An unprecedented window of opportunity has opened for achieving, within weeks, the establishment of an emergency national investment bank that can revive Australia’s economy. Success or failure hinges on what we do in the next few weeks to put this policy on Parliament’s agenda before it resumes for a trial sitting in May.
Your efforts are crucial to winning this fight.
Australia is in a dire economic emergency, which must be tackled with the same urgency as the COVID-19 pandemic. Australians should call on their politicians to support Bob Katter’s plan to turn the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) into an emergency national investment bank that can immediately direct credit into nation-building and job-creating economic development.
Member for Kennedy Bob Katter has echoed the call to immediately repurpose and recapitalise the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) to fund an industrial recovery in Australia.
Mr Katter and the President of his Katter’s Australian Party (KAP), his son and Queensland state MP Robbie Katter, declared in a 9 April KAP Facebook post, “We need to start public works projects to build our way out of this Coronavirus Depression.”
Like the USA’s and Europe’s, Australia’s economy has become a house of cards ready for a puff of breath to blow it over. The COVID-19 coronavirus may be that puff.
Addressing the pandemic emergency is not a question of short-term stimulus; it’s an imperative to restructure the economy to make Australia again capable of producing our own economic necessities, including food, fuel, and medicines and health equipment.
The demise of Holden is the symbolic end of real manufacturing in Australia, with a whimper not a bang. Australia has fallen hard since the 1960s when manufacturing accounted for more than 25 per cent of the economy. Today it is barely 5 per cent, while the parasitical paper-shuffling called financial services—dominated by banking—now accounts for the biggest slice of GDP.
