Smashing the narrative that’s keeping us trapped

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Lead Editorial

8 May 2024
Vol. 26 No. 19

A major wake-up call for the nation is being delivered by two truths revealing that neoliberal ideologies have stolen our future; notably: the speculative housing bubble robbing the prospects of our young people; and the lies about China, which threaten to rip our economic future from under us.

Australians are cynical enough about what “they are told”—whether by politicians or mainstream media—but today’s worsening economic crisis is pulling apart the very fabric of beliefs about where future prosperity lies.

We have been told the free market cures all ills, that privatisation and deregulation will increase the efficiency of service delivery. We have been told that government bureaucracy is bad, and only freeing the private sector from regulation and over-taxation can boost profit-making for the little guy. Competition will bring down prices, they say. Governments should not be involved in banking. Government infrastructure spending causes inflation and the only way to tackle it is with high interest rates. Unelected technocrats are infinitely more trustworthy than fat-cat public servants. Debt must be extinguished; the budget must be balanced; belts must be tightened. The lies go on and on.

Those lies are the basis of the Western economic model, founded to stop nations developing with a combination of government-directed public credit and industry policy. (See The genesis of austerity.)

The cost-of-living crisis is a direct result of this failed economic approach. Young Australians, who have put their lives on hold, feel deeply betrayed, as a 28 March ABC News article, “This isn’t the 30s I was promised”, made crystal clear.

Using datasets going back three decades, the article showed young Aussies are caught in “a perfect storm” of soaring costs of housing, healthcare and other essential expenses, debt (including HECS), and tax, combined with stagnant incomes. Today’s 30-34 year-olds are the first generation in nearly 50 years where most people don’t own a house, reported the piece. It is even worse than during the 1990s recession, when house prices were much lower: “In 1990, the average mortgage was about three times the yearly wage for a 34-year-old. Now it’s eight times.”

But the straightforward solution—public banking to issue cheap, long-term loans and to fund public housing and other development to boost the economy—has been stigmatised by the financial elite since “Old” Labor proved how brilliantly it worked during the war years (Almanac).

The majority of the world, however, is jettisoning neoliberal prescriptions to pursue the public banking strategies that China has more recently proved still work (p. 9).

These economic lies are tied with the lies we are told about China being our enemy: China is spying on us; China wants to take us over. This is because China represents an economic alternative that must be obscured.

Such lies were exploded by Washington Post revelations at the end of April, that the “nest of spies” identified and expelled by ASIO in 2020 for spying on Australia was not China. Nor was it Russia, the next best choice adopted by the mainstream narrative. It was India—our democratic ally! But India was only conducting “pretty run-ofthe-mill espionage”, wrote AFR correspondent Andrew Tillet, who would not have been so casual if it was China, or Russia. People are seeing through this. Just as they will see through the charade of AUKUS and the other plans of our dangerous Anglo-American “allies”, to realise the identity of our true enemy. But the enemy is not the USA; it is not the UK. It is the ideologies that have taken over those places (as well as here), imposed by the centres of financial power in Wall Street and the City of London. But their control is collapsing with their financial system—the very impetus for the drive to war (p. 12). They are weak and can be defeated by the world majority committed to development, which Australia must join.

In this issue:

• Tell Parliament to go after the biggest perpetrators of financial abuse—the banks
• The power of Senate inquiries: Westpac announces 3-year moratorium on regional branch closures
• David McBride did the right thing. All Australians should demand Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus do the right thing and let him go!
• ASIO/AFP clown show foreshadows further crackdown on online privacy
• NIB Coalition sponsors Congressional staff briefing
• The first bank failure of 2024 fleeces FDIC
• Thank banks for China’s economic rise
• Uni protests against Gaza slaughter shake establishment
• The real war: Failing hegemon vs world majority
• Sermon for Gaza: The price of peace
• Too little, too late Westpac!
• Xi visits Serbia on 25th anniversary of NATO’s bombing of China’s embassy
• ALMANAC: The next chapter in the private hijacking of Australian banking, Part IV

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