28 February 2012

Giving aid to China

Nice to see little old Australia doing its bit to build the economy of the 21st century's next superpower, China.

http://www.ausaid.gov.au/china/aid.cfm
National emblem of the People's Republic of ChinaImage via Wikipedia

The AusAID site states:

The Australian Government, through the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID), has provided almost 30 years of development assistance to China.

Isn't that re-assuring! 

Perhaps, thought, it might just be time for our politicians to accept the obvious fact -- that giving aid to China is simply not in our long-term, geo-political interests.  Far from it: the new China represents a growing threat to Australia's security, independence and identity, one that we should hardly be financing.

For those who care to think beyond the rhetoric and short-term decision-making, this is yet more evidence that we are ruled by a traitor class that has no regard for identity or sovereignty, but simply rules in the interest of high finance and globalist ideology.

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27 February 2012

A Book Review: 'On the Brink,' by Hank Paulson

Received from a member in Rockhampton: 

Your reviewer must own up to the darkest suspicious about the American political system.

His faith was first shaken when Jimmy Carter became president, which is probably too long ago for young nationalists of today to remember. Would military officers, this then-young scribbler asked himself, really take orders from such an obvious twit? Never mind the voters: they have to pick one of two, and how the choice is presented to them may leave them feeling they have no choice at all. But some reasonably mature men seem to take part in the process that refines the choice down to that final two. How does a Jimmy Carter get to be one of them?

Then there was George Bush II. He wasn't exactly another Jimmy Carter, but it was still a bit hard to believe that responsible adults would let him into the room while serious decisions were being taken.

And there were even doubts about politicians that your reviewer kind of liked, such as President Ronald Reagan. Ron might say all the right things, and we didn't really care if a script-writer wrote them for him - we knew that was happening. But would a responsible military officer really give an old man like that "the button," the mechanism by which the President of the United States supposedly ordered an atomic strike on the Soviet Union? What if he had a mini-stroke and started a nuclear war because he was confused and thought the Russian missiles were already on their way?

So your reviewer doesn't know what to believe about the American system. He keeps looking for evidence that someone who knows what he is doing is really in charge. And this led him to read Henry Paulson's book.

Henry Paulson was George Bush II's second Treasury Secretary. A Treasury Secretary in the U.S.A. is like a Federal Treasurer in Anustralia, but he isn't quite as high up the pecking order. An Australian Treasurer is always the second man in the government, and he often believes he should be the first man. There is a long tradition of Australian Treasurers kicking out their Prime Ministers and taking over, or at least having a go at it. In America the Treasury Secretaryship is not usually a starring role: the stars are the President, the Secretary of State (Minister for Foreign Affairs), and the Secretary of Defence. But in the financial crisis of 2008, Henry Paulson found himself at the centre of things.

Your reviewer remembers when H.P. was appointed. George Bush's now-long-forgotten first Treasury Secretary was sacked because he couldn't remember to keep saying the things that the boys in the President's office told him to say - he couldn't stay "on message," and apparently he couldn't decide anything either.

The 'Australian Financial Review,' Australian businesses' newspaper of record, informed its readers that Henry Paulson of Goldman Sachs was taking the job, and he was taking it on the condition that he was actually going to be in charge. Nobody was going to be telling him to stay "on message." Coming from Goldman Sachs, he would expect to outrank the boys in the President's office, and probably outrank the President too.

Then the financial crisis of 2008 struck, and Henry Paulson was suddenly the man in the hot seat. The Administration's policy on financial matters was suddenly the government policy that everyone wanted to know about, and President George wasn't really up to explaining it, or knowing what it was either. Henry had to do it, and he took to the crisis like a duck to water. He convened meetings. He negotiated with some people and gave orders to others. He accompanied his boss, George, to meet other terrifically important people such as President Sarkozy of France, Chancellor Merkel (a girl) of Germany, and assorted Chinese. He talked a lot on the telephone with Ben (Bernanke) and Tim (Geithner), and had lots of conference calls and late-night and weekend work, and so had his staff (he had lots of staff). He gave Sheila (Bair) a friendly shoulder to cry on.

He thought they were all good fellows most of the time, and he said a prayer to the Christian Scientist god (don't ask me - I don't know) once in a while, and occasionally had to rush out of a meeting to hide in a corner and have some "dry heaves." Your reviewer usually gets hay fever in those sorts of situations. Dry heaves might at least be over more quickly. Wet ones would be nasty though.

The President, great man that he was, occasionally came in with wise words of the sort usually attributed to sports coaches. You know the sort of thing: "Hang in there, tiger."

Your reviewer has now decided, on the basis of this book, that if anyone is really in charge in the United States, he or they don't bother to look down as far as the Department of the Treasury. If Henry knows anything about economic history, about the many times all this has happened before, he never mentions it. Does he know about the Fuggers of Antwerp, who financed kings, and whose collapse "shook the world"? Does he know about the Knights Templar, whose banking operations came to an abrupt end when they were all tortured and executed? Does he know about the Medici, who did better than the Templars, rising to provide the world with two popes (Leo X and Clement VII) and two Queens of France (Catherine de Medici and Marie de Medici) on the strength of their family's financial skills?

Your reviewer wouldn't expect every young Australian nationalist to know about all those things. But someone who is one of the top dozen or so men in the world, in terms of financial management, and whose whole speciality and career is in financial management, should know something of what has gone before. He should know about the 1890s depression and the inflation that occurred in Europe after the Spanish discovery of gold in South America, and what the consequences were. He should know about the Mississippi Bubble and John Law's paper money fiasco in France. Your reviewer knows at least something about those things, and he would want to be very careful about repeating the mistakes that led to the worst disasters. But Henry is from Goldman Sachs and he found himself in charge of American financial policy at a time of crisis, and he apparently believes that history began with World War II, and that all he needs to know is the law and how to bend it.

While all this was going on, like a good American novelist, he apparently still managed to notice the weather: "It was an overcast day in Washington." Your reviewer wouldn't have noticed a medium-level earthquake if he had been in that position.

There was another Marie (not de Medici) who was Queen of France once - Marie Antoinette to be exact. She had undue influence on her husband and the government, and she believed that a Minister of Finance should be a nice boy, never mind whether he knew anything about finance. Eventually the French cut her head off. Henry's boss, George Bush II, should be grateful the same thing didn't happen to him.

23 February 2012

Getting to "No" -- a strategic approach

A member in Rockhampton submitted the following link in the interests of further developing our organisational strategy.  The document is an excerpt from The War on Fatherhood and while it relates to one very specific issue, readers of this blog are urged to look beyond the immediate context and study this document for its deeper message: the idea of a "counter-revolution" within the context of "the social and cultural environment within which this problem, and our movement, exists"; and from this idea, the plan of a broad resistance movement.

Here is the link: http://www.fatherhoodcoalition.org/cpf/2008/Getting%20to%20No.htm.

This is a document to digest slowly and read through more than once.  Perceptive readers, particularly those with a bent for strategic thinking, will get a lot out of this article, whether the specific issue and movement in question is directly of interest to them or not.

22 February 2012

Coal Seam Gas And The Rise Of China

This is an edited and (slightly) expanded version of a speech given by a nationalist at a meeting held on February 19 to assist the organization of protest at Coal Seam Gas mining on the Darling Downs. Australia First Party supports all community and farmers’ groups which resist coal seam gas mining.



Australia’s  coal seam gas (CSG) question is not in isolation to other patters of mining and other land investment. Quite the contrary – although it is a special case. I am concerned about mining generally and its impact on our Aussie farmlands and the faked up water-restriction policies of the big parties that will destroy Aussie agriculture. But it seems to me that CSG brings all these things into sharper focus.

This meeting is concerned with general resistance to CSG. I would place some things within a larger political-economy picture in order that activists and their friends who are fighting CSG mining can make determinations as to the enemy in this struggle, where the blow should fall and so on.

I am going to talk abut China, or Chinese imperialism, the dependence of Australian business upon Chinese money. We can call it what we will, but the CSG question has a Chinese component. It is a serious political question because it involves the activities of a rising superpower hungry for energy to sustain its global reach and surging economy.

The Money Trail

Consider that ORIGIN Energy and ConocoPhillips have agreed to sell $70 billion worth coal-seam gas to Sinopec through a (currently) non-binding deal that would see the state-owned Chinese oil company boost its stake in Gladstone's biggest proposed liquefied natural gas plant to 25 per cent.

The gas deal, if it becomes binding, will support a $US6bn ($5.9bn) second LNG production train for the Australia Pacific LNG joint venture, which has started construction on a $US14bn first train

Coal seam gas extraction is obviously set to become a huge industry in Queensland, where massive contracts are being written to supply gas to China and Japan after 2014. Liquid natural gas companies have already put in about $5billion of investment in coal seam gas extraction and its processing into LNG for export. Moreover, the Queensland government will eventually reap about $1billion a year in royalties. That little kick-along plus the pseudo growth of some infrastructure and some paid employment counts to them as a real bonanza. Look out though if the Chinese companies don’t import contract labour (as is happening now in Gladstone). That might make the lies about the boom a little harder to sell

Plans are proceeding for a new export-oriented coal-seam gas area on the Queensland-South Australia border, with processing plants at South Australia's Port Bonython.

Gold Coast based Icon Energy has a memorandum of understanding with the Chinese gas company Shantou SinoEnergy to buy 40 million tonnes of liquid natural gas (LNG) converted from coal- seam gas (CSG), over 20 years.

Icon, along with South Australia-based Beach Energy, is drilling for CSG in the Nappamerri trough of the Cooper Basin.

While the Queensland CSG project is the most advanced at the moment, a similar opportunity is being pursued in the Gunnedah Basin in NSW with processing at Newcastle. There are some delays. The Gunnedah project would have poisoned the water of that town and the Liverpool Plains. The strutting mayor was all for it and took a $1,000,000 bribe for a local health centre – which at least got built even as the project has hit snags. The word is that the Chinese haven’t given up.

As LNG booms go, east coast Australia’s is shaping up as an export platform just like Western Australia.

China may increase subsidies for coal-seam gas production amid a plan to increase output ninefold by 2015, US company Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. said. recently

The world’s biggest energy user may unveil a proposal to extract natural gas from coal areas, possibly with an output target of 9 billion cubic meters by 2015 from about 1 billion cubic meters a year currently, Bernstein, said. The U.S. currently produces more than 50 billion cubic meters of coal- seam gas. Clearly, China intends to catch up.

The money trail tells you this is high-powered grab for resources regardless of the threat to Australia’s environment and her farms.

Even mining magnate and National Party funds-man Clive Palmer has said the technology is unproven and could have a devastating environmental impact.

Might it be that Clive Palmer fears public outcry generally and has covered himself and his other mining operations, by saying a leading Chinese firm had raised issues with him about the Australian industry, saying extraction techniques they abandoned 20 years ago are still being used here.

“Coal seam gas technology currently used in Australia is lethal and will kill Australians, poison our water table and destroy the land,” Palmer said. That was a valuable admission.

But isn’t China doing in Africa and Asia right now things that threaten livelihoods, the environment, people? Why would Australia be any different?

Selling The Land Itself

Chinese private and state-owned companies are increasingly acting on opportunities to acquire Australian agricultural land, with some $500 million of intended investment planned, according to a recent report by the Australian Financial Review.

The planned investments range from dairy farming, ultra-fine wool production, animal husbandry and frozen vegetables.

The findings come from a document, titled The China Food Security Study, that outlined Chinese overseas agricultural investment interests.

In Sydney before Christmas representatives from private and state-owned Chinese companies met with Austrade representatives, corporate advisors and industry heads, to cover investments in rural Australia that would encompass more than 100,000 hectares of farmland.

The federal government is due to receive a review of foreign investment in rural land, conducted by the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics (ABARE) and the Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation, the AFR reported.

Commissioned more than a year ago in response to concerns about the impact of foreign investment, the first phase of the study showed that 99 per cent of Australian agricultural businesses are owned by Australians, while 5.8 per cent of agricultural land was foreign owned.

But this will change rapidly as state-owned Chinese companies want to buy more than 100,000ha to produce everything from wool to milk. They overall push to control primary production also shows in their purchase of sugar companies and now - cattle stations.

Even a system politician can tell some truth.

Liberal Senator Bill Heffernan said Australia had slack regulations.

"The concept of sovereignty has changed."

"Now a country can use a chequebook, where it traditionally used armies, navy and air force, to take over another country's sovereign assets."

Senator Heffernan said other countries had tightened investment rules in response to looming food and water shortages.

But Australians, especially politicians focused only on "tomorrow's headlines not the country's future", were "asleep at the wheel".

"This is not xenophobia or Hansonism ... the slackness of our regulators puts Australia's long-term prospects at peril," Senator Heffernan said.

No: it is economic protectionism and more Australians can see that this is the only policy that makes sense. No Australian would reject some trade, and trade in resources too, if that trade furthered our own genuine growth. Rather, Australia as a resources-quarry, the position our country has occupied for over 60 years (when the multinationals were exempted from income tax) is to be hardened into out and out theft of our national wealth. Our national wealth in resources is vital to our future as a country. It must be protected.

National Farmers' Federation policy general manager Charlie McElhone was concerned state-owned entities may look to secure food supplies from Australia in a closed supply loop, distorting local markets. How true.

The Chinese-controlled mining giant Shenhua Watermark Coal continues its sweeping purchase of the coal-laden farms that make up an area 500km northwest of Sydney.

In Breeza, a small Liverpool Plains town near Gunnedah, there has been resistance to the temptation to sell to Shenhua, which, has so far, bought 43 properties in the area over the past two years.

The land of other States is being bought up for mining too. We are now at banana republic status. We just sell our national mineral wealth – and ironically import bananas.

People’s Resistance

Resistance must take on an anti imperial character. What about Australian wealth for all Australians and not just the foreign mining giants and their local collaborators? Will anyone stand up to a superpower? How ironic: Chinese military and political theory tells you – you can! Of course, the Chinese are not the only bloodsuckers in the game; however, they are the most obtrusive and the most sensitive. They are fighting a global struggle with the predators of Washington / New York and others for resources and Australia is one big pie of which they now seek a “share”.

Farmers in southeast Queensland have vowed to lock their gates to keep coal and gas explorers at bay. Last year, representatives of eight farmers' and residents' organisations joined the Friends of the Earth and others outside the Queensland parliament to launch the Lock the Gate campaign. They are opposed to miners' plans for up to 40,000 coal seam gas (CSG) wells and massive new coal mines on the rich agricultural lands of the Darling Downs. The farmers say that in the short term, mining companies, protected by state legislation, have extraordinary rights to enter land for exploration and mining, disrupting farm operations. Sadly that is true. Thankfully, everywhere there is massive resistance.

Hopes of a moratorium by Queensland opponents of coal seam gas mining are misplaced. The NSW government is now full steam ahead and so it will be in Queensland so the State isn’t left behind. Those who sell off our national wealth are always keen never to be behind the crook in the State next door. The local collaborators with Chinese imperialism can’t wait to show themselves as craven traitors.

For once I agree with activist Drew Hutton:

“When our leaders fail us, ordinary people have to become heroes. Landowners have refused entry by coal and coal seam gas companies to their properties in places like Felton, Gowrie Junction, the Scenic Rim and Kingaroy and many regions in New South Wales have done the same.

This is an issue that will divide the country. It is necessary to divide people or a new politics cannot be waged. One can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs – as the Russian proverb goes. Some Australians will line up to take a few crumbs off the table whilst others stand up as resistance fighters. In this division, there will be fire. Out of that comes the movement.

Hutton concluded:

“This division will not be along traditional party-political lines; it will have, on one side, those who love this country – its landscape and landforms, its beaches and billabongs – and, on the other, those who see it as the source of a quick buck.”

Leaving Australia a blackened hole in the ground, polluted, poisonous, with a population huddled along the coasts living in increasing environmental degradation, is not a future we want!



The struggle against the new emperors in Peking will test us all. A couple of years back Clive Palmer said that any opposition to Chinese investment was racism and with that false moralism those like him promote the Chinese economic invasion. Only fools fall for that propaganda. Chinese money now drives parties and business so that trade with them is no longer fair nor restrained. To protect their exploitation, the Chinese look for stooges with false arguments.  But more people resist. More ordinary Australians suffer.



A movement of national independence is building and Chinese imperialism is a fair target! The movement for national independence begins with a perceived wrong being addressed in struggle. It will grow until the Australian people expel from our country those who would plunder it and divide it and take control of our national wealth themselves!
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20 February 2012

False and Misleading


So now one of our leading manufacturers of tomato sauce is leaving the country to set up in New Zealand. They will then export their product from New Zealand back to Australia. What we have lost is: jobs, export income, and the taxes that are gained from the sale and manufacture of this product. We have also lost the income generated by the farmers that grew the tomatoes for the factory. The fastest way to stop these companies from moving out of Australia to some country where labour is cheaper so they can manufacture at a cheaper rate and make more profits for their greedy share holders, is to put a 300% import duty on any product they want to import back into Australia with the import duty being paid to an Australian based company that will manufacture its products here and employ Australians. This also goes for companies like Holden, which gets most of its vehicles manufactured overseas and then badges them as Holden. Why should we be paying top dollar for a car that is manufactured in Korea or some other place where labour is cheap especially when the value of the Australian dollar is so high against the USD? Why are we paying so much for overseas manufactured cars when if you are in the US for example you only pay $29,990 dollars for a brand new Ford Mustang Convertible yet we are paying $34,000 for a Captiva? Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we are being screwed and in my opinion any company that gets its products manufactured overseas and then rebadges the product with the name of an Australian owned company’s product is deceptive and borders on false and misleading. We need to put in place protective practices to protect the jobs of all Australians and we need to put in place a program where manufacturers have to name the place that their products are manufactured so they cannot just rebadge a product and call it something that people think is an Australian product. That is, in my opinion, false and misleading.

Peter Schuback
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