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Robert Butler
CEC New South Wales Senate Candidate
Enquiries Phone: 1800 636 432 Email: cec@cecaust.com.au
I live in Chatswood, have been married for 49 years and am a Solicitor. I have been a member of the CEC since 1989 and have watched the CEC grow in stature over the years and been privileged to be a part of it. I have stood as a CEC candidate in previous Federal and State elections. Whilst CEC success in its first 1988 electoral contest attracted popular support, we realised that more than mere populist sentiments were required to deal with the root causes of Australia’s ills.
Over the years I have watched as Australia lost its space industry and associated scientific base, its machine tool industry, most of its manufacturing, almost all of its fuel refining capacity, large numbers of its family farmers, and became reliant on a service industry, reduced to being a quarry for the export of raw materials with no value-adding.
In the process the Commonwealth Bank was dismantled and eventually sold off. State Governments sold off their State Banks and government handed to the private banks responsibility for the economy. All was unnecessary, as was the 1930's Depression.
The CEC has been at the forefront in identifying the ideas which drove the adoption of these policy decisions and in pointing out their long-term consequences if continued.
In the early 1990s, the CEC became closely associated with Lyndon LaRouche and the international LaRouche movement based in the USA, recognising in the methods and ideas which they represented, the essential elements for a successful and productive modern nation-state so eloquently summarised by Abraham Lincoln as “Government of the people, by the people for the people”. For 31 years the CEC as an independent political party has fought for principles derived from those ideas--the common good and national sovereignty--in economic and foreign policy. The CEC is thus part of a philosophically motivated movement which recognises that political intervention in the processes of government is necessary to inform, educate and bring about change.
In 1990, the CEC developed an economic program for the reconstruction of our nation entitled Sovereign Australia, and in 1994 published Sovereign Australia II--A Legislative Programme to Save our Nation, which contained drafts of the necessary legislation for economic reconstruction, including among other key elements, a debt moratorium for farmers and the re-establishment of a National Bank to invest in large-scale water, power and transport infrastructure projects, in order to expand our agriculture and manufacturing industries and create hundreds of thousands of productive jobs; these programs and legislation are far more urgently needed now, than when they were written. By far the most pressing issue of our times, both for Australia and for the world, is the accelerating onset of a new Great Depression, one which has been caused by the insane policies of globalisation, privatisation, deregulation, etc., policies which, if not soon reversed, will plunge the world not merely into a depression, but into a New Dark Age beyond the imagination of most people alive today.
The CEC has fought to free Australia from the Crown/City of London/Wall Street apparatus of banks and multinational corporations which the old Australian Labor Party denounced as "The Money Power", and which seized control of our economy under their globalisation, privatisation and deregulation policies and which currently threatens war with Russia and China to save their failed system.
Rooted firmly in its philosophical base and in the tradition of "American System" economists, Alexander Hamilton, Mathew and Henry Carey, the CEC advocates a dirigist system of physical economy, as refined by LaRouche, all of which is entirely in the tradition of our own King O'Malley's original plan for the Commonwealth Bank. Such a sovereign national bank owned by the Commonwealth would issue low cost credits, under authority of the Parliament, for the establishment and maintenance of infrastructure, including healthcare and education. Such a bank could also issue, through the private banking system, low cost loans to finance privately-owned industries whose physical goods production increases the relative potential population density of the nation. Its further functions would include exercising tight control over foreign exchange and private banking and also guaranteeing the savings of Australians up to a prescribed limit. The CEC also supports the raising of tariffs to protect industries that a re-established Interstate Commission would determine should be protected, in the national interest.
In contrast, both major parties have increasingly presided over the absolute destruction of the economy through deregulation, privatisation, dropping of tariffs, and the usual IMF nostrums, with the Liberals racing to speed up the rate of collapse through more extreme Mont Pelerin Society policies. Australia's foreign debt is now one of the highest in the world in absolute terms, and is the highest in per capita terms. It is no wonder that the electorate in general has a high degree of disgust with both major parties; Greens policies add another level of dimension to the destruction.
CEC collaboration with Mr LaRouche and his co-thinkers worldwide, has been based on achieving peace through economic development, both for Australia, and for all regions of the world--nations collaborating on mutually beneficial economic development projects provide the basis for lasting peace. A return to such a system of sovereign, protectionist nation-states (as in the early post-war period) will bankrupt the power of the world financial oligarchy, paving the way for Australia to pursue policies of the "general welfare" or "common good", as opposed to enriching a tiny minority of individuals, at the expense of everyone else.
The policies promoted by CEC candidates in the current election are at the heart of the steps necessary for Australia to achieve true independence for Australia as a productive agro-industrial economy with affordable housing, health care, education and full time jobs for all, and to avoid the insanity of a war with China and Russia. Our too-big-to-fail banks need to be broken up by Glass-Steagal-type legislation to isolate and protect the necessary retail banking sector, bail-in of depositors’ funds needs to be rejected, a new national bank and the undertaking of large infrastructure projects--water, power, transport (identified by the CEC in its literature)--to be undertaken to reinvigorate the economy, and above all to engender a cultural optimism in Australians.
These are some of the reasons for my continued support of the CEC, its policies, ideas and methods, and why I stand as a candidate to assist in their adoption.
Page last updated on 17 April 2019