Coming soon: Morrison’s ‘appointment in Samarra’!

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Lead Editorial

8 December 2021
Vol. 23 No. 49

A merchant in Baghdad sends his servant to the marketplace for provisions. Soon afterwards, the servant comes home white and trembling and tells him that in the marketplace, he was jostled by a woman, whom he recognised as Death, who made a threatening gesture. Borrowing the merchant’s horse, he flees at great speed to Samarra, a distance of about 75 miles (125 km), where he believes Death will not find him. The merchant then goes to the marketplace and finds Death, and asks why she made the threatening gesture to his servant. She replies, “That was not a threatening gesture, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I have an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.”

-Ancient Babylonian tale, as retold by American writer John O’Hara

Australian PM Scott Morrison will soon meet his political end. He may avoid it today or tomorrow, but it is assuredly coming. It is the job of our political movement to ensure that the wake-up call delivered by the current crisis spells the end of not only the political career of Mr Morrison, but the entire neoliberal economic paradigm that brought us here!

Australia is facing a physical economic breakdown, just as the speculative housing bubble, inflated by the policies of successive Liberal and Labor governments, is set to blow. This is occurring against a background of horrific thievery by criminal banks, exposed by the banking royal commission. The Morrison government, which pledged to implement Commissioner Hayne’s demands, quickly ignored them and soon moved to subvert them completely (p. 3).

With their deregulation taskforce, appointment of “business friendly” regulators and Al Capone clone Nicholas Moore to oversee them, Morrison and Treasurer Frydenberg are making the deregulation dictated by the 1981 Campbell Committee and 1997 Wallis Inquiry, which fashioned our current “law of the jungle” financial regulation framework, look like the strictest regulatory regime on earth.

Sterling First is merely one of a variety of schemes that target our elderly to “unlock” the capital held in their homes, superannuation and savings, so it can be used to build up the property bubble to save the banks. This ranks right up there with depositor “bail-in” and banning large cash transactions. Those issues provoked members of Morrison’s own government to turn against him, a phenomenon that is building by the day, currently peaking in reaction to his incompetent pandemic response. Will his government even make it to the next election?

Add to that the growing core of diplomats, defence experts, and now even leaders of the Opposition, warning of the potentially catastrophic implications of the government’s belligerence towards China in the name of “human rights”.

In a human rights disaster of our own making, US- and UN-led sanctions imposed on Afghanistan when the Taliban took over are killing Afghanis faster than the war did—for lack of food and healthcare. In an op-ed published by Al Jazeera on 4 December, leaders of four European NGOs on the ground in Afghanistan decried the severance of international funding, including development aid, and blocking of government reserves. Without urgent action, “more people will die of hunger in 2022 alone than from violence during the last 20 years of conflict”, read the statement.

Australia is “lambasting countries such as China for human rights violations while ardently supporting nations such as Saudi Arabia”, wrote freelance writer Dechlan Brennan in Pearls and Irritations on 7 December. Australia supplies weaponry to the Saudis, who are indiscriminately bombing, starving out populations, and committing war crimes in Yemen.

Blindly following our “dangerous” Anglo-American allies, as PM Malcolm Fraser—the leader who held out against Campbell’s financial deregulation—called the USA and UK, also means we are missing out on economic opportunities in our own region. Laos now has 414 kilometres of high-speed rail (p. 7), while we still have precisely zero!

In this issue:

• Treasurer bringing financial regulation into disrepute
• Australia signs up to fraudulent Five Eyes-Magnitsky agenda
• Solomon Islands crisis is largely of Australia’s making
• BRI: reviving real economies for 8 years
• Eurasian powers act against headlong war agenda
• Several public banking options floated in USA
• A postal bank will break the monopoly!
• Western Australia Spaceport aims to launch Australia back into space

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