competition Policy which led to the other privatisations in gas, electricity, transport and telecommunications. It picked up steam when the Murray-Darling Basin Commission started interstate water trading in 1998, and accelerated rapidly when Howard created his National Water Initiative (NWI) in 2003, and then the National Water Commission (NWC) in December 2004, to implement the NWI. Its final phase is the legislation now before Parliament, which Howard intends to ram through before the Federal election, and it has the full backing of Kevin Rudd's ALP.

Howard's enraged reply to Bracks notwithstanding, Howard, his Water Minister Malcolm Turnbull, and all of the key personnel of the institutions named above have constantly trumpeted their intent to privatise water, often under such typical NWC euphemisms as the "principles of consumption-based pricing and full cost recovery". Or, when NWC Chairman Ken Matthews lectures all over the country, he emphasises such "Reform Challenges" as, in his words:

• The water stewardship concept engages the private sector in improved water management. To [sic] often, water is seen as just the business of governments and in my view this is both myopic, and wrong;

• pricing reform not keeping pace with the task (e.g. recovery of water management costs; recovery of urban investments);
• strengthen competition and innovation and private sector opportunities;
• significant government subsidy of infrastructure still says the sector is not 'normalised'.

The Prime Minister and Cabinet's own website even features the study, "A Discussion Paper on the Role of the Private Sector in the Supply of Water and Wastewater Services". Echoing Bracks, NSW's Minister for Lands and Regional Development, Tony Kelly, declared on August 2, 2007, "I am just a little bit worried this is all about making water another commodity so that Macquarie Bank can be able to buy and sell it and make an absolute fortune".

An absolute fortune, indeed: under the 1994 COAG agreements, governments corporatised their water utilities, which are worth over $70 billion, but would be sold for far less. The real money would be made in charging consumers and the few remaining farmers tens of billions more for water.

The Murray-Darling Basin is the breadbasket of Australia, which accounts for 71% of all of our irrigated crops, and feeds 61% of all Australians. At stake, therefore, is the security of our national food supply, as well as the social and economic viability of regional Australia throughout the Basin. Deregulation of the dairy industry and the initial phases of water privatisation have already contributed to the collapse of Australia's farms by 20,000 from an official figure of 150,391 in 1994 to 130,526 today, though in reality there are far fewer, because the Australian Bureau of Statistics has changed their definition of what is a farm, from one with $22,000 of agricultural output to only $5,000, inflating the farm numbers.

The Privatisation Scam

Privatisation has a simple premise: the less water there is, the more can be charged for it. Thus, there was and has been no serious Federal Government attempts to expand water supplies throughout the entire, horrific drought-ridden period which began coincident with Keating's initial moves toward water privatisation in 1994-95, right through until today. Water supplies to farmers have been shrinking throughout that period, not solely, or perhaps even mainly, due to drought, but to governmental action or inaction, including, most recently, the cut-off of water allocations, and the diversion of ever-larger quantities into "environmental flows".

The whole process of privatising government assets, including water, was begun internationally under the Thatcher government in Britain, and was designed by a London-based think tank, the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS), the granddaddy of all right-wing, deregulationist, pro-globalist think tanks internationally. The MPS was set up after World War II by the British Crown and its chief financier, Harley Drayton, to organise against the type of strong national government represented by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the U.S., which would not kneel to the financial oligarchy. Given the Crown's role in privatisation, it is lawful that the President of the Murray-Darling Basin Commission is the Rt. Hon. Ian Sinclair, a member of Her Majesty's Privy Council. On behalf of, and answerable only to the Crown, the Privy Council is the ruling body of Britain and its still-existing empire ("Commonwealth"). Upon induction, all members swear sole allegiance to the Crown, and an oath of complete secrecy regarding any Privy Council business, which includes any financial business of substance throughout the empire.

All of the chief personnel involved in Howard's "water reforms", from the Murray-Darling Basin Commission through his National Water commission, are either hard-core privatisers or radical environmentalists. Notably, Howard stacked the MDBC and NWC with former officials of the radical right-wing, Big Business-financed National Farmers Federation (NFF), and with environmentalist fanatics, notably from the notorious Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists [sic]. (As in the global warming scam, Big Business is in bed with the environmental lobby, which it has heavily financed.)

The Role of the NFF

The single most important figure in determining water allocations in the Murray-Darling Basin, has been Dr. Wendy Craik, Chief Executive of the Murray-Darling Basin Commission since 2004, and the Executive Director of the NFF from 1995-2000.

However, since the MDBC could not force changes in water flows and allocations, Howard founded the NWC to establish the infrastructure and policies for such mandatory changes, and two of its seven ruling Commissioners were top figures in the NFF: Peter Corish, the national president of the NFF from 2002-2006 when he left to join the NWC, and longtime Howard hit-man, David Trebeck, the founding Deputy Director of the NFF and the mastermind of the 1997-98 plot to bust the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA). NFF personnel also co-wrote the Workplace Relations Act 1996 as the precursor to the present, anti-human Work Choices Act. Many think that the NFF'er and MDBC boss Craik is the obvious choice to head up the new Murray-Darling Basin Authority, which will dictate what her Murray-Darling Basin Commission could only suggest.

The NFF itself has endorsed Howard's new legislation, though it is obvious that it will decimate regional Australia. Their endorsement is not surprising, since the NFF is known by most farmers as "No Family Farms", and was founded to help push free trade and deregulation throughout the economy, as it is now doing with water.

The full story of the NFF is told in the Citizens Electoral Council's 1998 96-page pamphlet, Stop the British Crown Plot to Crush Australia's Unions we will summarise the essentials here.

When Howard first came to power in March 1996, six members of his government were closely affiliated with the H.R. Nicholls Society, a radical deregulationist spin-off from the Crown's Mont Pelerin Society. These included Howard himself, Defense Minister Ian McLachlan (a former president of the NFF), Treasurer Peter Costello, Minister for Workplace Relations Peter Reith, Assistant Treasurer Rod Kemp, and Minister for Employment David Kemp. The H.R. Nicholls Society was named after the turn-of-the-century editor of the Hobart Mercury, who crusaded against Mr. Justice Higgins, the President of the Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration, for his finding in the famous 1907 Sunshine Harvester case, that labour must be paid a "living wage" sufficient to support a worker, his wife, and three children.

The H.R. Nicholls Society, in turn, was indistinguishable from the leadership of the NFF, who had helped found H.R. Nicholls. The NFF itself had been founded in 1979 by members of the blueblood, Anglophile Australian Woolgrowers and Graziers Council, to lobby for free trade and to bust up the farmer-labour alliance policy of longtime Minister of Trade, the legendary John "Black Jack" McEwen, based upon a policy of rapid economic growth generated by a policy of "Protection All Around", for both agriculture and for manufacturing. The AWGC's Executive Director was David Trebeck, soon to be the founding Deputy Director of the NFF. Money poured in from Big Business to finance NFF actions against the unions, including the "wide combs" dispute in the shearing industry, and the Mudginberri abattoir conflict.

When then-Transport Minister John Sharp in early 1997 commissioned a report into "waterfront reform", he awarded an $80,000 contract to the Canberra-based industrial consultants, ACIL Economics (later known as ACIL Tasman), whose principals were NFF officials David Trebeck and Paul Houlihan, who was to be one of three authors of the union-busting Workplace Relations Act. Without tender, ACIL was then given a further $600,000 to develop the master plan to smash the MUA, complete with Dubai-trained strikebreakers from among Australian military veterans, overseen by Defense Minister and former NFF president Ian McLachlan.

To help crush the MUA, Big Business poured in funds to the NFF's Australian Farmers Fighting Fund (AFFF), which newspapers reported totaled $100 million. It was overseen by two well-known farmers: former Coles Myer chairman Nobby Clark, who was a partner with Rio Tinto in the world's largest diamond mine, Argyle in WA; and HR Nicholls cofounder Charles Copeman, who as a CRA executive had sacked his entire unionised workforce at Robe River in WA. Its trustees included NFF Executive Director Dr. Wendy Craik, who later headed up the National Competition Council until Howard tapped her to head the MDBC in 2004.

Besides the NFF'ers, another Howard appointee is Professor Peter Cullen, a member of the Wentworth Group, which advocates cutting off water supplies to agriculture and similar genocidal actions. In fact, contrary to Howard's phony pledge of "no forced reduction in allocations", Cullen openly calls for precisely that, as in The Australian on January 10, 2007. Among his other posts, Cullen is a member of the Natural Heritage Trust Advisory Committee, which specialises in locking up land in perpetuity. The Wentworth philosophy is most famously expressed by the quack "scientist" Tim Flannery, who demands that Australia's population be cut back to six million, and by fellow Wentworth member Prof. Mike Young of the University of Adelaide, who also calls for compulsory acquisition of water allotments because "the market is too small", as in his recent discussion paper. In fact, "buying water on the market should come before spending on water infrastructure, to allow the market to show which irrigation systems warrant future investment and which should be scrapped," Young told Stock & Land on June 12, 2007. "Some systems will inevitably be abandoned as water flows from them, with associated impact on rural communities", but, he chortled, "this would be a sign that the market is working."

Still another Howard appointee to the NWC is Chloe Munro, who oversaw the electricity sector "reforms" (i.e. wholesale privatisation) under former Victorian Premier and Mont Pelerin stooge Jeff Kennett.

How the Scam Actually Works

In January 2007, Howard gave merchant banker Malcolm Turnbull the newly tailor-made Cabinet post of Minister for the Environment and Water Resources, precisely for the purpose of overseeing the privatisation of the Murray-Darling under the MDBA. Turnbull is unabashed about his enthusiasm for water privatisation.

Go to Part 2, Bankrupting Agriculture

History of Banking Fraud: The Coming Battle By  M. W. WALBERT 

 The Coming Battle documents from Congressional records, newspaper reports and writings by the founding fathers and others a chronology of events long forgotten that shaped our fledgling nation from 1776 to 1899. Read about the manipulation of our money and its supply, the intentional creation of recessions, depressions and panics, manipulation of the stock markets, and the demonetization of silver.

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Eustace Mullins' carefully researched and documented treatise picks up from Walbert's expose' and brings it to the mid 1980's