Circa 1700s. Sailors off a schooner from Europe make landing at an island in the Pacific. The natives are friendly, and while not understanding the Europeans' speech, some of the natives manage to communicate in sign language. The sailors shower them with trinkets, bright, pretty things that glint in the sun and look nice when worn in the hair or on the body, but which have no intrinsic value. The sailors, meanwhile, sail away, their ship loaded with the finest tropical foods and riches, with definite plans to return.

1990s. The story repeats itself. This time the island has a name: Australia. The natives (including indigenous ones) are showered with the gifts of "foreign investment." The visitors fly out with their briefcases full of contracts, giving them the ownership of electricity systems, power plants, communication companies, hospitals, and banks. The natives retire to their meeting places in Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, and Darwin, happy with the coloured paper the visitors have given them, but wondering what to make of the strange word they had chanted: "privatisation."

There is a plot underway to ruin our nation, a plot which wraps itself in the flag of "economic rationalism" and "privatisation". This plot entails the sell-off, mostly to foreign powers, of the bulk of our nation's physical infrastructure and related assets which have been built up since even before Federation, for a mere pittance _some $100 billion dollars. The alleged purpose of this fire-sale, is to "make government more efficient," or, more commonly, "to retire government debt," as both the Howard government and Jeff Kennett's Victorian government proclaim.

These are lies.

Take, for instance, the remarks of perhaps the greatest privatiser of the last two decades, former New Zealand Minister of Finance, Roger Douglas: "I am not sure we were right to use the argument that we should privatise to quit debt. We knew it was a poor argument but we probably felt it was the easiest to use politically."

We show below, that because of the loss of future revenue of the privatised assets, the governments, after a one-time windfall, will be worse off than ever! More importantly, all of the mass misery, job cuts, union-busting, health and education cut-backs and the balance of the "economic rationalism" package is entirely unnecessary in the first place. For instance, by instituting a mere one-tenth of one per cent turnover tax on the sales of stocks, bonds, foreign exchange, and derivatives, which totals $37 trillion, virtually all of which is speculative, $37 billion in revenue could be raised immediately! (see Table 1, p 3 ). This would not only put the budget in the black, but would provide funds for great infrastructure projects and other necessities. By investing in the real physical economy, the economy would grow, and with it the tax base, generating still more revenue; most importantly Australia's citizens would be employed in well-paying, productive jobs.

But "economic rationalism" and "privatisation" were never designed to balance the budget; their purpose, rather, is to wreck the country.

The "economic rationalist" doctrines driving the present privatisation sales would have been recognised immediately as treason against Australia, by those early giants of the Labor Party who built this country, and by many nationalists among the postwar Liberals. This special report, Stop the Great Privatisation Rip-off! is designed to provide you with the knowledge you need, about the foreign power assaulting our country, who its Australian collaborators are, and how they can be defeated.

Our ancient enemy

From the day the First Fleet unloaded its cargo of political prisoners on our shores in 1788, this nation was forged in a struggle against the British Crown and its associated, City of London-centred "Money Power." (see The New Citizen, July-Sept, 1995, "The Rise and Fall of Australia") The hope of our great leaders such as John Dunmore Lang, King O'Malley, Frank Anstey, Jack Lang, John Curtin, Ben Chifley and others, was to establish on these shores a republic devoted to the "commonweal" to the common good of all its citizens.

Out of the mass strikes of the 1890s against that "Money Power", was born the institution committed to this vision of Australiathe Labor Party. Reflecting its noble aspirations that Australia should break with the slavery and tyranny of the British Empire, in favour of establishing American-style sovereignty, that Party spelled its name after the American, not the British, spelling of "labor." Its chief tenet was that credit must be created and deployed for the public good, not by private bankers for their own, selfish ends.

But by the early 1980s, both the Labor and Liberal Parties had been transformed into house pets of the "Money Power" and its doctrine of "economic rationalism." Once again, as has happened repeatedly in our history, the orders for this shift came from London, from the Mont Pelerin Society, the organisation which invented the modern notions of "economic rationalism" and "privatisation".

The Mont Pelerin Society

The Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) was founded in 1947 at a meeting in Switzerland, in a chalet on the slopes of Mt. Pelerin. Among its founders were some of the oldest and most powerful families in Europe, such as the von Hapsburgs, former rulers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Thurn und Taxis family, which ran the intelligence and postal system for that Empire since the Sixteenth Century. Numbers of those present, such as Max von Thurn und Taxis, had supported Hitler during the 1920s and 1930s. The Mont Pelerin Society called for a "Conservative Revolution"for the elimination of the nation-state, and the return to feudalism, a goal which had characterised all of the various European fascist movements of the 1920s and 1930s, of which the Nazis were merely the most successful variant.

The main "economists" associated with Mont Pelerin were the two leading "monetarists" of the Twentieth Century, MPS founder Friedrich von Hayek and the University of Chicago's Milton Friedman. Hayek took his philosophy from the early eighteenth century philosopher Bernard de Mandeville, whose pamphlet, "The Fable of the Bees," argued for the idea that "private vices equals public good," that is, that the unrestrained pursuit of lust and greed by individuals, would naturally result in the greatest good for society as a whole. The work of Mandeville, the founder of the notorious Hell Fire Clubs of Walpole's England, was repackaged by the British East India Company's house economist, Adam Smith, to become the doctrine of the "invisible hand" which naturally guided the "free market", which inevitably produced the best of all worlds.