Connect with us:
Craig Isherwood
CEC Senate candidate for Victoria
Enquiries Phone: 03 9354 0544 Email: cec@cecaust.com.au
Thirty one years ago, in 1988, when I was 27, my wife Noelene and I, together with a couple of other extraordinary Australians, founded the Citizens Electoral Council.
We had three small children all under 5 years old, but we believed that Australia was no longer a sovereign country, and our family farms and industries were being destroyed by globalisation and free-trade. The political party system no longer represented us, and was in fact destroying us. Nothing much has changed since—yet!
This was just after the October 20, 1987 Black Tuesday stock market crash which saw 25% wiped off the Australian stock market with ordinary folk losing millions; it was at a time when interest rates were not 3.5% as they are now, but 22%; inflation was running close to 8%, an all-time high in Australian history; and we were at the end of an era of the “developmentalists” (to borrow a term from Bob Katter MP), an era when leaders in government actually took pride in building infrastructure, an era now replaced by radical green anti-development policies, which have shut down the development of necessary physical economic infrastructure.
More personally however, over the course of 1981-85, I was part of a small group of farmers trying to develop new technologies in agriculture, using trace mineral supplementation. My passion for growing a wide variety of good quality vegies in the back yard, is an ongoing hobby—something that keeps me anchored in the real world. Back in the 1980’s we proved that by using new technologies of trace mineral supplementation, exceptionally poor soils could be transformed into some of the most continually productive soils in Australia. With these poor soils already written off by the agricultural authorities as worthless, we matched the yields of some of the best volcanic soils in the country. When these discoveries were brought to the attention of the agricultural departments, or more importantly the banks, the true “technological apartheid” confronting real development in this country became clearly evident.
I love science, and the exciting discoveries that science brings.
When I had finished High School in 1977, I was given an early offer to attend the Western Australian Institute of Technology to study Medical Laboratory Technology—today it’s called Medical Science. I rose to the top of that course in a year, and got to work in the Histopathology department at Royal Perth Hospital over the Christmas break, but discovered that whilst I loved the science, I did not like the job, but also I did not like the idea of being locked into this as a career course.
At 18—this was not what I wanted to do.
Effectively, I took a 10 year “gap-year”, during which Noelene and I were married in 1981. Over this period I worked as a service station attendant; youth worker in Perth Western Australia and also in Queensland; council worker in Noosa; farm hand/manager; and then as owner and operator of an equipment hire shop for several years which led up to 1988.
In 1988, Noelene and I were part of a team that decided to challenge the political status quo, and go “political”. My disgust for the lack of commitment for real technological development was a significant factor. We had to change this.
The CEC was formed in February 1988, with its headquarters based in the office of my hire shop in Kingaroy. Through a “mass-strike” grass roots movement that I helped to lead, catalysed by the previous years’ events I mentioned before, to our surprise, in the April 1988 Barambah by-election, we won our first seat, the seat of the former long-standing Premier of Queensland Sir Joh Bjelke-Peterson. Ironically, the candidate we defeated was the just retired leader of the National party and former Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss. Back then, Truss was standing for the State seat of Barambah, before going directly into Federal politics.
Simply by default, as we knew no better at that time, we were a populist movement. However, many of us who formed the CEC also held a deep commitment to fight for our sovereignty, and a disgust for the colonialism we still suffered as part of the British Empire—oops sorry, “Commonwealth”. As my fellow NSW senate Candidate Bob Butler has reflected, that deep commitment led to a very close association with the international LaRouche movement, established by statesman and physical economist Lyndon H LaRouche.
As we have witnessed, all throughout Australia’s recent history, populist political movements are built upon the shifting sands of time. Without a solid base, they quickly disintegrate with the challenges of confronting real political issues and challenges. The CEC in its early days, was no different. In order to make sure that the CEC did not disappear, in 1989, I founded The New Citizen newspaper, which will shortly be celebrating its 100th edition and over 20 million copies. The New Citizen has been the vehicle to bind together those who support the aims of the CEC, even during some very difficult and uncertain times when it was suggested we close it down.
In 1991, after spending several months in the U.S. with the LaRouche organisation, I re-founded the CEC as a principled, philosophical political party on the discoveries I had made during this time—discoveries in the science of physical economy. In 1992, because of the excitement generated Australia-wide after sharing my new discoveries, it became necessary to establish a national office to coordinate our political activities. Our family moved from Queensland to Melbourne.
The philosophy of the CEC is that all human beings are created Imago Viva Dei, (in the image of the Creator) and endowed with creative reason which, if developed and nurtured, enables us to make discoveries of the unseen physical principles that govern and determine the way the universe works. This divine nature of creativity sets us apart from all other animals, and gives us a responsibility to master those “unseen” physical principles which can improve the human condition, and the condition of the planet as a whole for generations to come. These principles, when applied through technology into the physical economy, can transform the productive powers of human labour for the betterment of all human beings. This is not some arbitrary good idea, but is the essential nature of what it means to be human. LaRouche’s discovery of “potential relative population density” as a measure of the improvement in the human condition, is truly revolutionary.
Our human creativity which is the true nature of mankind, is the idea celebrated by the world’s greatest poets and musical minds, (Shakespeare, Schiller, Keats, Shelley, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and many others), and which resonates with me having studied piano from a very young age.
This philosophy gives the CEC the place to stand through developing just and progressive policies, to oppose the tyranny of those who wish misery on the world by reducing human beings to less than beasts, and inducing them to accept less than their true human potential.
It also means that I am exceptionally proud that my fellow CEC candidates share these principled ideas, and are encouraged to act in accordance with this understanding of them, freely and creatively.
We have developed a very detailed track record and explanation of not just what the solutions are to the problems that Australia faces, but why they are necessary.
For Noelene and I, the CEC has never been about politics, but rather a mission to help bring about a better world, and that mission is now shared by our sons Aaron and Glen, along with Aaron’s wife Katherine. (Those were the young ones under 5 when we started out.) It is our shared mission for the New Just Economic Order which we see developing now amongst the BRICS countries, and which is opposed to the terrible misery inflicted by the still hegemonic (but decaying) policies of free-trade and globalisation championed through the institutions of the British Crown and its minions.
This global mission has allowed me to participate on an international stage, when last year at the invitation of Prof. Georgy Toloraya, Executive Director of the Russian National Committee for BRICS Research, I attended the 2015 Civic BRICS conference in Moscow.
From those humble beginnings in Kingaroy, Queensland 31 years ago, the CEC has matured into an internationally recognised institution, with much more to say and contribute in the years to come.
Page last updated on 17 April 2019