BRIBING US WITH OUR OWN MONEY

by Jeremy Lee
Having budgeted for a Budget Surplus of $7.8 billion, the Howard Government now finds itself in a position where the Surplus has burgeoned to $12.7 billion (Weekend Australian, 30/9-1/10/2000), about $1,000 per average family of four. Part of this growth is from the 'windfall' of indexed excise taxes which have automatically risen with world oil prices. Any suggestion that some of this should be returned to beset taxpayers, or that the excise take should have been pegged to pre-rise oil prices has been refused by Prime Minister Howard. A nice, 'politically-correct' set of budget figures is obviously a priority of Treasurer Costello. But nowhere is there any estimate for the resulting hardship in the community - the extra costs of unavoidable transport and travel; the obvious lack of adequate funding in many public areas such as health, education, roads.

Small business and farming continues to be crucified. The former is grappling with the first real impact of the GST - the Business Activity Statement, and the ensuing payment of accumulated GST "takings" to the ATO. It is hard to know what to say about farming. The loss of the wheat harvest in Queensland already has the banks foreclosing on dozens of farmers. The misery of dairy deregulation looks like handing control of the industry overseas. The prospect of higher interest rates - the result of a falling dollar - may well be the last straw for a viable agricultural industry in Australia. But so long as Howard and Costello have their huge Budget Surplus - an electoral treasure-chest for the election which must be held within a twelvemonth - the politicians may be nervous, but they are happy.

COSTELLO AND THE DONG

With the Australian dollar lurching from one record low to the next, Treasurer Costello was hard put to it to find another currency which had fallen to such levels. The Australian Financial Review (4/10/2000) reported on a question put to Costello by shadow-treasurer Simon Crean: "The question by ...Mr. Simon Crean was aimed at challenging the Government claim that the $A is only losing ground against the rocketing US dollar. " Mr. Crean said that in the past month the dollar had fallen against the Mexican peso, the Vietnamese dong, the Venezuelan bolivar, the Algerian dinar, the Bulgarian leva, the Bangladeshi take, the Mongolian tughrik, the Botswana pula and Swaziland's ligangeni ....."

Mr. Costello was able to find one currency which had fallen further - the New Zealand dollar!

ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF CORPORATE BULLYING

The issue of corporate control and political manipulation of political parties has received an added twist with the latest news from South Australia.
The Weekend Australian (14-15/10/2000) reported: "Some of Australia's most successful companies have threatened to uproot their South Australian operations and take jobs to other states if they are not granted taxpayer-funded packages. " Government sources have confirmed the state Government has paid out millions of dollars to subsidise highly profitable companies' local operations - many of which have donated funds to the Liberal Party - in expensive bidding wars against other states ....."

What does this mean? That 'other States' are offering bigger inducements? What a pathetic and immoral use of taxpayers' money! The new immorality of Australia's corporate-business elite was well captured in a two-page essay by John Carroll, Reader in Sociology at LaTrobe, and author of the hard-hitting book Shutdown. Carroll's theme is that the old service motive in business leaders of yesteryear has been totally replaced by greed in the new corporate leadership - Australian Financial Review (6/10/2000):
" .... A first principle of government should be to protect the people, and especially those less able to look after themselves. Yet there was little interest shown in counterbalancing the running down of manufacturing industry, the pauperising of much of rural Australia, the undermining of permanent full-time jobs in favour of unreliable part-time ones - and thereby compromising the chances of people in their 20s moving towards buying their own homes ...."

The cynicism produced by the gap between word and deed had, John Carroll said, spread throughout the community, particularly amongst the young, producing a "complete collapse of civic idealism among those entering adulthood ..." This had finally produced the eradication of values society needed for survival.

Carroll drew attention to the following passage in The Communist Manifesto: " ....The bourgeoisie ... has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash-payment'. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy waters of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indeafesible chartered freedoms, has set up a single, unconscionable freedom - Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by political and religious illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation ...."
" .... It means the country, served by its current elites, is in deep trouble."

The fact that Marxism-Leninism offered an even worse alternative does not alter the fact that, in this case, Marx's analysis was apt. Without a regeneration of morality, which stems from a preliminary spiritual regeneration, Australia's society is now sliding into chaos.

FOREIGN DEBT OUT OF CONTROL

As if to reinforce the article by John Carroll, the latest figures show Australia's gross foreign liabilities approaching $700 billion. Net foreign debt is now about $400 billion. Bill McConnell, writing in the AFR (6/10/00), said:
".... The $A has languished below US60c. for three consecutive months, recording nine record lows against the US dollar. It seems the longer the $A remains anchored to its lows, the greater the number of analysts suggesting the current exchange rate may be long-lasting rather than temporary ....In August this year, US financial giant Salomon Smith Barney/Citibank circulated a report examining the flow of funds into and out of the Australian dollar. The report concluded that the $A 'is particularly vulnerable because of the continuing large current account deficit'. A 15 percent rise in net foreign liabilities during the 1990s has meant that the 'growing call on foreign investors' portfolios is only possible if either demand for $A assets is growing similarly or the $A adjusts down to make $A assets cheaper'. ...."
The latter is now happening with a vengeance!

John Howard and Peter Costello, so keen on foreign investment, will only receive this in return for asset sales and takeovers. Brenadan Pearson (AFR, 6/10/2000) pointed out: "Global flows of foreign investment will top $US1 trillion (A$1.8 trillion) this year, driven by a wave of cross-border mergers and acquisitions, according to a new report from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development ...."
What's the betting this will include the sale of the remainder of Telstra at any price, by an increasingly transparent Howard Government?

CONTINUING DAIRY DISASTER

Developments are tragically unbelievable. A report in The Chronicle (Toowoomba, 4/10/2000) said that local milk was being dumped by the tonneful on the local rubbish tip. On October 5th, the same paper said the Calvert family of Nanango - dairy farmers for three generations - had started bottling their own milk under the label "Same Day Fresh Milk" and had been run off their feet by the demand. The milk was being sold across the Downs and into Toowoomba. The Parmelat/Pauls truck which previously collected milk from the Calvert's farm now no longer called. Some retail outlets were now refusing Pauls milk in favour of Same Day Fresh. Whether this local effort can match the huge monopolies forcing untenable prices on dairy farmers remains to be seen. It seems clear that if consumers are given the facts and the choice they will take the local product every time!

Meanwhile, the New Zealand Dairy Group has started buying heavily into Australia's National Foods, making it clear that the war between Parmelat (Italy) Dairy Group (New Zealand) and National Foods (currently Australian but for how long?) to control Australia's stricken Dairy Industry is gaining in intensity.

GLIMPSES OF OBJECTIVE REPORTING

It is heartening to see some objective reporting on the tragic events in the Middle East. Reporting has been so routinely slanted in favour of the US and Israel over the years that any change is welcome. Scott Burchill, lecturer in international relations at Deakin University, had a realistic article published in The Australian (12/10/2000) BETRAYAL OF A LOOTED PEOPLE. It presented a fair case for the Palestinians.

Burchill made the point: " ....The spin-doctors in Washington and Tel Aviv want us to see Arafat as a violent recalcitrant who cannot match Barak's generous concessions and compromises offered at Camp David recently. Palestinians on the ground live a different reality ...." He pointed out how similar current Israeli policy is to the old apartheid regime in South Africa.

Robert Fisk, who has always reported on Middle East affairs without bias asked, in an AFR article (20/10/2000) the obvious question:
"....Why couldn't Barak control the Israeli "security forces" who shot and killed more than 100 Palestinians, including children as young as nine, who fired missiles into a Palestinian apartment block and who then - according to an uncritical BBC reporter - threatened to use machine guns? ...."

(For a deeper look at events in the Middle East, see the October edition of The New Times Survey, obtainable from the Melbourne office, $3.00 posted).

MORE DOUBLESPEAK

by Antonia Feitz
Witnesses said that the two suicide bombers who damaged the naval destroyer USS Cole with a distressing loss of life, stood and saluted just moments before their craft exploded, literally blasting them into eternity as well as a hole in the ship. People will have different opinions on the morality of their act, but for President Clinton to describe it as "a despicable and cowardly act" is surely a misuse of language. It's not cowardly to die for your beliefs. But then, as we've noted many times, Doublespeak is already with us.

Clinton also said the attack would not deter the US from its mission of "promoting peace and security in the Middle East" (Australian, 14-15/10/00). Hmm, so sending a naval destroyer armed with cruise missiles to join other US warships in the Gulf to stop Iraqi attempts to break the UN sanctions is "promoting peace and security".....?

As a recent SBS programme showed (13/10/2000), some nations including France and Russia have begun to ignore the US bullying and the "UN" embargo. Increasingly, decent people can no longer in conscience tolerate the fact that after nine years of the embargo, Iraqi hospitals have no antibiotics and that millions of people are malnourished. The sanctions are not hurting Saddam - once a US star protege - they are hurting ordinary people. True to form, the US defence secretary William Cohen managed to describe this growing concern and compassion as a "lack of international willpower" to maintain the embargo.

BITTER 'FRUITS' OF MULTICULTURALISM

by Betty Luks
"We badly need to rethink our crazy policy of multiculturalism, after the County Court decided not to jail three members of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish family who had helped steal $20million from Australian taxpayers," protests Andrew Bolt (Melbourne Herald Sun, 19/10).

Nachum Goldberg, with his wife and two sons, were found guilty of running a money laundering scheme to help businessmen avoid paying their taxes. Although this Jewish family have managed to funnel at least $42 million to bank accounts in Israel and Switzerland over a seven-year period only the father received a jail sentence - of five years.

Andrew Bolt tells his readers how the system works for 'ethnic' groups: "...Multiculturalists have insisted our institutions adapt to ethnic and cultural groups, rather than the other way around. So if jail doesn't suit ultra-Orthodox Jews, then jailed they may not be." He asks, "Want to know how it works? Go back to the Goldberg case. Here is an allegedly pious family, happy to help cheat our community of $20 million. Why? Did they feel it wasn't really their community they were helping to rob?" "Maybe - given how Melbourne's 1,200-strong Adass community rallied behind them, paying their $1 million legal bill, school fees and mortgage."

Letters of outrage at the blatant 'one law for them - another law for us' have appeared in the major daily papers. In the Sydney Morning Herald (17/10), under the heading 'Too religious to go to jail', letters to the editor protested at the outrageous preferential treatment meted out to Mr. Goldberg and his family in comparison with the treatment of Aboriginals, or the five-year sentence handed out to another man for defrauding investors of $628,000.

A former Long Bay prisoner, explained to readers the Jewish faith, like other faiths, prohibits stealing and fraud. He muses, "...it is peculiar that they should have been spared the ordinary consequence of their actions by the profession of those beliefs. Does this mean that they or others of a similar view can commit other crimes without threat of imprisonment? This could be information of use to many." It certainly could!

But Andrew Bolt goes to the crux of the matter when referring to Judge Strong's bewilderment at the level of Jewish community support in paying the Goldberg's legal and other expenses. "Attempts were made to explain it on religious and cultural grounds," he writes, "But such ethnic or religious solidarity isn't limited to the Adass. Not when Palestinians in Sydney and Canberra this week firebombed synagogues. Not when Kurds last year trashed a Greek consulate. Not when our main Aboriginal body, ATSIC, ...has backed demands that half our land be put under black rule where 'the laws of the white man would not apply.'"

At last, Australians such as Andrew Bolt are waking up to the fact that their country, their nation has been deliberately fragmented by multiculturalism! Hopefully he is right when he says, "But our tolerance may finally be snapped by the Goldbergs. If so, it may be the only good we get from the millions they helped steal from us."

THE SPIRIT OF THE LAW AND 'DISPENSATIONS'

Israeli-Jew Israel Shahak helps us to understand why an ultra-Orthodox Jewish family did not see it as wrong to resort to criminal activities in this country.. In his book, "Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years", in the section on 'dispensations' he tells us:

"...the talmudic system is most dogmatic and does not allow any relaxation of its rules even when they are reduced to absurdity by a change in circumstances. And in the case of the Talmud - contrary to that of the Bible - the literal sense of the text is binding (emphasis added) ... in the period of classical Judaism various talmudic laws became untenable for the Jewish ruling classes - the rabbis and the rich. In the interest of these ruling classes, a method of systematic deception was devised for keeping the letter of the law, while violating its spirit and intention..."

Social Aspects of Dispensations
"From the ethical point of view, classical Judaism represents a process of degeneration, which is still going on; and this degeneration into a tribal collection of empty rituals and magic superstitions has very important social and political consequences... it is precisely the superstitions of classical Judaism which have the greatest hold on the Jewish masses, rather than those parts of the Bible or even the Talmud which are of real religious and ethical value... What is popularly regarded as the most 'holy' and solemn occasion of the Jewish liturgical year... is the Kol Nidrey prayer on the eve of Yom Kipper - a chanting of a particularly absurd and deceptive dispensation by which all private vows made to God in the following year are declared in advance to be null and void... Together with the deception of God goes the deception of other Jews (and Gentiles? Ed.)

The second dominant feature of the dispensations is that they are in large part obviously motivated by the spirit of profit..." (emphasis added).

Born in Poland, but now living in Israel, Shahak enlightens his readers, "The religious establishment - the rabbis and the religious parties - and, by association, to some extent the Orthodox community as a whole, are quite unpopular in Israel. One of the most important reasons for this is precisely their reputation for duplicity and venality..."

Reviewing Ehud Sprinzak's book, "Brother Against Brother: Violence and Extremism in Israeli Politics..." reviewer Ben Haneman admits to this division in Israel (Australian Jewish News, 29/9/2000): "We all know that there are at least two Israels, and the battle raging in the broadest terms concerns whether the land should be governed by the Torah and its interpretations, or by the Charter of the United Nations, and by implication, democracy."

One wonders how Israelis define the word 'democracy' and whether they are in agreement on the definition.

However, before we try to pry the splinters out of the eyes of the Jews, Australians need to come to grips with the corruption, duplicity and venality amongst, not only their own ruling elite, but within all levels of society. Whilst we would not agree with the underlying philosophies of Judaism or the United Nations, we can, and do, sympathise with those Israelis and Palestinians who want to find answers that will bring genuine peace to the Middle East.

FUTURE PROJECTS

An Australian Women On Line (AWOL) website.
We are going to set up a website for Australian Women and it will be devoted to their causes and interests. What! You don't have a computer? Your local library probably has one and you will find the library allows the community to access it! For those who are not familiar with what happens, ask your friendly librarian about it.

No matter what the subject, family's health, vaccination, home-education, the wool industry, the sugar-cane industry, any individual initiatives; whatever it might be that concerns the women of Australia, we need to know about it, we will publicise it through the website. It will then be available to all who tune in. There will be links to other websites with relevant information. We want to hear from Australian women on this project. Write to Betty Luks, P.O. Box 27, Happy Valley S.A. 5159. Tell her what you want to see on the website.

LETTER

In defence of Dr. Fred Toben, the following letter was sent to The Australian by Mr. Nigel Jackson.

"The finding of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission against the Adelaide Institute and its director, Dr. Fredrick Toben (The Australian, 11/10) represents a victory of interests over principles. "The HREOC can fairly be described as a pseudo-judicial body which was established and entrenched a few decades ago by servile and foolish governments to advance the interests of Jewish pressure groups and other minority ethnic bodies. Its 1991 report Racist Violence, compiled by two members of such groups, is scandalously prejudiced and was correctly denounced as such in the Parliament by the courageous and independent member for Kalgoorlie, Mr. Graeme Campbell.

Any fair-minded person who studies the publications of the Adelaide Institute over recent years will quickly realise that the HREOC's poorly articulated claim that none of its 'Holocaust material' is 'of historical, intellectual or scientific standard' is nonsense. During the last fifty years a significant number of highly intelligent and academically qualified people have cast profound doubt on the received version of 'the Holocaust which was promoted after World War Two and became prominent in the seventies.
The simplistic claim (of doubtful veracity) that all 'mainstream historians' agree that 'the Holocaust' consumed 'the lives of six million Jews' will not remove that doubt.

It is probably tautologous, the definition of 'mainstream' being 'those who accept the received version'. Historical disagreement of this kind should be dealt with by free and open debate in the intellectual forums of the land and not by appeal from a financially powerful elite to biased commissions or the courts." - Nigel Jackson, Belgrave, Vic.

WEST AUSTRALIA'S 34th ANNUAL SEMINAR & DINNER

SYDNEY CONSERVATIVE SPEAKERS' CLUB

ADELAIDE CONSERVATIVE SPEAKERS' CLUB