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One Nation advocates for the enshrinement of freedom of speech as a fundamental human right in our Constitution. We are the only Australian political party actively working to integrate freedom of speech into our legal and social framework. Contrary to popular belief, this right is not currently enshrined in the Australian Constitution, though many Australians assume it is.

While the Constitution provides a limited form of freedom of speech concerning political communications, it falls short of the comprehensive protection seen in the American Constitution, where freedom of speech is explicitly guaranteed.

I am calling for a thorough investigation into the necessity and benefits of including such a provision in our Constitution. Such a change would bring an end to governmental overreach and prevent legislation aimed at censoring speech by labelling it as ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’ for political reasons.

The press and media are also guilty of suppressing dissenting views that challenge the government’s narrative, and social media platforms are known for shadow banning or cancelling comments that oppose government positions. This was particularly evident during the Covid-19 period of mandates and shutdowns, targeting those who questioned government control.

We must resist any government measures that would further restrict freedom of speech and advocate for stronger protections to safeguard this essential right.

Transcript

I speak in support of this motion from One Nation to enshrine into the Constitution one of the most basic of human rights: the right to free speech. When it comes to free speech, One Nation has your back. Many people believe that free speech is an existing feature of the Australian legal and social framework. It’s not. The High Court has held that there is limited freedom of speech implied by the interaction of several sections of the Constitution, limited to political communication. The extent of this limited right is yet to be fully determined by the High Court. That being the case, this concept of the right to free speech, already enshrined in the American Constitution, would be a worthy improvement to our own Australian Constitution. I want to read from the motion that Senator Hanson has moved in her own name and mine: 

That the following matters be referred to the Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee for inquiry and report by 1 September 2024: 

The matter of a popular vote, in the form of a referendum, on the matter of enshrining the right to free speech in the Australian constitution, with particular reference to: 

(a) an assessment of the content and implications of a question to be put to electors; 

(b) an examination of the resources required to enact such an activity, including the question of the contribution of Commonwealth funding to the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ campaigns; 

(c) an assessment of the impact of the timing of such an activity, including the opportunity for it to coincide with a general election; and 

(d) any other related matters. 

This is fairly simple. It’s just an investigation and inquiry. 

Of course, any alteration to our Constitution must be done with the agreement of the Australian voters by way of a referendum. I know that the Australian people are sick of referendums, particularly since the doomed and expensive Voice debacle that we had to endure and that the Labor government poured more than $450 million down the gurgler on, when it could have been spent on something far more important. Yet ensuring that freedom of speech is a feature of our social and legal landscape would be worth it. 

Why do we need it? In Australia we’re significantly overgoverned and overregulated. One area that needs attention is the way that the government use the media to shut down anyone who wishes to discuss any concept that does not follow the government line. In these woke times, governments maintain a strong hand guiding the media into accepting and promoting often truly dumb and in some instances factually wrong propositions. We know that freedom of speech is suppressed because local newspapers and state newspapers rely on funding from advertising from local councils and state governments. It’s the same with the national government, the federal government. If someone comes up with an article that is too much out of the government line, then the governments won’t advertise. 

In addition to some factually wrong propositions from federal and state governments, we see propositions that undermine good governance and cede sovereignty, pushing a globalist agenda—ridiculous. Social media platforms have taken on the roles of pseudo fact checkers and censors of material, deleting material that’s deemed inappropriate, even if it’s accurate and is disclosing inconvenient truths. Truth doesn’t matter to government in Australia anymore. 

As an example, YouTube recently took down material from my YouTube channel, including material on COVID vaccine or COVID injection injuries that it had deemed medical misinformation. This was unnecessary and possibly unlawful, as some of the information was material placed before the Senate, covered by parliamentary privilege and supported by proof of its truth, fully referenced. It had been up there for six months. Once I started mentioning a COVID royal commission, it’s suddenly come down, and they’ve taken it back retrospectively. It was six months worth of work that this Senate has seen and witnessed. Somehow, political speech from the Senate is censored by YouTube, which is owned by a foreign corporation, meddling in Australian federal politics. 

It’s not the first time. This interference with the communication of parliamentary material is potentially an offence, but it’s not covered by any laws simply guaranteeing freedom of speech. Freedom of speech should still be moderated, on rare occasions, to exclude poisonous vilification or speech that promotes hate or other crimes, not something that might offend someone. That’s a dumbing down of the Australian population. If anyone’s feelings are hurt—you cannot give offence; you can only take offence. If someone says something in the chamber and I feel offended, that’s my responsibility; it’s not theirs. So we should be stopping this nonsense about someone, feeling offended, being able to shut down the other person. 

It’s the speech that considers alternative narratives or theories that deserves protection. This Labor government has done nothing to improve transparency and accountability in terms of government actions. Indeed, in terms of guillotines—the shutting down of debate—we’ve had major bills go through this parliament with not one word of debate. We’ve had major amendments voted on with not one word of debate or question. That’s not democracy. This Labor government has done nothing, as I said, to improve transparency and accountability in terms of government actions. 

During the COVID period of government failure, the government of the time moved into a period of hyperactivity, silencing critics and preventing any discussion of problems, COVID injection injuries—of which there were many—and alternative treatments, resulting in tens of thousands of needless, preventable deaths and injuries in the hundreds of thousands to innocent Australians. That was what the Liberal-National coalition did—two cheeks of the same backside. 

Of particular concern is the Labor government’s intention to introduce a bill to eliminate alleged disinformation or misinformation, with no identified deciders as to whether the information is based on truth or not. Who cares about the truth? Just shut it down if it goes against the government’s narrative. Who introduced the misinformation and disinformation bill? That’s right: the other cheek, the Liberal-National coalition. Labor introduced it. They didn’t put it to the vote. The Labor Party came along into government and they introduced it again—the same bill, pretty much. 

This misinformation and disinformation bill must be opposed. It represents government censorship at its worst. It’s a control agenda that’s occurring in so many Western countries, and I compliment Tucker Carlson for his courage in speaking the truth. It’s happening largely to the Anglophone nations: Britain, Canada, New Zealand, America and Australia—and, to some extent, in Europe, but it’s largely the descendants of the British Empire or Commonwealth. 

Usually, we’d rely upon state or Commonwealth legislation to resolve this issue of ensuring freedom of speech. Yet, since Federation, this has not been done properly by either of these jurisdictions, state or federal. It’s now high time to ensure once and for all that this protection can be established. It can be done. We need this inquiry. By our call for a committee to inquire and report to the Senate, assessments on content, process, resources required, timing and any other matters related may be brought back to the Senate for consideration. 

Freedom of speech, if enshrined within the Constitution, will provide greater real freedoms to all Australians. Let’s go through some of the freedoms. We’ve got freedom of life, freedom of belief, freedom of thought, freedom of expression, freedom of speech, freedom of movement, freedom of travel, freedom of exchange and freedom of initiative. Of all of those freedoms, freedom of life is arguably No. 1. But they don’t get off the ground without freedom of speech. Speech is first. These freedoms are birth rights, universal rights. Yet we now have to come to the government and ask permission to speak freely or we get censored. That means it’s not a right anymore. It’s something that we have to get permission from the government for, whether it be Labor or the Liberal-Nationals. 

Think about this: the most remarkable transformation of human civilisation on this planet occurred in the last 170 years. Prior to that, our ancestors were shuffling around and scratching in the dirt. Now look where we are. Human progress has come because of human creativity and human care. They’re inherent in people. People want to do things better, more quickly, smarter and more easily, so someone comes up with an idea. Through freedom of speech, they share the idea—and this happened so much in America and Britain in the 19th century, and even in the 18th century. Ideas were shared: one person came up with an idea; another person, by sharing it, built upon the idea and made it more magnificent; and then someone else came along, took their idea, made an initiative out of it and transformed human civilisation.  

Freedom of speech is a matter of life and death. It’s a matter of human progress. I support this motion.  

“Sovereign citizen” or “Freeman” are catchall terms referring to those who believe that by declaring themselves as “living people” or “natural people” they can break free from society’s contract with the corporate government. These groups share some common beliefs and behaviours. A central belief is that the Australian government and other agencies are corporations and illegitimate.  

Sovereign citizens believe they can issue their own driver’s licenses and vehicle registration, create and file their own liens against government officials who cross them, question judges about the validity of their oaths and challenge the applicability of traffic laws. They are wrong. They can’t do these things. 

I’m all for protecting fundamental human rights and freedoms, including freedom of expression, free speech, and religious freedoms, and I understand that many Australians have the sense that there’s a lot wrong in our society, on that I agree. The Sovereign Citizen movement is not the answer. 

The movement embraces a wide spectrum of beliefs based on false, pseudo legal concepts, including the view that a government-controlled and enslaved ‘strawman’ persona is created at birth. This is supposedly evidenced by documents showing the person’s name in all capital letters, birth certificates, social security cards, driver’s licenses, tax forms, etc.

Where did this movement come from? 

The sovereign citizen movement started during the 1970’s in the United States and is growing in Germany, England, North America, Canada, New Zealand and here in Australia.  

The word “sovereign” comes from the Latin word for ‘above’ and the Old French word for ‘highest’ or ‘chief’. Today the word sovereign, when used before a noun, means ‘free to govern itself”. Much like the common phrase ‘sovereign nation’, sovereign citizen means free to govern oneself. 

During the American colonial period, a Freeman was a person who was not a slave. The term originated in 12th-century Europe and was originally used in feudal society. In England it came to mean a man possessing the full privileges and immunities of a city, borough or trade guild to which admission was usually by birth, apprenticeship, gift or purchase. 

The Freeman concept today has become marginalised. The idea of a nation state is no longer new and people are accustomed to the idea that we’re born into nation states that make laws for us and that those laws are inherently valid.  

In the UK, there’s a movement like the Sovereign Citizens, one that is often referred to as ‘Freeman on the Land.” Freemen-on-the-land believe that the Magna Carta and “common law” mean that they do not have to comply with legislation they don’t consent to. 

Worth noting is that throughout history, even in the days when nation states were first emerging, people questioned authority. A healthy society is one where citizens can question without repercussions: Why should I obey the laws of this monarch, this emperor, or this system of government? Why does their assertion of the right to make laws for me have any validity?  

The quote by Don Chipp in 1980 proclaiming he would “keep the bastards honest” is more important today. People are entitled to question critically or philosophically those in positions of power.  I do this on behalf of citizens. It is every citizen’s right and duty to question and criticise.

What do Sovereign Citizens believe? 

There are a few common themes in the Sovereign Citizens movement that are based on misreadings and assumed loopholes in laws, including that: 

  • Laws are illegitimate because the legislators were not truly elected. The constitutional provision allowing a law was never actually ratified, the law does not comply with the common law or a higher law, such as natural law or God’s law. 
  • Law enforcement has no right to enforce the laws because police officers are attempting to enforce illegitimate laws, judges are sitting in the wrong type of court and judicial proceedings are not brought in the proper way. 
  • Citizens have the same authority as the state and should be treated as equal entities. 
  • Comprehension of law has departed from an older, truer law and citizens are only bound to obey the old law. 
  • There are little known procedures under old law that obligate modern judges to abandon modern law and decide the case under the old law. 

Sovereign Citizens believe that when you’re born, you’re a living person. Once you have your birth certificate registered, you create what’s called a ‘straw man’ or ‘straw person.’ The idea is that when you’re getting fined by the government, it’s your straw person or ‘corporate identity’ that’s getting fined. Not you, the ‘living person’.

Some of the Other Beliefs Held by Sovereign Citizens

  • I don’t have to pay taxes because the Government or the Constitution itself is illegitimate.
  • I’m not driving, I’m travelling in my vehicle on your roads.
  • I have the right to travel freelywithout the need for a driver’s license, vehicle registration, or insurance, to travel on toll roads without paying and without a license plate or driver’s license, because of the fundamental freedom of travel.
  • A court cannot convict me of a crime because all modern courts are technically admiralty courts, which only have jurisdiction over sea-based crimes.
  • I can incorporate myself and the court will only have jurisdiction over the corporation, not the natural person, myself.
  • Lawsuits or prosecutions are legal contracts which I can refuse to enter into and therefore not have to submit to a judge’s decision.
  • There’s a set of secret law judges are bound to honour, which I can invoke in order to escape punishment or access funds that the government is holding in trust for me.
  • I have the right to initiate a trial of a law enforcement officer or judge in their absence, find them guilty and seize their property for the infraction.

What’s Attracting People to the Movement?

Many in the Sovereign Citizen movement were initially drawn to it due to financial stress or because of frustration with the government. What starts as a search for tips to get out of a speeding fine might bring about a complete shift in ideology and a total rejection of government and the law. Society needs to be directly involved with democracy and citizens should continue to exercise their civic muscle and challenge those who should serve them in federal, state and local government. We all need to ensure that government power has been exercised fairly and that justice prevails in the courts.

Rejecting government outright and claiming to be immune from all laws doesn’t work in a civil society.

Is Any of this True or Legal?

Laws are not opt-in, nor are they opt-out. No Australian court has ever recognized the legitimacy of any of the arguments put forward by Sovereign Citizens with good reason, because if it did, that court would be illegitimate and would not have the authority to accept the arguments.  The concept is, in any case, incoherent.

Being a ‘citizen’ means that you are already part of a sovereign entity and are subject to its laws. In other words, you can’t be a ‘citizen’ if you claim to be ‘sovereign’. What entity or mechanism would grant you citizenship?  

There are some elements of truth woven into the fabrication. One of these is the law of the sea versus the law of the land.

Admiralty law is a synonym for maritime law. It’s the law that governs shipping and the sea. Sovereign citizens’ beliefs are sourced from a variety of bogus theories and legal theories that are not recognized by the legal system.

One of these theories is the that the United States legal system operates under maritime admiralty law, which is based on laws that govern international commerce and navigation. Maritime law as the basis of an argument for ignoring one’s legal responsibilities, is a common myth of the Sovereign Citizen movement. It’s utterly false!

There are areas where maritime law contains some unusual rules and concepts that are contrary to what we might call terrestrial law. Maritime law always operated separately and along very different lines from the main body of law.

Why are People Believing This? 

People are searching for ways to take back their rights, and these pseudo-legal ideas are finding fertile ground to flourish in, particularly since all the inhuman and dishonest restrictions imposed on Australians during the COVID response. Government, both state and federal, imposed and facilitated extreme restrictions on ordinary Australians that included border closures, lockdowns and vaccine mandates. 

There have always been people pushing back against government controls, however the Sovereign Citizen movement is gaining popularity with a growing number of businesses or ‘gurus’ selling the concept. Without a doubt, this is a reaction to the public health orders that have resulted in the loss of people’s jobs and freedoms.  

Sovereign Citizens reject the conventional ‘social contract’ system of laws and believe an individual should only be bound by things that they’ve explicitly consented to. The movement sells the ideology of absolute ‘freedom’ through opting out of civil society and the systems they were born into.  

What is Pseudo Law? 

Pseudo Law looks a bit like law, but it doesn’t follow normal legal rules. The belief that you can speak or write in a certain way, create your own identity documents and no longer be subject to any local laws, is appealing. The idea that you can become free of any legal constraints, including taxes and fines, is tempting. What those people fail to see is that they want all the protection and infrastructure provided by government, without participating and paying the cost for it.  

This entire movement is based on cherry-picked language from old cases and treaties that happened hundreds of years ago. Some of their concepts involve courts lacking jurisdiction because a flag with fringe makes a court an ‘Admiralty’ court. Another is that writing or typing a name in capital letters reveals the corporate entity, while lower-case denotes the living person, and this can be used to deprive the court of its jurisdiction. These ideas have been completely rejected and debunked in court. 

The attempt to create a quasi-legal system with a kind of legalese overlaying society is not the answer to our problems. 

Are there Two Constitutions?

Another aspect of the broad brush that is the Sovereign Citizen movement is the claim there are two Australian Constitutions, one legitimate and one corporate. In a nutshell, people are led to believe the Constitution adopted at Federation in 1901 has been superseded by a corporate Constitution linked to Australia’s financial registration in the United States with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). 

For the purposes of trading and selling bonds and other financial exchanges, most nations are registered in this way. The Australian government registered “The Commonwealth of Australia” as a Form 18-K entity for the purpose of issuing securities in the US. It’s a requirement of US law if Australia wants to borrow money and sell securities. 

Many governments around the world have done the same thing. It does NOT mean that Australia is now a corporation.

Government entities also routinely use an Australian Business Number (ABN) for operational activities such as ordering and invoicing, claiming goods and services tax credits or registering an Australian government domain name.

Australia has only ONE Constitution, which was adopted at Federation in 1901. 

People can verify this for themselves: obtain a copy of the “1901 Constitution,” identify the eight changes made through referendums, and compare it with the current Constitution.

If you don’t have a copy of the constitution, please contact our office and we will mail one to you.

Legal, Lawful, Common Law, Magna Carta: What Does It All Mean?

The Common Law system is the legal system followed in Australia, inherited from the United Kingdom. Common Law is developed by judges on a case-by-case basis, building on the precedent and interpretation of earlier court decisions. It fills in the gaps in legislation made by Parliament.

Sovereign Citizens often base arguments in Common Law, relying on the supposed distinction between the “living person” on one hand and legal “personhood” on the other.

Australian Common Law doesn’t make that distinction because it is one that was used to support slavery.

In Australia, which is a sovereign nation, every human being once wholly born is a legal person. 

Legislation enacted by Parliament takes precedence over previous court decisions (Common Law) and courts are required to interpret existing Common Law principles consistently with legislation. 

We are all bound by both sources of law. You cannot elect to live under the jurisdiction of only one or the other.

From birth we all have a legal identity. We cannot opt out of it by declaring ourselves a “living person”, or a “natural person”, a sovereign citizen or a freeman-on-the-land. None of these titles have any legal meaning or effect. 

Legal fact: Once a principle of Common Law has been superseded by statute or by a development in the common law, it cannot be revived by somebody saying, “I still consider myself bound by the old common law”. 

The Magna Carta is a foundation document of English (and Australian) Constitutional Law. In the context of the rule of law, its fundamental provision was that the King undertook not to act against a person except by lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land, and not to sell, deny or defer justice. This meant the Magna Carta was considered to establish that no-one, not even the King, is above the law. 

The Magna Carta (‘Great Charter’) of King John of 1215 was amended and reissued by later monarchs. On display at Parliament House is one of the four remaining originals of the 1297 issue, which contained the final wording that was entered on the Statute Roll of England. 

No Case Relying on Sovereign Citizen Arguments Has Been Won in an Australian Court

The study of jurisprudence (the philosophy of law) involves these questions and discussions. Why do we consider laws imposed upon us by others to be binding? Is it just because the state has people with guns and courts that can lock us up, that it forces us to comply with those laws? Or is it because of the inherent social contract – that by voluntarily becoming part of that society we implicitly accept all rules, both good and bad? Or is it something else? 

Pseudo Legal Arguments 

The idea of an ‘illegal government’ is a pseudo-legal body of ideas that has been floating around on the internet for years. This can be loosely called the ‘Sovereign Citizen’ or ‘Freeman’ movement. Those who subscribe to these ideas believe that governments and lawyers use secret, shady techniques to circumvent sovereign rights. They believe that relying on certain counter-tactics people can successfully defend themselves in the face of law enforcement and the court system. 

Travel restrictions, quarantine detentions, business closures and health orders have sadly become the ‘new normal.’ Since COVID, Australians are facing greater deprivations and restrictions on their fundamental human rights, such as freedom of movement, the right to peacefully assemble and the right to privacy, more than ever before. We are committed to and working hard to reverse these changes.

These Sovereign Citizen ideas are completely legally ineffective. Worse, they are potentially harmful to individuals who rely on them. The landmark case of Meads v. Meads, 2021 ABQB 571: Organised Pseudolegal Commercial Argument Schemes provides a breakdown of the theories and arguments put forward by those selling lessons in the sovereign citizen movement: 

  • Formatting & punctuation: Unusual formatting of names, such as “:gary-winston :of the family lineker”, documents “sealed” with a thumbprint in red ink and postage stamps placed on documents as if to “authenticate” them.
  • Inapplicable law & authorities: Reference to any of the Uniform Commercial Code (“UCC”, which is US federal legislation), Black’s Law Dictionary, Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights. Repeated pseudolegal “mantras” (common examples include “Notice to agent is notice to principal, notice to principal is notice to agent”, “All rights reserved, non-assumpsit”). 
  • Consent: Demanding evidence that the person has consented to be bound by some piece of legislation. Serving an “affidavit” and asserting that if the recipient fails to rebut the contents within a set time limit, they are forever deemed to be true. 
  • “Straw man” theory: Distinguishing between ones’ “real” and “legal” persons. Writing to staff in their personal capacities (e.g. “Ms So-and-so, doing business as Chief Executive of Such-and-such Council”). Addressing public bodies as if they were limited companies. 
  • Money: Charging for any interaction and using a “common law commercial lien” to enforce this.
  • Courts & court behaviour: Referring to alternative “common law courts” or “world courts”. Requesting a judge present evidence of their oath or “bond information”, or demanding they answer various questions to prove their suitability to sit. Refusing to sit or otherwise behaving disruptively in court hearings. 

Pseudolegal arguments are a response to the state and its judicial systems, but they are also a consequence of it. The uptick of Pseudolaw adoption is indicative of social unrest, disaffection, and inequality.

Unfortunately, people looking for answers to their problems online can readily find gurus cashing in on the disaffected. 

Credits

This post includes information attributed to Robert Sudy, who was once intrigued by the beliefs of the sovereign citizen movements. He attempted to employ these beliefs in a traffic matter in a Magistrates Court in New South Wales, albeit unsuccessfully.

Mr Sudy is not a lawyer; however, his research is meticulous and can be sourced here: https://freemandelusion.com/

This substantial resource provides analyses of the arguments and debunks them. It’s targeted at Australian law and is a helpful resource for other common law jurisdictions too. 

Robert entertainingly takes us down the rabbit hole of its frameworks and beliefs. His tone is irreverent and light-hearted and he is speaking from direct experience. It’s eye-opening. 

Access to justice requires education and information about government, law, politics and economics, as well as clearly accessible information on government functions and legal processes. This requires planning, funding and resources to support individuals and communities at risk of social and economic dislocation. 

In these unpredictable times, with governments exceeding their social license and not being accountable, people quite rightly are frustrated and feeling helpless. The way forward is to educate rather than scorn those who are vulnerable and misled. Many of those captivated with these ideas tend to be extremely mistrustful already, which is understandable after the societal upheaval caused by the governments’ COVID response and the restrictions on people’s lives and livelihoods.

Robert Sudy’s website is a free public resource. Extensive time and effort has been dedicated to bring this valuable information into the public domain to make it accessible to everyone.

While access to the website is free, donations are greatly appreciated. Your support will help cover the costs associated with maintaining the site, ensuring that it remains a valuable resource for years to come.

You can support his work by donating here: https://freemandelusion.com/honestybox/

Media Release

Transcript of Questions Asked of Minister Farrell

Senator Roberts: My question is to the Special Minister of State, Senator Farrell. The Constitution requires the proposed law to be submitted to the electors so electors can see what they are voting on in a referendum. Minister, do you agree that the proposed text to be included on the ballot paper is the full text of the proposed law change as contained in the enabling legislation, the Constitution Alteration (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander) Voice 2023?

Senator Farrell (Minister for Trade and Tourism, Special Minister of State and Deputy Leader of the Government in the Senate): I thank Senator Roberts for giving me the courtesy of some advance knowledge of this question.

Honorable senators interjecting—

Senator Farrell: Well, some people just like me! I hate to say it—I can’t help it! Some of them actually get a better answer if they give me a bit of advance notice. It’s hard to believe, I know.

I have been made aware that there are claims by one legal academic that the form of the proposed constitutional amendment and/or the ballot paper question do not satisfy the constitutional requirements for a referendum. But the referendum legal issues have been considered in detail by the Constitutional Expert Group, the Solicitor-General and the parliamentary inquiry. This gives me some assurance that the amendment and the question are legally sound, Senator Roberts.

Historically, all referendum ballot paper questions have either used the short title, until 1951, or the long title, after 1951, of the Constitution alteration that passed through the parliament. The question for the Voice uses the long title, consistent with the practice for over 70 years. The government is aware of a potential challenge to the ballot paper reform. This application has not yet been accepted by the High Court and is therefore not an active proceeding. At this point, I’m advised that it is probably inappropriate to comment further on that possible legal challenge.

The President: Senator Roberts, a first supplementary?

Senator Roberts: Section 128 of the Constitution makes no provision for a summary of the change to appear on the ballot paper. Section 128 requires the proposed law change to be submitted in full. Form B of the Referendum (Machinery Provisions) Act 1984, which allows for a summary, is in breach of section 128 of the Constitution. Minister, will you ensure the Voice ballot paper is compliant with the constitutional provisions for a referendum?

Senator Farrell: I thank Senator Roberts for his first supplementary question. Yes, Senator Roberts, I will ensure that the wording in the question on the referendum on 14 October is compliant with the Constitution. Can I reiterate my earlier answer, that all of the advice that I’ve got from the Constitutional Expert Group, from the Solicitor-General and from the parliamentary inquiry that examined this issue is that it does meet the existing constitutional requirements. I should say that my office has at all times tried to facilitate your ability to get advice directly from the AEC about any issues that you might have with the ballot paper. I invite you to— (Time expired)

The President: Senator Roberts, a second supplementary?

Senator Roberts: A case could and will be made to the High Court that including a misleading feel-good summary on the referendum ballot paper rather than the actual details of the change is a breach of section 128 of the Constitution, which may have the effect of misleading voters and rendering the result void. Minister, are you or your government about to make a $364 million mistake?

Senator Farrell: I thank Senator Roberts for his second supplementary question. No, I don’t believe so. I have seen some of the reports that you are referring to. Interestingly, one of the reports I think that you’re relying on was from Michael Detmold, who was my constitutional law lecturer in 1972 at Adelaide university. But that doesn’t mean, Senator Roberts, unfortunately, that everything he may or may not say is correct.

Senator Scarr: Did you pass?

Senator Farrell: You’ll be surprised, Senator Scarr—I did. I not only passed Constitutional Law 1, but I passed Constitutional Law 2. That was even more surprising! (Time expired)

My Response to the Minister’s Answers

RSVP here: https://www.churchandstate.com.au/big-ideas/

When

Friday, 11 August 2023

7 pm to 8:30 pm

Where

BTP Conference & Exhibition Centre

1 Clunies Ross Court

Eight Mile Plains QLD 4113

I’ve got a suggestion, if Labor wants to keep disobeying direct orders of the Senate we can show them why there are jail cells underneath Parliament House.

Transcript

I like Senator Farrell. He’s a good bloke. We don’t always agree. I accept that he’s overseas right now. Yet his repeated non-responses are not acceptable. His behaviour is not acceptable, because answering questions is important for accountability. The people that we serve deserve honesty and accountability. There’s only one word to describe this government’s attitude to Senate estimates, to questions on notice and to orders for the production of documents. That word is ‘contempt’. They continue to treat this chamber with contempt. Almost every order by this Senate to produce information is met with contempt from this government, and it is appropriate that we begin to treat appropriately the ministers who treat this Senate with contempt.

We have had explanation after explanation after explanation from ministers. Ministers are all too happy to come into this place and cop a lashing for an hour and continue to refuse to produce the information that this Senate has ordered. The explanations are not good enough. They are intentionally inadequate. It is not good enough that this Senate continues to accept them without any further action. It’s time for this Senate to use its constitutionally enshrined powers to hold ministers to account, and that must be through charges of contempt when they continue to disrespect this Senate’s orders.

I remind senators that it is this Senate, not the government-dominated privileges committee, that makes the final determination on matters of contempt. If this Senate is not happy with a minister’s disobedience of a direct order, then the Senate itself can vote on contempt, which we would do and which should happen. The time for meaningless, hollow blather, in explanation after explanation, is over. Start serving the people or face contempt motions. There are jail cells in the basement. It’s time for the executive government to be reminded why they’re there. That’s not a joke. That is fact. It’s time for the government to be reminded why there are jail cells in the basement.

After studying commerce at the University of Southern Queensland, instead of working as an accountant, Robbie joined the CEC, now Citizens Party, as a full-time staffer in its new HQ in Melbourne.

In the 30 years since, he has worked as a researcher, media liaison, campaigns director and research director, with a focus on Australian political history and especially the history of the Commonwealth Bank.

Robbie has been an active campaigner and has been at the forefront of many over the last decade, including:

  • a national bank
  • a Glass-Steagall separation of Australia’s bank
  • stopping the bail-in of Australian bank deposits, in which he worked closely with my office
  • reforming Australia Post and a post office “people’s bank”
  • justice for the hundreds of thousands of victims of Australia’s banks and financial institutions and reforming the financial regulators

Transcript

Speaker 1:

You’re with Senator Malcolm Roberts on Today’s News Talk Radio, TNT.

Malcolm Roberts:

Welcome back to Today’s News Talk Radio, tntradio.live. I want to welcome my second guest now, Robbie Barwick. I’m very proud to have worked with Robbie and his organisation, the Citizens Electoral Council. Welcome, Robbie.

Robbie Barwick:

Hi, Malcolm.

Malcolm Roberts:

I hope you’re listening to the first hour.

Robbie Barwick:

I was. I loved every bit of it. That was excellent.

Malcolm Roberts:

I’ve got a question for you before we take off, but first, I want to give you a proper introduction. So, Robbie studied commerce at the University of Southern Queensland. Instead of working as an accountant, Robbie joined the Citizens Electoral Council, now, the Citizens Party, as a full-time staffer in its new headquarters in Melbourne. In 30 years since then, he has worked as a researcher, media liaison, campaigns director, and research director with a focus on Australian political history and especially the history of the Commonwealth Bank. He knows government. He knows banking. He knows economics, and he’s a first rate individual. If he says something, it can be trusted. Robbie’s been an active campaigner.

Malcolm Roberts:

When I say campaigner, not electoral campaign, although he was a Senate candidate at the last election a couple of weeks ago. Robbie’s been an active campaigner working on many campaigns and it’s been at the forefront of the last decade, including a national bank, Glass-Steagall separation of Australia’s banks, stopping the bail-in of Australian bank deposits in which Robbie worked very closely with my office and with me, reforming Australia posts in a post office people’s bank, justice for the hundreds of thousands of victims of Australia’s banks and financial institutions, and reforming the financial regulations. So, welcome, Robbie. You’ve just done a marvellous job. You continue to do a marvellous job.

Robbie Barwick:

Oh, thanks, Malcolm. That’s very kind, coming from you.

Malcolm Roberts:

What do you mean coming from me?

Robbie Barwick:

You do marvellous work too, mate.

Malcolm Roberts:

All right. Thank you. Well, the key is I’d say that we share, that we both look upon ourselves as serving the people and that’s what I could see coming out of Ellen’s work. Before we get into questions about banking and currency and money, what’s something you appreciate, Robbie?

Robbie Barwick:

A good sleeping. No, I’ll add to that, outspoken senators like yourself and a few others, but I reckon, in my work, I always value meeting ordinary people around Australia who can feedback to me their direct experience of the economy of the world, their life, how it works. I never cease to be amazed, Malcolm, at how much Australia relies on ordinary people who are prepared to go that extra mile to keep the system going keep in their own little way. The nurse who’s worked a double shift and she’ll stay on another 15, 20 minutes because there’s not enough people there. And this is all unfunded stuff, right?

Robbie Barwick:

The people in industry who make sure that machine works, et cetera, because without them, we don’t have an economic system that actually goes the extra mile for them, that makes sure those things happen. So much of our essential services are held together with the equivalent of elastic bands and sticky tape, which is the efforts of the people who provide them. And the most recent one I discovered, which we worked together on as well, was how licenced post officers provide our postal services. And these are all small businesses working very, very hard for peanuts, right around Australia, very tough business conditions and they provide an essential service for Australians. So, that’s what I appreciate more than anything.

Malcolm Roberts:

Well, yes. And the only thing I would disagree with you on that and I do want to acknowledge the licence post office and especially Angela Cramp. The only thing I disagree with you is the term ordinary. I would call them and I do call people everyday Australians, because there’s nothing ordinary about any one of them.

Robbie Barwick:

That’s true.

Malcolm Roberts:

I know what you mean by ordinary. You mean average, typical, or every day. I know what you mean.

Robbie Barwick:

They’re not ordinary that’s for sure.

Malcolm Roberts:

No. And the whole economy based on them and what I think it boils down to, Robbie… Correct me if I’m wrong, you’ve been around a lot as well. … is that it boils down to a four letter word starting with C. They care. When you put a human in a position, most humans, almost every human, almost that they matter, then they show that care. The other thing about humans is that we know there are some fraudsters. We know there’s some crooks. There’s some dictators.

Malcolm Roberts:

We’ve had our Hitlers. We’ve had our Joe Bidens. We’ve had our globalist predators. We understand that, but the majority of people are honest and that the two words, care and honest, leave us vulnerable because most of us are caring. Most of us are honest and we think everyone else is like us. And so, when we are caring and honest, we can become vulnerable to the used car salesman, to the tyrannical global bankster, the global predator who wants to control us. And we become victims in a sense.

Robbie Barwick:

Yeah, that’s true.

Malcolm Roberts:

Yeah. So, our strength is also our vulnerability. Now, listen for our listeners, they won’t know this name that I’m about to use, Craig Isherwood. He’s a Citizen Electoral Council National Secretary when he wrote an astounding paper, very simple, but for very, very powerful paper called, “The Australian Precedents for a Hamiltonian Credit System”.

Malcolm Roberts:

Now, Robbie gave me that paper when we were starting to discuss this show, Robbie gave me that paper and I read it on my way to Darwin for holiday. And I read it again on the way back. And the second time I read it, I got so much more out of it. Now, Ellen hit exactly the first question. If you don’t mind, Robbie, this is the question I had. If you don’t mind, we’ll park our earlier discussions and just go through this paper and see where we go.

Robbie Barwick:

Sure.

Malcolm Roberts:

Okay.

Robbie Barwick:

Let’s do that.

Malcolm Roberts:

I knew you’d be up for it. Okay. So, the very first point that I wrote as a key point is that Reserve Bank of Australia admitted to me in Senate estimates hearings that money is created in electronic journal entries, Ellen Hodson Brown reiterated that. She confirmed it. The question that I said was, “Who creates money?” It’s not whether it should be created or not. Clearly, for the system of credit, it needs to be created. Otherwise, people can’t invest. So, it needs to be created. The key question then is, “Who should create it?” And that’s exactly where Ellen got with her comment as well. That’s the key question. Is that the key question? Who creates credit?

Robbie Barwick:

Who controls the creation of credit? One thing to understand the financial system is so fluid and there’s so many clever people out there, Malcolm, always looking for an angle. You can forbid private banks from creating credit and they’ll find a way to create it anyway. So, your local store creates credit when they give you credit by selling you stuff something on credit. Credit is a pretty basic concept, actually. So, it’s more about who controls that. And that’s where the best form of control. Apart from having certain well-regulated banking system, the best form of control is to have a public banking presence that defines the terms for the whole system.

Robbie Barwick:

And so, the private banks have to work within those terms, because if they stray too far away from that, they won’t be competitive with the public bank, right? And so, the public bank can make sure that the creation of credit is fair, it’s productive, et cetera. And the private banks know that well, okay, they need customers. If they don’t have depositors, they’re not going to be banks. There’s a standard that they have to live up to. That’s served Australia very well for a long time, but it really does come down to the control. Who controls it? And my favourite quote, which isn’t in that Craig Isherwood article, although it might be, but the Labour Party once, upon a time in Australia, fought very hard on these issues.

Robbie Barwick:

We call it the old Labour position was about. Who controls money? And they called it the money power. Who controls the money power? And this became a name for the private banks. They called them the money power. They had this chokehold over Australia and they said the money power has to be brought under the control of the people. And by the people, it means the democratically elected government.

Robbie Barwick:

And John Curtin said in 1937, when he launched labor’s election campaign that year, which was seven years after the beginning of The Great Depression and this period of intense upheaval where the role of money was central, he demanded labour will legislate until the Commonwealth Bank would be able to control credit of the nation, rates of interest, direction of general investment, and currency relations with external markets. And he concluded, he said, “If the government of the Commonwealth deliberately excludes itself from all participation in the making or changing of monetary policy, it cannot govern except in a secondary degree.”

Robbie Barwick:

Meaning someone else is in charge of the economy, not us, not the people through their government. And so, what he was saying, it’s not just a good idea. It’s a question of sovereignty. A nation can’t be sovereign if the people through their elected government doesn’t control the credit of the nation.

Malcolm Roberts:

Okay. So, is it fair to summarise it by saying whoever controls the money creation controls the country?

Robbie Barwick:

100%.

Malcolm Roberts:

That’s what I thought you’d say.

Robbie Barwick:

There is no more definitive power in a nation than that.

Malcolm Roberts:

And as you pointed out, it’s all about sovereignty as well as economics. And to me, it seems that my job as an elected representative is to serve the people. If you’re a grocer at a corner store, your job is to serve the people. If you’re a policeman, your job is to serve the people. Now, policeman’s job becomes a little bit more difficult because at times he has to apprehend someone and bring justice or at least arrest them to try them before the courts to ensure justice is conducted. But that service that’s the critical thing. At the moment, correct me if I’m wrong, I’m looking for your view, the people serve the banks rather than the banks serving the people. Is that a fair statement?

Robbie Barwick:

That is a fair statement. You can read a version of the explanation or the description of this in Adele Ferguson’s book that she wrote just towards the end of the Banking Royal Commission in 2018. And you’d be familiar with Adele Ferguson, Malcolm, the investigative journalist in Australia.

Malcolm Roberts:

Yes. Yup.

Robbie Barwick:

She had a lot to do with highlighting bank issues that led to the Royal Commission, but what she documents in that book, Banking Bad, I think it’s called, a play on the show Breaking Bad, is how from the time of the privatisation of the Commonwealth Bank onwards, so the mid-1990s, the model of banking in Australia changed from one in which… Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to overstate it. The private banks were never perfect, but there was a general understanding that the private banks made their profits from the credit that helped their customers make their profits, right? They rightly got a cut from helping their customers get wealthy and preserving their deposits.

Robbie Barwick:

The model changed in the mid-90s to one in which the public, the customers became cows to be milked by the banks. Everything was about fleecing them, death by a thousand cuts. What can we sell these customers? What can we saddle them with so that through charges and interest rates, et cetera, we can just keep bleeding them for our profits? And that led to the abuses, that led to the Royal Commission.

Robbie Barwick:

And now, this became a standard model across the board from the mid-90s on, where the public absolutely served the banks, but a variation of that has always existed with private banks and banking. It’s always come up periodically in the rural debt crisis that erupt periodically around droughts and things, where it becomes a debt problem. And suddenly, instead of the banks being flexible, they’ll come in and mass foreclose. And you conducted an inquiry into that back in… Was it 2016, something like that?

Malcolm Roberts:

2017.

Robbie Barwick:

20 17. What’s happened in Australia with agriculture is we’ve gone from having something like 200,000 farmers in 1969, who between them had a billion dollars in debt to probably less than 30,000 farmers today who have $70 billion in debt. And now, the farmers do not get to accrue wealth. They’re so heavily indebted that all they’re waiting for is the next crop to be able to pay off or pay down their last lot of debt right before they incur more for the next crop. And they really have become debt slaves. And there’s a variation of that across the board in the way the economy where it’s unfortunately.

Malcolm Roberts:

So, I can recall reading a very short simple book. It was called End the Fed, the Federal Reserve Bank, End the Fed by former Senator Ron Paul in the United States, who was the only one really to hold the government accountable, held the Federal Reserve Bank accountable, wanted an audit of the gold reserves, et cetera.

Robbie Barwick:

Audit the fed. Yup.

Malcolm Roberts:

Yup. He said that every major recession since 1913 is directly attributable to the US Fed. Every major war since 1913 is directly attributable to the US Fed. Boom and bust cycles help the banks because they flood the joint with credit. Everyone goes hog, wild, and credit and overcommit themselves, and then they tighten it up. And next thing, people have to foreclose on their asset. The banks foreclose on their assets. So, private banking has failed repeatedly. Yet the banks continue to spread the bullshit that they make their money on the difference between what they charge for interest and for loans versus what they pay for deposits. Complete rubbish.

Malcolm Roberts:

The banks make their money by creating money, giving credit. And credit is essential, but they seem to have powers such that there’s no accountability. What I’m reading in Craig Isherwood’s article is something that I concluded as well, that if you have a public bank, it keeps the private banks honest. You’re not saying get rid of private banks. You’re saying let’s have both and then we’ll have accountability. Is that basically it?

Robbie Barwick:

Yeah, 100%, in any sector. I think this applies to insurance as well. Queensland for a hundred years had a state government insurance office, which was incredibly important at providing insurance that the private insurers wouldn’t provide, but also setting a standard that the private insurers had to meet if they wanted to have customers. That was called SGIO. But for banking, it’s absolutely essential. There’s this enormous power to do with money, right? Where you get to create credit and then charge interest on it and direct where that credit goes and have people come to you cap in hand begging for that credit, because it is, as Ellen pointed out, even if you had a gold currency, that there’s never enough of the actual currency for the economy to work, right?

Robbie Barwick:

The credit is the lifeblood of the economy. So, these private banks, they get to determine all that. If there’s no public alternative that says, “Okay, we are going to make decisions slightly differently for the private banks,” the private banks naturally are accountable to shareholders and they want them to maximise their profits. So, they’re going to pour their credit into things that maximise their profits. They’ll enjoy the boom. They’ll monopolise the boom. And when it goes bad, then they will cut off that credit, foreclose on everybody, call in all those loans. So, they never lose. It’s the poor mug customer that loses and that’s how the private banks work, because their solvency and their profits come first.

Robbie Barwick:

Let us use the power of this credit as a public entity to do the things that actually benefit the economy, benefit the people. Let’s make low interest loans to build infrastructure, to keep important industries solvent and productive, not just solvent but productive. So, agriculture, manufacturing, et cetera. Every loan that public bank makes, Malcolm, will also be profitable, but you don’t have to have quite as much profit. You don’t have to have charge quite as much interest, right? This makes a world of difference. And in fact, because I’d hoped you read Craig Isherwood’s article, I was just brushing up on it before. And they pointed out there that one of the first things that Commonwealth Bank did when it started was the Melbourne Board of Works wanted a loan.

Robbie Barwick:

And in those days, 1913, the only place a government entity like the Melbourne Board of Works could get a loan was from London, the private banks in London. In addition to stiff underwriting charges, the best they could do, the private banks in London, was 1 million pounds at 4.5% interest. So, instead, they turned to Denison Miller, the Governor of the Commonwealth Bank and he offered them 3 million pounds at 4% interest, a lower interest rate. And when asked where the very new bank got all this money from, Denison Miller replied, “On the credit of the nation, it is unlimited.” And under Denison Miller, you’ve read the article, the first decade under Dennison Miller, this bank was spectacular.

Robbie Barwick:

And all it did was use its power as a bank, but for the public benefit. Everything was profitable. It just didn’t have to make a massive profit and Australia benefited from that. And that’s why this is, well, as King O’Malley said, the key pin or the master key to the financial system. This should be the master key. This is what solves all those various problems in the financial system.

Malcolm Roberts:

Well, I’m glad you raised that, Robbie, because there were so many things in Craig’s article. The first publicly owned-

Robbie Barwick:

Shipping line.

Malcolm Roberts:

… shipping line in Australia was created through funding and support from the Commonwealth Bank. The Light Horse Brigade was funded by the Commonwealth Bank. There were so many other infrastructure at a local government level, state government level funded by the Commonwealth Bank. It got us on our feet. It basically built us, and it did that by enabling credit. And it took that control out of the hands of the private banks that screw us and keep us under their control, rather than making money out of making us wealthy as a country.

Robbie Barwick:

And importantly, in those examples you’ve given, the private banks, including most importantly, the foreign private banks, the London banks that controlled us, the way the Commonwealth Bank functioned under Denison Miller showed this claim that you would’ve heard in parliament a thousand times, Australia depends on foreign investment. No, we do not.

Malcolm Roberts:

Thank you.

Robbie Barwick:

We do not. There’s no excuse for $1 of foreign debt.

Malcolm Roberts:

Another example was the second World War and we were poor in terms of having ability to make machine tools. Next thing that grew out of nowhere, because Australians are very resourceful. We’re very clever, very capable, very innovative. We punch above our weight. We’ve been held back by privately owned banks. And when people were given the free rein, look what we did.

Robbie Barwick:

Yeah, exactly. So, the thing with wars, it’s interesting. People like to discount the way a war economy works because of those are special circumstances. That’s what the banks say, right? The only thing that’s special about a war is in the emergency of a war conditions, the governments turn to a public banking option like Australia did in both World Wars, because a war is on the private banks aren’t game to say anything, right? They have to be seen to be supporting the effort. After the war, they go back to attacking the government. No, no, no, you cannot do that. The power of credit has to be back in our hands. So, during the war, when you see what the banks was able to do in both wars, it was extraordinary and it’s also an example.

Malcolm Roberts:

Can you hold that thought and we’ll discuss that very issue after the ad break?

Robbie Barwick:

Sure.

Malcolm Roberts:

Stay tuned. We’ll be right back with Robbie to discuss some really fundamental stuff.

Malcolm Roberts:

Right. Robbie, over to you again, because you’re going to explain how the availability of credit during the war solved The Great Depression. Is that correct?

Robbie Barwick:

Well, no, no. The Great Depression impression was the exception. They didn’t do it in The Great Depression. They did it in the wars.

Malcolm Roberts:

That’s right.

Robbie Barwick:

So, the first one was World War I and you gave some of those examples there, but it was things like the Commonwealth Bank didn’t fund the war per se. It funded part of it that you gave the example of the Light Horseman. And the story of the shipping line was quite extraordinary because we were stranded as a country. All the ships were controlled from the British as well and the Prime Minister Billy Hughes said, “We need ships.” And he said to treasury, “Give me £2 million.” There’s 15 ships available here in London, but he wanted to keep it secret because if it became public, that the Prime Minister of Australia was in the market for 15 ships for Australia, the British privately controlled shipping lines would’ve blocked the sale.

Robbie Barwick:

They didn’t want that. They didn’t want a government shipping line in Australia, right? So, he called back to the treasury in Australia and said, “I need £2 million.” They called Denison Miller and the money was there. He just made the money available. They bought the ships. And that was the beginning of the shipping line that eventually became Australian National Line. So, there were some things they directly did, but what they otherwise did was look after the economy in those war years. And one of the more extraordinary things was the commodities pools that they set up, Malcolm, for things like wheat and other agricultural products that we were producing that in those days we produced… You had a small population.

Robbie Barwick:

We produced for the British market, et cetera, but that was all disrupted. So, they created a pool and the Commonwealth Bank funded that. So, the farmers, when they brought their wheat crop in, they got paid straight away anyway, even though the wheat hadn’t been sold yet, because they’re putting in a pool and then the Commonwealth Bank managed the sale of that wheat over time, but the important thing was to keep the farmers going. So, they all were still productive because there was a war and that’s the thing that it could do. It funded 60 local governments around Australia. And you would’ve noticed that a lot of that funding was in things like very early electricity infrastructure, basic electricity infrastructure, small hydropower plants, this thing.

Robbie Barwick:

This was the early industrialization of Australia. The private banks weren’t going to fund that. These councils could turn to the Commonwealth Bank and the Commonwealth Bank funded it for them, important investments. Malcolm, because in the old days, things were built better than they are today. If you go to some of these places in the list, a lot of this information comes from a great book that was written on the 10th anniversary of the Commonwealth Bank to document all these amazing things it did.

Robbie Barwick:

And if you go to those places that it lists what the Commonwealth Bank invested in this infrastructure, you’d probably find a lot of that infrastructure is still there and still working order to this day, essentially later. This was the early economic development of Australia. World War II, even more spectacular and it was because of the Commonwealth Bank. Until John Curtin and Ben Chifley took over the government in 1942, the Commonwealth Bank had sat there idle as it had done all through the ’30s.

Malcolm Roberts:

Would it be fair to say that the private banks from Wall Street, London, the City of London were actively working with the Labour Party and its so-called conservative opposition to destabilise and undermine the Commonwealth Bank? Rather than just sitting there and used, it was being undermined.

Robbie Barwick:

No, 100%, but this is where a specific understanding in history is important. I know why you say that because of what you know about the Labour Party today. The Labour Party back then was a very different animal. It was the Labour Party that was fighting for the bank to be used properly. It was the Menzies’ liberals who were completely in the pockets of the private banks in London who made sure it wasn’t. And in the early ’30s, when they needed it the most, we had 25% male unemployment in Australia, Malcolm.

Malcolm Roberts:

Geez.

Robbie Barwick:

We were being crushed in The Depression and there was a proposal to get The Commonwealth Bank to issue £18 million. Six million pounds was to go to farmers. Twelve million pounds was to go to public works. That was the proposal of the labour government then in 1931 and the former Queensland premier, who was a treasurer named Ted Theodore. The Head of the Commonwealth Bank, so Robert Gibson said, “You are asking me to inflate the money supply. I tell you, I bloody well won’t.” Now, forget what he said about inflation, because that’s a longer story. It was quite overstated. The issue there was a public servant defied the order of the government that owned his bank. He was just the manager of it, right?

Robbie Barwick:

And this led to the 1937 Royal Commission on Banking. And that Royal Commission ruled that that public servant was wrong. He should have followed the orders, but why did he defy it? Because in those years, the bank was run by a board that he was the chairman of and all those boards were representative of the private sector. And they were very much in the pockets of the private banks who didn’t want the Commonwealth Bank to function like it had function under Miller. As soon as Miller died in 1922, I think it was or 1923, Malcolm, there had been a single governor up to that point. They replaced him with the board.

Robbie Barwick:

So, you would never have someone of that noise again, because they had the right person in the right place at the right time, who could show what the bank would do. And they had a board which was a representative of private banks and private industry and they made sure in the next 28 years, it didn’t do anything. So, you’re right. They were actively suppressing it. And it was the Labour Party that fought very, very hard over this and people like John Curtin was at the centre of those fights. So, when he came to power in 1942, he knew he had a tool at his disposal, which was the Commonwealth Bank. And in those years from 1942 to 1949, when Labour lost office, those seven years are the high watermark of the Commonwealth Bank.

Robbie Barwick:

They showed what the Commonwealth Bank is capable of, even more extraordinary than World War I, because it also had the powers of a central bank by then. It got to tell the private banks directly what to do, not just compete with them. And the combination led to the greatest economic transformation in a short period of time probably the world had ever seen. We were an agrarian backwater economy and that’s why that machine tool example is such a good one. In three years, we went from an economy that relied on imports for everything. We mainly provided raw materials to the British, et cetera. We went from that to an economy that could literally produce anything. And machine tools are very complicated.

Robbie Barwick:

They are the machines that make the machines. They represent how really productive an economy is. We went from importing them all to making our own. There was nothing that was beyond the capabilities of Australians and it’s instructed the way the Labour Government did it because they weren’t ideological, Malcolm. They knew they had the Commonwealth Bank to fund it, but who did they turn to run the actual wartime mobilisation? They turned to a blue blood to them, someone that is socialist. The Labour Party was socialist, et cetera. They turned to a captain of industry Essington Lewis from BHP.

Malcolm Roberts:

Oh, yes.

Robbie Barwick:

And in those days, BHP was not a mining company, right? It was a mining company, but it was a steel maker. That’s what BHP was. And Lewis ran it and he had developed a really good relationship with Ben Chifley, but nothing would’ve happened without the funding and the Commonwealth Bank provided that. And it was extraordinary. We could produce ships, we could produce planes, we could produce machine tools. We could do anything. By the end of the war, we were approaching something like the high 20s as a percentage of our economy of manufacturing.

Robbie Barwick:

And by the late ’50s, it peaked at the mid-30s. About 33% or 35% of our economy was manufacturing. Today, it’s less than 5%. It’s tiny. It’s pathetic. It’s been smashed completely, right? But it was a transformation that was powered by the Commonwealth Bank because the long term investments that it required, the Commonwealth Bank was able to do that. And in this article, we show the charts of government spending and how the money issued by the Commonwealth Bank fueled that government spending.

Malcolm Roberts:

Let me just repeat the title of that article. It’s called, The Australian Precedents, E-N-T-S, for a Hamiltonian Credit System. The author’s name is Craig Isherwood, I-S-H-E-R-W-O-O-D. At the time, he was the Citizens Electoral Council National Secretary. Where can they get that article? Where can people get that article?

Robbie Barwick:

That’s on our website, www.citizensparty.org.au. If it’s hard to find, they can call out tollfree number 1800-636-432 and ask for a copy of it.

Malcolm Roberts:

Okay. Just a quick little snippet, I’ve just had this realisation that Menzies has given the credit for opening up Australia, but what I think had happened now is… Some lights dawned on the wood heap in my brain. … Labour as a result of the second World War built the capacity, our productive capacity for manufacturing. After the second World War, Europe was devastated. Japan and China were devastated.

Malcolm Roberts:

The only large manufacturing facility available was in America, which had not been attacked apart from Pearl Harbour, and good old Australia where we had the raw materials as well. So, we actually then put that productive capacity to work. And it wasn’t Menzies at all who deserves the credit. It was really the Labour Party under Curtin and Chifley. Is that right?

Robbie Barwick:

I’m firmly of that view. Now that said, I will give Menzies the credit for not stuffing it up as such, though I’ve got some specific criticism.

Malcolm Roberts:

Well, hang on, hang on. He bought in the double taxation legislation in 1953, which enabled foreign and Maldives nationals to completely avoid paying company tax in this country, which has really hurt us long term.

Robbie Barwick:

No, no, no. There’s a lot of those things that he does. Don’t worry, you got to hold me back not to blast Robert Menzies, but what I mean by not stuffing it up is by the time Curtin and Chifley, the government, left office in 1949, the zeitgeist had changed. The public expectations had changed. In fact, it’s known as the post-war settlement. This was universal around the world.

Robbie Barwick:

The kind of economic policy represented by what Roosevelt had done in America in the 1930s that Ellen Brown described with the reconstruction finance corporation using a public bank to invest in infrastructure and industry. We did it in World War II. You know the first thing the Labour Government in Britain did after World War II when they replaced Churchill was nationalise the Bank of England. Up until then, the Bank of England had been a privately owned bank for 150 years.

Malcolm Roberts:

From 1694 when it was formed, it had been a private bank.

Robbie Barwick:

Exactly. The first thing they did was nationalised it because they were copying Australia’s success, right? We set the tone and the expectations changed. So, when Menzies took office, he knew that he couldn’t buck that system now. People expected that there would be this public presence in the economy, but I’ll give you an example of why Menzies doesn’t deserve very much credit at all. The great Snowy Mountains Scheme, the defining infrastructure project of our history. Robert Menzies boycotted the opening of that in 1949. He opposed it. And only when it was immensely popular while he was prime minister, because it was Chifley who started it, he then went to the opening of the first stage, the second stage, et cetera, to capitalise.

Robbie Barwick:

But the fact he boycotted it was an ideological position he had and he even tried to sabotage it. He didn’t succeed, but that project was supposed to be funded by the Commonwealth Bank, Malcolm. And when he took office in 1949, he scrapped all that and he would only fund it out of revenue, the annual budget. And even then, he made the project, the Snowy Mountains Authority pay 5% interest to the government on the money that it gave them to fund the project, right? Whereas that could have all been done off the annual budget through the Commonwealth Bank, which is what the original plan had been.

Malcolm Roberts:

As I understand it, Robbie, Menzies tried to undermine the Snowy Mountains Scheme and McKell stood up to him and gave him hell and read the right act to him. Menzies pulled back his horns, but didn’t help it too much.

Robbie Barwick:

No. That would make sense, because I was going to say, the other man in the Menzies era who deserves credit for keeping him in line was Black Jack McEwen. Because Curtin and Chifley created the productive capacity of Australia. Black Jack McEwen did everything in his power to protect it, to make sure it survived, it lasted, right? In this era that we are in, the neoliberal era, all those policies that these guys stood for, they’re criticised for. I mean these liberals are so extreme now. These neoliberal liberals that you’ve been dealing with in parliament are so extreme now that by their standards, they would call Menzies a socialist. And of course, Menzies is the last thing. Menzies was a socialist.

Robbie Barwick:

It’s just that Menzies had to accept and everyone accepted in those days that you needed to have a public presence, including a public bank. The existence of the public bank, even when Menzies neutralised it a bit in 1959, he split the reserve bank function off from the Commonwealth Bank to weaken its power. Even when that happened, though, just the existence of the Commonwealth Bank and the Commonwealth Development Bank, as something the private banks had to compete with and the Commonwealth Development Bank was able to issue long term credit. It was able to provide flexible lending for farmers and all those things. It still performed a very useful function in the economy that helped stabilise the economy until Keating finally scrapped it in the mid-90s.

Malcolm Roberts:

Something for you to think about, we may or may not discuss it after, I’d like to continue with the priorities on the banking. But to me, the Labour Party is the party in the history. Even though I disagree with this ideology, the Labour Party in the era of Curtin and Chifley and some of the early Labour Party prime ministers were dinky-di. They were fair dinkum Australians. They were doing what they thought was the best for the country. Now whether you agree with them or not, that’s another thing.

Malcolm Roberts:

But what I’m saying is they were genuine. I do not see that in today’s Labour Party. They do not look after the worker. Their policies are selling out to the globalists. They’re completely enemy of the worker. Same with the liberal, the modern liberals are really socialists in many ways, because what I see, Robbie, is both Labour Party and the Liberal Nationals cow towering to the major banks and doing the bidding of the banks and the globalist predators through the UN, the World Economic Forum. That’s where we’ve gone. So, Menzies was far, far better than today’s liberals. Curtin and Chifley were immensely better than today’s Labour Party.

Robbie Barwick:

They were patriots.

Malcolm Roberts:

Thank you.

Robbie Barwick:

They fought for sovereignty. And yeah, in terms of modern labour, they’ll be outraged at me saying this, they hate our party for saying it, but they bear no resemblance at all to the old Labour Party. And even the last hurrah of old labour and it was slightly messier, even the Whitlam government, there was an economic component to the Whitlam government where they tried to do things that if they had to succeeded would’ve been incredibly useful now, but because it involved this issue of taking on the private sector and the private banks and the private resources companies was a big one, a really big one. They wanted to buy back the farm. What’s his name?

Malcolm Roberts:

Connor.

Robbie Barwick:

Rex Connor was the real soul of old labour in the old Labour Party and so was the treasurer, Jim Cairns who was quite a lefty, but a very, very decent person. I got to know Jim in his final years and he told me something. He had been the treasurer under Whitlam. And you know what he told me? He knew that Labour did not have to… Those loans that eventually brought them down, those foreign-

Malcolm Roberts:

King O’Malley loans.

Robbie Barwick:

… King O’Malley loans, the attempt to borrow those loans, that was not their first preference. He knew they didn’t have to borrow at all. They could have used the reserve bank as a national bank again, but unfortunately, the politics had changed and he and Connor could not persuade their colleagues to do so. And so, then they went to London and Wall Street, which is where they usually went. But those banks wouldn’t lend for the programme that Connor and Whitlam and Cairns wanted, which was to encourage Australian ownership of Australian resources. That’s what they wanted to do. Those banks wouldn’t lend that.

Malcolm Roberts:

We have to go to an ad break now, Robbie. So, everyone will be back straight after the ad break with Robbie Barwick. And let’s talk first of all about King O’Malley coming from a family of bankers and then maybe talk about whatever you want to talk about, Robbie. You take the show home for the last 10 minutes or so.

Robbie Barwick:

I’ll go with Wayne.

Malcolm Roberts:

Welcome back and people all over the world will be very interested in the figures I’m about to give before I ask Robbie to take the show home. This is from Craig Ishwood’s article, a paper presented to the federal cabinet calculated the value difference in exporting bauxite, which is raw material for aluminium versus processed aluminium in $19.70. One million tonnes of bauxite exported as the raw material, bauxite, earned 5 million back then. Processed one step into alumina, it earned $27 million, five times as much. Processed again into aluminium, it earned $125 million. That’s 25 times as much, but wait for it. When processed finally into aluminium products, it would earn $600 million.

Malcolm Roberts:

Robbie, we have become a quarry and we are letting people overseas get the value added. And it comes back to what King O’Malley did. King O’Malley was a banker, came from a banking family. He was a yank and he came out of here and he represented Australia and Federal Parliament and became a member of the Fisher government that enacted the Commonwealth Bank legislation. He knew how currency is issued and he knew that it should be in government hands.

Robbie Barwick:

This was the gospel he preached. He gave the speech in parliament in 1909 and it went for five hours, Malcolm, this speech. They didn’t have limits like you have to deal with in those days. And in that speech where he laid out exactly how the Commonwealth Bank should work, because it was legislated a few years later, he said, “I am the Alexander Hamilton of Australia.” He was the greatest financial genius to ever walk the earth and his ideas have never been improved upon. And that was a reflection of the fact that he was an American. He grew up in the American system.

Robbie Barwick:

In his lifetime, he’d seen the effects of what Abraham Lincoln did during the Civil War using greenbacks to help fund the transcontinental railway line, which opened up the United States. The boom of productivity in the United States from the Civil War onwards around that investment has only been matched by what we’ve seen in China in the last 30 years. This was incredible in the United States in those years. And it was done using these American Hamiltonian methods and that’s what he was saying. He knew Australia’s potential, right? This is what we need.

Robbie Barwick:

And from the time he landed here in the late 1880s until he got that bank, he just did nothing but preached the gospel of national banking from one end of the country to the other, until he got it, until he persuaded them to set it up. And then the rest was history. I got something to read to you. A few years ago, we did some archive work in the National Library up there in Canberra. And we stumbled across this letter that O’Malley in 1937 when he was very old wrote to Franklin Roosevelt then the president. In the letter, he was introducing to Roosevelt, an economics writer, Dr. LC Jauncey, who was a friend of his. Then he gave a little bit of this history and it’s worth reading.

Robbie Barwick:

He said, “I had the honour of forcing the Commonwealth Bank onto the Australian statute book after 10 years of fighting in parliament while I was Minister for Home Affairs. Nobody would second it. We gave the late Denison Miller $50,000 to start the bank. And at the end of six months, he returned it and that is all the capital we ever put into the bank. Since its foundation, it has made $200 million net profit for the Australian taxpayers and now has a capital of over $50 million in reserves.”

Robbie Barwick:

And then he said, “I do hope Mr. President that before you retire, you will transform all the reserve regional banks or the federal reserve into government banks so that the American people will have the profits for themselves as we have here.” So, he kept his American patriotism as well and he’d succeeded in doing it here. And he wanted the Americans to reign in the fed and turned the fed into a proper national bank, which of course, it’s not, because it’s privately controlled.

Malcolm Roberts:

Robbie, we have three minutes until we have to start winding up.

Robbie Barwick:

Here’s the solution. Here’s what I want people to think about in terms of a solution that is immediately available to Australians, Malcolm. We can bring back a national bank. We can bring back the Commonwealth Bank through a stepwise process. And the first step is to start a type of bank that’s actually quite common around the world, but quite effective. And it’s a postal bank and that’s how the Commonwealth Bank started anyway. When they set it up in 1912, there were no bank branches and they used the post officers as bank branches. And what we propose is let’s get a public bank again, a public bank that the public can use. Not just own, but use it, but you can put your deposits in there.

Robbie Barwick:

They’ll be safe from financial speculation. They’ll be safe from things like bail-in, because it’s 100% government guaranteed. Your branch won’t shut down because we have this network of post officers right around Australia, right? There’s 1,500 towns in Australia that don’t have any banks, but they have post officers, right? So, your branch won’t shut down. It will always be there for face-to-face banking services. It will lend loans into local communities, because that’s what a lot of private banks, most of them don’t care about that. They’ve got one obsession, which is mortgages in the big markets. You can do that. And most important, it’ll break their monopoly. The big four are effectively… They’re an oligopoly, but they’re effectively a cartel.

Robbie Barwick:

So, you might as well call them a monopoly. If they have to go back to competing with a public option like they did for 80 years in Australia, that breaks that monopoly, they will have to compete again. They’ll have to compete on services. They’ll have to compete on the way they provide credit, right? They will see that if they don’t lift their standards, they will lose their customers to this public bank. The public bank’s going to get a lot of customers anyway. And I’ve found in talking to a lot of people across the board in parliament, I talked to all the parties, Malcolm, as you know, there is broad support for this. Even in the major parties, there’s support for this idea. But see, what happens is that every party has specific agendas, et cetera.

Robbie Barwick:

The big two major parties, they don’t have institutional support at the top, but they have individual MPs who support it. That has to be galvanised, right? If the public realise how important this solution is to the number one control over our economy and how it works and get behind this campaign, this is something we can force through into the political agenda in Australia and actually get it passed. We need to use a policy like this to get the Labour Party to go back to its roots. We talked about Labour being different to the old Labour. That’s in terms of parliamentarians. What you find at the grassroots of the Labour Party, Malcolm, the union guy, who’s still the union guy and in the Labour Party, et cetera, they think their party’s a sellout.

Malcolm Roberts:

Yeah. Yeah.

Robbie Barwick:

Let’s get them rallying around these policies that used to be fine. We’ve got a Labour government now. Let’s force this Labour government to go back to its own tradition.

Malcolm Roberts:

Amen, amen to that. This is why a public bank is one-nation policy. The key area that we have to win though, is the narrative because the media has denigrated it, but it will bring back accountability. And I want to thank you so much, Robbie, for coming on, just being your normal frank, blunt self. Thank you so much and your informed self. You come with the facts and the data.

Robbie Barwick:

Thanks for the invitation.

Malcolm Roberts:

We’d like to have you back again, because we can also talk about-

Robbie Barwick:

No worries.

Malcolm Roberts:

… peace being a very, very formative time, not just war, for currency creation in government hands.

Robbie Barwick:

Yes. Yes. Hear, hear.

Malcolm Roberts:

Thank you, Robbie.

I talk to author and activist Ellen Brown on banking, debt and the need for a people’s bank.

Ellen Brown is an American author, attorney, public speaker, and advocate for financial reform, in particular public banking.

She is the founder and chairman of the Public Banking Institute, a nonpartisan think tank devoted to the creation of publicly-owned banks. She is the author of thirteen books and over 350 articles published globally.

Ellen began her career as an attorney practicing civil litigation in Los Angeles. Her interest in financial reform was sparked during 11 years spent in Africa and South America, where she began to explore solutions to the challenges of the developing world. She researched the private banking cartels, their hegemony over Wall Street and control of the Federal Reserve.   She also looked at public banking, which she discovered is a very successful model. The only operating state-owned public bank in the United States today is the Bank of North Dakota and has been touted as outperforming the big Wall Street banks.

In 2007 Ellen published the first edition of her best-selling book Web of Debt (now in its 5th edition). The book details how the private banking cartels have usurped the power to create money from the people themselves and how the people can get it back. Her writings proved prescient, as the financial collapse of 2008 laid bare the systemic problems she had identified.

In her 2013 book The Public Bank Solution, she traces the evolution of two banking models that have historically competed—public and private—and explores contemporary public banking systems around the world. Her latest book is Banking on the People: Democratizing Finance in the Digital Age (2019).

The Web of Debt is one of the best books I’ve read. Ellen is a dynamic woman with considerable energy and extraordinary research skills. Amazingly, much of her research was done painstakingly before use of the internet became widespread.

Transcript

Speaker 1:

This is the Malcolm Roberts Show on Today’s News Talk radio, TNT.

Malcolm Roberts:

This is Senator Malcolm Roberts. This is Today’s News Talk radio tntradio.live. I want to thank you for having me as your guest, whether it’s in your car, your kitchen, your lounge, your shed, or wherever you are right now. As regular listeners understand there are two most important themes for my programme. Firstly, freedom and specifically the age old freedom versus control challenge. Secondly, personal responsibility and integrity. Both are fundamental for human progress and for people’s livelihoods.

Malcolm Roberts:

On this show, we’re going to talk about money, money, money. We’re going to cover the eighth and final key to human progress. So I’ll list those eight keys to human progress. The first is freedom, the second is rule of law, the third is stable constitutional succession. The fourth is secure private property rights. The fifth, sorry, I’m losing track of counting. The fifth is strong families, sixth affordable, efficient, reliable energy.

Malcolm Roberts:

Then we did the next one last time, which is taxation. And this one, the eighth key is honest money. Now I’ve just introduced the word there honest money. We’re going to learn today from international and Australian experts about something we all take for granted. That’s right money. Think about it. It’s intimately involved in almost every aspect of our lives yet we take it so much for granted that we don’t see where it is, where it comes from. And we are living in misery at times. So many people living in misery.

Malcolm Roberts:

I’m going to refer to a quote from my website on the CSIRO looking at what’s pushing the global climate scam, but I’m going to quote from Ellen Brown’s book, where she’s referring to Louis McFadden, who is a senior member of the American House of Representatives, quote, “In 1934, he filed a petition for articles of impeachment against the Federal Reserve Board charging the Federal Reserve Bank with fraud, conspiracy, unlawful conversion, and treason.

Malcolm Roberts:

Then I’m going to quote from his speech where he spoke of one instance of 60,000 home and farm owners losing their property to bankers at one stage of the great depression. Here’s what he said. Their children are the new slaves of the auction blocks in the revival of the institution of human slavery. A document that I referred to called the Bankers Manifesto of 1934 added weight to these claims from these charges from McFadden, an update of the banker’s manifestation of 1892. It was reportedly published in the civil servant’s yearbook in January 1934 and in the New American in February, 1934 and was circulated privately among leading bankers.

Malcolm Roberts:

It said in part, ‘Capital must protect itself in every way through combination monopoly and through legislation,” that’s controlling governments. “Debts must be collected and loans and mortgages foreclosed as soon as possible.” Now listen to this bit. When through a process of law, the common people have lost their homes, they will be more tractable and more easily governed by the strong arm of the law applied by the central power of wealth under control of leading financiers.

Malcolm Roberts:

People without homes will not quarrel with their leaders. This is well known among principle men now engaged in forming an imperialism of capital to govern the world. Now, Australian speaker and researcher, John MacRae cites the same quote independently via another credible publication. Note that the bankers rely on what they falsely refer to as the law yet they are in their dominant and powerful position due to supposedly legalised legislation past deceitfully and in breach of the American constitution in breach of the American constitution.

Malcolm Roberts:

Their position is legal in that it’s legislated yet it’s fraudulent and thus unlawful that enables the people to remove it using the law. So what I wanted to discuss today with two very credentialed people is covering the basics of what is money? What do banks provide? Why are they so powerful? Who pays for the transfer of wealth from people and businesses to banks? So we will learn today how money is not honest. And we will learn today what is honest money?

Malcolm Roberts:

My first guest for this hour is Ellen Hodgson Brown. She’s an American author, attorney, public speaker and advocate for financial reform in particular in public banking. She’s the founder and chairman of the Public Banking Institute, a nonpartisan think tank devoted to the creation of publicly owned banks. She’s the author of 13 books and over 350 articles published globally. Much of a research was done before the access to the web, the worldwide web. An amazing woman.

Malcolm Roberts:

Ellen began her career as an attorney, practising civil litigation in Los Angeles. Her interest in financial reform was sparked during 11 years spent in Africa and South America, where she began to explore solutions to the challenges of the developing world.

Malcolm Roberts:

That’s why I love people who look around and see what’s going on. She researched the private banking cartels, the hegemony money over wall street and control of the federal reserve bank. She looked at public banking which she discovered as a very successful model, a very successful model, it’s successful in Australia in last century as well. The only operating state-owned public bank in the United States today is the Bank of North Dakota and has been touted as outperforming the big Wall Street banks. Every year it’s made a profit since it started.

Malcolm Roberts:

In 2007, Ellen published the first edition of her best selling book, The Web of Debt and it’s now in its fifth edition. And I can thoroughly recommend that. I’ve read it. The book details, how the private banking cartels have usurped the power to create money from the people themselves and how the people can get it back.

Malcolm Roberts:

Her writings prove prescient as the financial collapse of 2008, laid bare the systemic problems that she had identified. In her 2013 book, The Public Bank Solution, she traces the evolution of two banking models that have historically competed, public and private, and explores contemporary public banking systems around the world. The latest book is Banking On the People Democratising Finance in the Digital age and it was published in 2019. The Web of Debt is one of the best books I’ve ever read. Ellen is a dynamic intelligent woman with considerable energy and extraordinary research skills. Welcome Ellen.

Ellen Hodgson Brown:

Well, thanks Malcolm. It’s great to be talking to you. I’ve seen you on some little video clips lately, and you’re doing great work there.

Malcolm Roberts:

Thank you very much. And I’d like to talk about your work today. We always start Ellen with something you appreciate. What’s something you appreciate anything at all?

Ellen Hodgson Brown:

Well, I appreciate all the ordinary things that everybody appreciates, family and friends and health, and I used to appreciate travel, but I haven’t travelled since COVID. I think one advantage or one good thing about these lockdowns and about crises in general is that makes you appreciate things that you used to take for granted, like being out in public and able to breathe without having a mask on your face, simple things, or being able to travel without jumping through a lot of hoops that I’m not willing to jump through.

Ellen Hodgson Brown:

But one thing I really appreciate is the computer. Because when I first started writing books, we didn’t have access like we have now. And I had two small children and I dragged these two kids up and down the elevators in the UCLA library with these great heavy books, xeroxing studies and you’d get them home and they wouldn’t be what you really needed or it would refer to something else that you didn’t have access to. And now everything’s just at your fingertips, which is quite amazing, a whole world of knowledge, plus the ability to see into other countries and what people are doing around the world and get a sense of you can travel without actually travelling.

Malcolm Roberts:

So I was filled with admiration for you. We’ve talked before you took part in the Senate hearings rather on lending to rural and primary production customers. And you did a marvellous job there. We’ve talked before on the phone, I’ve read your books. I was stunned that you’d done most of your research before the internet and now I’m even more stunned because you were carting two girls around with you wherever you went. How did you do that?

Ellen Hodgson Brown:

One girl one boy.

Malcolm Roberts:

One girl one boy. Okay, well I’ve got to be fair 50:50. How did you do that?

Ellen Hodgson Brown:

That’s the thing. It took a lot of legwork. So I never go into libraries anymore. It’s all just right there. I did see that there was somebody at the World Economic Forum said that the Metaverse is going to be more real to us than our real lives. Well, I hope not but that is sort of the computer is a whole world in itself with great depth. It’s censor, of course you can’t always be sure you’re getting real information, but it’s incredibly interesting.

Malcolm Roberts:

Well, I know you’re a very strong woman, a very determined woman. I’d like to explore that a little bit later on, a very strong human in fact. I don’t distinguish between men and women in that sense, women are incredibly strong. I asked you before we were putting this together a couple of weeks ago, your idea of what you’d like to talk about. And you said you only see one substantive pro question for you and that’s proposed questions about solutions.

Malcolm Roberts:

You suggested some. What can we do about our unsustainable unrepayable sovereign debts? The US federal debt is now $30 trillion, not counting unfunded future liabilities. Second question, what to do about inflation. Third question, how to make banks and banking work for the people. Fourth question, how to make national currencies honest? So they’re the questions I’d like to ask. But first of all, I think we have to define the problem. So let’s define the problem. Let’s understand the issue, which is the problem. So what’s money Ellen?

Ellen Hodgson Brown:

Well, economists say there are three critical factors in money, which is, it has to be a medium of exchange, a unit of account and a store of value. So virtually everything we call money today, doesn’t really qualify on all those points are not very well. Store value, that value keeps fluctuating. Well, even gold. I have some gold and I have some gold stocks and I totally think it’s a good idea but it does fluctuate a lot. And so it can go up $50 in a day. I think just from reading your email, I suspect you favour a gold backed currency, but it didn’t work in the 19th century. That’s why we went to Fiat money anyway. So there’s that. That’s one definition.

Ellen Hodgson Brown:

There’s M1, M2, M3, the way the Federal Reserve defines it or M0 to start with. So those are all different levels of how liquid the money is or how accessible. So M0, they get kind of confused together, but say M1 is cash, which is obviously very fungible and your bank reserve or your bank deposits. And then bank reserves are created by the Federal Reserve and you can’t actually spend those, but those are I think they’re called M0. Anyway, M2 is the larger circulating money supply. M3 they no longer even count it anymore, but it included all the shadow banking, which is unregulated forms of money. I just read that estimates are that there are $50 trillion in Euro dollars traded every single day. And these are totally unregulated. The Federal Reserve has no control over them, they’re called dollars but they’re not even really dollars. They’re Euro dollars means any dollars created outside of the United States. So it could be Japan or anywhere.

Ellen Hodgson Brown:

And they’re really just banking accounting. It’s an accounting thing where they’re basically creating credit and credits and debits that there’s no physical paper involved. Anyway, it’s a huge amount of money it’s in the shadow banking system, nobody knows for sure even how much it is. It’s certainly not transparent. It’s not trackable at all but it’s between banks. It’s legitimate. Apparently banks can’t operate without it. And I remember reading that on the gold system, the only reason it really worked was that you had a lot of credit that ways of expanding credit besides the gold, because there’s just not enough gold to do all the trades that need to be done.

Ellen Hodgson Brown:

Even if you take one single product, I think there’s [inaudible 00:14:31] was talking about this and he, he has a gold bug, but he said that to do like a hundred dollars product, you have to do many hundred dollars worth of credits because every producer in the chain of production operates on credit. So they have to pay their workers and materials before they get paid. And then the next step up also needs. So they would also need gold if we were only operating in gold. So you can’t do it in just one metal. The Euro Asian Economic Union that’s headed by Sergei Glazyev. I just wrote an article on that. They’re proposing a new monetary system where it wouldn’t be backed by gold in the sense of that you could take your dollars and cash them in for gold at the bank, which is what you actually could do in the 19th century.

Ellen Hodgson Brown:

And that’s what happened. That’s what went wrong in the 1930s to ’33 collapsed where people were rushing to the bank and trading in their dollars for gold. The banks didn’t have that much gold and they were on a fractional reserve system. So they only had a certain percentage of actual gold. So they ran out of gold so the banks then went bankrupt. So you’ve got to have credit on top of your gold in some way. But anyway, so the Russian system that is being proposed and that maybe our new banking system is, it’s not exactly backed in the sense of you can cash in your dollars for gold, but it’s measured against.

Ellen Hodgson Brown:

So it becomes a stable unit of value because it’s measured against a basket of commodities and currencies when I wrote Web of Debt, I was proposing that you could use the cost of living index. In other words, a basket of things that everybody uses. And then you could figure out what the value or how much it would cost in dollars, how much it would cost and pay us, et cetera. And that would be your exchange rate rather than what we have now, where exchange rates are easily manipulated by speculators that short sell the currencies. And we’ve had several crises over that. Anyway, so what money is, is very fluid.

Malcolm Roberts:

Wow. What an answer controversial, sorry your last word

Ellen Hodgson Brown:

And controversial.

Malcolm Roberts:

Controversial. I was just about to summarise it. I asked you a simple question, simple question. Money, what is it? No, no, you’ve done a brilliant job. It’s a medium of exchange, which enables people to exchange my work for someone else’s goods and someone else makes a different product. So he makes butter and he exchanges it with someone who makes clothes and she makes clothes. So it enables an exchange of… It’s a medium of exchange. So we have to have that. Otherwise, it’s back to barter system. And a medium of exchange enables us to specialise, which gives us efficiency.

Malcolm Roberts:

The butter maker will be far better at making butter than I will be. And I don’t have to have the dairy cattle to make the butter. Then you also said, it’s a unit of accounting. It’s a measure of an account. And then you also said, it’s a store of value. So wonderfully, clearly they’re the three things. And then you went on with how liquid the money is, the bank reserves, unstable, shadow banking, credit, fractional reserve, a stable unit of value, manipulated, speculators. It’s a real mess. It’s a real nightmare. No wonder people don’t take much interest in this because it’s so damn complex yet let’s try and simplify it before we get onto your-

Ellen Hodgson Brown:

Yeah, well, I should have… The most important thing and the most what you might consider fraudulent thing is that it’s not created by the government. Virtually all of our money is created by banks when they make loans, which I actually think is a good thing. We need a credit system and that’s a way to do a credit system. But the problem is who controls the banks? Who owns the banks? Who has first access to the money, which is called the can Cantillon effect. Whoever gets their hands on the money. First is most able to profit from it. So obviously the private banks, Wall Street, City of London, et cetera, they can create money on their books for their cl their favourite clients who may be one big cartel.

Ellen Hodgson Brown:

And so they have easy access to cheap money and they can raise the rates to whatever they want on the rest of us. So, anyway, there’s the problem is that money is created by banks. They do it by double entry bookkeeping. So if you go to the bank to take out a loan, let’s say you want to buy a house and you take out a loan for $500,000, the bank will write $500,000 on one side of its books just into your deposit account, your checking account. And you can now write checks on that. And on the other side of their books, they’ll write the same $500,000 as an asset because you have agreed to pay that back. You’ve signed a mortgage, et cetera. You’ll pay that back plus interest.

Ellen Hodgson Brown:

Whereas, on the deposit that they wrote on the other side of the books is a liability to them because when you pay your seller, if the seller is in another bank, then the bank will have to come up with that 500,000, which they probably don’t have. What they do is they borrow it somewhere. So they borrow it. It used to be, they borrowed it in the Fed funds market from each other, but they don’t do that much anymore although that’s the interest rate that the Fed is allegedly raising and that’s supposed to cure inflation, which it absolutely won’t right now under these circumstances. We know it’s not that kind of inflation. But anyway, so now I lost my train of thought.

Malcolm Roberts:

So what, what you’ve talked about now is there’s the way the banks create money. I’m not bragging here, but I went to the University of Chicago, which is in the city of Chicago, as you know and it’s won more Nobel prizes for economics and finance than any other university in the world anywhere. So it’s got a very good name for finance, and they never told us that. They never told us how they create money, who controls the money creation and what you’ve just said, I’m going to give you an example to back you up in a minute but what you’ve just said is that banks create money in the first place by ledger entries, journal entries. And I can confirm that because I asked the Deputy Governor of Reserve Bank of Australia, Guy Debelle, he was the deputy governor at the time.

Malcolm Roberts:

And I said, so what you’re saying is that money is created using journal entries. And he looked at me hesitated, and then he said, “Electronic journal entries.” So it’s created as some people would say, it’s not quite right, but it’s created out of thin air. And as you just said, the person who creates the money has the greatest control, but then these same people, privately owned banks, the same people control the Federal Reserve Bank, the same people determine interest rates. The same people determine the money supply, how easy it is to get money. So they really control the government. They really control the economy, don’t they?

Ellen Hodgson Brown:

Right. And also to confirm that in 2014, that the Bank of England came out in their first quarterly report and said contrary to popular belief, banks do not act simply as intermediaries taking in deposits and lending them out again. In fact, banks create money when they make loans. And in fact, they said that 97% of the money supply is created in that way. So that was confirming what used to be conspiracy theory before that. When I wrote about it, in Web of Debt, it was considered quite controversial but now everybody agrees. That’s how it’s done.

Malcolm Roberts:

So what we’ve got here is a money creation system that’s privately owned and privately controlled in large measure. And you wrote very glowingly of the Commonwealth Bank, Australia’s Commonwealth bank early last century. And rightly so, you did a very good job on that. However, it was a rarity. And so the Commonwealth Bank had to be killed because it provided competition for the private banks, Wall Street and the City of London banks did not like it at all. It held them accountable, it controlled the money and it had to go and both Labour and Liberal party governments over the last a hundred years have well until 1995, ’96, when Keating sold off the last of the Commonwealth Bank.

Malcolm Roberts:

It was destroyed over a period of about 70 years. And my next guest will explore that further. So money is important in an economy. It’s important to economic health. You’ve already talked about how we measure it. M1, M2, M3, M0, volume of money. You’ve talked about the fact that money is not honest. Money is controlled, so let’s go on banks. What’s their role in relation to money Ellen?

Ellen Hodgson Brown:

Well, as the Bank of England is confirmed they’re not merely intermediaries taking in money and lending it out again. They’re actually creating the money, which sounds shocking but actually we do need that sort of system. We need a credit system. The question is just who owns the bank and who controls the bank. As you’ve said, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia originally was an excellent model. We’ve had several quite good models too. Historically Alexander Hamilton’s original plan was to have that sort of infrastructure and development bank in the end, it wound up privatised over his objection. He didn’t think that stocks should be… Well, it was sold to foreigners over his objection. But anyway, that was the intention was sovereign money and sovereign credit. And of course the American colonists started out with sovereign money, which was original to them at the time, not counting the fact that the Chinese did it like about a thousand years ago.

Ellen Hodgson Brown:

But for Western civilization, anyway, that was unique that we didn’t have money. The colonies didn’t have money. And so it was the Governor of Massachusetts in 1691 I think who got the bright idea of paying his soldiers, but just by issuing these little receipts, which were considered an advance against taxes, which was the same system as the tally system which was done by the British from like 1100 to 1700, something like that where they would split a… Well, I hope I’m not getting too far out.

Malcolm Roberts:

No, no, keep going.

Ellen Hodgson Brown:

Okay. So in the tally system, they took a stick and notched it. So it was an accounting system and then they split the stick. And since no two sticks split the same way, it was foolproof against forgeries. So you could put the sticks together. So the government kept one half the stick, and then the payee kept the other, other half of the stick. And then those sticks circulated in the economy as money. And that’s basically the same thing that the American colonist paper money was, which was, and you’d pay it to somebody who had delivered goods or services to the government. So the collective body of the people acknowledged that this was a debt owed to this person or whatever. And then that paper would circulate in the economy and when tax time rolled around, you could use it to pay taxes.

Ellen Hodgson Brown:

We actually did that in California in 2008, but the problem was that the government, the local government wouldn’t take the money back in taxes. So it did work. It would work, it works as an advance, but you have to agree to use this to take it back. And that’s what does give it its value and stability and so forth. But anyway, it worked well for the colonists, except for the fact that it was a lot easier to issue the money than to pull it back in taxes. Because these are frontiers when they didn’t like the idea of taxes in the first place, they were kind of hard to nail down.

Ellen Hodgson Brown:

We didn’t have a computer system at that time. But anyway, it worked pretty well except that they wound up hyper inflating or over printing and devaluing the currency until the Pennsylvanians, the Quakers in Pennsylvania got the idea of forming their own bank. So instead of just printing money and spending it, they printed money and lent it to the farmers. So that’s the ideal. That was the first US public bank was this the Pennsylvania state or colonial bank where they printed money, lent it to the farmers at 5% interest, which at that time was a quite good interest rate. And then the farmers would pay it back. So it went out and it came back. So it was stabilised. It was sustainable. It wasn’t just money going out and going out and going out.

Malcolm Roberts:

Okay. So we’re going to go for an ad break now, but before we do, I’ll just make a statement that we can ponder over the ad break. Ron Paul who’s very, very highly regarded. Former Senator says that the Federal Reserve Bank in America is neither federal, it’s not a government body, nor has it got any reserves. It’s a privately owned entity. Beyond the reach of the president, beyond the reach of Congress. And that leads to complete absence of restraints on bank’s power.

Malcolm Roberts:

Now we have bailouts and we have bail ins, which have been enabled to protect the banks at the cost of the everyday Australian. We’ve seen you’ve documented the international role and power of banking associations, like the bank for international settlements, the world bank, the international monetary foundation, their role in ruining nations and making nations dependent. The IMF international monetary I’ve forgotten what’s the F for? Foundation. I’ve forgotten.

Ellen Hodgson Brown:

Fund. International Monetary Fund.

Malcolm Roberts:

Thank you. I just had a complete blank will crippling, Mexico, crippling Russia, the Malaysian Prime Minister at the time McCarty he’s one of the feud have called out the globalist banks their power is enormous. So when we come back, let’s talk about the fact that Henry Ford said, “If the American people knew what was going on with banking, there’d be a revolution by morning.” So rather than have that revolution on the streets, could you talk about your main questions and I’ll remind them of remind you of them. What can we do about our unsustainable unrepayable, sovereign debts? What can we do about inflation? How do we make banks and banking work for the people? How to make national currencies honest? We’ll go for the ad break. And then we be right back with Ellen Hodgson brown to give us the solutions.

Speaker 1:

The midterms and America votes on November 8th, with his expert analysis and opinion. This is TNT radio with Jeremy Beck.

Jeremy Beck:

An important recall vote in San Francisco took place on the 7th of June alongside the many primary elections on the same day. Voters decided to oust the radical District Attorney Chesa Boudin whose soft on prime approach has overseen a horror show of lawlessness for the many victims of crime. Boudin is one of several dozen rogue prosecutors elected to public office largely thanks to funds from billionaire George Soros.

Malcolm Roberts:

So we’re back with Ellen Hodgson Brown discussing money and banking. So Ellen, what can we do about our unsustainable unrepayable sovereign debts? You’ve mentioned that the United States federal debt is now about $30 trillion, not counting unfunded future liabilities. What can we do about it?

Ellen Hodgson Brown:

Well, sovereign debt of course is the debt of the government. Dealing with personal debt is a lot harder. Actually the first money system I probably should have mentioned this was that the first money system in recorded history was the Sumerian money system, which Michael Hudson’s written a lot about. And it was just an accounting system, but they did charge interest. And when the debts got too high, they would have a debt Jubilee periodically. So they would wipe out all the debts and start all over. And that’s obviously the ideal, if you can do it. But the reason they could do it was that the king was considered the representative of the gods and the gods owned the land. And so the king could just order that the debts would be wiped off the clean slate. But today the debts are owed to private banks and we just wouldn’t be able to do it legally.

Ellen Hodgson Brown:

So doing a debt Jubilee for the people would be a lot harder, although it certainly would be, it seems like it’s needed because one problem with the way we create money is that banks create the principle, but they don’t create the interest. So debt always grows faster than the money supply, and there’s not enough money to pay it all back without borrowing more which means the debt just goes up and up and up. It’s a pyramid scheme. So how do we bring about a debt Jubilee under today’s circumstances? Alexander Hamilton actually had a very good plan, which I think we could do. Although you know obviously it’s probably not going to happen, but what Hamilton did with the state’s deaths, the colonies debts that became the states was to roll them to accept them in exchange for stock in the first US banks.

Ellen Hodgson Brown:

So you could pay partly in gold and partly in these debts. And we could actually take that $30 trillion in debt and turn it into stock in a big bank and pay some dividend on it. And actually, there is a bill that we have here in the US right now, a National Infrastructure Bank Bill, where they’re modelling it on the first US banker, the Hamiltonian model, where they would take federal securities and in exchange for stock in the bank. And that’s how they would capitalise it. So that’s one possibility. Another possibility, as long as you don’t pay interest on it, really the debt doesn’t hurt. If you just keep rolling it over and over and over. So you could just have the Federal Reserve buy all the debt. The central bank returns its profits to the treasury.

Ellen Hodgson Brown:

So it doesn’t keep the interest. It’s really the interest that’s the problem. That’s the thing that we have to pay year after year and projections are that in a few years, it’s going to be up to something like a trillion dollars a year just for the interest. So that’s getting right up there with the military and are really expensive things in the budget. But that’s another possibility. In other words, you can just keep rolling it over and hold it by your own central bank assuming your central bank were actually publicly owned and controlled and serving the people. So it could be dealt with. Now foreign sovereign debts, it does look like half the world is likely to join this new [inaudible 00:37:10] system and just walk away from their debts. That’s what Sergei Glazyev said that they don’t need to pay their debts.

Ellen Hodgson Brown:

They just walk away from the debts in dollars and start their own system. And that could happen. Would it destroy the dollar? I don’t think so. Because of the amount of dollars that are out there in the Euro dollar system, I mean the dollar is basically our unit of account. It’s just how people measure value. And it’s so entrenched that I’ve read other experts who say that it probably can’t be shaken loose even if half the world does abandon the dollar and take up some other currency, but I’m getting far a field again. Sorry.

Malcolm Roberts:

So Ellen, before we move on to the solving inflation your ideas on comments on that, there are many different ways of do doing this, but what seems to be coming out of it is that we need to talk about it. We need to have an open Frank discussion about it. We need to have the truth on the table. We need to understand who owns what in this, who controls what so that we can then establish a system that is good for the people rather than just for a few globalist predators.

Ellen Hodgson Brown:

Right. Transparency and accountability. Totally.

Malcolm Roberts:

And they’re the enemies at the moment and so there’s no transparency. A lot of this is hidden. Okay. So the solution is not an easy one, but it must be achieved. If we don’t achieve a solution by open honest frank discussion, then it’ll come through some form of control and that’ll be devastating for everyone ultimately for the global predators themselves. So what to do about inflation Ellen?

Ellen Hodgson Brown:

Well, the argument is that this is a monetary inflation, and they’re trying to tighten the money supply and not supposed to fix it, but it’s not a monetary inflation. It’s a supply problem. There’s two sides to inflation that you often hear that inflation is always and everywhere, monetary phenomenon. But that’s not true. It’s half a monetary phenomenon, it’s a half a supply phenomenon. In other words, if money goes up and supply goes down, you’re going to have too much money competing for too few goods.

Ellen Hodgson Brown:

But if you can keep the supply and the money in balance, then you don’t have inflation, then prices remain stable. So what we need to do is up the supply, which a good infrastructure bank would do it, we’ve got the amazing model of China that in a couple of decades, they came up from absolute poverty for most of their people up into well, anyway, how did they do it?

Ellen Hodgson Brown:

But they have these infrastructure banks where they just basically create the money as credit build the thing like the high speed rail, and then the fees from the trains pay back the loan. And that’s the way it should be. You extend the credit, you use the credit to build something productive, don’t keep pumping it into existing houses, which will just drive the price of houses up. But you put it into new productivity, new infrastructure, which we desperately need in the US and probably, I don’t know how Australia is, but here we got a serious infrastructure problem, build new infrastructure, put money into all sorts of productive things. That’s what Roosevelt did in the 1930s with the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, he funded anything that was productive that would pay back, not speculative, but actual producing assets. So that’s what we need to do.

Malcolm Roberts:

Okay. That makes sense, because if you generate something in terms of productive infrastructure, and then you use that to generate wealth, then you don’t have inflation and you do have prosperity wealth.

Ellen Hodgson Brown:

The interest rates is going to just make it worse because all the producers have credit lines and they’re not going to be able to afford their credit lines. We’re already seeing that business is falling off.

Malcolm Roberts:

And what you just said worked in the Commonwealth Bank when it was a true public bank in the early part of last century generated infrastructure and we… We’ll come to that more later. I won’t go on any more of that now. How do we make banks, coming to your fourth question, how do we make banks and banking work for the people Ellen?

Ellen Hodgson Brown:

Well, they need to be public institutions, publicly owned and controlled, the sustainable, transparent and accountable that they need to be. When we have this, the public banking institute, our mission is to try to get public banks established in the US like the Bank of North Dakota. And you often hear people say, you want to give the government a bake, because people don’t trust the government anymore than they trust bakers, but you need to design the system so that it is responsive to the people, accountable, transparent and so that we actually have control over it.

Malcolm Roberts:

So that again mimics what happened with the Commonwealth Bank. The Commonwealth Bank, when it was formed. The first governor was a man named Dennison Miller who was very energetic man who really aspired to do something really well. And he was working for the Bank of New south Wales. What is now known as Westpac. He was taken from Westpac of Bank of New South Wales and made in charge of the Commonwealth Bank. And he had a wonderful objective then to do the best for the country.

Malcolm Roberts:

And he basically ran the Commonwealth Bank very, very well and worked for the country despite Labour Party and Liberal Party or the precursor Liberal Party, trying to undo it all because one of the things that the Commonwealth Bank did when it was a true people’s bank in the early part of last century, was it provided competition for the private banks. The private banks were then held accountable, which is what you just said. The accountability is so important, but that accountability has to be to the people you’d agree with that.

Ellen Hodgson Brown:

Right. Totally.

Malcolm Roberts:

Okay. Thank you for mentioning the Commonwealth Bank in your book, the Web of Debt. The fourth question, your last question.

Ellen Hodgson Brown:

[inaudible 00:43:57] very inspiring.

Malcolm Roberts:

Yes. The fourth question you suggested was how to make national currencies honest? How do we make them honest? Because as you pointed out at the moment, whether it’s seashells or paper or trinkets or tally sticks or whatever medium is that it can be corrupted. It’s not necessarily backed by anything. There’s no real reserve there. There’s no real value there other than what it’s deemed to be valued. It’s Fiat. It’s an announcement, a pronouncement. So how do you make national currencies honest?

Ellen Hodgson Brown:

Well, I’m not actually opposed to national currencies. I’m not sure I know the answer to that. There are a lot of people attempting to establish an alternative currency system, like a cryptocurrency system, a crypto currency would be honest if it’s backed by something like food back currencies, I think would be a great idea where it’s basically an advance against the future productivity of the farmers. They could issue their own cryptocurrency. But anyway, I think our Fiat system is not that bad. It’s who creates it and who controls its creation. In other words, if you had public banks that were actually accountable and sustainable and what was the other word I forgot now, anyway, it’s getting late here. So if you had public banks that were there to serve the people and the people in control of it actually had that sort of sense of mission that you could have an honest fiat currency.

Ellen Hodgson Brown:

Fiat currency is not really unbacked. It’s backed by the full faith and credit of the people, which means the people agree that to accept it. It so if I went to the grocery with a gold coin and tried to pay for my groceries and said this is worth 1800, whatever it’s at right now at 1850 or something, the grocer wouldn’t know what to do with it because they wouldn’t know for sure that it was valid. He’d say, “No, give me paper money or give me your credit card.” Because things are valued in the Fiat currency and that’s one of the properties of a good currency. I don’t know what, how do you answer it?

Malcolm Roberts:

It’s very difficult, but it seems to me that what you’ve said in answer to each of the four major questions is that it has to go back to being publicly owned bank, a government led bank, not, not necessarily led because governments can then do political things but an independent bank that’s independent from privately owned banks because privately owned banks are the root of the problem. These privately owned banks, these globalist predators, when things are going well, they love capitalism. When things are going badly, they want socialism.

Malcolm Roberts:

And that seems to be a major problem for these people because they make so many… Without any accountability, they make horrendous decisions which ultimately the people pay for in a loss of their house, the loss of their cars, the loss of productive capacity of the country, the decimation of a whole economy. And then you extend that power, that national power internationally through the Bank of International Settlements, the International Monetary Fund, the world bank, et cetera. You’ve got a huge problem and they’re basically controlled by the same globalist predators. So that seems to be the core to take it back and give it to the people. But either way you’ve done a marvellous job in painting the fact that there are no simple solutions and yet there is a basic simple solution and that is people’s banking. Ellen, can I ask you some personal questions?

Ellen Hodgson Brown:

Sure.

Malcolm Roberts:

Because I’ve got just two minutes to go and I like to finish on the hour rather than early. First of all, I want to thank you so much for joining us. And I look forward to staying in touch, but I read that you were born in 1945, that makes you almost 77, 76. How do you do it?

Ellen Hodgson Brown:

Almost 77. Well, how do I do it?

Malcolm Roberts:

Yeah. You look at the research, you’ve done the clarity, your ability to say that it’s not all bad. Some things that need to be considered, but you’re juggling all these complex concepts in your head.

Ellen Hodgson Brown:

Well, it’s incredibly interesting. Don’t you think?

Malcolm Roberts:

Oh yes.

Ellen Hodgson Brown:

You’re doing marvellous work and just the idea of cracking this nut. Like how do we figure this out? And, well, actually I got divorced if you want to get really personal 20 years ago. And I was quite depressed. And so at some point I said, “I don’t want this body anymore, but if somebody up there has a good idea for [inaudible 00:49:03].”

Malcolm Roberts:

So you took it on as a challenge. I’d want to give you the last say we’ve got 20 seconds left. How do they learn more about you? What’s your website?

Ellen Hodgson Brown:

Oh, ellenbrown.com or publicbankinginstitute.org.

Malcolm Roberts:

ellenbrown.com or publicbankinginstitute.org. Thank you so much Ellen. What a wonderful person you are. Thank you for being so open and honest.

I talk to journalist Tony Thomas who is interested in climate change, indoctrination in schools and universities, the ABC, and Aboriginal politics. See all episodes of my show on TNT radio.

Recorded 19 February 2022

Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):

You’re with Senator Malcolm Roberts on Today’s News Talk radio, TNT.

Senator Malcom Roberts (00:07):

And welcome back to Today’s News Talk radio, tntradio.live. This is Senator Malcolm Roberts, and I just want to apologise for my amateurish approach to the microphone. I’m learning this game as we go. So bear with me, please. Hope this is much better now. I’ll look for some feedback from the panel in the gold coast. This hour coming, I’m going to be chatting with the real journalist. Tony Thomas is someone who hasn’t lost sight of the dignity and responsibility of journalism. Tony’s now 81, he’s been in journalism for more than 60 years. Since he started his cadetship, and I want to emphasise that word cadetship, in 1958 on The West Australian newspaper, he spent a decade there, followed by 10 years writing economics for the age in the Canberra Press Gallery. Through the 1970s. He’s an ideal person to talk about the Press Gallery and the media in Canberra reporting on politics.

Senator Malcom Roberts (01:04):

He spent 20 years with weekly business magazine, BRW, including as associate editor. Since retiring from salary journalism in 2001, he’s published more than 400 features for Quadrant and Spectator magazines, and his work is marvellous. It’s always factual and accurate. He’s done a part-time master’s degree in literature and a bachelor of economics at Australian National University and published nine books on history, business, and current affairs, including four books of collected essays in the past five years. So you can see that he’s across many different topics. One of his books on business won an award in 2000, from the chartered accountants body as quote, “A substantial contribution to the literature of the industry.” Tony’s major topics currently include climate change, indoctrination in schools and universities, the ABC and Aboriginal politics. Welcome to tntradio.live. Tony.

Tony Thomas (02:04):

Thanks very much Malcolm, a very nice introduction.

Senator Malcom Roberts (02:10):

We always start with appreciation. Tell me something you appreciate, no matter how briefly, no matter what topic, what do you appreciate?

Tony Thomas (02:18):

I appreciate the ability to research right, and get published with alacrity. There’s no fun writing for a publisher, and then your book comes out 15 months later, but writing for Quadrant Online, I put the article in within a day or two it’s up on the blog site. So, that’s very satisfying.

Senator Malcom Roberts (02:43):

Thank you. Now I want to go back to your cadetship. How did young journalists operate? Is it like the classical movies tell us 40 years ago, they would sniff an issue, they would go out and research it, they’d talk to people, above all, listen to people, give everyone a fair hearing. And then they would write an article without fear, without favour, objective. Is that the way you started? Is that the culture in which you started?

Tony Thomas (03:14):

Yes. In those days, the young journalists were monitored and herded by old veteran pot belly grizzled journalists changed [inaudible 00:03:27], who’d been in the game since before the war, who would roast you for the slightest grammatical mistake or sloppiness, and so on. I must say though, The West Australian was a monopoly in that capital city. So they weren’t as sharp as many other newspapers are where everybody’s competing, but still it was a four year cadetship. I did three years and you learn shorthand. I actually learned shorthand twice over once at school and once on the job. And you were put through all sorts of experiences, especially court reporting, which may seem quite okay for a young cadet. But in fact, it’s the most difficult and exacting form of reporting. And if you get one little thing wrong or you mishear something because of bad acoustics, you are in big trouble. So the training was quite slow in those days, but thorough.

Senator Malcom Roberts (04:30):

Thank you very much. So basically it’s an apprenticeship and you learn-

Tony Thomas (04:35):

That’s right.

Senator Malcom Roberts (04:35):

…the tools of your trade and the methods of your trade and the processes of your trade by the guidance of experienced people, successful people. You also said something else, implicitly. You said that The West Australian was a monopoly. And therefore it wasn’t as sharp as some of the other papers where there was cutthroat competition. You also said there’s shorthanded school as shorthand was at school, basic skills that are not taught today. Now, just of something of interest. And you also mentioned you were sent to court reporting, where you have to be accurate and precise and succinct, just a little sideline, whenever I’m approached by anyone in the media, whether it be by phone or personally, I always turn on my recording device.

Senator Malcom Roberts (05:23):

The other day in parliament, I was wandering through the corridors on my way to Senate estimates hearings, and Andrew Probyn now with the ABC saw me and he went past me and he said, “Can I just get your comment off the record, of course, about a topic?” And I said, “Hang on just a minute, I’ll just turn my recording device on.” And he said, “No, if that’s it, not interested.” So, there’s that kind of thing, he’s not willing to stand up to accountability because if he misreports, this is my opinion, if he missed reports, then I can hold him accountable for it. The moment I did that, he ran away. So journalists have prized impartiality, what happened?

Tony Thomas (06:09):

Well, what happened there, was the old story, as you said, of journalists not wanting to be accountable. Now, it’s 10 times worse with the TV journalism because the TV journalist will interview you for half an hour and then cut and snip the interview down to just a few sentences, according to whatever agenda he’s on. And some really clever people like Joanne Nova, the climate blogger in Perth, when she was met by the ABC filming team, had her own filming camera set up in the lounge room and she filmed the ABC filming. And so then she was able to say, this is what the ABC has done with that interview, where they’ve cut, how they’ve distorted it, and basically how much they left on the cutting room floor. So there’s an old saying about, trust me, I’m a journalist. Well, that’s ironic.

Senator Malcom Roberts (07:15):

Yes. That’s a really important point. You’ve just mentioned journalists, as we agreed is not accountable today. And it’s worse with TV because of the editing. That’s implicit in what you said, Joanne Nova’s filming the filmers. There’s a story, I was in Cannes with a candidate who was fairly inexperienced and he had a colourful background, nothing wrong with it, but he had background and some of the media locally were trying to distort that misrepresented to cast dispersions on him. And one of the journalists came up and I said to him that I was recording it in front of the candidate.

Senator Malcom Roberts (07:54):

And then I proceeded to answer his questions by asking him questions. And after a couple of minutes, he realised that he was being interviewed and I realised where the slant of his thrust was going to go. So what I did was I posted the recording on Facebook immediately. Now that’s taking away livelihood from a journalist, but in my opinion, it was also protecting an honest, innocent person from being slandered or being misrepresented. So that’s one way of fighting the media, but how else can we protect ourselves against the media?

Tony Thomas (08:36):

Well, before the online world happened, the journalists for print could write what they liked and the only response that any reader would have would be to write a letter of complaint to the editor. And then the editor, which is like complaining to your wife about your mother-in-law. The editor would normally pick a side of the journalist and throw the letter in the bin, or whatever. But now that there’s an online world, if a journalist writes a piece that people object to, either on that site itself or on their own blogs or anywhere, they can put a post up arguing back against the journalists. So, that’s what the online world has opened up. The journalists are now accountable to every person on the planet, which is an excellent thing.

Senator Malcom Roberts (09:32):

Yes, until we get censorship in social media, which is what Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and LinkedIn are doing. So how do we counter that?

Tony Thomas (09:43):

Well, as Trump and Joanne Nova, and people are doing, they’re finding other platforms, which are pretty obscure, and I’m not across them, I think a bit [inaudible 00:09:56], and these ones are open and not centering you. So that takes some power away from Twitter and Facebook.

Senator Malcom Roberts (10:05):

What about polls? What do they show about trust in the media these days, Tony?

Tony Thomas (10:09):

I’ve been looking into this and there, there was a poll by the Reader’s Digest of all things in Australia last year. And they wanted people to rank professions according to trust. And guess where journalists came, they came second last of 30 professions, just ahead of politicians. Sorry about that, Mal. And just-

Senator Malcom Roberts (10:32):

You’re not affecting me because we deal with honesty, Tony, I know exact be what you’re talking about. They’re [inaudible 00:10:38].

Tony Thomas (10:38):

Yeah. And just ahead of delivery drivers, and when you go to a place like the United States, there was a, I think a Pew poll, for how is trust in the media represented across 46 countries, and of the 46 countries trust in the media, in the US was bottom. You can’t get any lower than that. Only 29% of the population said they trusted the media. Whereas I looked up Australia, that was 43%, but Australian trust in the media is below what you got in Croatia, Poland and South Africa. If you want a bit more there’s other polls quite recently, where trust in the media overall in the US is only 36%, which is the second lowest ever since Gallup began polling, only 11% of Republican trust the media. But when you take all American adults, only 10% trust the media on their COVID coverage. Now that is truly remarkable and indicates that no matter what the press is saying, their audience frankly, is mostly not believing it.

Senator Malcom Roberts (11:59):

So, they’re startling figures. So trust is just about shot, which will ultimately lead to two things, correct me if I’m wrong, people will stop paying media. People will turn to alternatives as we are doing. We are turning to what I call independent truth media, podcasts, independent stations like tntradio.live. These are the things because ultimately there is a free market, but let me just check again. Pravda still exists, doesn’t it, in Russia?

Tony Thomas (12:36):

I think so. I’m not sure.

Senator Malcom Roberts (12:38):

I’m pretty sure it does. That means our journalists in this country, our media in this country are ranked below Pravda, who would’ve thought that 40 years ago before 1988? Who would’ve thought that?

Tony Thomas (12:52):

Well, I don’t know where the Russia who was on that list of 46 countries, but I’ll give you the benefit on the doubt there, Malcolm.

Senator Malcom Roberts (13:00):

Well, some of the Eastern block countries.

Tony Thomas (13:02):

Yes. Well, they were there. Poland, Croatia. You name it.

Senator Malcom Roberts (13:07):

Yeah. How effective is the ABC’s charter for impartiality?

Tony Thomas (13:12):

Oh, it’s really a joke. What it actually says is that the ABC reporters should follow the weight of evidence. So that means if there’s a consensus about something, they should reflect that consensus. But it says that all points of view should be covered over time. And what this has done is given a licence to the, in addition it said, you don’t have to worry about tinfoil hat conspiracists and [inaudible 00:13:44], and people like that who are not actually entitled to any sort of point of view in balanced coverage.

Tony Thomas (13:53):

Well, the ABC people of course have now lumped climate sceptics to take the most pertinent example, along with the tin hat foil conspirators, and they won’t touch any sceptic point of view. And on the rare occasions they have, such as on their science show where they interviewed Dr. Judith Curry, a very esteemed American climatologist with a sceptic point of view, they book ended her with two or three of their own pet climate scientists, so that everything that Judith said, they were able to drown out with opposing views from their several friends there. So, that’s how they pretend to keep their charter, while actually protecting the public from the views of a very large proportion of people on climate.

Senator Malcom Roberts (14:51):

Well, it’s very interesting you mentioned. I didn’t know those details about the ABC, even though we’d done some research and some work in response to some political activities a couple of years ago. They are a disgrace, in my opinion, I think they should be sold with the exception of the regional arm. And that should be retained, especially for natural disasters. So, I’ll come back to the ABC in a minute. Well, let’s deal with them first, before we go to-

Tony Thomas (15:16):

[crosstalk 00:15:16] Pilborough.

Senator Malcom Roberts (15:17):

…go to the Pilborough in 1980s, the ABC actually requires dealing with the consensus, supporting the consensus. Now, that’s very interesting because they don’t do their research. When it comes to climate, the consensus is with the scientists who don’t believe that carbon dioxides from human activity has to be cut. That is undoubted. The Oregon petition 33,000, 34,000 now scientists, who are opposed to what we are being told by the United Nations. Kevin Rudd as prime minister, what a disgrace he was, his behaviour was atrocious because he’d basically lied in parliament. He said that 4,000 scientists produced the IPCC’s report. I challenged him. I wrote to his office and I said that the claim is really 2,500, but of those 2,500, only about a 1,000 produced a science report.

Senator Malcom Roberts (16:24):

In the science report, and you would well know this, in 2007 there was one sole lonely chapter claiming carbon dioxides from human activity effects climate, needs to be cut. The rest was bumf, fluff. That was it. Chapter nine, from memory in 2007. In that chapter, the reviewers numbered about 57, of those reviewers, only five endorse a claim that carbon dioxides from human activity affects climate, only five. And there’s doubt that they were even accredited scientists. So we have, not 4,000 that Kevin Ruddd told us, we had five. That’s from the UN’s own process, the UN’s own data, which Dr. John McClain painstakingly took from UN documents. After that exposure by Dr. John McClain, the UN stopped producing reports on the numbers of scientists, but that is a blatant lie. Now what makes it even more so atrocious, Tony is that I wrote to Kevin Rudd, his department responded to me. I then told them why their response was nonsense. They then responded to me again, from memory. And then I told them why that was nonsense. I won the argument. They didn’t respond. Hard data they go against.

Tony Thomas (17:48):

Yeah, I actually am a friend of John McClain, here in Melbourne.

Senator Malcom Roberts (17:53):

Wonderful man.

Tony Thomas (17:54):

Yeah. He tipped me off that there’s a key chapter in the IPCC reports called Attribution Studies, where they have to literally attribute global warming to CO2, via their modelings. And I’m not sure which report it was. It could have been the 2007 one. There were only 60 scientists involved in that attribution exercise, and basically all of them were in a network where their peer reviewing each other’s work, and hobnobbing together, and you can do one of those spider graphs where you can link just about every one of them to every other one. So it was a small group, a closed shop of people, but there were 60 people basically dictating this entire global warming hysteria that’s been going on now for 30 years.

Senator Malcom Roberts (18:51):

Well, not only that, I’m pretty sure you’re citing the data there that I also cited. There were 60 authors of the critical chapter, the sole chapter, again. The overwhelming majority of them were climate modellers, not empirical scientists.

Tony Thomas (19:10):

Sure.

Senator Malcom Roberts (19:10):

And there’s no empirical data, which is the fundamental root foundation of science. Objectivity is based on empirical data, hard facts, hard observations. None of that appears in chapter nine, 2007, the sole chapter that claims warming and attributed to carbon dioxide from human activities. What’s more though, is we see… And why hasn’t the ABC reported that? Why hasn’t anyone reported that? Because they’re too lazy, in my opinion Tony, to go and do the work, do the research that you were trained to do. And now it’s that second nature to you, but not only that, they don’t report on the links, the links to, for example, the network of very close, I think about four institutions, those 60 odd scientists, I don’t call them scientists, I call them academics. The 60 academics that produce the chapter nine, but largely modellers overwhelmingly were modellers.

Senator Malcom Roberts (20:12):

But more importantly, they were from, I think about four different modelling organisations. All enrolled in spreading this climate crap. And so they feed off each other, they validate each other’s papers. And when you look through the peer reviewers, they’re all forming a very close club and they depend on each other to maintain their positions. But there’s also another connection, a colleague of mine in Canberra, who I think you know, Peter Bobrov, he did an analysis of those who are connected to the United Nations or globalist organisations. Overwhelmingly, the loud voices, the mouths that spread this nonsense, they’re academic activists, advocates. They’re all one in the same, it’s hard to tell the difference between academia and activists these days, but they’re overwhelmingly connected to the UN or associated globalist bodies.

Senator Malcom Roberts (21:14):

And then David Karoly, he was editor, lead author for one chapter, I think it was in 2001 for the sole chapter that claims warming and attributed to carbon dioxide. He was also one of the three primary reviewers of the same chapter, the equivalent chapter, sorry, chapter nine in 2007. And the 2007 report just built on the 2001 report. So if we’ve got crap at the start in 2001, and it was, then it was validated by the people who produced the crap. It was validated in 2007. And David Karoly, despite people saying the science was settled back then, received a grant for $1.9 million to research this climate science, despite it being settled. And it’s just stunning the money that taxpayers spread out through people like Kevin Rudd, and sadly the liberals. So there’s this very tight incestuous group, but the media doesn’t talk about it.

Tony Thomas (22:17):

Yeah. The Australian Academy of Science in 2015, put out a booklet called a Question and Answers on the Science of Climate Change. And I immediately went looking for where are they going to produce the evidence for the CO2 causing the warming? And it said, “Paleo climate studies plus outputs from modelling provide compelling evidence of the connection.” Well, since when is output from models, been compelling evidence, it’s just a scientific absurdity. And this booklet would’ve gone through the hands of dozens and dozens of academy of science people, making sure that they weren’t going to get caught out on anything, and this just goes through. Output of morals to them is compelling evidence. It’s shocking, really.

Senator Malcom Roberts (23:14):

But no media journalists pick it up apart from Adam Creighton and Tony McCrain and sometimes Graham Lloyd. The media seems to willfully ignore it. And when you challenge him, aren’t they still ignore it. You mention the Australian Academy of Science, I had dealings with will Stephan, who is a member of the Academy, from memory. He was on four government funded organisations. And yet when he was introduced as a newly selected member of the climate commission, or should that be climate [inaudible 00:23:44], but anyway, climate commission, the minister at the time for climate, pushing climate, he was Greg Combet, and he said that Will Stephan. And the others were all impartial.

Senator Malcom Roberts (23:55):

They already had strong connections to the government. And as you point out, that the only thing that they can hang their hats on now is modelling. We had 90 models producing vastly different outputs. So which one of these is the settle science? And now we have whittled that down from 90 to 40, they say. So as it was asked in Senate estimates last week, if you’ve got 40 models producing different results, what does that tell you about the science being settled?

Tony Thomas (24:29):

Yeah. Yeah, that’s right. What they’re now going for is to pretend that basically the consensus is overwhelming and there’s no more argument. And so if you start signing the pledge and so on, that is proof that everything’s okay, there’s this organisation called Covering Climate Now based in Columbia University, School of Journalism and The Guardian and a few other groups, and they’ve got 460 media groups worldwide to sign the pledge, to do their utmost to hide global warming and shun any critics of it. And to use words that the guardian recommends like global heating, global crisis, emergency climate breakdown. So they even want to constrict the language into this campaign of theirs. Well, once you realise that 460 media outlets have signed that pledge, how can you possibly imagine that any of them remain objective on the subject?

Senator Malcom Roberts (25:40):

Exactly. And I love your use of data. Your readily available at your fingertips data. And I note that News Corporation in its editorial, leading up to the Glasgow Conference of Parties with the UN back in, what was that? November last year. The news Corp said, “We’re going to change our editorial policy slightly. We’re going to be reporting more implicitly,” didn’t state it directly, a slanted view, but Tony, we’re going to go to an ad break now. What I’d like to do when we come back in a minute or so is have your views on the role of the now activist global news agencies like Associated Press, AFP, Reuters, AAP, et cetera. We go to the ad break.

Tony Thomas (26:29):

With pleasure. I’ve been researching that all week. Okay. Thanks Malcom.

Senator Malcom Roberts (28:38):

Welcome back you’re with Senator Malcolm Roberts interviewing a journalist with 60 years of experience, Tony Thomas. Tony, one of the advertisements a minute ago just said “Your future depends on how you think.” Could it be any better said? The quality of our decisions depend upon what we think or on how we think. And particularly based on data, how can we make a sound decision on voting, which will determine taxation and community policies, defence, social policies, industry policies, productivity, with a biassed media? People have been asleep in this country. The media perpetuates the two parties, which are so similar. It’s really a uni-party, but people are still asleep. COVID though have as awoken people, and no matter how much the bias is there, and it’s very solid. People seem to be waking up. What’s the role of the now activist global news agencies?

Tony Thomas (29:36):

Well, people don’t really realise or appreciate that if it wasn’t for the huge global news wholesalers like Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, Reuters and Bloomberg, their newspapers would be half empty and the same with the radio, news, and so on. That they just shovel in the output from these news global wholesalers. And I’ve just been checking, and I find that AFP, which has got literally thousands of journalists there and probably thousand or more media customers, and Reuters and Bloomberg have all signed this covering climate now petitioned to hype global warming and stamp out any dissenting views. And then I began to realise that The Australian newspaper, which has been my main reading and I’ve always respected it, is taking basically ghastly climate propaganda from AFP. And there is an example, just the other day about a headline, The acceleration of global warming code red for humanity.

Tony Thomas (30:58):

And it was illustrated with a picture of a cool city with beautiful green grasses, blue skies, pink, white, fluffy clouds. And then because of CO2 on the left side of the picture, it turns into a boiling hot hellscape, fires and cracked earth, not a green thing in sight. And this was all under the heading, Breaking News. And then I found that the same guy from AFP who’s their global head of climate coverage called Marlowe Hood has got more than 20 of these propaganda pieces into The Australian.

Tony Thomas (31:41):

And it’s just unbelievable that they wouldn’t at least be put under comment, but to have them all in the news section like that. And clearly The Australian having paid for a feed from AFP, just uncritically takes everything that they offer. But if we move on to Associated Press, there’s a huge scandal just broken in the United States, where five leaftist philanthropic foundations have given Associated Press $8 million to hire 20 new reporters to push the climate change message.

Tony Thomas (32:29):

So this means that when you are reading climate stuff from now on, from Associated Press, you could be reading material by people who’ve been hired with money from foundations like The Rockefeller Foundation, the James and Catherine Murdoch Quadrivium Foundation. There’s the Walton Foundation, there’s another one that I’ve forgotten. Anyway, they’ve all got green leaf credentials. They’re all determined to save the planet. And this is so contrary to the codes of ethics of Associated Press itself, which it says don’t allow money to influence anything you’re doing and always be wary of anyone offering money to influence your coverage. And in point, they even said, announcing this $8 million grant that they were no longer going to be so wary because the money from these foundations is such nice money, and we really need it. I mean you can’t make this stuff up.

Senator Malcom Roberts (33:41):

No. And we know that I think it was John Rockefeller. One of the early Rockefellers about a hundred years ago, thanked the New York times, that’s right, for keeping the global control under wraps. So not being impartial, just silencing the control of the major 46 newspapers in the United States that were biassed and controlled by the globalists. And then there’s another problem we have Tony, and that is that I think it was Julia Gillard’s Labour government that had in amongst its ministers and its staff, amongst its MPS. It had something like 150 journalists working for them. Anastasia Palache was recently reported, was it 30 journalists reporting to her or reporting in her department-

Tony Thomas (34:39):

There could have been.

Senator Malcom Roberts (34:39):

…and what’s happening, sorry?

Tony Thomas (34:41):

Well, it could have been triple figures for all the media Flex in the Palache Queensland government. And it’s much the same in the Andrew’s government. The teams of media flex that he owns are probably larger than the teams in any other media outlet stable.

Senator Malcom Roberts (35:03):

So the point I was getting to, that’s a really important thing to say that the biggest employers of media are in fact, the politicians because what’s happened with increasing competition, especially from the internet, is that some of the conventional, what I call the legacy media, especially the print media, are now shutting down. Well, have been for many years, shutting down the number of journalists they have. And so journalists go and are employed by the politicians, especially those in government with seemingly endless taxpayers money to employ journalists. And this army of journalists, writes crap. And then the under demand journalists in the mainstream media, the legacy media, they just take whatever they’re given and copy and paste it, straight into the media. And so what we’ve got is, we’ve got governments of both types, labour liberal, both virtually writing newspaper articles.

Senator Malcom Roberts (36:07):

I cancelled my subscription to Sky News because it’s now woke, lame. Prime Minister Morrison seem to do some favours for some of the journalists in Sky News. And now they just gush about him. It makes people sick. And Sky News is dropping in viewership now. I don’t buy any newspaper, other than The Weekend Australian because my wife likes The Weekend Australian magazine, some News Corp journalists are quite good, Alan Jones, but he’s sacked or he’d been let go. So, that tells you something about News Corp. Bolt has been throttled, Terry McCray’s good, Graham Lloyd is sometimes impartial. We’ve got these temperatures. The temperatures today are cooler in Australia than the temperatures in the 1880s, 1890s. Fact Bureau of Meteorology’s own record. We know that temperature hasn’t increased. There’s been no warming trend since 1995, none globally.

Senator Malcom Roberts (37:14):

If you take away where the El Niño and Southern Oscillation in this, which is cyclical, there’s been no warming in Australia. We see now that we’ve had two experiments, real life experiments, and that’s the key to science. In 2009, there was a massive recession, a pretty severe due to the global financial crisis near the end of 2008. So when we have a recession, industrial production goes down, which means the consumption of hydrocarbon fuels goes down, which means the production of carbon dioxide from human activity goes down. It went down enormously. So the human production of carbon dioxide went down enormously in 2009. Yet the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere continued increasing unabated, same linear trend of increase. In 2020, we had almost a depression around the world due to government restrictions on COVID, not due to COVID, but due to government restrictions because of COVID.

Senator Malcom Roberts (38:18):

And so again, we saw a reduction in carbon dioxide from human activity, and yet the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere continued increasing at a linear trend. We know from science that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are controlled entirely by nature. We know that there’s 50 to 70 times more carbon dioxide dissolved in the oceans than there is in the entire atmosphere. And the UN has given us those figures. And so slight changes in temperature of the ocean, which is naturally variable, lead to either absorption of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or liberation from the oceans to the atmosphere.

Senator Malcom Roberts (38:58):

So we’ve got this massive facts staring at us in the face. And yet we don’t see any of it reported in the media. So the media is destroying itself, people are losing trust. As you’ve pointed out, alarmingly. The people are losing faith in the science because they know there’s no overall warming, that people are losing faith in politics because of the lack of responsibility. And that means people don’t take responsibility because they don’t see that they can affect the outcome of politics. So these are not good science for our society, are they?

Tony Thomas (39:34):

No. Sure, the one sided reporting is pretty terrible, but even getting away from the climate issue, the public have got so many good reasons not to trust the media. I was just been looking into the scandal at the New York Times, which is the premier masthead in the world, old where-

Senator Malcom Roberts (39:56):

Well, I’ll disagree with you, but you can have that view.

Tony Thomas (40:00):

Yeah, well, but for 10 years, they were taking a $100,000.00 a month from the Chinese Communist Party to run Chinese communist propaganda in the guise of advertorials from the China Daily newspaper. And it only came to light because Republicans began demanding from China news, full details under probably the foreign lobbying act of just what they’d been up to with the American mainstream media. And it turned out that since 2016, they basically bought the American media for as little as $20 million, that included the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, New York Times, and running these propaganda pieces about which islands belong to China, and which don’t, and how nice the Chinese have been to the [inaudible 00:41:00].

Tony Thomas (41:00):

And it turned out that the New York times had run 200 of these pieces. And when China daily got sprung, the New York Times, which has kept their archives back to 1850, that’s how comprehensive they are. Sneakily went in and deleted all 200 pieces from their archives. So, this is an enormous scandal and you wonder the New York times would have any reputation at all left after this. So that’s just one of the latest scandals to hit the American media, which helps explain the low levels of trust there.

Senator Malcom Roberts (41:45):

What about the role of fact checkers these days? Are they a restraint on bad reporting?

Tony Thomas (41:51):

Well, they’ve been captured by the very same people, who are running so many, dare I say, fake news items. For example, Facebook contracted out fact checking to some group. And when somebody sued Facebook over their fact checks, Facebook said, but our fake checks are only opinion and that’s protected under the first amendment. Well, once they’ve said that, you know what fact checking’s all about. Now Agence France-Presse, and I think Associated Press have also got their fact checking outfits alongside, but of course, who needs fact check more than AFP and AP itself, there’s been a whole litany of leaks and stories from within these large media groups, like the New York Times where.

Tony Thomas (42:48):

For example, the New York Times editor, when it came out, the Trump collusion with Russia story was dead in the water, briefed the journalists to say, well, we gave that one, a good run. We focused our whole coverage on the collusion story. Now that’s gone. We need a new cause. So let’s focus on how racist America’s been since 1619, I think it was. And so that’s the new line that is being propagated through the New York Times, all about race and identity politics and so on. Well, once upon a time, or as the TV, people used to say, just the facts ma’am, just the facts. Well, now you’re getting just the narrative, thanks. Just the narrative that we’ve selected.

Senator Malcom Roberts (43:39):

And we’re getting something else too. I think Tony, from the use of these labels like racist, Islamophobe, homophobia, misogynist, et cetera. What I’ve noticed happen is that if I present something or when I present, so that is solidly backed by data, which is my habit, and a logical argument that shows cause and effect. Then people respond, especially journalists with either silence to shut me down, stop my common sense getting out or with labels. So they call me racists, Nazi, whatever they want to call me, tinfoil, hat wearer, a conspiracy theorist. And what I’ve learned to do to them is to turn around and say, well, thank you for just confirming that you have got no data or you can’t string together a logical argument for rebutting what I’m saying. Thank you for admitting that you’ve got no data and that I’ve won the argument, because if you had any argument, you wouldn’t be using labels, instead you’d be presenting the data in the argument, instead of valid response.

Tony Thomas (44:48):

Well, that’s an excellence response from you and basically name calling does lose you the argument in any debate. I must say there’s a new trend. It’s creeping in everywhere where the reporters are writing. What’s supposed to be a straight story and they’ll suddenly throw in the words “He falsely claimed,” or “He claimed without evidence,” or ” XYZ is a conspiracy theory.” And they attach these completely subjective labels to what they’re reporting. And I think as Joanne Nova said, “As soon as you see any of those labels, like false, misleading, without context and so on, have a good look because it’s very likely that what you’re reading’s correct.” And I could give you a recent example, the ABC 7:00 PM news last Sunday had a report on Scott Morrison, the prime minister accusing the opposition leader, Albanese of being soft on China. And the reporter said, Morrison accused Albanise, without evidence of being soft on China.

Tony Thomas (46:02):

So I put in a complaint to the ABC saying, what evidence would actually satisfy your reporter, that Albanese was a tool of China. Would you want a stat deck from three government ministers? Would you want a high court ruling? Would you want a Royal Commission that establishes the truth? Do you want a court case leading to a victory for Albanese, and how come you never say that Albanese, when he turned around and accused the prime minister of being the Manchurian Candidate no less, how come you never attach the label without evidence to that one? So I’ll be interested to see how the ABC replies to my complaint there. Sometimes I win these complaints. So that one time in three, I’d say.

Senator Malcom Roberts (46:51):

Well, I’m going to set aside. I’ve had questions that I prepared for you, further questions. We could go for hours, but I’m going to set them aside entirely because I’m sensing something far more interesting here. We’ve established what the media is like these days sadly, they’re propagandist. But I want to know about Tony Thomas, you’re 81, you’ve got the voice of someone in their 40s. You’re taking on these bastards in the media, you’re taking on these bastards in the government. Tell us what you do during the day. It’s fascinating.

Tony Thomas (47:28):

Well, I’ve been retired a long time and I don’t have too many babysitting duties. So I just think of a subject, research the hell out of it, wind up with maybe 30,000 or 40,000 words of raw material on it. And then I boil it all down to about 2,000 words and send it off to Roger Franklin at Quadrant Online. And as I said, he publishes it very, very promptly. And I love finding out stuff that’s so outrageous, that people have to say, Tony must be making that stuff up, but I’m always scrupulous to put in my links and evidence for everything I say. I mean the latest article I wrote-

Senator Malcom Roberts (48:12):

I’ve seen your work.

Tony Thomas (48:15):

…Biden’s new assistant deputy secretary for nuclear waste disposal, being a fetishist to do with gay men, pretending to be dogs with tails stuck up their rectum and all sorts of goings on there. And copiously illustrated with photographs. And this is the man now in charge of America’s nuclear waste industry, and as some of the commenters have said anything to do with nukes, you wouldn’t let a man like that, normally within a thousand miles of it, I mean, he’s entitled to his hobbies after work, but he’s making an absolute parade of his fetishisms. And as somebody else said, are his subordinates going to respect him in his role? Or is he basically shot his credibility, even in the nuclear waste area where he is qualified and nobody’s claimed that he’s not qualified. So, that’s the sort of article I love writing that just make people real back saying this can’t really be happening in the world I live in.

Senator Malcom Roberts (49:29):

Well, maybe giving Biden the button to obliterate the world through America’s nuclear arsenal is good because I don’t know if he’d be able to remember where it is. So may maybe very safe. Tell me what is most satisfying about your whole career spanning now 60 years? What are the highlights?

Tony Thomas (49:50):

When I was in the Press Gallery in the 70s, I was the only journalist who immediately spotted that Rex Connor, the minister for minerals and energy was a nut case. And I spotted this because he’d drawn a map with gas pipelines, going all over Australia, which is about 2,000 miles wide and high. And he apparently saw no technical problem with crisscrossing the country with these gas pipelines. And then he got up and told parliament, he was going to set up a nuclear enrichment plan on Spencer Gulf in south Australia, because there, it would be safe from enemy submarines.

Tony Thomas (50:30):

And I just knew that this man was short of a few kangaroos in the top paddock and began writing that way. So for a couple of years, I was almost the only writer who was critical of this minister for energy until he fell flat on his face, trying to do deals with raising $4 billion from Saudi Arabians. And it was all just a fantasy. And so he got sacked, his mate, Jim Cairns got sacked and then Whitlam, the prime minister got sacked, and that was the end of the labour government. So I think that was my proudest moment.

Senator Malcom Roberts (51:13):

And you weren’t proud, from what I can pick up, of leading to the dismissal of the labour government. You were proud of the fact that your facts eventually prevailed because of your gathering the data and your dogged persistence. And this is where it’s wonderful to be on a station like tntradio.live, because I happen to have been brought up in a family, and we’ve only got a minute or so to go now, Tony, before the news.

Senator Malcom Roberts (51:38):

But I was brought up in a family that ridiculed Connor, but later on, I talked to people and listened and there was some marvellous, what would you call it? Overall aims that he had for protecting our resources? Not for nationalising them, but for protecting them and getting a good price for them. So I can see both sides of the argument, but what’s important here is not whether I agree with you or disagree with you because in part I agree, I can see some things I disagree, but the fact that you were determined you would [inaudible 00:52:09] and you got the facts out and that’s extremely important, isn’t it?

Tony Thomas (52:12):

And unpopular, you could say.

Senator Malcom Roberts (52:16):

So that’s something to really wear proudly because it’s something that Pauline and I do as well. Proud of being honest. Tony, I want to thank you for speaking so bluntly, so refreshingly purely, so objectively, and thank you for coming loaded with data. This is Senator Malcolm Roberts on tntradio.live. Thank you very much, Tony Thomas.

Today I talk to Emeritus Professor of Law David Flint about our broken system of democracy, the monarchy and republic fight, China, ABC, Biden and much more. Listen above or read the transcript below. See all episodes of my show on TNT radio:

Recorded 19 February 2022

Transcript

(00:01):

You’re with Senator Malcolm Roberts on Today’s News Talk Radio TNT.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (00:07):

Good afternoon, or wherever you are in the world. It may be good morning. This is Today’s News Talk Radio, tntradio.live. Thank you for having me as your guest in your car, your kitchen, your lounge, to your shed, or wherever you are right now. There are two themes to my show, freedom and personal responsibility. Freedom is specifically in the context of freedom versus control. As we can see under assault all over the world is freedom right now. The control freaks want to take over. It’s basic, freedom is basic for human progress and people’s livelihood. The second theme is personal responsibility and the importance of integrity. That’s also basic for personal progress and for people’s livelihoods.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (00:55):

Our show’s direction and tone are along these lines. I’m fiercely pro-human. I’ve had enough. I’ve had a gut full of the media and politicians bagging and ragging on humans. Excuse me. I’ve just been told that my mic level is too high. The second thing is that I’m very proud to be part of the species that is the only species in the world that is capable of logical thinking. Although sometimes I wonder if all people are capable of logical thinking. Another aspect and tone is that we are positive. While we are here to deal with issues that people face and are concerned about, I encourage our guests to provide solutions, lasting, meaningful solutions, as well as what’s wrong with politics, what’s needed in politics. As well as what’s wrong with politicians, what we need in politicians. As well as what’s wrong with the media, what’s needed in the media.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (01:58):

We’ll get to the core issues, words and all to develop solutions. We’ll cover the human aspects, the strengths, the weaknesses, the vulnerabilities, the failings, the highlights. What makes people real? We want to be data-driven. We will be and are data driven, factual, truthful, and honest. And we will speak out bluntly on the issues. I had the privilege, and I mean that sincerely, the privilege of being one of the many hundreds of thousands of protestors in Canberra last weekend. I was down there, was due to come home for the weekend, but decided to stay. And so glad am I that that happened. My wife and son drove down the 14-hour trip to join me and join hundreds of thousands of protesters in Canberra.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (02:47):

And those protesters were either ignored by the media or downplayed into just a few thousand or maybe one channel even had 10,000. That’s complete rubbish. It filled acres and acres of land between the old parliament house and new parliament house. And what an exciting buzz it was. It was phenomenal energy there. People are angry, but they weren’t violent. They were calm. They’re determined, they’re encouraging, supportive of each other. The posters that people had, the signs, it was just beautiful. It was absolutely stunning to be there. And after the protest, I went down to Camp Epic, which is where tens of thousands of people are camped out. People have driven here from Perth, driven to Canberra rather, from Perth, from Darwin, from Brisbane. It was absolutely stunning.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (03:37):

And the environment, the tone, the energy was electric, but it was also people having fun. People just being themselves. It was a real community, tens of thousands of people from all over the country showing what real Aussies are about. And they’re about respect, they’re about care. They’re about freedom and they’re about community and connecting with each other. It’s one of the highlights of my life to just feel that atmosphere. It was just absolutely marvellous to see that back in Australia, after months and months, two years of government control.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (04:11):

What I’d like to do today is talk about the media. And it was triggered, this topic, by something David Flint, Professor David Flint said during his talk on the conversation two weeks ago with me here on TNT Radio. He says that the first duty of the press, The Times newspaper declared in 1851, “The first duty is to obtain the earliest and most correct intelligence of the events of the time and instantly by disclosing them to make them the common property of the nation.” David Flint is a very honourable man, a highly respected man, and he’s nailed it right there with that quote from The Times. So I’m going to hold the media to account today with my two guests.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (04:58):

First up, it’s great to be talking with Professor David Flint again. He joined me last fortnight to chat about the constitution and we invited him back. I didn’t realise it would be just within two weeks. Professor David Flint, who has an order of Australian medal, is an emeritus professor of law. He read law and economics at Universities of Sydney, London, and Paris. After admission as a solicitor of the New South Wales Supreme Court in 1962, he practised as a solicitor from 1962 to ’72 before moving into university, teaching, holding several academic posts before becoming professor of law at the Sydney University of Technology in 1989.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (05:38):

Professor Flint is the author of numerous publications. His publications include books and articles and topics such as the media, international economic law, Australia’s Constitution, and on Australia’s 1999 Constitutional Referendum. And I almost made the mistake of voting for that referendum until I listened to some high court judges in Brisbane. And then I became totally in favour of our constitutional monarchy. He was recognised with the award of World Outstanding Legal Scholar. I’ll say that again, World Outstanding Legal Scholar, awarded by the World Jurist Association Barcelona in October, 1999. He was made a member of the Order of Australia in 1995.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (06:23):

There’s a higher qualification though, that David has. He has come from lofty academia. He works and rubbed shoulders with some of the most powerful people in the country, and he is respected by them. But he remains a man of the people. You’re just as likely to bump into him on the street, bump into him at a protest, bump into him at a conference. He challenges the elites and the establishment, but is still highly respected by even them. He’s aware the system is broken and the media is responsible for perpetrating the two party system, the pseudo-democracy. Well, we’re given a choice, but there’s no real choice because they’re both the same. Welcome, David.

David Flint (07:03):

Well, thank you very much. Lovely to be on your programme again, Malcolm.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (07:11):

Something you appreciate, David, what do you appreciate?

David Flint (07:14):

Well, I appreciate common sense. Particularly because I think it’s such a guide in relation to politics and all sorts of public activities. Common sense mixed with integrity, if you have those two, I think you’ll go a long way. And that is what is so missing in the management of society today. You quite rightly quoted that comment from The Times back in 1851 at the time of the referendum in 1999, which wasn’t just a referendum about royalists wanting to keep the monarchy. It was about requiring those who wanted to change the constitution to be doing something to improve the governance of the country. We had quite a few slogans in that campaign. And one which really cut through was vote no for the politician’s republic because this was going to increase the power of the politicians.

David Flint (08:25):

It was going to take away the role of the crown as providing leadership above politics, and playing a role as one of the guardians of the constitutional system. That’d be taken away, and what you would have would be a puppet president and the power of the politicians, that is the two-party cabal, would’ve been significantly increased. But what we found in that referendum was that most of the politicians wanted the politician’s republic. The extraordinary thing was that the media, which have a duty because they get all their freedom. They get their freedom in return for being responsible,, for giving that real information to the people without bias and without distorting emphasis and not suppressing anything that’s in their code of ethics.

David Flint (09:22):

They have that enormous freedom so that they can be responsible but they weren’t in the referendum. And this is where I particularly noticed it because I was chairing the vote no group. And we used to meet regularly every day, and we would be amazed sometimes by the way in which the arguments were distorted. But there was an independent observer of that referendum in 1999. This was Bill Deedes, and later on made Lord Deedes. He was a very distinguished fighter during the Second World War, and he was one of the very lofty stream of people who’ve been editors of London Telegraph. London Telegraph is one of the most reliable newspapers in the world.

David Flint (10:14):

But he wrote this about the Australian referendum, “I have really attended elections or votes in any country. Certainly not a democratic one in which the newspapers have displayed more shameless bias. One at all, they determined that Australians should have a republic and they used every device towards that end.” That’s all of the newspapers. Most of the electronic media, all of the public media, the ABC and SBS, all of them were pushing one way. There was only one major person in the media who offered something towards the no case, and that was Alan Jones. Alan Jones used to say when people rang in and said, “Alan, I don’t know how to vote. What should I do?” He’d say, “If you don’t know, vote no. If you don’t know, vote no.”

David Flint (11:18):

But the fact is, even with all that massive campaign, all of the politicians, almost all of them, just a handful of them who were coming out and saying this model’s no good, all of the media, except Alan Jones, as a major person in the media, and many of the elites, big businesses, they’re all saying vote for this republic, although it would’ve increased the powers of the politicians. And yet, we were able to get a vote, which shows the common sense of the Australian people. We were able to get a vote, which produced a national majority. It produced a majority in all states. In a referendum, you’ve got to win at least four states. We got all states and we won 72% of electorates. Not relevant to a referendum but it just shows how sweeping that decision was by the Australian people, which shows that there’s a lot of common sense out there among the electorate. And-

Senator Malcolm Roberts (12:22):

Let me jump in there, David.

David Flint (12:25):

Sure.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (12:27):

That is a remarkable statistic you’ve just given us. But overwhelmingly, the Australian people, despite the media, despite the politicians being almost exclusively in favour of the republic, and despite the propaganda, the constant barrage all through the media, with exception of Alan Jones, the people still kept their sanity and the people prevailed. So that’s really important to understand.

David Flint (12:56):

And remember, we didn’t have much money. We didn’t have the money for advertising that Malcolm turn … Malcolm [inaudible 00:13:04] funded most of the republican campaign, and he put a lot of money into it, but it didn’t make that much difference.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (13:13):

Let’s come back to the media because I’d like to include this in the summary when I give it in a minute. You’ve written articles on the degradation of today’s journalism. People worldwide are waking up to the death and the dearth of journalism talent. What is it that you have been railing against in your articles against the media and that people are now waking up to?

David Flint (13:37):

Well, I think we’ve seen the worst in the United States where the mainstream media and a lot of the social media have decided to become the propaganda arm of the democratic party of a democratic party, which is swung to the far left. And when the media decided to become a propaganda arm, it’s like living in a communist country. It’s not as bad because you still have other media. But we saw this, for example, when Hunter Biden lost his laptop, and that laptop contained an enormous amount of information, which demonstrated that the Biden family had been operating as an enterprise while he was a senator while Biden was vice president, and now as president. He was operating as an instrumentality, particularly when he was vice president, which offered to plutocrats, usually in authoritarian countries. Offered to them access and influence in Washington, but highly improper of course, but that laptop showed this.

David Flint (14:55):

What happened when that laptop came out and young Hunter Biden didn’t deny that what was on that laptop was his. He didn’t deny that, although some people are saying it’s a Russian setup, but it turned out to be perfectly real. What it showed was that the Biden family was behaving, offering access and influence to plutocrats and their favourite plutocrat, because they were the ones willing to pay the Chinese communists. Now, what did the mainstream media do? What did the social media do when this came out before the final voting and the election? They killed it. Twitter and Facebook closed down the New York Post to cut … But New York Post was one of the few journalist outlets that was willing to broadcast this and mention this.

David Flint (15:55):

And after the election, there was an opinion poll, which showed that the majority of people didn’t know about what was on the laptop. They didn’t know about the laptop story because the press managed to hide it. And the majority of them said that if they had known, they would have voted against Biden. Well, that just demonstrates that the median America, a lot of it owned by corporate interests who were making a lot of money out of slave labour in China and the sort of things that go on in China, and they hoped to make a killing in the Chinese market, they were willing to sacrifice their media ethics to make sure that Trump didn’t get in.

David Flint (16:48):

Because Trump had shown himself to be the first president of the United States since Clinton effectively, unleashed the communist by allowing the communist to join the world trade organisation in the hope that they would follow its rules, which they haven’t. I mean, that’s why we’ve got a tax, I think of about 280% on our barley, because they had questioned the origins of the virus, which we’ve suffered from. That’s the situation-

Senator Malcolm Roberts (17:23):

We suffered from the virus, David, or have we suffered from government restrictions and mismanagement?

David Flint (17:27):

You’re absolutely right. And this really comes to the question we’re discussing. You’re right. This virus is benign in relation to the majority of the people. It’s one of those viruses where we’re fortunate enough to know who the vulnerable are. The vulnerable aren’t the healthy children, they aren’t healthy people. It’s essentially those people who are both elderly and suffering from other illnesses, they’re the ones who are the most vulnerable. And they’re the ones who should have been looked after. You’re so right, we’ve suffered terribly from government decisions, but it hasn’t been the virus that has caused the suffering for the great majority of people. And even in relation to the vulnerable, more people, more vulnerable have died than should have died because of the activities of the government.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (18:28):

I agree entirely but nowhere have I seen that in the media, except for maybe Adam Creighton in The Australian, a wonderful economist who speaks with data and truth. Terry McCrann, similarly. Perhaps if I could give a summary, and then we’ll start the conversation about what triggered me to invite you back so quickly. First of all, you’ve mentioned the politician’s republic, the vote for a republic would’ve been a vote for a politician’s republic to increase people’s power. That’s a wonderful insight that I didn’t realise until you mentioned it to me last week and you’ve repeated it again. You also mentioned that the media gets its freedom, whether implicit or by law, if it presents impartially.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (19:15):

You chaired the no vote group and you saw yourself, shameless biassed back then, I was too young at the time to realise that, but I thought newspapers were objective, but I realised now it was completely biassed. And you mentioned that was across all forms of media, all papers, most electronic media, the ABC, the SPS, the public broadcasters. And you said quite rightly so, there’s only one major media person who was opposed to the republic vote. And that was Alan Jones. How many times have we heard Alan Jones being pilloried for being alone in dissenting from the majority view? Majority of the media view that is.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (20:02):

And I loved your comment about Alan Jones saying, “If you don’t know, vote no.” And I would say that right through almost every topic today. And you pointed out something that was the core to what you said, despite all the political propagandist, the overwhelming weight of political opinion, political experts, which are not really experts, and the media, the people prevailed. And that’s why in my opening comment, I support humans because when we’re aware, we prevail. You then went on to talk about the USA gives us the worst examples of media bias, democrat bias, social media, which is paid to shut down opposition, the media itself. You quite rightly pointed out. And that’s significant, Professor Flint, because the USA is known to be the home of modern democracy.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (20:56):

We could argue Britain is, but in terms of modern expression, the USA thumps its chest about that a lot. And yet the USA now has the worst censorship because it’s hidden censorship. And we know for example, that if the tanks roll in and the army gets out with guns, we know that we’re being controlled. But what you’ve done is you’ve highlighted the hidden control, the subtle control, the invisible control, which is every bit as effective as a gun or a tank. The media has silenced me. They sometimes silence Pauline Hanson. And it’s significant to understand, I don’t know if you mentioned this, but you did mention that the corporates control the media and the media has become a propaganda arm.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (21:40):

That was mentioned to me by someone called John McRay back about 10 years ago, that he showed me quotes from the owners of the media, the Rockefellers, controlled by the banks, the major banks pushing the bank propaganda. And we’ve been under this not just for the last two years of COVID, not just for the last 24 years since the referendum, but we’ve been under this for a hundred years and longer. And you also pointed out that the communist part, Chinese Communist Party controls many of the corporations or the same people who control those corporations are in bed with the Chinese Communist Party to control humans around the world, not just China.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (22:20):

So we are in fact, while not ruled by the Chinese with guns, we are ruled by the corporate globalists with silence and with propaganda. Now, you mentioned, Professor Flint, that in my show two weeks ago when we had a chat, that the media perpetuates the two party system. And it’s really a one party system because the policies are almost identical and we’re given a choice, we think, but in fact, there’s no real choice because we get shafted with the same policies. How is the media perpetuating the two party system that is effectively one party?

David Flint (23:01):

Well, I think we see this, for example, in relation to the Wuhan virus, which the communist wanted us to call COVID-19 and the WHO, which is under their control, agreed to. But they do this because they’ve become the propaganda arm of the politicians. And that means the two party system, which as you write this in many ways is becoming almost one party because like oligopolist in a small market, they’re not competing. In a small market, oligopolists don’t compete on price. They compete on product or brand distinctions, different ways they advertise, for example. And that’s what the politicians are doing. They’re both, for example, for net zero emissions, they have very similar policies on most things, but they make a slight difference by saying one will be harder on China than the other.

David Flint (24:02):

Although both sides demonstrate that some politicians when they retire seem to be able to get very good jobs with the Communist Chinese. I think they’ve become, in many ways, the propaganda arm. And you see this in relation to the virus. Their favourite phrase is doing the right thing or the people have done the right thing. These people are going to do the right thing. We have to do the right thing. The right thing means what the politicians have decided is right. And this is from a group of politicians in the national cabinet most of whom have had no life experience and really don’t know that much about doing the right thing. Because they’ve been so up to their necks in political manipulation that they’ve lost a lot of the ideas of what the right thing is.

David Flint (24:58):

And just take it, for example, just take it at the beginning. They’ve ignored the common sense rule in relation to [inaudible 00:25:06]. Two common sense rules. Firstly, you look after the vulnerable. And if the virus is such that we know who the vulnerable are, and here we do know who they are, you look after them and you let everybody else get on as best they can with their lives. But what do they do? They abandon the vulnerable, the premier of Victoria being the worst there. And they tied down the rest of us as though we were all sick so that we couldn’t go out. We had to stay home. I live near Bondi Beach. The first thing they did was to close the beach. Though anybody with any sense knew that the virus didn’t survive in the sun and the wind, but it was probably the healthiest place to go to. It was the first place they closed. And the second thing that they-

Senator Malcolm Roberts (25:58):

Excuse me, David. Oh, sorry, when you finish this point, we’ll go to the ad break.

David Flint (26:03):

Yes. The second thing they ignored is [inaudible 00:26:07] fundamental rule for any decent constitutional system, that is that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. They’ve whittled away all of the controls on the politicians. We’ve had just some minister or the premier deciding on a whim, for example, in New South Wales that they’d closed down the construction industry. They didn’t even have medical advice to do that. She closed down the construction industry for two weeks costing one and a quarter billion dollars and it wasn’t justified. And the reason is these regulations, these regulations are now made by a minister in his office in the middle of the night. Whereas once upon at a time, the regulations were to be submitted for audit by the executive council, the government council, even in colonial terms this was done.

David Flint (27:07):

And the second big thing, even more important was the regulations were subject to parliamentary scrutiny, particularly by the upper house and how fortunate we are to have a senate as we have now, unlike the Canadians who have a weak senate, we’ve got a strong senate because we based it on the American senate rather than the appointed Canadian senate, which is just a political stitch up. And that senate and the upper house in the states, except Queensland, which the way the politicians took to work, the upper houses can disallow the regulations. That’s a very important power. And the politicians know they have a sword of Damocles above their heads when this political system works, but they’ve been whittling this away just like the republic. The weakness in-

Senator Malcolm Roberts (28:00):

Thank you very much. We’ll resume this conversation with Professor David Flint after a minute or so of advertisements. Thank you very much, David.

David Flint (28:11):

Certainly.

Automated (28:11):

TNT Radio’s, Mike Ryan.

Mike Ryan (28:13):

What do you miss the most about being able to, or not being able to practise medicine? What the actual, what it all means to you? Because I mean, it’s overall saying, oh, well he’s got to going to go to court. It’ll be handled legally, but it’s much more than that. It’s your whole life, your whole being. What’s the thing you miss the most about not being able to practise medicine?

Mark Hobart (28:42):

Being part of the community in North Sunshine where I grew up, where I went to school. A community is so important. It’s your connection to everybody else. We’re all connected to each other. We’re connected to each other through love. That is the number one binding force of the universe’s love. And the other force is not love. It’s the opposite, it’s destruction. And that’s what we’re facing.

Mike Ryan (29:23):

Dr. Mark Hobart, truly an honour to speak with you.

Automated (29:26):

Mike Ryan on Today’s News Talk TNT Radio.

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We want to show you what’s dangerous about this river, but we can’t. That’s the problem. You can’t see ice cold water, snags like tree branches or strong currents. So in enjoying our rivers, remember where a life jacket avoid alcohol around water, never swim alone and learn how to save a life. Our rivers are beautiful, but more Australians drown here than anywhere else. It’s simple, respect the river. Head to royallifesaving.com.au/respecttheriver for more information

Automated (30:11):

For the news and talk, you can’t hear anywhere else. It’s TNT Radio.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (30:18):

Welcome back. This is Senator Malcolm Roberts, and I’ve got a very intriguing and very expert guest, Professor David Flint. And I’m going to give you a summary now before we resume our conversation with David. David pointed out that the media is pushing the two party system and it’s really one party. It’s perpetuating the two party system. At the War Memorial last week, the week before last, I took part in the service that precedes the opening of parliament for the year. And they call on the prime minister and the leader of the opposition. At the church service before parliament started the next day on Tuesday two weeks ago, they called on the leader of the opposition and the prime minister to take readings from the Bible.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (31:08):

And as professor Flint pointed out, the policies are almost identical. They’re so similar. And so we need to understand who controls the parliament. I’m going to be asking Professor Flint that in a minute. During the week, David, I was in Senate estimates and I asked Senator Seselja a simple question that anybody should have been able to answer. He’s in the government, as you know. And we were questioning the CSIRO, and in that segment, I said to him, “Minister, your party, led by the prime minister, won the election in 2019 based largely on one particular issue.” He said that the labour party was in favour of the UN’s 2050 net zero policy that the Liberal Nationals Party was not, it opposed UN 2050 net zero.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (32:04):

“Where is the evidence for that change in policy? What changed in the science?” And David, I have never seen anyone so uncomfortable. He didn’t look me in the eye once. He looked down, head was bowed. He was squirming in his seat. He was just making up words as he went. Then I said to him, “Let’s go back in time. Tell me the basis of your policy.” And the same endless dribble. And he’s a nice man, Senator Seselja, but he was talking absolute nonsense. He could not tell me the basis of the policy that is now gutting air energy sector, stealing land from properties, stealing property rights from farmers, decimating our manufacturing, controlling our water, locking up our resources all on behalf of the UN.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (32:54):

Then I asked him a simple question, policies should be based upon hard data that shows the impact of a certain amount of a specified, quantified impact of carbon dioxide. What it will do to temperatures? Rainfall. I asked him, “Isn’t that fundamental?” And again, more waffle, looking down in the eyes, head bowed, squirming. They haven’t got anything but they get away with it because as Professor Flint said, the media pushes the two party system, which is really one party and the narrative. And then they come up with slogans, as Professor Flint said, doing the right thing. These politicians are lacking practical experience. Very few of them, none of them have worked for a few years at the coalface, as if literally at the coalface underground, lacking practical experience.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (33:43):

I asked a simple question, Professor Flint, who among the politicians came to Canberra to listen to the people at the protest of where every day Australians came out in the hundreds of thousands? I’ll tell you who. Pauline Hanson, Malcolm Roberts, Gerard Rennick, George Christensen. You just pointed out some fabulous points with COVID. They have ignored the fundamentals. They have ignored common sense. They have not looked after the vulnerable. They have betrayed the vulnerable. That’s something I’ve been talking about in the senate and publicly for many months now. Then they tied up or they tied down the rest of the people, the healthy people. They stopped exercise on beach. They stopped fresh air. They stopped access to the sun for vitamin D.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (34:33):

And as you said, Lord Acton said that the power tends to corrupt, and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely. Regulations being made by the minister, just being introduced in the middle of the night. Professor Flint, one of the things that’s emerged from the response to the virus is that the state and federal governments, labour at state level, liberal at national level have worked together on this. That’s completely opposed to the intent behind our constitution. Isn’t it?

David Flint (35:11):

Yes, we’re supposed to have competition and the states are supposed to take decisions in relation to state interests and the federation in relation to federal interests. But you say right, they do work together. And one of the things the media does, which really irritates me is that they attribute to the politicians the fact that our death rate is lower than that of a number of other countries. This completely ignores the fact that the real reason for that is we are a remote island nation. And like all other remote island nations, we’ll have a lower death rate from this sort of virus. And to attribute that to the politicians is ridiculous.

David Flint (35:57):

But then we get them when they stand up there, the politicians will refer to the medical advice and the journalists just accept that. We never know who the medical advice was from or rarely know it. We never see it so it can’t be tested. We are given glib answers like follow the science. Whereas we know that the scientists are divided on a number of significant issues. And we saw that in relation, for example, to ulcers and Australia went to scientists, received the Nobel Prize because they went against the science view that it was just a disabling condition. It could never be a disease, and they found that it was a disease. And for that, they were given the Nobel Prize. And then you’re told, believe the experts.

David Flint (36:52):

Well, having worked in a law office when I was young, in a law office where you are involved in a case concerning two sides and you’re acting for one side and there’s another people, people acting for the other side, each side has their own experts. Whether they be medical experts or engineering experts. They’re all very well paid. And I’m not saying they act in any way improperly, but they give different views. Experts are divided all the time. This idea that you must believe the experts, which means you must believe the expert that the politicians that are trying to adopt as their view is ridiculous.

David Flint (37:32):

But I think the very worst thing they do, Malcolm, this is this rule against medical treatment, including prophylactic or preventative measures in relation to this virus. It’s the only malady I know of where doctors are instructed to do virtually nothing between somebody catching this virus and really getting a serious case of it, be aware when they start putting them onto a ventilator. But nothing happens in between because they’ve ruled that none of the medical treatments, which have been shown in a number of jurisdiction to be very effective, can be used. And we know also that most of the media won’t mention these things, particularly the social media, because it goes against the interest of big pharmacy.

David Flint (38:25):

And we know that big pharmacy needs under American law, they needed to get approval for their vaccines. They needed to be able to show that there were no preventative measures, which could be taken against the virus. Hence, this campaign to kill off Ivermectin and other. This is not just the magic cure but there a number of things used either to prevent it or to cure it in the early stages. And these proved very effective. Yet in Australia, we’re told that you can have no medical treatment and no serious medical treatment between catching it and really getting a very bad dose when you’re … There’s nothing much they can do if you are in a weak condition. Otherwise, you might get out of it and they put you onto a ventilator.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (39:26):

Well, David, perhaps I could summarise your points again. The media has been silent on the live and the prime minister has repeatedly said, “Australia has no vaccine mandates.” Yet the Morrison, Joyce Federal Government drives the vaccine mandates, and at the very least enables mandates through many means. The Morrison, Joyce government bought 280 million doses of these things. They could easily stop the mandates at the state level by withholding these injections from states that don’t make it optional, but make it compulsory through stealing people’s livelihoods. The federal government indemnified the states. Senator Hanson’s bill could amend that so that the federal government can stop mandated injections.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (40:15):

The states said, this is the fourth point I’m making, the states say that the vaccine mandates are in line with the unconstitutional so-called national cabinet that the prime minister leads. The prime minister, as you’ve just pointed out, his government withdrew the proven, safe, effective, affordable treatment using Ivermectin and various other drugs. And it’s significant, Professor Flint, that you can freely mention Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine and alternative natural treatments on this TNT Radio station. But you can’t mention it on any other network apart from podcasts. You can’t mention it on social media without being banned.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (40:58):

The federal government health department provides the data and systems that the state’s access to enforce the mandates. The federal government mandated vaccines in aged care workers. The federal government mandated vaccines in the Australian electoral commission poll workers. They’re mandating it in some defence personnel to inject. They drove the employers to mandate injections, BHP, for example, and they funded ridiculous policies by the premiers of the states. And yet, despite all these things showing completely that the states could not have mandated injections without federal government enabling them to do so, supporting them to do so, the prime minister of this country has repeatedly lied to the people.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (41:47):

“Australia has no vaccine mandates,” he says. That doesn’t get reported in the media, or if it does, it’s done in a positive way that the prime minister says that. And yet at the rally last weekend in Canberra, hundreds of thousands of people were walking up and they were saying he’s a liar. The prime minister is a liar. So we come back to government control and that is only one on side controls the media, and that’s the money side, the corporate side. Professor Flint, do they also control the government?

David Flint (42:25):

Well, I think they have a very strong power over the government. It’s in the interest of government to follow what is in the interest of big pharmacy it seems. You can only judge politicians by their results when they’re in government, not what they say. For example, in education, for example, they say that they’re very interested in children’s education, but the fact is that we know that there’s a very strong Marxist influence in education departments. We know that notwithstanding the increase in funding, which I think is about 40% increase since that was introduced, we know that standards in Australia have fallen more than any other OECD country except perhaps Finland.

David Flint (43:22):

So the more money we’re putting in, the standards are falling and that’s because our education departments are not allowing or not encouraging the teaching of children in the really important disciplines. They’re filling their minds with all sorts of propaganda and Marxist rubbish. Their obsessions, for example, you get some new dogma for example, about gender fluidity or something like that. And that becomes an important issue as we saw in relation to the religious legislation. But as you say, there’s this obsession with vaccines as though it’s the only thing which should be followed. And that’s where the money is. That’s where the very big funds are being made by big pharmacy, instead of things which should be associated with vaccines.

David Flint (44:12):

For example, early treatment, that should be the first thing that they should be following because that would’ve saved lives in relation to the vulnerable. And it’s something which I don’t think we should be considering seriously for children, given that these only have a temporary authorization. We don’t know the long term consequences of some of the things which are being put into children’s bodies. They’re very serious things, which are being done. And the national cabinet has gone along with what a really communist solutions that is lockdowns. Lockdowns don’t work. They regiment the people even more, but they certainly have had no effect in relation to getting rid of the virus because they don’t get rid of the virus. And they’ve resulted in more deaths in Victoria, which had the most serious lockdowns, had more deaths among people from suffering from the virus. But you are so right-

Senator Malcolm Roberts (45:17):

Yeah, go ahead.

David Flint (45:17):

Certainly.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (45:20):

I’d like to interrupt to summarise what you’ve said before getting onto the solutions. Because I know you’re a man of solutions. So let me just summarise what you’ve just said. The media is culpable for serious damage, serious problems in our community. Medicine, it’s enabled deaths because it doesn’t hold the government accountable for its complete obsession with unproven injections and reliance on them. Greg Hunt, the federal health minister has said, “The world is engaged in the largest clinical vaccination trial. These drugs, these injections are experimental. It’s a trial. And we are now talking about injecting them into kids without any assessment of long term consequences.”

Senator Malcolm Roberts (46:06):

In the United States you also mentioned that a lot of this is driven by money. In the United States, 70% of American advertising in the media is funded by big pharma. And yet, as you rightly pointed out, the obsession is leading to deaths through the mismanagement of COVID and the application of experimental injections. You pointed out the damage to our educational sector, the 40% collapse in measured outcomes. And yet the manipulation of kids growing at adulthood, children, I should say. You mentioned the early treatment that’s proven affordable, safe, successful around the world. And you also mentioned that lockdowns are effectively a communist solution.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (46:59):

Journalism, Professor Flint, over the decades, journalists have fought for freedom to tell the story and rights to privacy of sources. Yet, they’ve shown no regard for the freedoms and privacies of the people as you just pointed out. Yet, their duty is to provide, freely tell both sides of the story with accuracy and balance. Who holds them to account? And where do we go to from here? How do journalists restore their reputation? Because at the moment they’re feeding on each other and the people are watching them destroy themselves. But we do need a strong, solid press, don’t we? So what do we have to do now? What are the solutions?

David Flint (47:35):

Well, the solutions I think, are by going to those outlets such as this station where the truth is being presented. That is our best solution. I would not recommend the regulation. You can’t have the regulation of the press because they’re free. And there is some protection from defamation laws, but that only relates to individual reputation and not reputation of institutions and things such as early medical treatment, which is important. So we have the power. We have the power to deal with the media and we have the power to put the right politicians in office. And this is something which Australians must seriously do. They did that in America with President Trump, they got a man in who was obviously going, from what he promised, was going to change the direction of the United States.

David Flint (48:36):

And this had a magnificent effect because the Republican Party is so open in the way in which it pre-selects. And it doesn’t restrict pre-selection to even members of the party, any registered supporter of the party can vote in those pre-selections, which gives tremendous power to people in America. We don’t have that, but we can choose people from other parties or at least give our first preferences to people like yourself. Now, you One Nation, New AP parties, which are talking about this, what you said also about the federal government, I’d like to comment on that briefly.

David Flint (49:18):

The federal government had the power to stop mandated vaccines. And you were quite right, the legislation that you proposed, I think One Nation introduced legislation to that effect that I think was within power. The commonwealth has the power to move in relation to quarantines. It can occupy the field. And that’s the core part of the management of vaccines, the control of quarantines. And I think that the commonwealth should have continued in that first case concerning the West Australian border. It should not have allowed the states to close off their borders, locking down whole states that achieved nothing in relation to controlling the virus.

David Flint (50:08):

And it was most inappropriate, in relation to Australia. The whole real economy should have continued. As you rightly have pointed out in the past, it’s not the politicians who are imposing this sort of thing, lockdowns and so on, who suffer. It’s the people who lose their jobs. It’s the people who lose their businesses. The people who are tied up, they’ve put their savings into some business quite often. They’ve mortgaged their house. And an enormous number of people have been ruined by the activities of the government, who’s only just beginning to start again.

David Flint (50:45):

There was no need to close down vast parts of the economy in Australia to stop this disease. What they should have done was looked after the vulnerable. What they should have done was encouraged early measures and preventative measures, prophylactic measures. If they’d done those things, as the media should have been calling on them to do, we would’ve been in a better situation than we are today. And we wouldn’t have this massive debt, which is going to be carried by the next generation of Australians.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (51:18):

So I’m going to have to summarise now before we end the show, because I wanted to do a summary. You’ve raised some marvellous points. The solutions you’ve said are up to the people. The market, choose the media well. We have a choice as to which media we watch. The media is sweating on that. We see Joe Rogan topping the media ratings in the United States with 11.5 million views of one of his podcasts with Robert Malone. The nearest competitor was Fox News with 3.5 million views. That’s a long way behind. CNN, the propaganda experts in America, around about 800,000 views [inaudible 00:51:59]. Don’t have regulation, that just gives more control to the globalists and to the government.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (52:04):

It’s up to the people through media choice and through political choice at votes. We have the power, you said, Professor Flint. I make a note that pre-selection in the liberal party now on New South Wales is becoming just like labour, fictionally written. You’ve pointed out that the commonwealth government has the power, it just hasn’t exercised it. And you’ve pointed out something that I’ve said repeatedly in the senate, people are paying the price for police stupidity.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (52:30):

The governments and the politicians make the mistakes regardless with no responsibility, and the people pay the price. For goodness sake, people of Australia, wake up. Choose who you listen to in the media with your wallet, follow and vote for politicians who work for you, serve you, and give your preferences at accordingly. Professor David Flint, thank you very much again for yet another wonderful session. I love your practicality, your common sense, your good sense. Thank you so much.

Dan lives with his wife of 25 years and three children on their property approx. 160 km north west of Charleville.  They run about 1000 head of cattle and have Droughtmaster breeders.

Like so many people in Rural Queensland, Dan and his wife Katrina have invested their working life of blood, sweat and tears into purchasing their own Freehold property so as to provide their family’s livelihood by breeding and grazing livestock.

While not one of the most willing students at school, Dan lives by the principles of respect, observing those around him, looking, listening and ‘having a go’ as the means of learning life’s valuable lessons.

Dan’s key interests are, in order of priority, his wife, his children and everything that makes up his livelihood from machinery to animals to the governance of not only his livelihood but the governance of our society as a whole.

Acknowledging the sacrifices made by our forefathers and the selfless conviction of the men and women of our current defence forces, Dan cannot and will not sit back and watch our government throw away our rights and freedoms so hard fought, won and defended by our nation’s most courageous people. Dan has first hand experience when the Constitution doesn’t work for us as it should.  In 2017 he was convicted of six tree clearing offences with the magistrate fining him $40,000 and ordering him to pay costs of more than $72,000.  Later it was dropped to $10,000.  He is going to share his story with me today.

Transcript

Senator Malcolm Roberts (00:05):

Welcome back to today’s news talk, radio TNTradio.live. We’ve just spent an hour with Professor David Flint learning more about Australia’s constitution. In this next hour, I’m going to chat with Queensland’s grazier, Dan McDonald. Now I said of Professor Flint, that he is an expert with international recognition, and international awards, yet he’s a man of the people. He’s one of us. He gets down and dirty, mixes with people in the streets, in rallies, in meetings, he attends functions and speaks knowingly, but also lovingly, with the people.

                Now we have a man who is of the people, but can mix it with the experts, and he’s self-taught. Dan McDonald lives with his wife of 25 years, Katrina and their three lovely children on their cattle property. About 160 kilometres Northwest of Charlottesville. They run about 1000 head of cattle and have drought masters breeders. Like so many people in rural Queensland, Dan and his wife Katrina have invested their working life of blood, sweat, and tears into purchase their own freehold property, so as to provide their families livelihood by breeding and grazing livestock. So he’s used his initiative, done this, they’ve both used their initiative to do this, and they’re try to make a living, which is a purpose; one of the things we have to do in life.

                While not one of the most willing students at school, Dan lives by principles of respect, observing those around him, looking, listening, and having a go as the means of learning life’s valuable lessons. Dan’s key interests are in this order of priority: his wife, his children, and everything that makes up his livelihood from machinery to animals, to governance of not only his livelihood, but the governance of our whole society, as a whole. This man has gone into battle for us all, and what he’s going to talk about affects every single Australian and their children, and our country itself and our country’s future. Acknowledging the sacrifices made by our forefathers, and the selfless can conviction of the men and women of our current defence forces, Dan cannot, will not sit back and just watch our government throw away our rights and freedoms so hard fought, won and defended by our nation’s most courageous people.

                Dan has firsthand experience when the constitution doesn’t work for us, as it should. In 2017, he was convicted of six tree clearing offences with the magistrate fining him $40,000 and ordering him to pay costs of more than 72,000, up for 112,000. Later in an appeal that was dropped to 10,000. Dan’s going to share his story with me today. And I want to remind people, I have eight keys to human progress, the first is freedom and the free exchange. Second is the rule of law. Dan is going to talk to us about the rule of law, because the law is supposed to protect people, not control people. Hello, Dan.

Dan McDonald (03:27):

Good day, Malcolm. How are you?

Senator Malcolm Roberts (03:29):

I’m very well made. What’s something you appreciate?

Dan McDonald (03:33):

Oh, Malcolm, I think the top of that list would be my family, and second to that would be honesty.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (03:40):

Amen. Okay. Dan, let’s get stuck into it. Property rights; tell us what they are and why they’re so important, so fundamentally important to everyone.

Dan McDonald (03:52):

Absolutely. So, Malcolm, we have two different elements here; we have property and we have of rights, and I think it’s important if we just touch on both. Essentially what property is, is anything tangible and intangible that is capable of ownership. So, quite often we have, and being related to land, we can say that’s tangible. It’s something that we can see, we can touch. But of course, we also have elements of property that are intangible; we can’t see them, we can’t touch them, but they certainly exist, and they certainly have a value, and they certainly play a very important role in all our lives. So when we combine the two and we talk about property rights, what whereas essentially doing is talking about our right to use our property. Rights in themself are essentially defined as a power over, or an authority to use, to enjoy, to occupy or to consume.

                If you have a right to something, that is what gives you the authority or the power over that thing. And when we combine those rights with property, essentially, we’re talking about the most valuable element; it is the right to property, that is, I say it again, the most valuable element. If we take rights of use away from any property, essentially it becomes absolutely worthless. We cannot underestimate or overestimate that it is the right of use of property, whether it be a cup of coffee, whether it be a motor car, or whether it be your house and land, it is the right of use of that property that actually affords it value. If we just use a cup of coffee, as an example, if we buy a cup of coffee, the most valuable element that we are purchasing there is the right to consume it. How many people out there would buy a cup of coffee if they did not have the right to drink it? So we can apply that same principle to all forms of property; they all have rights attached, and as I say, it’s usually a right of use a right of enjoyment, a right to consume. So there’s no doubt about it; property rights are extremely important. Indeed, they are the most fundamental element of a free and democratic society.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (06:30):

And just to interrupt, I’m hoping to not disturb your train of thought, but it’s so important that in our federal constitution our forefathers, the inserted Section 51 Clause 31, which basically says that if the federal government interferes with someone’s right to use their property, the federal government must pay them just terms compensation. In other words, if you destroy someone’s, or impair someone’s right to use their property, you must pay compensation, which is essentially you are buying their right to use that portion of their property.

Dan McDonald (07:08):

Absolutely. That’s right. And just to go back there just quickly, and give another example of how, how rights in property can work. We can have a land owner, owner parcel of land, and of course that gives them the absolute rights of use of that land, but then that land owner can of course, lease that property out or rent it out. Now, when someone enters into a lease or rental agreement on a home, they also acquire a right. The right they acquire specifically is the right to occupy. So if someone rents a home, the tenant that’s paying the rent actually holds the right to occupy that dwelling. Once again, that’s a property right; a very clear example of how rights can be owned, and obtained, and held without physically owning the tangible property. The tenant holds the most valuable element of that property when they enter into that agreement by physically owning the right to use that is whatever they comply with the terms of, of an agreement.

                So this is how it works, and this is why it’s so very important. Essentially, Malcolm, we could not have a stable society anywhere throughout the world without having secure property rights; it is absolutely fundamental. When we don’t have them, well, essentially we’re inviting outright anarchy, because we just cannot exist without them. I cannot overstate that. None of us, whether you are a farmer, whether you are a business owner in the city, no matter what you do, every element of your life every day involves the use of an enjoyment of rights, property rights, so, it’s something that we certainly cannot live without.

                When we talk specifically about an impact on, on farming, as you pointed out in your introduction, I’m in the business of farming, a food producer, it is extremely important to have property rights, because it is not actually the land itself that allows us to produce food; it is our right to use the land that allows us to produce food. It doesn’t matter how good our soil is. It doesn’t matter how much rain we get. It doesn’t matter how much fertiliser we use. If we don’t have the right to use our land, we can’t produce anything. So it’s extremely important. And of course, essentially in a civil setting as such, we don’t lose our property. We don’t lose property full stop, because we’re afforded protection by our legal system, supposedly. And I say that for this very reason, that in a civil setting, if someone comes and takes your property, you are able to, throughout our legal system, seek to recover that property, or certainly seek damages for it, if it’s unrecoverable.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (10:34):

So could I just jump in there for a minute because you’ve raised two extremely important points, firstly, a new slant on things, which will help us all; it certainly was new to me: rent. If I go to rent your property, then I am buying the right to use your property without owning that property.

Dan McDonald (10:53):

Absolutely.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (10:54):

So property rights, thank you so much for that clear, succinct example. It reinforces the fact that property rights is about, if you buy something, you have a right to use it. And so it’s not simply the owning of something, but it’s owning the right to use it. That’s very important.

Dan McDonald (11:15):

And that’s why, Malcolm, we need to always remember that rights in themself are property.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (11:21):

Yes. Thank you.

Dan McDonald (11:22):

They’re capable of ownership. As I said earlier, property is anything capable of ownership. And there are many examples where we can own rights. Where rights are owned and it’s no different. If we hire a motor car from a car rental company; when we hire that car, we purchased the right to use that motor car. Very similar to, as we said, with a tenant renting a home, a tenant actually acquires the right to occupy the dwelling. That is the whole purpose of it. So there are elements of ownership, of rights, right throughout everything we do.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (12:01):

And there are protections too, because, I hope we get onto, I’m going to let you just go wherever you want to go. Okay? Please, because you are so knowledgeable and so basic.

Dan McDonald (12:14):

As far as you go talking about protections, Malcolm, that is the most fundamental element of all when we talk about rights, when we talk about property-

Senator Malcolm Roberts (12:21):

But before we get into that in detail, if I, as a landholder, a grazier, destroy my land, and wash the top soil into the neighbouring property, and destroy his or her use of their land, then my neighbour has a right to Sue me for impairing his right to use his property, for stealing his right to use his property. Correct?

Dan McDonald (12:46):

That’s correct, because-

Senator Malcolm Roberts (12:47):

So there are natural protections. Away you go.

Dan McDonald (12:49):

If you cause damage to another party, you are liable.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (12:51):

Yep. So away you go. Now take off.

Dan McDonald (12:54):

So, it’s very important that we have security of property rights. Now, as we know, all throughout the developed world, we have elected governments in our supposed democratic societies, we have elected governments that are effectively administrators, and as you would well know, and I think your previous call had pointed out, effectively governments act as administrators to serve the people, and effectively provide us with security. Okay? So that’s one of the most fundamental elements of any democratic society is a government providing a secure environment for us all to live in. We have to be able to rely on our institutions of government to protect our property. That’s where the buck stops. That’s where our judicial system operates from. So essentially, we have to be able to have trust in government to protect our property. It’s the only foundation upon which any of us could invest or acquire any form of property. However, as I’ll get to a bit later on, in my own case, it was actually the administrator, it was actually government that have taken my property from me. And that, of course, not only does it add insult to injury, it really leaves you in a position where you are totally powerless, when the administrator that you have to go to for justice is actually the same body that’s taking from you, all hope is gone.

                So I’ll just touch on this, Malcolm; if a food producer loses property rights, they’re extremely vulnerable. It’s no different to someone living in a rented house. If a tenant has fully complied with the terms of their rental agreement, yet the landlord, the owner of the property comes along and says, “Well, I’m not happy with you being here today, get out.” Well, of course the tenant becomes extremely vulnerable. They’ve got an absolute reliance upon their right to occupy that dwelling. So in that same context, a food producer must have the right to the use of his land to produce food. If you don’t have the right to use your land, what have you got? How can you operate? Where is the security of your equity? Where is the security to invest your blood, sweat, and tears, if you don’t hold the right to use your land. So the loss of property rights in a farming context is extremely devastating for landholders, but it is also a situation that leaves the vast majority of populations all over the world, vulnerable.

                And as I say that for this reason, we have to, we have to never forget the fact that food producers are a very small sector of our overall population. Just to give a brief example, Malcolm, in Australia, we’ve got just under 26 million people. We have approximately 87,000 farm businesses, and the vast majority of those farm businesses are family operations; they’re husband, and wife and children. We have 65% of our production gets exported. Okay? And ironically, we actually import about 15% of our food consumption in this country. But if we average all of this out, Malcolm, it’s quite clear that 87,000 farmers in Australia feed 130 million people. So essentially you break that down, we’ve got just under 1500 people relying on one farmer to feed them. Okay?

Senator Malcolm Roberts (17:23):

So what were those numbers again? 87,000 farmers provide food for?

Dan McDonald (17:26):

We’ve got 87,000 farmers. We’ve got 26 million people in Australia. Okay? We actually export 65% of our produce, and we also import 15% of our consumption, so if we base a calculation on the calories of food that we produce, okay? And the calories of food that are, on an average basis, consumed by human beings, it’s quite clear that we feed Australian farmers feed 130 million people that is, we feed our own population and we feed a large number of people just over 100 million people elsewhere throughout the world. So we’re

Senator Malcolm Roberts (18:10):

Feeding five times. Yeah, more than that. Yeah, no five times our population. Okay, continue.

Dan McDonald (18:18):

So, you break it down, you’ve got every farm entity feeding 1,494 people. Now, to my way of thinking, and I’m sure most would agree. That’s a fairly vulnerable position for that 1,494 people; they’re reliant upon one farm entity to feed them. You got nearly 1500 people that are solely reliant on one person to feed them, essentially. Every time we see another farmer go out of business or of their productivity, detrimentally impacted, that 1400 people have got to go somewhere else to get their food. Now you can’t keep doing this. You can’t keep working on that trajectory for too long before you certainly have a very vulnerable population across the globe.

                You know, we live in an era at the moment where most times people can go to a grocery store, and they can fill their trolley and go home and they can do it, arguably at a reasonable cost. But of course, let’s not forget that it is only the abundance of supply that both protects, and effectively ensures the sustainability of the population, but an abundance of supply also is what controls the value, the cost. So the more supply we’ve got, the more affordable food is for people.

                To get back to the property rights aspect, we have to remember that in producing that food, we are 100% reliant upon the farmer’s right to use his land. So effectively, all these 130 million people across the globe are fed by Australian farmers, their food security is underpinned, not by the farmer’s piece of land, or how much rain he got, but primarily by the farmer’s right to use his land. If he loses the right to use all or part of his land, he can’t feed anybody.

                So I can find no clearer example to demonstrate just how vulnerable city people are when it comes to their own sustainability. It is 100% reliant upon the farmer having security of the right to use his land. And unfortunately, Malcolm, that is essentially what is missing in this country. That is a major problem that has to be addressed. At some point it has to be addressed. We’ve been losing farmers in this country for decades. We’ve lost 50% of our farmers in the last 40 years. We go forward another 40 years, how many of us will be left? But at the same time, we’re told we’re going to have a growing population.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (21:23):

So, let me take us to the ad break in a few minutes, and we’ll when we come back, Dan, could you tell us your story? What happened? How could that happen? The constitution is there to protect you, what compensation did you receive for the theft of your property rights, the rights to use your property? But let me give our listeners, we’re guests in their company right now, so let’s give our listeners a summary of what you’ve said. The security of property rights is essential. It is the right to use the property that you have a right over. Governments should act as administrators to provide security. But we’ll see, after the ad break, that government has been the thief of your rights to use your land.

                I add here, Dan, the government has three roles: to protect life, protect property, protect freedom. And freedom’s absolutely essential, but so is secure property rights. Government is now the administrator that is committing theft, not protecting people. If a farmer or anyone who has an asset, such as a small business, and this is affecting small businesses right around the country with the government’s capricious restrictions over COVID mismanagement, small businesses have us the right to use this, what they own. If we lose the right to use our land, then you as a farmer, Dan, cannot earn a living. So it becomes a means of shutting down your provision of feeding your family. That is a fundamental human right that you are being denied. It’s also significant that the communists want to take away land and property. That’s one of the first things they do. The World Economic Forum has said, “You will own nothing and you will be happy.” That’s what the plan is right around the world.

                The bankers though, I hope John McCrae is listening here, a wonderful man, he was on our show two weeks ago. We’ll be having John back. He gave me a quote from the Bankers’ Association in America many years ago, “The banks want people to lose their houses, because when they lose their houses, they are at complete control of the major banks.” Dan just told us that Australian farmers feed around 1500 people, each Australian farmer. Now let’s have a look at the restrictions on property rights, and the rights to use our land. Have a look at when Dan comes back with this in mind; all restrictions apart from natural restrictions, like drought, are due to government. We have an abundance of supply from our farmers. Southeast Australia is completely green, producing massive quantities of food after the drought broke, yet, some of the supermarket shelves are bare?

                Why? Not because of a shortage of food, not because of a shortage of supply, not because a shortage of truck drivers, but simply because truck drivers are not able to come to work because of injection mandates, and because of close contact rules, which are completely wrong. They’re completely capricious. So government is acting to control the supply. And I must remind people before we go to the ad: 100% reliance of farmers to use their land is essential for us to feed our bellies, drink a beer, have access to just about everything over to you with the ad break,

Senator Malcolm Roberts (27:39):

And thank you for allowing me into your company with my guest today, Dan McDonald. Dan, you’ve told us the background, the foundation, now tell us what they did to you. The people who are supposed to be protecting us all are the ones who are thieving from us to control us. What happened?

Dan McDonald (27:55):

So Malcolm, to go back to the start of my investing in this big business, I and my wife chose to, to develop a grazing business, a livestock grazing business, and in doing that, of course we needed land upon which to do it. In that process, we sought out to purchase, so we had the absolute rights to the use of freehold grazing land. And that’s exactly what we did; we found some freehold grazing land, and that’s what we purchased against the backdrop of a secure element of property that would be protected at all costs, and we would be able to not only produce food for a hell of a lot of people, but in doing so, we would be able to sustain ourself and our family. So, we bought the land, and said about doing what was necessary to improve it from the perspective of grazing. So, infrastructure like fencing, and water points in the like-

Senator Malcolm Roberts (29:06):

So let me just show you what a keen student I am. When you bought that, you say you bought the land, you bought the land and the right to use the land according to how you and Katrina wanted to.

Dan McDonald (29:18):

Well, essentially, exactly that. And just to go a little bit further there, Malcolm, land right across Australia and, and most developed nations throughout the world is classified into primary land uses. So, you don’t go to the middle of Brisbane to buy a grazing property. Land in cities and towns will either be classified as residential, or commercial, or industrial, and right across Australia it’s like that. And essentially we purchased land that was classified as grazing land. Okay? So ironically, the primary land use for this land, as classified by government is grazing. And of course, in freehold tenure, our most fundamental issue there was buying land that we had the right to use. That’s what we did. And we’ve invested essentially our life’s work into doing that.

                Everything went okay there quite some time, but along the way, of course, when you’re running a grazing business, you’re actually feeding livestock; that’s the whole purpose of your business. And that’s exactly what we did. We just, we used our land to feed our livestock, and everything we thought we were doing was right. And as far as the letter of the law goes, it was right. We hadn’t stolen anyone else’s land. We hadn’t ran our cows onto someone else’s property. We were using our own land. Anyway, along, came the government, and essentially said to us, “Well, hang on, you can’t do the that.” And I said, “Well, what’s wrong? What can’t we do?” “Oh, you can’t use your vegetation to feed your cows.”

Senator Malcolm Roberts (31:10):

When did you buy it, by the way?

Dan McDonald (31:12):

2003.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (31:14):

Thank you.

Dan McDonald (31:16):

So of course, this came as a fairly big shock to myself, and my wife, and my children to have a government body telling us that we could not use our land. And I said, well, hang on a minute. That’s what we bought it for. And ironically, Malcolm, some of the land here that we purchased, we actually purchased from the Queensland government. So it was land that was essentially in what was called leasehold tenure prior to us buying it. We purchased it, and then obviously purchased the lease of it. And then we repurchased through an approval process, the freehold tenure to that land. So that gave us the unimpeded, supposedly, right to use the land. And it was a all done so under the classification of being grazing land.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (32:07):

So, isn’t the selling of something as a con, a confidence trick, so the government are con artists, the government is also misrepresenting something; they’re basically committing fraud.

Dan McDonald (32:22):

Exactly. Malcolm, there is no other the way to describe it. So when we go into a process of purchasing land of any sort, we have a contract. We buy subject to certain terms and conditions, and also, there’s a duty of disclosure there from a selling party. And particularly when the selling party is the government, they have a duty to disclose any rights or encumbrances that they wish to hold over that land. This is the whole purpose of our land, our property law regime that we have in this country, but essentially, government are not complying with that. Government are committing fraud; they are failing to disclose. And I say, deliberately failing to disclose their true intentions.

                If government offered land for sale, and in that process, they disclosed the fact that the purchaser would not obtain the right to use the land, or quite clearly, very few people would want to buy the land. Would they no different to, if you go to a coffee shop and buy that cup of coffee, but you don’t buy right to drink it, well, you’re not likely to buy too many cups of coffee from that shop. So, the government are actually committing fraud. They are failing to disclose they are selling land under that regime. And of course, then it’s not until you physically make use of the land that they’ll then quite happily come along as they did in our case, and prosecute us.

                So, in about 2016 Malcolm, they commenced proceedings against us to prosecute us, essentially under what they called a regime of illegal tree clearing, which in real terms, and as it was certainly adopted in the court, was essentially feeding cows, feeding livestock. We were grazing livestock with our vegetation.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (34:28):

And perhaps I should clarify; I’ve been to your place a couple of times, the trees that the state government alleges you were killing, clearing, were mulga. There’s scrubby bush, they’re borderline calling it a tree.

Dan McDonald (34:47):

Well, that’s correct, Malcolm and-

Senator Malcolm Roberts (34:49):

And cattle love it in the drought. And you bought that property, did you not, because it had some mulga on it because in a drought, it provides all provides very much more security. So you purchased it because of the mulga, and your right to be able to use that mulga?

Dan McDonald (35:05):

That’s right. That’s the feed source, and it’s a renewable feed source, essentially, all we do is effectively prune it to feed livestock, and it grows back again. It grows back very quickly. As a matter of fact, it would be extremely difficult to eradicate it, it grows back so quickly. However, under the government’s regime of land clearing laws, they’ve effectively locked it up as conservation. Just, it’s ironic; we have land that is still classified by government as grazing land. We have a situation where the primary land use is effectively now conservation. Government have implemented a regime across us where we do not now have the right to use our land at all. We physically do not have the right to use it. They will allow us to use certain areas of our land, under very strict guidelines, and other than that, our property is effectively conservation.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (36:11):

So hang on, hang on. You are charged with the responsibility of providing a livelihood. You have the right to use your land, but the bureaucrats in the city of Brisbane and the city of Canberra tell you how to use it. They’re running your farm.

Dan McDonald (36:29):

Absolutely.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (36:30):

That’s communism.

Dan McDonald (36:30):

Absolutely.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (36:32):

And now that you have had the right to use your land stolen from you, that is communism. They basically own it, even though you paid for it.

Dan McDonald (36:42):

If we get into the nuts and bolts, just briefly of how it all come about. I mean, obviously when this matter-

Senator Malcolm Roberts (36:49):

Go for it, we’ve got 17 minutes left.

Dan McDonald (36:51):

Yeah. When this matter came upon, as I sought to obviously investigate and represent myself throughout the court proceedings, and I did so, but the primary thing I wanted to work out, Malcolm, was where this came from, what was the root cause of the fact that I had had my primary element of property stolen from me. And essentially, that all came down to the federal government. The regime itself of taking white land was implemented by the Queensland state government. It fundamentally came from the coercion and pressure of the federal government, as it done across many states throughout Australia, but there was certainly no state more heavily impacted than Queensland. And primarily, the whole goal of the federal government’s taking of our property and locking it up for conservation was all about securing carbon credits to go into this ridiculous emissions trading type regime we now have being implemented across the world.

                So, effectively, instead of government coming along and paying me for the property that they wished to acquire, which would’ve been consistent with the constitution, they effectively stole it, by way of regulation, and that’s the situation we are now in now. And as I said earlier, that’s been a devastating impact to myself, my family, but it’s also a detrimental impact across the broader population, not only of Australia, but the world. This is not just my own property that’s impacted by this; it’s right across Australia, it’s certainly right across Queensland. And the loss of production that comes from that is profound. And essentially, that loss of production will only continue to increase, as in the productivity is declining, of our land or all the time, and there’s nothing we can do about that.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (38:57):

Okay, we’ve just heard from Professor David Flint, one of the world’s best and Section 51 Clause 31 of our federal constitution says that wherever the federal government interferes with someone’s rights to use their land, their property, they must be paid just terms compensation. What exactly did they do? Why did they do it? Without paying compensation? And how did they get away?

Dan McDonald (39:29):

Malcolm, the federal government got around it by actually getting the states to do the dirty work. You know, states were coerced financially into enacting the appropriate legislation that would effectively acquire the property in question for the federal government. And that’s the exact mechanism they used to avoid compensating anybody. No one’s been compensated; we were certainly not compensated at all. The most valuable element of our property was stolen from us, and we’ve never been offered 1 cent of compensation. So that’s the mechanism they use. States have their own constitutions. Interestingly enough, whilst there’s no specific provision for states to compensate when taking property, it is actually embodied within the state’s constitution, and it is also embodied in the state’s legislature. They do have legislation that says, if they’re taking property, they must pay fair compensation. But of course they refuse to do it. So-

Senator Malcolm Roberts (40:38):

So the state government-

Dan McDonald (40:39):

The situation we are in, and somehow that’s the environment within which we’re expected to produce food.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (40:47):

So, so let me just give the people who have us as guests in their present company, some details. Because I first learned about back around 2008, ’09 ’10, something like that. We had the UN Kyoto protocol, which came in in 1996. That was the same time John Howard’s government, and John Anderson’s national party government came into, into power in Australia. So the Howard-Anderson liberal national government said, “We will not sign the UN’s Kyoto protocol, but we will comply with it.” Now they had a choice they thought, “To comply with that. We will have to shut down power stations, reduce car travelling, reduce industry.” And John Howard’s government realised that was not going to be accepted by Australians, and rightly so. So, they concocted the idea, and the UN blessed it, that what we could do is stop the farmers’ rights to use their land, stop them clearing the land that they bought. And in that way, they would save the trees and absorb carbon dioxide. Forget for a moment that grasslands absorb more carbon dioxide, and forget for a moment that it’s all crap anyway. Just forget about all of that.

                So then they had a problem. “Okay, so now we’ve protected our power stations from the UN, we’ve protected our cars, our industry from the UN, how do we steal it from the farmers? Because we have to pay just terms compensation, and that would be a couple of hundred billion dollars. Okay, so what do we do? Oh, I know. The states, they don’t have to pay compensation. It’s advisable to, but they don’t have to, so we’ll do deals with the state governments.” At the time in 1996, and I’ve seen this document, another property owner showed it to me. An agreement was started between the federal and state governments. At the time, the Prime Minister signed it on behalf of the federal liberal national government. The premier of Queensland signed it on behalf of the National Party government. At the time in 1996, Rob Borbidge was the State Premier. All the officials who signed this were either members of the National Party or members of the Liberal Party. Three from federal, three from state of Queensland.

                And later on, that was an understanding that they would comply with the federal request to curtail, to steal farmer’s rights to use their land. Correct me if I’m wrong here, anywhere Dan, and then-

Dan McDonald (40:47):

No, you’re spot on, Malcolm.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (43:47):

And then, when Peter Beattie came to power, the labour government in Queensland in 1998, the rubber started hitting the road. And Dan bought his property in 2003 with no understanding of this, no disclosure from the owners of the land, the Queensland state government.

Dan McDonald (44:04):

Absolutely.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (44:04):

Then when he started using it, he was penalised for doing so. Now it’s very important that people understand Queensland’s state [inaudible 00:44:16], the parliament entry record includes in its records letters from John Howard, the Prime Minister, federal liberal Prime Minister to Peter Beattie, the State Labour Premier saying basically, “Please stop farmers clearing their land, for the purposes of the UN Kyoto protocol.” And Peter Beattie responding saying that they would do so for John Howard’s governments to compliance with the UN. The similar thing happened in New South Wales and Bob Carr, I think he was in Environment Minister at the time, but he was on YouTube. I’ve seen it. He was gloating, laughing, saying that he stole farmers’ rights to use their land, so that the Howard government could comply with the UN’s Kyoto protocol. And what happened was John Howard’s government, the Howard-Anderson liberal national government went around the constitution deceitfully to steal farmers’ rights to use their land. Is that not correct?

Dan McDonald (45:22):

That is absolutely correct. So, the primary security mechanism we had to protect our land has been totally ignored. And of course, government acting as the primary administrator, yeah, they’ve just totally ignored it. And, and essentially we don’t have anywhere else to go. It’s a fundamental issue that will continue to play out for a number of years. And I think I’ve highlighted the vulnerability of the greater population. Malcolm, let’s never forget that besides water, food is the most valuable commodity on this planet.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (46:06):

Oh, hang on, hang on, also oxygen. Well, and now they want to tax our carbon dioxide that we exhale.

Dan McDonald (46:14):

We’d like to hope that we can continue to breathe without having to pay a tax.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (46:17):

But they’re taxing it.

Dan McDonald (46:19):

The most valuable on the planet, and the only protection, right? The only protection for consumers comes from an abundant supply, which stems from secure property rights. We are losing our property rights, and effectively, we are now losing our productive capacity.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (46:41):

Thank you. Thank you. This goes to other areas as well. There is a grazier, or at least he used to be a Grazer near Okie, which is an army defence base. It’s got an army Air Force squadron there, and they have to use PFAS chemicals well, they don’t have to, but the government chose to use PFAS chemicals for firefighting. That PFAS is now polluting the in underground water. It’s destroying the soil so much so I won’t go into the details now, but the Defence Department, after doing this to David [Jefferies 00:47:23] and Diane [inaudible 00:47:23] property, does not pay compensation. The state government under Campbell Newman, I think, liberal government, I can stand be corrected, but I’m pretty sure it was Liberal National Party government under Campbell Newman, took the water rights from David Jefferies and Diane [inaudible 00:47:41] with no compensation. Water is essential for farming. And then John Howard’s government, John Anderson’s government stole the farmer’s property rights before that. And so, the rights to use their land. So, our food production is really threatened. And this is all about control of land, is it not, Dan?

Dan McDonald (48:07):

Absolutely Malcolm. Absolutely. And look, let’s just never forget the fact that rights are property, and rights are always owned by somebody. And it doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about rights to use land, to drink a cup of coffee, to drive your motor car, or indeed rights to breathe oxygen, those rights belong to somebody, okay? So, your rights are your property. All of us own property, we all do. Don’t think you need to own something tangible to own property. Your rights to breathe, your right to choose what you do with your body.,Those rights are your property. You own them. Nobody else, no one else has the right to them. They’re yours. And they must be protected. Unfortunately, this is the biggest downfall of our society and our government at the moment; our rights are not being protected. Indeed, if anything, they’re being totally denigrated and decimated by government.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (49:11):

Well, as I mentioned earlier on governments have three roles: protect life, protect property, protect freedom. The government in your case has hurt all three. They’re not protecting life; they’re creating a woody weed monoculture that is destroying life. They’re destroying your opportunity to provide a livelihood for your family. They’re destroying your rights to use your property. They are stealing your freedom in the name of protecting the environment, but really in the name of the United Nations to control land. We can see it in native title legislation; the land was taken from some people, and handed back to the Aboriginals we were told, but the aboriginals can’t use it. It was stolen to lock it up. Murray–Darling basin, more legislation that the Howard-Anderson government introduced in 2007 was done to do exactly the same thing. It’s to steal the right to use the land. And in Dan’s case, it was done without compensation. Is there anything you’d like to say; we’ve got about two minutes left before I have to wrap it up, Dan.

Dan McDonald (50:31):

Malcolm, I’d just say that we’ve got to remember the fact, and I would say that you spoke then of the impacts to people like myself, the impacts to farmers trying to generate a livelihood. Malcolm, I would contend that the impacts are far greater for the vast population. Because as I pointed out, every farmer is feeding almost 1500 people. The greater impacts of all of this are on the vast population. They haven’t seen it yet, but there’s one thing for sure, they will. The only protection that consumers have is abundant supply, which stems from our secure property rights. That’s where it all comes from. We cannot afford to have rights in any way, shape or form just denigrated, and not secured. It’s the fundamental pillar, fundamental foundation of our very existence.

Senator Malcolm Roberts (51:32):

So my eight keys to human progress, number one is freedom, because that’s where you invent, you initiate, you exchange ideas, you exchange concepts. Number two is the rule of law, so that what you earn, you keep, and your neighbour can’t steal it from you. Number three is a constitutional governance that provides continuity, so that provides security; a stable environment. Number four is secure property rights. And Dan’s explained that, and shown us how he’s fought to try and get them back, and failed. Dan, it is so important, a true liberal in terms of a Liberal Party, a true liberal says there is nothing more sacrosanct apart from the right to life, than the right to secure property rights, yet it’s the liberals and the nationals who stole them.

Dan McDonald (52:33):

Yes, that’s right, Malcolm. The fact are that that over the last 20 years, a little over 20 years now, the most detrimental impacts, and policy directions in this country have came from the supposedly conservative side of government, the Liberal National Party, it is the coalition at a federal level that have driven this all the way.