Saturday 30 March 2013

Australia's best years under public credit implemented by their Labor Party


National Banking in Australia:
The Commonwealth Bank
July 2012
By Robert Barwick 

In two distinct phases, from its inception in 1911 to 1923, and then from 1942-49, the Commonwealth Bank proved the power of national banking: it directed the public credit of Australia into the development of great infrastructure and crucial industries, including the Trans-Australian Railway; it financed Australia’s participation in WWI; and it financed the miraculous war-time economic mobilisation of WWII which transformed Australia from an agrarian backwater into an agro-industrial powerhouse, including the postwar great Snowy Mountains Scheme. Just as in the United States, the rise and fall of the Commonwealth Bank is the story of Australia’s battle for national sovereignty.

The American-inspired patriots of colonial Australia who fought for nationhood knew that national banking was the determining issue. Australia’s labour movement was born out of the bloody 1890 maritime and shearers’ strikes against the London banks, pastoral houses and shipping companies that controlled the colonial economy, and whose stranglehold would unleash the devastating crash of 1893. Already in 1891, NSW’s Labor Electoral League, one of the components which would form the Australian Labor Party, enshrined a commitment to national banking in its electoral platform, alongside a demand for “The federation of the Australasian colonies upon a national as opposed to an imperialistic basis….”

It was the expatriate American ALP politician King O’Malley who gave the Labor Party its deep appreciation of the workings and the signifi cance of national banking. In 1908 O’Malley convinced the federal Labor Party conference held in Brisbane to adopt a detailed national banking proposal in its fighting platform. In a five-hour speech in Federal Parliament the following year, O’Malley emphasised the importance of a national bank for Australia’s sovereignty:

We are legislating for the countless multitudes of future generations, who may either bless or curse us. … We are in favour of protecting, not only the manufacturer, but also the man who works for him. ... I propose the institution of a government national bank for managing the finances of the Commonwealth and the States. … Cannot honourable members see how important it is that we should have a national banking system … —a system that will put us beyond the possibility of going as beggars to the shareholders of private banking corporations? The movement of the money volume is the vital monetary problem—the master-key to the financial situation. Through the control of this movement prices may be made to rise or fall or remain substantially steady. … Such power is an attribute of sovereignty … and ought to belong to none but the sovereign people exercised through … Parliament and Government in the interests of the whole people.”

O’Malley triumphantly proclaimed the precedent for his proposed new national bank. “I am the Hamilton of Australia”, he declared. “He was the greatest financial man who ever walked the earth, and his plans have never been improved upon. … The American experience should determine us to establish a national banking system which cannot be attacked.”

Labor vs. the Money Power

To force the ALP caucus to implement the national banking policy, over the opposition of Melbourne’s British-controlled Collins Street banks, O'Malley formed what he called the “Torpedo Brigade” among Labor MPs. O’Malley and his allies pushed through the Commonwealth Bank Act in December 1911, and O’Malley personally handpicked Denison Miller to run the new national bank, exhorting him, “You have a chance to make history, Brother Miller, Australian history, which will become world history. Think the matter over deeply. And accept the job. Decide to make history— I’m sure you’re the man to do it.” In his 1962 book, The Great Bust, former New South Wales Treasurer and later NSW Prime Minister Jack Lang documented the terror which Miller and the Commonwealth Bank had struck into the British oligarchy, until Miller’s untimely death in 1923:

In Australia the war had been financed by the then newly established Commonwealth Bank. It had found all the money to keep the armies abroad, and also to finance the producers at home. It had financed the Commonwealth Shipping Line deal for Hughes. Denison Miller had gone to London after the war had finished and had thrown a great fright into the banking world by calmly telling a big bankers’ dinner that the wealth of Australia represented six times the amount of money that had been borrowed, and that the Bank could meet every demand because it had the entire capital of the country behind it. The Bank had found £350 million for war purposes. A deputation of unemployed waited on him after he arrived back from London at the head office of the Commonwealth Bank in Martin Place, Sydney. He was asked whether his bank would be prepared to raise another £350 million for productive purposes. He replied that not only was his bank able to do it, but would be happy to do it. Such statements as these caused a near panic in the City of London. If the Dominions were going to become financially independent of the City of London, then the entire financial structure would collapse.”

Lang went on to describe the City of London’s intention to bridle the Commonwealth Bank, by creating a supranational banking structure that would take control over the finances of all nations, constituting a de facto world government. The subjugation of the banking system of Europe today, under the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) demanded by London and related financiers, is a dead ringer for the process exposed by Lang:

Basically it was a problem of banking. Some formula had to be devised which would enable such local institutions as the Commonwealth Bank of Australia to be drawn into the City of London’s net. The financial experts studied the problem deeply. Out of their deliberations emerged the plan to centralise the control of all banking throughout the Empire by channeling it directly into the supervision by the Bank of England. The Bank of England was to become the super Bankers’ Bank. … The Bank of England took up the idea of Empire control most enthusiastically. It was even decided to aim at a World Bank, to be run by the League of Nations, which would control the credit of the world. The grand idea was that one single Board of Directors would make the decisions which would determine the economic policy of the world. The bankers were to be the supreme rulers. Naturally, the Governor of the Bank of England expected to be at the apex of the system. If, for example, the Bank of England could control the Commonwealth Bank of Australia there should be no impediment in the way of controlling the government of the country as well. … The death of Miller removed at a critical moment the one man capable of defending the citadel of Australian fi nancial independence.”

Notwithstanding the remarkable accomplishments of the Commonwealth Bank, its mere twelve years of operation, before private financiers seized control of it following Miller’s death, were not enough for the Bank to break the British monetary stranglehold on Australia. Frank Anstey, one of O'Malley’s former Torpedo Brigade members and the mentor of future prime minister John Curtin, showed in his 1921 book, The Money Power, that the issue was understood to be national sovereignty:

Australia is a mere appendage of financial London, without distinct economic existence. ... London is, so far, the web centre of international finance. In London are assembled the actual chiefs or the representatives of the great financial houses of the world. The Money Power is something more than Capitalism. ... These men constitute the Financial Oligarchy. No nation can be really free where this financial oligarchy is permitted to hold dominion, and no ‘democracy’ can be aught but a name that does not shake it from its throne.”

Indeed, when Miller died in 1923 the London banks directed the Australian government to hand control of the bank to a board of private businessmen, who promptly turned off the tap of public credit. During the Great Depression, the privately controlled board of the Commonwealth Bank refused to follow a government directive to issue credit for public works— a plan to alleviate the 30 per cent unemployment, on the successful model being applied by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt. This defiance of government policy, by the board of the bank, caused such a scandal that in 1936 a Royal Commission was established to investigate banking in Australia. The commission found that the government should be the ultimate authority over the banking system, findings ignored by the Lyons-Menzies governments.

In a 1937 speech to the Labor Party’s election campaign launch in Fremantle, WA ALP leader John Curtin reiterated Anstey’s 1921 warning that there could be no Australian sovereignty without government control over the nation’s finances. Curtin demanded restoration of the Commonwealth Bank’s original charter, and that the Bank be freed from the vice of private financiers and put back under government control:

If the Government of the Commonwealth deliberately excluded itself from all participation in the making or changing of monetary policy it cannot govern except in a secondary degree.”

In 1939, on the eve of the war, the aging King O’Malley again went to bat to re-establish the Commonwealth Bank under its original purpose and charter, as opposed to its domination and speculative misuse by private fi nanciers. In his pamphlet Big Battle, O’Malley insisted that the individual rights people believed were theirs could not be guaranteed without sovereign control over credit, and that the purpose of national banking was to facilitate the creation of tangible, physical wealth, as opposed to the inevitably disastrous “fog wealth” of private banking speculation:

“Permanent wealth is produced by the slow process of industry, combined with skill and the manipulation of capital. Fog wealth is produced by the rapid process of placing one piece of paper in the possession of a bank as a collateral security for two pieces of paper. Some of the enormous quantity of paper which is being created now will sooner or later collapse. But with the Commonwealth Bank capable of sustaining legitimate credits, there can come no panic which will again destroy the market value of intrinsic values, ruin debtors, deprive workers of work, and produce general distress. Oh! Would that I possessed the power to arouse the Australian people to the imperative importance of reviving the Commonwealth Bank!”

After the War

The Commonwealth Bank was indeed revived by John Curtin and Ben Chifley during and immediately after WWII, with stunning success. But the British Crown’s Privy Council overturned Chifley’s bank nationalisation legislation, which had been passed by both houses of Parliament in 1949, and soon Labor was out of power for the next 23 years. During that period Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies, a professed admirer of Hitler and Mussolini during the 1930s and a notorious lackey of the anglophile Melbourne financier Sir Staniforth Ricketson, finished off what was left of the Commonwealth’s function as a national bank.4 He established the Reserve Bank as an independent central bank with control over the nation’s finances, and appointed as its first governor a British-educated Fabian, H.C. “Nugget” Coombs. As Minister of Post-War Reconstruction, Coombs had ripped up most of Labor’s grand postwar reconstruction plans. He gloated of the globalist control over banking when he said of himself, “I am a member of the international freemasonry of central bankers.”

Remnants of a public credit policy continued to exist in Australia, through the Commonwealth Development Bank, the Australian Industry Development Corporation (AIDC), and the various state banks, which enabled the federal and state governments to direct lending into farming, manufacturing and small business. In 1981, under the direction of a cabal of investment bankers centred in Hill Samuel Australia (later renamed Macquarie Bank), a subsidiary of the City of London’s Hill Samuel & Co., Ltd., the Committee of Inquiry into the Australian Financial System (the Campbell Committee) demanded sweeping banking deregulation, including the elimination of all such public credit institutions. To its eternal shame, it was the Labor Party, under Fabian traitors Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, that delivered on the City of London’s demands upon assuming power in 1983.

Keating deregulated the banks, exposing Australia to the predations of foreign banks; fl oated the dollar; amalgamated unions to bust their bargaining power; annihilated manufacturing by slashing tariffs (to “enhance competition”); and privatised major public assets, including the Commonwealth Bank. As revealed in Keating: the Inside Story, by John Edwards, Keating declared his intention to dismantle every aspect of the advanced agro-industrial economy that “old” Labor governments had used public credit to build up, proposing that Australia’s economic future should be almost solely that of a raw materials exporter, with whatever shards of manufacturing might manage to hang on with low or no tariffs: “Minerals, wool and wheat—that’s our long suit. And we have to make secondary industry competitive.” Three decades after Keating began this assault on Australia’s economic sovereignty, his intention for Australia has been realised.

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