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Lead Editorial

26 April 2023
Vol. 25 No. 17

The Albanese Labor government has its marching orders, in the form of two major reviews into the Reserve Bank and defence strategy. Such reviews are pre-determined, the outcome assured by the choice of luminaries who conduct them. These two reviews share a clear agenda—to strip Australia of all national sovereignty.

The Defence Strategic Review locks us into the agenda of our Anglo-American “dangerous allies”—as the late former PM Malcolm Fraser called the USA and UK in 2014— to provoke a war with China, our biggest trading partner. A feature of that agenda has been increasing “interoperability” and “interchangeability” of Australian and US forces, meaning, in practice, Australia is decreasingly capable of engaging in war without the United States. In that way, this agenda is stripping us of sovereignty … and $368 billion, for submarines not to defend Australia but to help the USA confront China!

To ensure the outcome of this Review, the key people who prepared it were all close to the US war machine it locks us into. In Pearls and Irritations on 26 April, independent journalist Caitlin Johnstone summarised the Defence Strategic Review this way:

“So to recap, Australia’s foreign policy is being shaped ‘for decades to come’ by an ‘independent’ strategic review that (A) was authored by someone who is compromised by US funding, (B) is being implemented in part by an American former military official, (C) calls for greater and greater cooperation with the United States across the board, and (D) focuses primarily on targeting a nation that just so happens to be the number one geopolitical rival of the United States.”

As this AAS documents in detail (pp.3-5), the RBA Review is equally an assault on any potential for Australia to exercise economic sovereignty. As such, it’s a shameful betrayal by a Labor government of Labor’s greatest legends, John Curtin and Ben Chifley, whose fight for national banking and democratic control of the financial system is their greatest legacy.

Essentially, the review demands the government give up its power to overrule the central bank, which would, therefore, hand the RBA fully over to the control of the global banking apparatus centred in the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, the “central bank of central banks”. The BIS was established in 1930 by Bank of England Governor Montagu Norman (when the BoE was still a private central bank before being nationalised in 1946), the German financiers who funded Hitler, and the most powerful banks on Wall Street. Also in 1930, the Governor of Australia’s governmentowned Commonwealth Bank refused Treasurer Ted Theodore’s order to issue money for industry and infrastructure to alleviate the depression, fully believing bankers should not answer to governments. Norman sent his envoy Sir Otto Niemeyer to Australia to dictate brutal austerity instead (back page), after which Niemeyer became England’s representative to the BIS in 1931 (for more than three decades, including leading its collusion with the Nazis).

This event sparked Curtin, Chifley and Labor into the political fight to enshrine the principle of democratic control of the banking system in law, which they understood was a matter of national sovereignty. The principle was endorsed by the 1937 Banking Royal Commission report, and they achieved their goal of legislating it in the Commonwealth Bank Act 1945.

In demanding its removal as the first of 51 recommendations, the RBA Review makes this admission: “While no Australian Government has used these override powers, there is the possibility that established conventions cease to be observed.” (Emphasis added.)

This is unelected, unaccountable bankers saying to Parliament, “before you get big ideas of emulating Curtin and Chifley, give up your power to implement them”. Worse, the treacherous bankers’ supplicants in the modern ALP have agreed!

But why are they afraid of this power, unused for 78 years? Because of our fight, for a national banking system, including a public postal bank. Keep fighting!

In this issue:

• Chalmers trashes Curtin and Chifley’s greatest legacy
• RBA Review: Pre-emptive strike against democratic accountability and economic revival
• A tainted Defence Strategic Review
• The Canberra war pigs with their snouts in the AUKUS trough
• Taiwan Part Six: US-China ‘normalisation’ and provocations
• Pentagon leaks and another ‘lone assassin’ coverup
• US Glass-Steagall bill back on the table
• The Battle lines are drawn!
• Foreign interference in banking crushed Australia before—don’t allow a repeat!
• ALMANAC – The Industrial Finance Department: An Australian experiment in small business finance—Part I

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