THE PROPOSED ATTACK ON THE SENATE

Not content with his (temporarily) unassailable position in the polls, and his assumed entitlement to decide everything, from Australia's war status to who should be the head of State, Prime Minister Howard has now announced that he wishes to reduce the powers of the Senate. Instead of a "house of review" he says, it is now a "house of obstruction. It has had the temerity to block some of his legislation., which he thinks is unforgivable.

Since he came to power in 1996, the Senate has passed 1205 bills and rejected 28. One or two of these were quite draconian, like the ASIO anti-Terrorism bills, which suspended or watered down a number of ancient rights and freedoms. None of which has smoothed Howard's ruffled tail-feathers. Like Gough Whitlam and Paul Keating before him, he doesn't like his programme being questioned in any way, let alone blocked. He hasn't used the Keating phrase "unrepresentative swill" in describing the Senate; but his general attitude is much the same as the last Labor Prime Minister.

The Senate was established as a States' House, as a check on a perceived threat by a central government on these formerly colonial governments which had ceded a few of their powers for the sake of the new federation. Few people realize that the writs for a Senate election are issued by State Governors - not the Governor-General, as in the case of the House of Representatives. Senate candidates nominate themselves to State Governors, and State Premiers can, theoretically, block unsuitable candidates. Some will remember that Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen nominated his own replacement, Albert Field, for a Labor Senator who had died in office.

Theoretically there is nothing to stop a State Government from requiring a statement of loyalty to the State and to the Constitution before being allowed to stand for office. Why, for example, should a State allow anyone from a party pledged to the abolition of the Senate to stand for office? The party system has destroyed the original idea, making Senators just as subservient to the Party Whip as those in the Lower House. Nevertheless, the emergence of minor parties holding the balance of power in the Senate has made it a much less odious body than that of its lower counterpart.

An excellent article by Mike Steketee (The Australian, 12/6/03) pointed first to what Howard and his predecessors had done to the House of Representatives:
"….So thoroughly have they debauched its role that, were it not for the requirements of the Constitution, we could close it down tomorrow and it would make no difference. Party discipline has become so tight that legislation never gets blocked in the house and seldom receives proper scrutiny. The house does not fulfill its role of holding the Government accountable, as is obvious from the farce that passes for question time …..Oppositions in Australia regularly complain about the decline of parliament. But their enthusiasm for reform just as routinely flags when they get into office because they are reluctant to relinquish the control the present situation gives them …. Howard wants to do to the Senate what successive governments have done to the house - neuter it ….."

It is comforting to find a few journalists capable of discerning what is going on. Whoever wins in the 'ratings game' between Crean and Beazley can hardly be expected to put up a strong stand for the Senate.

WHERE ARE THOSE WEAPONS?

THE LONG-TERM PLAN

Emerging here and there, like the tip of a largely-submerged iceberg, is the exposure of a long term strategic plan, written three months before President Bush gained office. Michael Gaddy wrote in the Sierra Times (US) of 2 March 2003 under the heading THE DEATH CERTIFICATE OF OUR REPUBLIC the following:

"…. I. Like many other supporters of the Constitution, have been asking since the 2000 election; exactly what drives the foreign policy of the Bush Administration? The answer is revealed in the doctrines of the Policy for the New American Century, (P.N.A.C). Neil Mackay, in the Scotland Herald, reveals the master plan now driving the Administration: ..

* A Secret blueprint for United States global domination reveals that President Bush and his Cabinet were planning a premeditated attack on Iraq to secure "regime change" even before he took power in January 2001. The blueprint, uncovered by the Sunday Herald, for the creation of a "global Pax Americana" was drawn up for Dick Cheney (now Vice President), Donald Rumsfeld (Defence Secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy), George W. Bush's younger brother Jeb and Lewis Libby (Cheney's Chief of Staff).
The document, entitled "Rebuilding America's Defences: Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New Century", was written in September 2000, by the neoconservative think-tank Project for the new American Century (P.N.A.C). The plan put forth by PNAC reveals, regardless of whether Saddam Hussein was in power in Iraq, an attack there was preordained. Maybe this can explain why they continue the war beat no matter how many times this administration is caught prevaricating about Iraq.
Inside the document prepared by PNAC is the following:
"The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."

The document also outlines a "blueprint for maintaining global United States preeminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests. This American grand strategy must be advanced as far into the future as possible"…..
It (i.e. the PNAC blueprint):
· Refers to key allies such as the United Kingdom as "the most effective means of exercising American global leadership".
· Describes peacekeeping missions as "demanding American political leadership rather than that of the United Nations".
· Reveals worries in the Administration that Europe could rival the United States of America.
· Says "even should Saddam pass from the scene" bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will remain permanently - despite domestic opposition in the Gulf regimes to the stationing of United States troops - as "Iran may well prove as large a threat to United States interests as Iraq has".
· Spotlights China for "regime change" saying "it is time to increase the presence of American forces in Southeast Asia." This, it says, may lead to "American and allied power providing the spur to the process of democratization of China".
· Calls for the creation of "United States Space Forces", to dominate space, and the total control of cyberspace to prevent "enemies" using the Internet against the United States. (How long will it be before those of us who oppose this quest for empire become the "enemy"?)
· Hints that, despite threatening war against Iraq for developing weapons of mass destruction, the United States may consider developing biological weapons - which the nation has banned - in decades to come. It says: "New methods of attack - electronic, 'non-lethal', biological - will be more widely available …. Combat likely will take place in new dimensions, in space, cyberspace, and perhaps the world of microbes. ….advanced forms of biological warfare that can "target" specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool."
· Pinpoints North Korea, Libya, Syria and Iran as dangerous regimes and says their existence justifies the creation of a "worldwide command-and-control system."

The only reference we have seen to this document in the Australian media has been a comprehensive article by Kenneth Davidson, Staff columnist, in The Age, (Melbourne), March 20 2003:

Davidson substantiated the contents of the report, asking this question:
" ….The question for PM John Howard must be to what extent does his Government subscribe to the Bush strategy outlined in the think-tank's document? Howard says Australia's participation in this war is in Australia's national interests. How? To answer this question we must know why the war is being fought in the first place. For all I know, Bush, Howard and Tony Blair may be absolutely sincere when they claim that getting rid of Saddam is a humanitarian act that will make the Iraqis better off, or that Saddam has the will, the motive and the weapons of mass destruction capable of threatening other countries. But these are not the real reasons for the invasion. The real reasons can be summed up as deciding who controls Middle East oil and gets access to the water from the Tigris and Euphrates, and what currency will be used to pay for the development of the oil and water resources …."

THE LITERATURE OF SOCIAL CREDIT & THE SOCIAL CREDIT OF LITERATURE
by Dewi Hopkins

The Australian Heritage Society launched the Social Credit booklets of Anthony Cooney and Michael Lane at the League of Rights' 2002 National Weekend. Subsequently, writer, poet, and retired school teacher, Mr. Dewi Hopkins of the United Kingdom has written such an excellent review of the books we thought our readers would find much of interest in the review.
He writes:

"I have long considered that reviews are really conversations among writers with readers listening in." Well, our readers can now 'listen in' to his contribution to the writers' debate as to the worth of the works of Cooney and Lane. Source: Liverpool Newsletter, Spring AD 2003).

"It is easy to describe the appearance of a book as a milestone, but that is the only way to welcome these six. Their publication is a milestone indeed, and the Australian Heritage Society is to be congratulated. Anthony Cooney and Michael Lane are the most significant Social Credit/Distributist writers active at present: and that implies no contempt for a number of others. We can all be Indians, but we can't all be chiefs.
I would describe Mr. Cooney and Mr. Lane as traditionalists, and having used that vague term I shall have to show what I mean by it; for on another day I would be just as likely to call them revolutionaries, in the sense of that word understood by most of the writers considered in these books. By traditionalist I mean (here at least) one who is in a tradition: not one who seeks novelty for its own sake in order to stand out from past and present as an innovator, but one who, seeing truth and goodness, holds to it and even enriches it with his own contribution. As has been often pointed out, it is such a person that is a real 'original' or, as Lewis and Tolkien put it, a subcreator.

The best criticism comes from within the Tradition:
The tradition within which Cooney and Lane work is that of Christendom, or western civilisation, though both are well aware of virtues that exist in other traditions. The best criticism is within the tradition, and if we look at, say, our major literary critics they have been engaged in judging not only poetry and prose but also, and in the process, the development (which for a considerable time now has seemed a decline) in the culture of the society (western society, that is) and the interactions of its distinctive parts.
It is useless to conceive of a culture as a thing separate from both 'high' and 'popular' culture if we wish to advance the cause of Social Credit and/or Distributism: obtuse to say, 'Oh, I don't read poetry or take much interest in art, and I don't know much about music.' If the money power is ever to be defeated it will be by a people that knows itself, with a confident and integrated knowledge. Everything seems to combine to achieve the opposite result now, and this tendency has to be reversed before anyone can effectively take on the money power.

"ONE SWORD AT LEAST" - G.K. Chesterton:
Speaking of which, it is in this sense that they both remind me of G.K. Chesterton. To read him you must be prepared to see sparks fly; and mighty glad I am that Mr. Cooney has engaged in a dazzling piece of literary criticism that again reminds me of Chesterton himself who, as a literary critic, almost invariably saw straight to the heart of a matter and expressed his judgements with startling clarity.
It would have been well worth mentioning among recent reprints Chesterton's The Victorian Age in Literature, published recently by Edgeways Books, an imprint of The Brynmill Press.
In the case of Chesterton's poetry, it is shown to be in advance of modernist poetry, not only in that he did compose some free verse (inspired perhaps by Walt Whitman) but also in that his best poetry is multi-levelled, shifting within one poem between times, places and situations. He is referred to as constantly focusing and refocusing his "camera."
'Reviews' are really conversations between writers':
I hope I shall be forgiven for expressing my amazement that Mr. Cooney must have been writing this at the very time when I was writing for Mr. Lane's Triumph of the Past that another poet, the Scot, Andrew Young, had what I dubbed 'the cinematic imagination' and that the cinecamera was an invention waiting to happen. Another friend on reading my essay, telephoned to express his own surprise on finding that he had used (or as he thought 'coined') an expression in an essay that he had sent to his editor only to find that it had been used in my essay already. How or whether this synchronicity can be accounted for I do not know, and I bring in this personal note because I have long considered that reviews are really conversations among writers with readers listening in.

"SOCIAL CREDIT ASTERISKS" - Anthony Cooney
I think that if I entered Anthony Cooney's study I should find the air alive with static electricity from all the ideas generated there over the years. You will see what I mean if you read Social Credit Asterisks, which deals in the liveliest way with a number of topics with no connection obvious to the uninitiated to Social Credit, but each one related to a quotation from C.H. Douglas: thus getting beyond the usual range of Social Credit writing.
Political analysis, social comment -- all are excellent, but what I think I found most entertaining of all was his scourging of the 'God slot,' in which all is shown to be chummy, chummy-churchiness, without the sense of sin and with no content whatsoever of Christian teaching or controversy.

HILAIRE BELLOC 1870-1953
The book on Belloc is incisive, with, even so, amusing and sad autobiographical details engaging my sympathy before the account of Belloc's work on history and tradition leading inescapably to his exposition of Distributism. Whereas he gives us the detailed theory as well as the historic justification of Distributism down from ancient Rome and through the middle ages into the modern period, Chesterton less directly conveys the very spirit of the movement in all his writings.
Douglas again
Unlike them, Douglas (between whom and Belloc there was recognition and mutual respect but also rather sharp difference - which Mr. Cooney manages, to my satisfaction anyway, to reconcile) remains a somewhat elusive figure because he forbade the writing of a biography. Cooney gives us what he can and laments the paucity of recorded informal sayings.
I can offer one here, related to me more than once by the people to whom it was spoken. When they were a young man and woman they had told Douglas that they were fully persuaded by his ideas and proposals and asked him, "What should we do now?" to which he replied, "My dears, you are writers. What you must do is write." And I was assured that he did not mean that they should write Social Credit pamphlets.
Therein, I am convinced, lies the real "real Social Credit." We are given what talents we are given, and we must develop, enjoy and use them. To give us the conditions in which we can practise this freely is the true policy of Douglas, Chesterton and Belloc and of the Christian Church when (occasionally) being true to itself.
Only from this cultural background will worthwhile individual initiative come; and it is against this background of "tradition and the individual talent" that I like to view the newest talent upon the stage.

And now Michael Lane
Michael Lane is a highly educated young man (young compared with me, that is, and I hope he will be pleased, even if surprised, to be so described), and in his monthly Triumph of the Past connects to the age-old Tradition and also shows great respect for wisdom wherever it is to be found (India or Japan, example.) This is the traditionalist. Being aware that nothing comes from nothing he has studied everything he can find that embodies the Social Credit and leads to Douglas.
It is inevitable that what he finds will not simply say what Douglas said before Douglas said it (just as the Chesterbelloc had a vision of the same reality as Douglas but not viewed from quite the same angle.) He is a meticulous researcher, painfully careful to say just what he means and willing to express reservations where necessary. He is zealous but no zealot.

"HERALD OF SOCIAL CREDIT"
The two books considered here have already appeared in parts, as essays in Triumph of the Past, but here they are presented as most satisfactory wholes. Tom Robertson and Charles Ferguson, both of whom realised the flaws and frauds of the monopoly financial system, need careful exposition because - like Douglas -- they do not give up their riches at a first reading.
But they are riches indeed, and I can only acknowledge Mr. Lane's presentation of them has enlarged my understanding considerably. I still need to read Herald of Social Credit more than once again to be sure that I have fully grasped him, partly because Ferguson's prose style is as dipped as Douglas' and his use of some terms such as 'capital' and 'finance' seems to vary between one meaning and another but his proposals to free people to finance themselves independently of the banks through local initiatives seem so radical as to be too good to be true. Examples show a basis in history, however.

"HUMAN ECOLOGY & SOCIAL CREDIT"
Integrity of the sound man in a sound society:-
Robertson's concept of Human Ecology, too, sounds novel, but it embodies not only financial understanding but a view of the integrity of the sound man in a sound society that ties it in with the view of Chesterton that truth is quite simply sanity.
His dissatisfaction with the Christian Church is rather ruefully acknowledged by the (Catholic) Mr. Lane to be far from baseless and this is one of the things that make Lane my kind of writer: that he has an open-minded attitude to criticism. His defence of the Church is none the less convincing for being restrained and rational.
A sense of joy that I am engaging with a real person:
All this, as I say, makes him a traditionalist - and one with a place in the Great Tradition - an impeccable researcher, historian and exponent; but what I also find in him is what I find in all the authors I have mentioned (and certain others, naturally.) That is, a sense of joy; that in reading him I am engaging with a real person. I cannot escape the feeling that now, at last, something is going to come of it all. For eventually the mask of careful impersonality is dropped, and there comes an inspiring peroration. I experience the pure, laughter-inducing pleasure that depends not on jesting (though jesting is a good thing too) but on high intelligence and a fine grasp of vital truth. I am sure that the final chapter of his book on Ferguson holds out promise that an initiative is on the way. I hope to live to see it brought to fruition."

Books by Anthony Cooney:
"Clifford Hugh Douglas" $5.50; "Social Credit Asterisks" $8.50; "One Sword at Least - G.K. Chesterton" $8.00; "Hilaire Belloc 1870-1953" $6.50. Prices include postage and handling.
Books by Michael Lane:
"Human Ecology: and Social Credit" $9.50 "Herald of Social Credit" $11.50. Prices include postage and handling. Available from all League Book Services.

DECLINING NUMBERS IN THE BUSH by Betty Luks

As if the crippling drought was not enough, many rurual centres face the prospect of declining numbers warns Linda Brady of "The Morning Bulletin" 6th June 2003:

"The crippling drought, vanishing services and a perceived lack of opportunities are driving" the young people from the bush. For every four young people who leave Central Queensland's rural areas, only one moves in to "fill the void". In practical terms that is one young person to do the work that four persons once did, which translates into three less in numbers requiring the services of the local doctor, the publican, the mechanic or the local food store.
Linda Drake, Family Support worker for "Lifeline" said a key reason for the exodus was most likely the impact of the drought. "A lot of these young people have seen their parents doing it tough" she said, "and they can see no other alternatives." The present drought came hard on the heels of the early 90's drought, which left many a farmer and grazier in a precarious financial situation.
Another reason for the decline in numbers is that many young women are unwilling to live in the such isolation. "A few years ago," she explained, " young women really targeted young men on the land - they saw them as having great prospects - but even young women can now see what has happened to farming, thanks to the drought, and life on the land is less appealing."
Pity Linda Drake couldn't see what the policies of successive governments have done to the people on the land!

If it wasn't for the diabolical financial policies of governments, in the good times the farmers and graziers could have 'put enough away' to see themselves through the bad times.
One young person observed that governments and the bureaucracy continually move the goal posts with such things as land clearance and irrigation. "Sometimes you look at the sums and they just don't add up," said Emerald farmer Wayne Reeves. He also thought many young people did not want to struggle and battle through like their parents. "It is," he said, "a hard life - hard on families and hard on relationships."
One wonders how long it will be before the cities feel the effect of what is happening in the bush?

Betty Luks' Queensland visit

SYDNEY CONSERVATIVE SPEAKERS' CLUB

ADELAIDE CONSERVATIVE SPEAKERS'CLUB
Please note there will not be a meeting in June and the next CSC will be held on Monday 7th July 2003. Details of speaker have yet to be finalised.

SOUTH AUSTRALIA: The State Weekend will be held over Saturday 16th & Sunday 17th August.

GIPPSLAND, VICTORIA REGIONAL DINNER
The 34th Gippsland Regional Dinner will be held on Wednesday 9th July 2003. The venue will be P J's Colonial Café, 22 Church Street, Traralgon (halfway between Seymour and Hotham Streets). Guest speaker will be the National Director of the Australian League of Rights Betty Luks who will be speaking on: "The Usurping of Power by Politicians World-Wide".
Dinner will be $30 per person and drinks to be purchased from the bar. Please make out cheques to Gippsland Socred, (a group set up to promote Social Credit in Gippsland). Remittances to D. Sykes, 225 Neaves Road, Callignee Vic. 3844 before 2nd July, 2003.

WEST AUSTRALIA STATE WEEKEND
The West Australian State Weekend will be held Saturday 9th and Sunday 10th of August. Make a note in your diaries NOW. The theme for the Seminar is: "Insanity Fair". Guest speakers will include Mr. Geoff Muirden of the Australian Civil Liberties Union, and Mr. Tom Lawson on Australia's most crime-ridden capital city - Perth.

LATEST JEREMY LEE VIDEO PROVING VERY POPULAR
Have you purchased your copy of Jeremy's video? At a time of worldwide unrest and disillusion with the vested interests manipulating the lives of ordinary people, the material in Jeremy's video, "Retell the Story!" will prove a bombshell! How can nations, communities and families be so deeply in debt that there is no apparent way out? And, he asks, "Who's the mortgagee?" Send for copies of the video today. Available from all League Book Services for $20 posted.