Australia's Great Reserve Bank Fraud, Part 1

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This is the first article in a 3-part series.

For some 60% of Australians life has become an ever-deepening struggle to make ends meet, and most are losing the battle. The reasons for this crisis have remained unacknowledged by Rudd and Swan, thereby denying Aussies even the comfort of hope.

Over a period of two and a half decades, incremental tariff reductions delivered the destruction of close to half our manufacturing sector, and the elimination of two thirds of family farms, with a concomitant collapse in the regional and rural economy; sequentially forcing one million Aussies to migrate to coastal cities to find jobs.

The pressure this placed on urban water resources, highways, infrastructure, and housing, was exacerbated by a disastrously high intake of migrants and refugees.

Meanwhile, a non-functioning FIRB has allowed foreign investors to openly speculate; and government has restricted supply of urban land, to broaden profit margins for election campaign-contributing developers.

Stimulated by intense urban migration, and confronted by restricted market supply, land prices have soared and home affordability has evaporated for the majority of young Aussies; most of whom must now rent. But with a critical under-supply of commercial rental homes, and the virtual elimination of the Housing Commission in all states and territories, rents have rocketed; with prospective tenants actually bidding to pay higher rents, while the losers become homeless.

In the midst of this calculated chaos, and in defiance of rational economic theory and practice, the Reserve Bank has repeatedly raised interest rates, thus precipitating thousands of mortgage defaults; and forcing still-roofed families to sacrifice food and medical care in order to save their homes.

Government, the media and banks are propagating the myth that interest rate rises hose down an overheated economy and depress consumer spending. This may well be the most convoluted piece of non-logic ever cast before a bewildered public. In the ultimate indictment of media monopoly, not one editor or journalist has even glanced in the direction of the screamingly obvious; that this entire scenario is a construct of easily exposed misrepresentations, distortions, outright lies and propaganda.

While a sanity-restoring future is still remotely achievable, Australians must come to terms with the truth. There are three main drivers of current Australian inflation. The first is fuel price rises. The second is duopoly supermarket prices. The third is interest rate rises.

Impacts are cumulative. The utterly unnecessary Iraq War has restricted oil supplies; a situation exacerbated by OPEC refusal (or incapacity) to significantly expand production. The media have targeted the Saudis as the primary culprit, yet all but the politically naïve know that the US controls Saudi Arabia, this being the very first globalised nation. In fact, transparently, the oil companies themselves are manipulating supply; once more, to force prices higher and expand already colossal profits; but also to finance alternative energy technologies. Finally, it must be said that most of the oil price structure is due to the futures market; gambling brought to the investment market.

Rising oil prices elevate production costs in all parts of industry and commerce, proportionately thrusting product prices skywards; which in turn forces increasingly desperate employees to demand wage increases to meet the expanded cost of living.

Meanwhile, Woolworths and Coles, monopolising 80% of Australian groceries, are profiteering at the expense of both producers and consumers. Simultaneously facing unfair competition from subsidised foreign corporations, Australian produce growers are going bankrupt. Once local growers have been eliminated, the subsidies will cease and produce prices will rise, ballooning the already bloated cost of living. The future looks bleak.

It is clear, therefore, that oil and supermarket profiteering is creating a production-price/wage inflationary spiral; exacerbated by a secondary tier of increased costs for everything from health care to professional services.

To divert attention away from this chain of economic destruction, collaborating media and politicians paint a daily picture of workers blowing credit on plasma TVs and other consumer items; yet our surveys show that credit cards are being used primarily to pay for electricity, phone, school fees, car registrations, clothing and footwear, groceries; car tyres, batteries, repairs and fuel. In the course of two programmes, SBS’s Insight presenter, Jenny Brockie, made the same discovery. In other words, credit is being used to cover the critical deficit in incomes, as inflation chews up once-adequate wages.

Nevertheless, although workers are struggling to survive, banks and credit companies; in concert with the advertising industry, cleverly exploit some vulnerable consumer’s psychological need to see themselves as upwardly mobile, and convince customers that with super-easy time payments they can afford a more reliable car, a new home entertainment system for their children, a computer, or replacement whitegoods. In fact, they cannot.

So what are worker’s real incomes? Academic and government sources quote ridiculous figures like $1000 per week; figures monstrously distorted by fat executive and professional salaries. Most full time workers are actually receiving between $380 and $500 per week; but those with part time jobs are earning considerably less.

A 2006 interactive questionnaire survey of a demographic corridor on the Sunshine Coast, reportedly a tourism-prosperous Australian representative population, showed that 54% of Aussies have incomes below $15,000… less than $275 per week; and 68% have incomes under $29,000. The families of most wage earners appear to receive in the vicinity of cumulative $460 per week. In the survey, participants nominated that a minimal single income should be $500 per week, and for a family of five, $1000 per week (full survey results available on request).

Unsurprisingly, the then infamous 1999 Bulletin Gallop survey presented an even more dismal picture, and a 2006 Commonwealth study into Aboriginal poverty showed that 23% of Aborigines live below the poverty line; matched against 17% of mainstream Australians. All job network managements later surveyed concurred generally with this assessment.

The human impact of these figures is that more than half of all Australians are dying in slow motion from malnutrition and lack of medical and dental care. Is there a registered nutritionist or medical practitioner who is prepared to publicly challenge this statement? The recent budget did not even pretend to address these crises. Instead, it placed the burden of an entirely spurious plan of economic recovery on those whose actual survival is most threatened: age pensioners, carers, low-paid workers and the unemployed.

With sustained unemployment 6% higher than during the Great Depression, this is clearly a human disaster dwarfing anything else in Australia’s history, and it exposes as a sadistic joke, the media and political establishment’s propaganda banner of The Booming Economy.

So can anything be done about this? The answer is a resounding, yes! To round off this first article in this series, we will glance at the most easily resolved hurdle on Australia’s road to economic recovery… the Reserve Bank must significantly lower interest rates.

The belief-system monolith of Reserve Bank independence must be demolished once and for all. The Governor is not divinely omnipotent and the bank is not independent. Frankly, we are astounded that so many Australians have fallen for this propagated myth. The Governor must comply entirely with the Australian Government’s directives; all of whose members seem to have forgotten that ultimate authority resides in the People of Australia. All arguments to the contrary must be disregarded.

If politicians have been foolish enough to sign treaties with the World Bank or IMF without mandating such action through referenda as required by the Australian Constitution, then the onus is entirely on the dishonest politicians.

Two of the most important words in the history of civilisation have not been heard in quite a while, National Sovereignty; and what these words mean is that no international organisation or alliance has supremacy over the democratic wishes of any sovereign nation. This is what we mean when we say that All Authority Resides in The People; a phrase that has had global currency since the aristocracy and their claimed supreme right to rule, were rejected forever at the time of the French, American and European revolutions.

There is a remaining range of options, to not only relieve the current intolerable stress on Australians, but to restore prosperity to once-traditional levels. Fuel prices can be lowered substantially, and the supermarket duopoly can be dismantled and prices contained. In the next article of this series we will examine details of how these strategies can be implemented.