Lead Editorial

17 December 2024
Vol. 26 No. 51

The Australian Citizens Party has a laser-focus, above all else, on defeating the power of the banking cartel over Australia; 2024 will be remembered as the year that fight achieved unprecedented breakthroughs and victories. The biggest breakthrough was the outcome of the major Senate inquiry into bank closures in regional Australia, which recommended the government consider re-establishing a national bank operating in post offices.

It’s impossible to overstate the significance of this result. The proponents of public banking have been locked in a death-struggle against the private banking monopoly for more than a century. Ever since King O’Malley won his fight for the Commonwealth Bank in 1911, the private banks have used every weapon and trick they had to sabotage national banking, with varying success. They finally prevailed in the 1990s, when they privatised the Commonwealth Bank and remaining state banks. The neoliberal mantra of all major-party politicians—Liberal and Labor—was that “government should not be involved in banking”. National Party leader David Littleproud insisted to an ACP representative in 2023 that Australia would never have another public bank: “Times have changed”, he claimed. Such statements only served the major banks, which paid for them through multi-million-dollar donations to both major parties that are a mere fraction of the profits they’ve been able to gouge from Australians thanks to not having to compete with a government bank anymore.

A year later, the Senate committee is the first major government inquiry since the Commonwealth Bank’s 1996 privatisation to officially recommend in favour of government banking, and even David Littleproud is now expressing support for a public post office bank. The Australian newspaper reported in August that a public post office bank is “back on Labor’s agenda”. The ACP’s unflagging efforts have driven this dramatic shift, not least through leading the engagement with the Senate inquiry. Along the way the ACP has built a grand coalition of groups supporting the fight for a bank; now we have won the policy debate, we have to see it through to fruition.

The other victory against the banking cartel this year was stopping Jim Chalmers from repealing democratic authority over the Reserve Bank. Originally part of the national Commonwealth Bank, the RBA was split off as the central bank in 1959 so it wouldn’t be used as a national bank to invest in the nation’s development, but only to support the private banking system. In the 2008 global financial crisis, and again in COVID, the RBA did nothing to support the economy, but conjured hundreds of billions of dollars to prop up the banks. Nevertheless, the existence of Section 11 of the Reserve Bank Act 1959, which empowers the democratically elected government to overrule the RBA board, means that at any time a government could decide to use it as a national bank to invest in the economy, as RBA Governor Michele Bullock has admitted numerous times to Senators Gerard Rennick and Nick McKim. That’s why Chalmers’ RBA Review was so desperate to remove this power. In one of our most decisive victories, the ACP stopped this plot dead in its tracks, and in doing so we educated a lot of politicians on the principles at stake.

Also in 2024 the ACP got heavily involved in stopping the Mis- and Disinformation (MAD) bill, helping to generate a record number of opposing submissions to the rushed Senate inquiry; and, on foreign policy matters, we intervened in the debate on the horrific bloodshed in Gaza to expose the Messianic extremists in control of the Netanyahu government, who want to bring on literal Armageddon.

Our next challenge is the 2025 election, due before May. The ACP is gathering a force of dedicated candidates to make a big dent in the uniparty’s control with our policies of a postal bank and foreign policy independence. So, enjoy Christmas and the New Year and prepare for a big 2025.

In this week’s issue:

• All we need for Christmas is a … post office People’s Bank!
• Mike Pezzullo and his grand concept of delusionalism
• Trump’s wake-up call to Australia
• RBA’s monetarist tool continues to threaten nation
• African surge for sovereignty
• The empire dismembers Syria
• Alastair Crooke on the fall of Syria—and what comes next
• The ACP is on the move
• New era for steelmaking can transform Australia

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