Lang Hancock, “Australia Today,” undated [1976?].
With thanks to Gina Rinehart of ANDEV.

I have on more than one occasion said that Malcolm Fraser represented the best chance for decades of rescuing Australia from its present calamitous socialist path.

As you know, Malcolm Fraser said, in speaking of the Liberal Party: “We not only have the obligation of providing good government, but we have the duty to pull Australia out of its economic and social malaise.”

What has gone wrong? Why has the Fraser Government not been able to distinguish itself from the Whitlam regime? We know the Prime Minister wants to. What is stopping him? It is no use waiting until the Liberal Party is bundled out of office again. The time to find out is now.

The unbiased way to find out is to consider the view of sympathetic observers in foreign countries. I, of course, include Western Australia in this category.

Bureaucracy At Its Worst

It is essential that capital be attracted so that giant new mines — that is, coal, iron, bauxite, uranium, manganese, etc. can be brought into production, with or without Australian participation. Capital can only be attracted and mines developed if Australian Governments realise that there is no place in industry for the kind of government interference at any level that industry is being killed by at present; i.e. the hordes of government agencies, departments, committees, inter-departmental committees and the usual trappings of giant bureaucracy. These must be tipped overboard if Australia is not to go under.

Through constant government spending — State and Federal — allied to government crippling of industry (and in particular, giant new mines) the inflation rate in Australia has been such that no new project can get off the ground and carry the government on its back. Seeing that Australia’s inflation rate is above world average, this position is worsening daily. Queensland Premier, Mr. Joh Bjelke-Petersen says: “We can forget all about development projects for a long time to come. That applies to all States.”

So for all infrastructure — that is, gaols, schools, hospitals, customs houses, railways, towns, ports, etc. — have been built by private money in Pilbara, amounting to $230,000 for every man employed. The government has contributed nothing in cash or “know how”, but it has taken some 80% off the top through tax, excise, customs duties, etc. — not only from the companies, but from every man employed by the companies and contractors.

Such government pillaging of our sources of wealth production is the path to national bankruptcy following hard on the heels of Canada and Great Britain. The latter will soon have the lowest standard of living in Europe. Already its per capita output is less than that of East Germany. It is now no better than when U.K. had the strike caused three-day week.

In a nutshell, the whole problem is that big government has got too big for the capabilities of politicians to handle.

If Malcolm Fraser fails to get on top of this enormous pile of inertia, then he, like his predecessors, will have failed.

Malcolm’s Problems

As outsiders see it, the main forces arrayed against the Prime Minister are:

  1. An ever-increasing dominance of the Canberra bureaucracy.
  2. The emergence of a trade union dictatorship controlling the political, as well as the industrial life of the nation.
  3. The powerful, high-protectionist manufacturing lobby, which is probably the main source of the Liberal Party’s election funds.
  4. The socialist press, dominated by socialist trained journalists educated by the State from excessive taxation levied disproportionately on the 12.5% of the people who produce the basic wealth of the nation.
  5. The inept quality of the ministers supporting the Prime Minister, due to the fundamental error of the Liberal Party’s pre-selection system.

“The Quiet Revolution”

Progressively all incentives have been removed (by succeeding governments) from the Australian producer, worker and investor, by the growing power of central government to impose restrictive controls and regulations allied to its capacity to waste money; money which has been raised through excessive taxation and inflationary deficit spending. Such spending merely gives added power to the bureaucracy and renders the elected government more impotent whilst imposing increased burdens on producers.

In other words, pursing the path of Cairns’ “quiet revolution” to destroy capital by means of inflation and excessive taxation.

The Robin Hood Syndrome

In common with socialist governments throughout the world, Australian governments have been increasingly concerned over the years with the distribution of wealth — not the creation of it. That is the Robin Hood syndrome; “Rob the rich and give to the poor,” without thought to the inevitable catastrophic result. What happens when there are no rich left to rob?

Wasted Education

Enormous amounts of money have been wasted on so-called education, but the very basic knowledge upon which the whole of our civilisation rests has not been taught in any seat of learning.

Nowhere have we been educated to understand that everything comes from the earth — you must either mine it, or grow it in the first instance.

No one has educated the Trade Unions to the fact that their fundamental function should be to foster trade, not destroy it.

No one has educated the government to understand that it is their job, not the Trade Unions’ job to govern the country.

No one has taught the academics (the arch priests of mis-education) what to teach to make a society healthy, wealthy and wise.

The Fraser Government has made genuine, praiseworthy but painful efforts to reduce government spending only to finish up with a record deficit.

Why not abandon the present inevitable road to disaster and attempt to reduce big government drastically? No one could deny that this challenge is not big enough, seeing that the ultimate utopian goal would be to reduce government power of interference until it was left with only those things with which it is capable of administering. For instance, the Police Force, the Titles Office and a nuclear-armed Air Force.

Treasury Control

Surely the most practical way of reducing the power and cost of the bureaucracy would have been to place a very strong character or “hatchet man” in charge of the Treasury with strict instructions from Cabinet to reduce the funds of every department right across the board by a common percentage sufficient to balance the budget over two or three years, thus throwing the onus on all the departmental heads to effect economies within their own departments.

Having passed up the great chance, the next best thing that Cabinet could do would be to heed the long-standing advice of Milton Friedman and introduce a system of uniform taxation. This will help to slow down the inflation spiral. On the other hand, wage indexation confirms inflation as a permanent part of our economy.

Then abolish by decree the instruments of socialism and nationalism built up by the previous Liberal and Labor Governments over decades, such as the Reserve Bank, the A.I.D.C., the P.J.T., the Department of Minerals and Energy, etc.

To stimulate the economy, to create employment and to save the inevitable march to devaluation (which in itself is inflationary unless tariffs and sales tax are simultaneously reduced), it will be necessary for Cabinet members one and all, to recognise and preach the truth of the fact (in Parliament, in the Party Room and through their press officers) that the basis of all civilisation is mining and that Australian cannot exist without it.

Mining Must Be Paramount

This being so, mining must be removed immediately from being stifled under the impediment of multitudinous government departments, State and Federal. Mining must be all0wed to proceed on a commercial basis, irrespective of Australian ownership, export licenses, the whims of eco-nuts or the strangulation of so-called guidelines. Government guidelines represent the blind leading the mentally decrepit who can’t think for themselves.

Contrast the Coalition Party’s tragically poor understanding of the importance of the mining industry to Australia with that of the full appreciation of the this fact by the communists (0r whatever name you choose to describe the subversives), who fully realise that if they stop the mining industry they automatically bankrupt our nation.

A study of the disproportionately high number of strikes that are called to hold up mining will illustrate this point. The strikes are generally called for political reasons. They can hardly be instigated on account of working conditions because in the Pilbara the conditions could hardly be bettered. For instance, the housewife gets an attractive, airconditioned “all mod con” house with everything laid on for $8 per week, whilst the food in the mess is better than any first-class hotel in Australia.

Big Government

One of the main problems facing Malcolm Fraser is the fanstastic growth of government over the years. Government has poked its incompetent nose into every facet of the commercial and private life of Australians. It has become so large, so complicated, so all-embracing and so inefficient that no cabinet of men elected through the Parliamentary process could possibly expect to have the competence to administer it sensibly. If Mr. Fraser was able to select 27 men from the whole 14 million of Australians, I doubt if he could come up with a wise enough group capable of exercising judgement over the whole range of government affairs as they are constituted today. What hope then has he got of selecting a 27 man cabinet from the very limited number of limited capacity individuals provided by the Liberal and Country Parties in Parliament?

Just take one of the many fields (and incidentally the most important) with which government unwisely concerns itself, for instance, mining. No government in Australia, State or Federal, has ever elected a Minister for Mines who has found, managed or financed a major mine. No civil servant employed in any of the multitudinous government departments, State or Federal, has ever managed a major mine, built a major port or raised hundreds of millions of dollars of risk capital to finance or establish a major mine or build a railway of the ore carrying capacity that now operates in the Pilbara or to finance any phase of such great world-shattering free enterprise ventures.

If a Minister is incapable and his permanent staff incapable — as they must be — of exercising judgement in such cases, surely the answer is to take the matter out of government hands and leave it to the industry that makes its living in that direction.

There is only one answer to this (and unfortunately the Fraser Government has been unable to tackle it with any degree of success), and that is to reduce drastically the range of government activity.

The Gorton Tragedy

It is one of the tragedies of the Liberal Party that it allowed the bureaucracy to dismiss John Gorton before he had:

  1. got Australia’s first nuclear power plant started;
  2. put a strong character in charge of Treasury to reduce and control government spending and
  3. got a measure of control over the growing civil servants.

The building of the first nuclear power plant might have compelled Australia to mine its uranium to feed it while it was economic to do so and thus launch Australia into the nuclear age. As it is, it would seem (because of some 5 years of government impediment and delay) that internal costs have skyrocketed to the point where the law of diminishing returns has applied to such an extent that it would appear that the world’s richest uranium deposits which lie within Australia’s borders, are rapidly becoming no longer financable. The scope of this tragedy to Australia cannot be measured in words or money.

Technology Breeds Jobs

As you well know, each succeeding generation needs a breakthrough in technology to provide opportunities for careers for the rising generation. For instance, there has been great leaps forward in comparatively recent times, starting with the discovery of electricity, followed in turn by such things as the invention of the telephone, the motor car, radio, television. As a result of these advances, tremendous markets are opened up, millions of people throughout the world are employed, resulting in a rising standard of living in the countries capable of jumping on the bandwagon. In the case of the nuclear age, at present there are 40 countries throughout the world constructing nuclear power plants — Australia is not one of them.

It does look therefore, that the rising generation of Australians will be denied the opportunity of sharing in this giant leap forward. The uranium situation in Australia has been handled so badly, that we have now reached the absurd position where the government is not allowing an Australian company to use its skills to explore for uranium within our shores and yet it is prepared to subsidise up to 85% of the company’s expense to employ its experienced and qualified staff in foreign countries looking for uranium for the benefit of our rivals in trade.

Mis-government

The slow strangling unto death of Australia’s infant uranium mining industry is one of the most depressing features of the whole sad history of mis-government in Australia. The policies of our various government over the years have caused our uranium to be a wasted asset, lying uselessly in the ground, whilst in exchange for enrichment plants and nuclear capability, Brazil is to supply Germany and South Africa is to supply Iran with uranium.

Australia was ready to go in 1973. We could have captured the cream of the world’s markets. We could have solved our power problem. We could have solved our unemployment problem, (for those willing to work), and given hope of interesting and expensive careers to those of the next generation by entering the nuclear ago.

As it is, the buck has been passed by setting of the Ranger Enquiry, but please do not be naïve enough to imagine that this is the end of the prospective uranium miners’ troubles. It is only the beginning.

There is the bureaucracy to be contended with in the matter of titles, the communist faction controlling the eco-nuts and the unions, to say nothing of the Aboriginal Land Act — all hurdles still to be overcome — not to mention government indecision, by which time inflation will have made the project unprofitable and consequently unfinancable (even though the Australian deposits are the world’s richest). I sincerely hope to be proved wrong!

The proposed Aboriginal Land Act is a dangerous piece of legislature. It gives aboriginals exclusive mineral rights without any obligation on the part of the aboriginals to find the minerals to which they are to be given such rights.

Seeing that governments, technical men and big companies don’t as a rule find mines, it is essential that the discoverer be given first right to profit or loss by his discovery. As it is vital that fresh discovering of minerals be made from time to time, no one, other than the discoverer, should be given this right, be he black man, white man, old Australian or new. The absolute first right of the discoverer must be held sacrosanct if Australia is to prosper.

Communists Our Masters

Regarding our masters — the communist controlled Trade Unions — the most effective procedure would have been to confront them head on on the day that the Coalition assumed office. There is nothing surer than that the subversive controlled unions will put an end to Fraser and Australia unless their base is swept from under them.

  1. It is no use delaying confrontation with the unions until their funds build up into the multi-million dollar range and they become too wealthy to govern.
  2. It is no use using Mr. Hawke as the consultant in a policy of appeasement.
  3. It is no use compromising with them until the Australian dollar has to be devalued to the point of no value, at which point the government’s power will have evaporated.
  4. It is no use feeding the crocodile in the pious hope that he will devour you last.

Subversives

The subversive element in the unions must be reduced to their rightful place in national affairs, which is divorced from controlling the foreign policy and political life of the country.

If they continue to take over the role of the Australian Government, if and when the elected government opposes them on some point of foreign policy interference ans asks them to obey the law, Mr. Fraser will be justified in confronting the Australian public with a referendum asking if they want to be controlled by the communist led trade union dictatorship or by the elected government of the country. I believe the P.M. would get overwhelming support to carry out firm measures against the unions such as enforcing the election of their officers by secret postal ballot, and by fining and imprisoning them for every violation of the law. If the police are ineffectual is serving summons’ and collecting the fines, then Mr. Bjelke-Petersen’s advice should be accepted and the army should be put in to do the job forthwith, with the overwhelming backing of the Australian people.

Referendum Would Condemn G.G.

The above type of referendum might have value, but I can see no point in creating a Roman holiday for the legal profession by conducting a referendum to alter the constitution to allow or not allow double dissolutions of Parliament or something of this nature. The public is heartily sick of elections, the Kerr affair and dissolutions; in fact, Australia would be better off if Mr. Fraser had suspended Parliament for a while and set the members to work seeing how many acts on the statute books they could, with advantage, repeal.

We have got such a surfeit of laws of all kinds, few of which are necessary, most of which are damaging to the country’s best interests. There are so multitudinous and so involved that every citizen of Australia, every day of his life, must invariably, unwittingly break several of these laws or regulations.

One of the governments problems seems to be their constant pre-occupation with passing useless legislation through Parliament.

If you would take time to think, I feel sure you would come to the conclusion that you would have some difficulty in nominating any law since the end of the War, no matter how well-intentioned, that would not be better repealed to the benefit of the community. Every law that Parliament passes gives added power to the Canberra bureaucratic octopus and lessens the capacity of the electorate to produce.

High Hopes of Prime Minister

Having elected what promised to be the best Prime Minister material that the Liberals have had for thirty years, Australians and our friends overseas were overjoyed.

Now they said we have a leader who speaks like a Prime Minister, thinks like a Prime Minister, looks like a Prime Minister and conducts himself as a Prime Minister should — his recent press acclaim in America confirms this.

True Picture

However, now that the new government has been in office for some nine months, what is the view of overseas people qualified to judge? It is somewhat as follows:

  1. Australia’s inflation rate is above world average.
  2. Its wage rate is even higher than that of U.S.A.
  3. Our strike performance is the worst of any raw resource producing country.
  4. Our growth rate is 2% compared with Japan 5%, U.S.A. 7%.
  5. No new, big mines are being developed because of our rising internal cost structure allied to government interference and fifth column environmentalists. For instance, they have killed uranium mining.
  6. The foreign exchange earnings will show a debit balance because of lack of establishment of any new ventures attracting an in-rush of capital and business and generating large quantities of foreign exchange.
  7. Despite all protestations to the contrary, by responsible Ministers, Australia will be forced to devalue by some 15%, which, added to the existing inflation rate, will increase inflation by that amount; unless the government simultaneously reduces tariffs drastically.
  8. The Treasurer has brought down a budget with an all time record deficit.
  9. Labor’s variable deposit ratio provisions to curtail capital inflow remains on the statute books and governments can utilise it at will. (This is a constant threat which must be removed immediately.)
  10. There is no security of tenure.
  11. The Shah of Persia (whose economy shows promise of being able to provide some offset to our total dependence on Japan in future) is quite convinced and so is a good section of overseas press proprietors, that Australia will turn communist due to the encroaching power that the communist led unions have displayed in conducting the political and foreign affairs of Australia.

Fraser-Whitlam Duet

One of the problems with which Malcolm Fraser has had to contend is the fact that the over-powerful bureaucracy have been able to compel the present government to follow a path similar to that of the Whitlam era. For instance:

  1. The Coalition has maintained Rex Connor’s hated and unnecessary Minerals and Energy Department, the A.I.D.C., the P.J.T. and even increased the frightening power of the Reserve Bank. Remember it was Lenin who said any government which controlled the central banking system was already 90% along the road to communism.
  2. They have retained Labor’s variable reserve deposit ratio provisions to curtail capital inflow. This piece of criminal folly remains on the statute books, and governments can utilise it at will. This is a high-powered “Sword of Damocles” hanging over investors heads.
  3. They have adopted the Whitlam “Ranger Enquiry” which should have been discarded as a waste of money immediately upon assuming office. There is nothing that the Ranger Enquiry (costing government and the private firms some millions of dollars) can add to the knowledge that is already readily available to the government at no charge. Prior to the Rulison experiment in the U.S., 200 safety programmes were run. The facts produced from these programmes are available at no charge, in addition to which the environmentalists who tried to stop the experiment failed in three courts in the U.S.A. The simplest way to dispose of the Ranger Enquiry would have been to dispose of the departments responsible for administering it.
  4. Similarly with Medibank, the present government would have saved the nation a lot of money and themselves a lot of bother, if they had disposed of Medibank entirely, on assuming office. As it is, the taxpayer is saddled with this octopus forever more at an ever-increasing cost, whilst the Fraser Government will forever more than have the odium of having to deal with it. Irrespective of what compromise they make (and they are now very near the Labor Government’s original conception of it), the government will find itself in interminable trouble, in fact even more than if they had boldly killed it at birth. It is just like a disease, it will not go away of its own accord. The Labor people will not allow the criticism to die while Medibank exists in any form at all. They believe it to be their No. 1. vote winner.
  5. The Liberals have accepted the I.A.C. report compiled for Whitlam on June 6, 1975 whereby the gold mining industry has to be brought under the same thoughtless taxation climate that applies to the rest of the mining industry, despite the fact that shortening the life of the gold industry will add next to nothing to general revenue. In the long-run, it will lessen it.
  6. Mr. Fraser signed the Whitlam trade agreement between Japan and Australia.
  7. Mr. Fraser has donated to the American education system a million dollars this implementing Whitlam’s plan.
  8. The present government revived and implemented Enderby’s extra court.
  9. Malcolm Fraser has followed the globe-trotting path of Whitlam and gone to China and then to America. China is a nation of some 800 million people whose industrial capacity is little more than 2.5 times that of 13 million strike-bound Australians. In this respect, it would be interesting to ask Messrs. Fraser and Whitlam if they noticed that the biggest truck that the Chinese use to operate their iron mines carries 12-tonnes on its back, whereas the Pilbara has 200-tonne trucks in operation! With such a wide gap in technique in favour of Australia, what did they hope to learn from China at the taxpayers’ expense? The Chinese are of no significant value to Australia compared with the oil and dollar rich Middle East for instance. Why not go fishing with the Shah of Persia at his lodge on the Casplan Sea instead of in socialist Canada?
  10. The present government has retained Whitlam appointees in the Prime Minister’s department, in other departments and in China. This has allowed the Prime Minister’s prestige to suffer in the eyes of the Chinese dictatorship because it is axiomatic in the eyes of the dictator that anyone who doesn’t annihilate the opposition immediately on obtaining power must be weak and not worthy of respect.
  11. As for following Whitlam to the U.S.A. to find out their attitudes on defence and their economic conditions, the P.M. had only to read the National Miner where it clearly stated that the Americans have no intention of defending anything west of Hawaii. Whilst the National Miner issue of August 9, 1976 will give him a more accurate run-down on the U.S. economy than anything he can learn in back-slapping political circles in Washington.
  12. They have retained the Commonwealth Government in actively engaging in costly but pointless uranium exploration.
  13. It would seem that the only instance where the present government had departed from the Whitlam Government is in the sacking of Gair. Giving vent to such spite served no purpose; it merely involved the taxpayer in the expense of transporting a substitute for him.

Such a sorry picture cannot be changed, except by a series of startling innovations which would mean that the elected government would have to govern in its own right.

Suggestions

For instance:

  1. Put a “hatchet man” in charge of the Treasury to balance the budget gradually.
  2. Replace high tariffs with devaluation of the currency to its proper level.
  3. Wipe out all government departments which serve as instruments of nationalisation and socialism.
  4. Become better educated than the communists regarding the vital nature of mining in respect to its value to the Australian economy.
  5. Guarantee security of tenure right from the discovery to the production stage.
  6. Declare the right part of Australia to be a frontier area and make it 100% income tax free for a trial period of twenty years with a re-investment clause of 40% of profits to qualify for tax immunity. This re-investment clause would be applicable to capital only; it would apply to wage and salary earners who would reap the benefit in their first pay envelope.

Given these inducements, there is no need to send bureaucrats holidaying overseas on the pretence of searching for foreign capital — capital will come of its own accord if our climate is ripe, but will not whilst we offer no security of tenure and subject it to the dictatorial powers of the Reserve Bank, no matter how much overseas jaunting is undertaken at the taxpayer’s expense.

Secession The Only Answer

If our government is not prepared to embark on such a programme and having tried both the Labor and Liberal administrations only to find that neither can do anything to free us from the economic straight-jacket of the Canberra bureaucratic octopus; where do we go from here? How do we leap off the galloping bandwagon which is leading us ruinously to socialism and anarchy?

There seems to be one hope only and that is for W.A. to lead the way back by “seceding” under a constitution which limits the power of government.

This brings us to the very meat of the “secession” movement.

It is absolutely futile to secede and at the same time set up the same type of overriding Canberra bureaucracy in Perth.

We must only secede if we do so under a constitution which limits the power of government to win election by buying votes with promises of huge handouts to the populace. Such spending promotes the build-up of huge government departments, which in turn virtually take over the governing of the country.

It is no fluke that Germany has an inflation rate of only 4% approximately (due to imported oil), whilst we are fast approaching a 20% inflation rate.

Germany’s capable handling of the situation is brought about by the vast experience that they have had a pre-Hitler inflation, and their determination to guard against it in future. They have done so by limiting the power of their government to squander money. This is achieved because the Treasurer is limited to what he can spend by the Constitution, is free of control of the Cabinet, and has to report direct to Parliament only.