ACP leadership takes centre stage against the Money Power

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Lead Editorial

6 December 2023
Vol. 25 No. 49

The Australian Citizens Party’s appearance at the 1 December Senate hearing into bank closures in regional Australia was truly historic, in multiple ways.

First, the ACP has revived Australia’s fight against the Money Power—the private financier oligarchy that seeks to dictate to nations and people. The historic fight to bring the Money Power under democratic control was always the quest of the “old” Labor Party, the history of which the ACP knows better than anyone in Australia, from our original research.

The 5 January 1907 Brisbane Worker, owned by the Australian Workers Union, proclaimed Labor’s mission: “The Money Power! It is the greatest power on Earth; and it is arrayed against Labor. No other power that is or ever was can be named with it…. It attacks us through the press—a monster with a thousand lying tongues, a beast surpassing in foulness any conceived by the mythology that invented dragons, wehr wolves, harpies, ghouls and vampires. It thunders against us from innumerable platforms and pulpits. … Yes, so far as we are concerned, the headquarters of the money power is Britain. But the money power is not a British institution; it is cosmopolitan. It is of no nationality, but of all nationalities. It dominates the world. … And that is why Labor men and women should stand religiously to their principles, and refuse the baits of compromise and expediency. The Labor Party represents the one Movement able to cope successfully with the Money Power; the one moral force not vitiated by it….”

Tragically for Australia, Labor abandoned that fight in the early 1980s, entering into a mad embrace of private banks and investment firms and their neoliberal ideology of deregulation and privatisation. It is the ACP that has consciously taken up the mantle of old Labor’s King O’Malley, John Curtin and Ben Chifley to renew their historic battle, and our leadership in that tradition is now being acknowledged.

Second, the ACP took centre stage in the Senate hearing last week, whereas usually we have a background role. Since 2017 the ACP and its activists have powered many inquiries into banking-related issues, including on then-Treasurer Scott Morrison’s bill to “bail in” deposits to prop up banks; the ACP’s bill introduced by both Bob Katter in 2018 and Pauline Hanson in 2019 to establish a Glass-Steagall separation of banks that take deposits, from financial speculation; the Morrison bill to ban cash transactions over $10,000; the removal of Christine Holgate as CEO of Australia Post for opposing privatisation and wanting a postal bank; the failure of the regulator ASIC to police the Sterling First scheme; and ASIC’s failures of investigation and enforcement (ongoing). In September 2022, the ACP organised a forum in Parliament House on a public postal bank. In each case, while the ACP has campaigned publicly and forcefully on the issues, when it comes to the nitty-gritty wheeling and dealing in Parliament between politicians and other parties, it is the ACP that has been prepared to stand back out of political sensitivity, or so others could take the glory. The ACP’s attitude is always policy first, not personality; we take pride, not glory, in results. Our willingness to work this way is one of the reasons other parties are willing to work with us on these issues.

For this Senate committee to depart from the usual treatment of the ACP and invite us to testify in our own name, demonstrated that the ACP’s authority on national banking, and its role in powering this inquiry, cannot be denied. Indeed, Inquiry Chair Senator Matt Canavan, and Senator Malcolm Roberts, both conspicuously acknowledged the ACP’s role in the inquiry and in banking matters, during the hearing.

The only way to bring the Money Power under democratic control is by re-establishing a People’s Bank. This inquiry, and its open recognition of the ACP, is a massive step towards that goal.

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In this issue:

• ACP leadership takes centre stage against the Money Power
• Big Four banks’ worst nightmare dominates Senate hearing
• Opposition strengthens against central bank power grab
• McBride prosecution proves Australia is not a democracy
• Bank of England ring-in is ‘the wrong Andy’
• The world’s biggest creditor is reinventing world finance
• Biden and Xi summit cordial, but skirts Taiwan issues
• Hate thy neighbour (Part 3)
• Unique BRICS-Plus summit points to steps forward from Gaza ‘pause’
• The ACP shows the way!
• Again, Australia fights private bank ‘dictatorship’
• ALMANAC: From Austria to Australia: Bank of England’s Niemeyer dictates austerity

Click here for the archive of previous issues of the Australian Alert Service