Now in today’s program, we will be looking at crime and punishment, we’ll be looking at the liar, Mr John Howard, the federal immigration minister and the booklet for citizens, the Victorian police chief commissioner Christine Nixon has made a comment which I fully endorse – unusual isn’t it to have an anarchist concur with the police commissioner, it’s nice to see that a lot of other, the normal idiots out there, the normal authoritarians out there, came out to give the police commissioner a bit of a kick, and a letter I wrote to the right honourable prime minister John Howard which he probably received by now but obviously won’t look at, and why succeed? And we’re exploring another issue about the state succeeding from the Commonwealth. Yes. He’s finally lost his marbles, I can hear you think. Think again. Listen in and Mr John Glasbrook will be coming in at about 15 minutes time to talk about matters economic. And it’s the 4th economic thinker he’ll be speaking about. Now lets start off with APEC.

Yes, didn’t mention it, did I? Now most of our listeners will know that Sydney is in lockdown mode and the worlds most powerful men, well I should day, the worlds most powerful puppets, (lets not forget where real power lies in doesn’t lie in the poor, it doesn’t lie in parliament, or in presidents or in Prime Ministers, it lies in the boardrooms of national and transnational corporations) we’ll see the corporate puppets troop into Sydney, have a meal and a bit of a tongue wag amongst each other, and our beloved Prime Minister will be welcoming them, he’ll think of it as the highlight of his political career. Obviously the will be a lot of nasty people out there, demonstrating, demonstrator types who’ll be out there to make life a little bit difficult to actually show the world that not everybody agrees with the concepts and the ideas that are being promoted. But it’s very interesting really. The thing about the state is that it really does need terrorists to justify its position, it does need violence to justify its position because it can point the finger at people and say look at those violent people, if it wasn’t for us, they’d make your life a misery. If there is no violence, obviously they’ll create some type of violence. We’ll see somebody ripping his shirt or something and it will be front page news. But obviously nobody talks about the violence which was perpetrated by the policies which is pursued by these puppets, these corporate puppets who’ll be meeting in Sydney, well you don’t want to talk about that, do you, the underlying reasons? But I was very interested to hear that our beloved Prime Minister, I know many of our listeners will be going don to APEC, they’ll be enjoying the best meals, the best drinks, they’ll all be supportive of the taxpayer, won’t they, like the Prime Minister and his entourage and the 10s of 1000’s of police and army personnel who’ll be there and the workers who’ll be building that nice 5km brick wall, it goes on and on doesn’t it, what a waste of money? But I was very interested to listen to the Prime Minister is always looking with an eye for a little bit of political advantage, and he’s forgotten about the international terrorists because initially when this conference was proposed it was all talk about international terrorists, Sydney would have to be locked down because of the international terrorists, but its interesting that the Prime Minister has changed his tune, with an election around the corner he really has to look at the violent protestors. He’s tried the blacks, he’s tried the asylum seekers, he’s tried the Muslims, he’s tried the unemployed, he’s tried the disability support pensions, his usual tricks don’t seem to be doing the right thing for his electoral fortunes in the community so now he’s pulled out the violent protestors- that’s right, it’s you I’m talking about you scumbags! The violent protestors. And according to the Prime Minister, and who am I to disbelieve our Prime Minister, it’s not the international terrorists who are responsible for locking down Sydney next week, its violent local protestors! That’s you! Keen to regain the political advantage, after failing to convince the community that the greatest threat they face is unionists and refugees and aboriginal and Torres Strait islanders and Muslims and even those nebulous international terrorist and Prime Minister has pulled the violent local protestors from his little bag of tricks. According to John Howard, once a violent protestor, always a violent protestor. Maybe I should say to John Howard, once a warmonger, always a warmonger, once a liar, always a liar. But who am I to say that? I’m just an individual, he’s the Prime Minister? Who are you going to believe, me or the liar? The person whose to blame for the public disruption a the APEC meeting in Sydney next week is John Howard. This is his big chance to play big man in the world’s scene. Just as the person who’s responsible for the fiasco at the G20 protests in Melbourne in November last year was the treasurer Mr Peter Costello, it’s the Prime Minister who’s responsible for the problems faced Sydneysiders over the next 10 days. The Prime minister and the treasurer are willing to put a city of over 4 million people at ransom to satisfy their political vanity, this is all it’s about. It’s not about the puppets making decisions, it’s about them satisfying their political vanity/ Only a fool would jeopardise a city’s people and businesses to push their ideological barrow and what we are seeing is fools holding this type of meeting in a major city. Considering the public reaction to APEC meetings around the world over the past decades, you would think the Prime Minister would have been advised by the NSW government, federal police and Australia’s security agencies, all 6 of them, to hold his little pow wow with the world puppets in a more suitable surroundings. Only a government that holds it people in contempt would hold such a divisive meeting in a city with over 4 million people. Why couldn’t they have it at Lizard Island or on top of Mt Kosciusko? Or even in some uninhabited ice flow down the Antarctic? If Mr Howard think that he’s equipped , and he keeps talking about those violent protestors, God he wants those violent protestors there, without those violent protestors he’s going to have a lot of trouble justifying all that money that’s been wasted so that he can chew the fat with all those corporate puppets over the next few days. Oh he’s waiting. I wonder if there is any moneys being distributed to a few agent provocateurs to hold those violent protests which he’s so concerned about. If he thinks he’s going to win some public sympathetic for holding the APEC meeting in the centre of Sydney he’s badly mistaken because people realise whose ultimately responsible for the decision which has a lockdown of a city of 4 million and if I was a business person living in Sydney and I had my trade decreased, because of the APEC meeting I’d be sending in a bill to the federal government. It’s their decision, because of Howard’s political vanity, because of Costello’s political vanity that this meeting is being held in Sydney and the G20 meeting was held in Melbourne. Anybody who’s got one synapsing neuron would know you don’t hold this type of divisive meeting is the centre of a large city.

You’re listening the Anarchist World this Week broadcast across Australia on the national community radio satellite.

I was a little surprise, well I really wasn’t surprised, because many people in authority have got brains and don’t usually push the normal garbage. The Victoria chief police commissioner Christine Nixon made the assertion that the phrase ‘war on terror’ is as useful as the discredited phrase ‘war on drugs’. And everybody just went bananas! Isn’t it refreshing to have this erudite addition to the hackneyed one-dimensional commentary that has dominated newspaper, radio and television’s assessment and analysis of the war on terror, the new hundred year war. The use of terror to promote a political cause or ideology is nothing new. If anyone has read the Old Testament about Joshua smiting this and raising cities and destroying whole populations, you’d really realise politically inspired terrorism in not something that the human race has not faced before. The difference between the period described in the Old Testament and today is the weapons of mass destruction that are available to individuals and states that are willing to use terror to seize and maintain political power. Although individuals and mediaeval fanatics like Al Qaeda dominate today’s debate on the use of political inspired terror the nation state continues to play the dominant role in politically motivated terrorism. The greater the concentration state power in the hands of individuals ant small groups the greater the potential for political terrorism. The Hitlers and the Pol Pots and Stalins of the world would never have been able to unleash the terror they did if they did not control the state apparatus. Can you imagine Adolf or old Pol Pot or Joseph Stalin on some street corner carrying on if they didn’t control the state apparatus. The greater the number of institutional checks and balances, the more effort that is made to decentralise power, the greater the protection the individual enjoys from the arbitrary exercise from state power the less chance those exercising state power have of using political terror to advance national racial and ideological agenda. If you look at the Howard governments agenda over the last 11 years, they have always used the threat of terror to promote their authoritarian ideological wet dreams. Christine Nixon’s the Victorian chief police commission is afraid that phrases like the ‘war on terror’ do not advance debate and the struggle on the ground against nation states, groups and individuals who think you can blow up a social relationship is an important point that should have been made by people in authority long ago. It seems that everybody is too frightened to speak up. Politically motivated violence is an endemic human problem. Until we as a society are willing to acknowledge those who exercise power are just as much if not more of a danger than those ho are trying to seize power through the use of politically motivated violence. The struggle against politically motivated terrorism. We have this them and us attitude, don’t we? It’s them and us. Look at your history books. Look at politically motivated terror. Look at how it’s being used. Look at how it’s continually used, these days we’ve got good nuclear bombs and bad nuclear bombs and good terrorist and bad terrorists. Obviously who you think is who to a large degree depends on your political motivations. You’ve been listening to the Anarchist World this Week and Johnny Glasbrook is about to enter the studio to talk to us about matters economic.

- Well, you’re back for round 4! You’re a glutton for punishment!
- Lets talk about John Kenneth Galbray, one of my favourite economists. He lived from 1908 to 2006. He was a prolific writer on a lot of economic topics and many of his books became best sellers. He was also very much favoured by John Frances Kennedy. He appointed him to become the American ambassador to India and Henry Truman put him in charge of inflation and price controls during WWII. But he was not very popular with Lyndon Baynes Johnson or Richard Nixon because he was opposed to the Vietnam War and because his iconoclastic ideas upset a lot of business leaders. He was very interesting person and he taught at universities like Harvard and Princeton. He was editor of a magazine called Fortune and he spent a lot of time teaching, travelling and writing. Probably he is best known for his book “the Affluent Society’ which was published in 1958. Although it’s nearly 50 years old it strikes some remarkable parallels with contemporary society as did Karl Marx’s theory of capitalism.
- What are the contemporary parallels?
- Well as Marx said, he predicted the growth of monopolies and cartels, John Kenneth Galbray, in another book that he wrote, ‘The New Industrial Society’ argued that there were very few industries in the US where you had pure competition. And most industries in the US, Galbray argued, were dominated by monopolies or oligopolies, contrary to the neo-classical and orthodox economists who would have us believe that pure competition drives the economy and most industries today. And another parallel with the affluent society today is that Galbray argued that one of the big problems in the 1950’s and in the post war economic growth, was that there seemed to be an abundance of private goods and commercial products and
- And that everybody had access to goods
- Yeh there was an abundance of goods and a paucity of public services. This growth in commercial product, luxury cars and homes, ran parallel with a contraction in public services or a deterioration of public services.
- He told the future - sounds like Australia 2007
- Very much the same. And even the politicians then as now claim that they could resolve it, we haven’t gone very far at all, not very far. So what John Kenneth Galbray was arguing was that the model that was driving economics, neo-classical economics, which was still centred around the idea that the market plays the competition and that equilibrium natural forces of supply and demand, needed to be given room to produce the most productive allocation of resources and private enterprise. This model still drove with the engine behind neo-classical theory. He said that now we’ve come to a stage where we’ve reached a great amount of affluence, it’s time to get rid of that model. It’s time to start building a new model so that we have a society and a model of economic policy that is more appropriate for the times.
- So he was saying, we’ve go the affluence, lets look at the service component, let’s look at people having their basic needs met.
- Because what the iconoclastic John Kenneth Galbray argued was that if you have a market system driven by competition, this theory is also about minimal government intervention, because it believes that market and competition is the source of efficiency and power in the economy so you don’t want government intervention. You don’t want taxation. You have regressive forms or minimal amounts of taxation. And you have minimal government intervention in the economy so if you have that theory dominating economic policy you are going to have this parallel running between affluence and public resources and services being diminished. Private affluence for a minority and public poverty for the majority. That’s right and we still have it. You go to public hospitals, primary state schools where I live, even recently students in portables, unair-conditioned, no heating, and in the winter you have quite cold conditions, and this is not common and you have the Victorian treasurer John Brumby was in for 8 years, now leader of the government saying that they are going to do something about these problems. Well this is a government, like the federal government, whose policies are underlined by neo-classical economics. So I am saying what Galbray and other economists would say, that nothing will be done about infrastructure problems. Because output and the supply of private goods and services will always outstrip the availability of public services when you have an economic engine that’s driven in this way by a model that’s not suitable for the times.
- So what you’re saying is that currently, although there is affluence, there is a great deal of poverty and that poverty is not necessary. The affluence that we have as a community could resolve those problems we find in the public sector.
- That’s right, they could easily be resolved. But part of the problem also, along with the model, is the methodology that is being developed by neo-classical economists. I’m not talking here about gross domestic product or national income or unemployment measures that were developed by the macro-economists, what we have now today is, and which were rejected and which certainly would have been rejected by Karl Marx, is the use of technical and mathematical models to try and tell us how well off we are or how well our society and economy is performing. Galbray was an uncompromising critic of any use of technical or mathematical models in economics because he like Marx would have argued that this is a reductionist approach to understanding history and society and it removes economics from being a complex product of political and cultural circumstances, it removes economics which economists are trying to do, from the decisions that are made by politicians and by the boards of directors and by transnational corporations to manuver large amounts of foreign investment and it reduces us to mathematic model, of what’s going on in the world
- It’s a science of formulas, people like to try to tell us. It has nothing to do with culture or politics. You’re saying, it’s all intertwined. It’s got nothing to do with science or formulas. Is that what Galbray is saying?
- That’s right, it’s got nothing to do with science. That economics cannot be see as being separate from culture and politics. And economic activity has to be understood by testers the way that Galbray was an advisor to John Kenneth Galbray. Milton Freedman was an advisor the Richard Nixon, an international crook of gigantic proportions. Adam Smith was well received by big business and government during the industrial revolution. Karl Marx was hounded out because of his ideas. The history of economics shows that economic theories are part of politics. They’re part of the historical and political circumstances at the time and it’s not a value free subject. So Galbray rejected the technical and mathematical con that neo-classical economists, in their own vested inters, develop, because it would give them more power. They would be the only people who would understand it. Not only that, you would have to go get advice from an economists, to know what’s going on.
- Is that expensive, there are natural laws and these people have found the equations to support the natural laws and if they are natural laws what can you and I do about it?
- Neo-classical economists have also been remise according to Galbray, not only because they claim that monopolies and oligopolies are the exception to the rule in a competitive economy, when in fact it the competition is the exception and monopolies are the rule, economists ignore the impact of advertising on consumer behaviour, consumer sovereignty because the other aspect of the competitive market theory, is that the consumer is totally independent. The Consumer has all power in the marketplace. They make the decisions, choices, this was other people like Milton Freedman and classical market economists always go on about prices and choices and competition. But big business spends billions of dollars manipulating the consumer. You go into a supermarket to try to get lolled into a false sense of relaxation, drop your guard. You are surrounded by all kinds of subtle temptations and pressures. They us subliminal advertising to employ special psychiatrist to try to manipulate you psyche as soon as you step in. So Galbray has pointed out that these technocrats being employed in specialist functions to manipulate consumers and there is no such thing as consumer sovereignty, it’ bullshit.
- So in summery, what do you think is Galbrays' contribution of economic theory have been?
- Well I can see why John Kenneth Galbray was so important to the likes of Henry Truman and John Kennedy, coz he knew a lot about economics and he knew that a lot of the classical economic theory was actually bulldust and hence that was why people like Lyndon Baynes Johnston and Richard Nixon claimed that he was anachronism. That he was the product of a by-gone era when in actual fact, the economic model that classical theories that were being embraced by people like Richard Nixon and later on Milton Keynes, are anachronistic, they are not suited for the times and circumstances that we are in when we have a society with a superfluous output of BMW’s when you can walk down to Docklands and find all these high-rise, commercial buildings and you walk down to the subway and you find people sleeping in the subway. This is characteristic of society not only in the 1950’s it’s characteristic of society in the 21st century/
- Well thankyou very much John and round 5 next week, the last, final round. Who are we going to knock out?
- Milton Freedman who was the leader of the Chicago boys
- Thankyou very much

Right, that was John Glasbrook and as you heard he will be in for the last round next week, and he will talk about that wonderful, wonderful man whose responsible for the worlds economic cows no he’s not an anarchist, he’s a capitalist.

Crime and punishment. This is a particularly subject to broach. The Australian criminal justice system reminds me of going to a Roman Catholic funeral. The funeral has a lot to do with the church, and very little to do with honouring the life of the deceased. The deceased is an extra in the greater pageant although their death was the reason for the ceremony. This week, Justice Phillip Cummins, of Victorian Supreme Court, made a comment while sentencing Peter Dupas for life in prison without parole for the murder of Marcena Helvagas, about the need for the victim, and their relatives and friends to be the main players in the criminal justice system. I think this comment highlights significant weakness in the way crime and punishment is handled in this country today. The criminal justice’ system tends to make the process not the victim the centre of the trial. If the accused is found guilty of the crime they’re accused of, they are either fined, given a community sentence, community service order or jailed. And jailing offenders, except in cases like Peter Dupas, who is a proven risk to the community doesn’t help the victims or society. Jail should be limited to a very small percentage who are a threat to the community if not incarcerated. Offenders involved in victimless crimes and in many cases where victims exist, should repay their debt to society and the victim, not by being incarcerated, at taxpayers expense, but by being allowed to work in the community. The courts should be able to direct a percentage of their wages to be paid to the victims to help compensate them for their pain and suffering. Obviously, we all know that monetary compensation could never fully compensate the victims for the humiliation, pain and suffering but it could go someway to making the victim not the legal process, the centre of the criminal justice system. Anything would be better than the current push to incarcerate more and more and more people for victimless crimes in many cases victims would prefer to see offenders spending their time working and compensating them for their pain and suffering, rather than leaving them to rot in prison and asking the taxpayer to pick up their tab for their incarceration.

You’re listening to the Anarchist World this Week broadcast across Australia on the National Community Radio Satellite. I’m Joseph Toscano I’m hosting today’s program.

Now something completely different. As you know I don’t usually reading stuff on this program but today I’m going to make an exception. Because I’ve sent a letter off to our beloved Prime Minister, the right honourable John Howard, which I would like to share with you.
Dear Prime Minister right honourable John Howard (yes, yes, I’ll wash out my mouth with soap and water, calling him the right honourable, I don’t know why the politicians think they should be addressed as the right honourable)
I could not help noticing the fuss in the 4th estate about you meeting the Grand Poohbah of the Exclusive Brethren and his merry band of men.
I was impressed by your justification pointing out why, out that they were Australian citizens, that from time to time, you make the effort to meet all types of Australians. Considering you were are to take time off from running the country to chew the fat with the folk from the Exclusive Brethren, you may be interested in having a little chat with a small delegation with the Anarchist Media Institute to discuss affairs of the state.
Unfortunately, we cannot help you with your re-election campaign, as unlike the Exclusive Brethren, we do not charge members a 10% tithe but ask our supporters to help us when they can. I know you will not give up the chance of showing your even handedness, and in the next few weeks I am sure you will invite us to Kirribilli House for tea, scones and a little chat about how to stymie those Fabian Chardonnay socialists, those horrible people that make up the black armband brigade and those ungrateful doctors wives (that seem to have forgotten you butter their bread) from seizing the tiller on the good ship private enterprise Australia (my apologies to John Batman) from your more than capable arthritic fingers.
So we do not waste our time during our little conversation, I have taken the liberty of setting the agenda for the fireside chat with Janette and yourself. Knowing you are keen to remove Beattie's jackboot from the neck of Queenslanders, I'm sure you will be more than willing to discuss ways of removing the Commonwealth government's jackboot from the necks of the States. A few ideas include:-
• The power of recall - allowing the electorate to recall a fresh election in between elections, to remove poorly performing politicians who do not keep their promises, (oops, maybe I should not have mentioned that thing about promises - my humble apologies),
• Citizen Initiated Referendums - giving the electorate, not just Parliament, the power to call a referendum to change the Constitution. Knowing your ideological penchant for all things democratic, I am sure you will support this initiative.
Finally, considering how stressful it must be for you in Parliament when those ingrates on the crossbenches call you a liar, fraud and cheat (their words not mine), you would be all in favour of abolishing Parliament and replacing it with a federation (sorry to use the "F" word, knowing you are not into pole dancers) of community and workplace councils based on direct democratic principles.
In a direct democratic society, the electorate makes decisions and appoints or elects delegates with limited mandates to coordinate those decisions at a regional and national level. I am positive you will agree that giving a politician signed blank cheque to make decisions for the electorate for three whole years is not the type of thing you would write home to mother about.
All the very best, see you in a week or two. By the way, could you get Flo to send down some of her famous pumpkin scones for our afternoon tea with you and Janette down by the harbour at Kirribilli? I am glad you do not like that fellow Peter Costello - considering what he keeps saying about you in the media - you do not want that type of breaking wind at our little pow-wow.

Your humble servant,

Joseph Toscano.

Yes, Yes I have truly sent off that letter, cross my heart and hope to die. Now remember, the Communist empire disintegrated because of black humour and irony. The thing about John Howard and his pathetic bunch of moronic liars is that the you have a great opportunity to wave these people off. Because what you and I have been saying now for over a decade, that these people, liars and cowards, liar is self-explanatory and cowards because they love to divide and rule by picking on those segments of society that are not able to defend themselves, we all know that we’ve all seen it. But you have a role that is not just to sit here and listen to me dribble on. Go out there, go forth and multiply, tell your friends and neighbours and workmates why you’ve stopped listening to these people, because every second word they tell you is a lie. It doesn’t say much for a country where the Prime Minister of the government of the day is full of lies. Full of them! Full of them! Listen to what they say and you’ll soon realise it’s just a load of garbage, it’s not even spin. I mean, in spin there is a little bit of truth in spin. You have to start from some truth. What you have is twisted reality. The truth twisted to suit their ideological wet dreams. This is what it is about. And it’s up to you, not me, but you to tell people why you think this and what you’re going to do about it.

You’re listening to the Anarchist World this Week, broadcast across Australia via the national community radio satellite.

Now I was a little bit touched to see the federal immigration minister Andrews, now that’s a very nice chappy, Mr Andrews, realise his little booklet about possible questions that future citizenship applicants will have to answer to become Australian citizens. And I’m thinking, did Mr Windshuttle write these questions for out mate Mr Andrews? Putting aside the question about whether answering 20 questions about the material in the booklet has anything to do with whether people wanting to become citizens will contribute to the welfare of the country, (it doesn’t make sense does it? You just learn what’s in the booklet and then you answer the questions end of story you just go onto the next aspect of your life. I think this is a pathetic waste of time pandering to the racist and nationalist elements of society) but if you are going to have this pathetic little booklet and this pathetic test for Australian citizenship, don’t you think the people sitting the citizenship test should be given the whole story not just a one dimensional interpretation of Australian history?

I mean, flicking through the book I found it hard to find any real important questions. Where are the questions about the traditional owners of this country - Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders? Where are the questions about how they were violently dispossessed of their lands in the most brutal manner imaginable? Where are the questions about how successive Australian governments continued to deny Indigenous Australians their rights? Continue to deny they were the original inhabitants? Continue to deny that they need to be compensated for the theft of their land? Where are the questions about the ticket of leave men and women (ex-convicts) who did the back breaking work of clearing the land to establish Australia's pastoral and agricultural industries? It just didn’t happen overnight did it?

Where are the questions about the pivotal role of the trade union movement played in winning the wages and conditions that the Howard government is trying to strip away through the Work Choices legislation? Where are the questions about the countless men and women who through their courageous action on the streets have forced successive Australian governments to establish pensions, a universal health care system, a universal free secular education system and who through their courageous actions prevented the introduction of conscription during World War One preventing a further 60,000 young Australian men, from a population of 5 million, being unnecessarily sacrificed on the European killing fields for the glory of God, King and Country? Where are those questions?
The Howard government's citizenship test is an insult to the spirits of those men and women whose courageous actions created the very conditions that people from all over the world leave everything behind and immigrate to Australia to enjoy.
Do you think people immigrate this country to enjoy Howard’s’ Work Choices legislation? You think they immigrate to this country to see all those rights and liberties and freedoms which make Australia different being stripped away? Isn’t it tragic? Isn’t it really tragic that we are reduced to this? That citizenship is about answering a few questions on some pathetic list?

You’re listening to the Anarchist World this Week broadcast across Australia on the national community radio satellite.

Succession, Hmmm? The S-word. Last week we told you to put your hands over your ears, when we talked about the P-word, Public interest? This week, put your hands over your ears when you talk about succession. A very, very seditious extremely seditious concept. I’ve been thinking to myself over the last few weeks, I’ve seen the federal government stripping more and more and more power from the states to impose their ideological driven agenda on us citizens. It’s time that the S-word, succession, became something that we start to discuss. At the end of the 19th century, Australia’s 6 colonies had the opportunity to form 6 independent nation states or form 1 nation. The Commonwealth of Australia didn’t just spring out of thin air; it emerged from a series of debates and conferences that spanned a decade. And it emerged from a series of referendums in each colony, that saw the people living in NSW, WA, Victoria, Qld and SA agree to form a federation. And the key was the F-word. A federation of Australia.

To stop the smaller states from being dominated by the larger states, and the Commonwealth government dominate the people living in the states, the states agreed to form a federation. In a federation, each state retains control of its own internal affairs and the federal or central government deals with matters which affect the country as a whole. To ensure the independence of the states, the Australian Senate consists of the same numbers of the Senators from each state irrespective of that states’ population. The residents of the 6 colonies that federated to form Australia did so because they believed that the Senate not only act as a house of review, but also that it protect the autonomy of the people living in each state. Since WWII the federal government has achieved more and more powers through a carrot and stick approach. They offer states financial incentives to give up their powers and use the High Court they appoint judges, to find implied federal rights in the Constitution, for example, the Work Choices legislation, and the Corporation Act, a very the long bow indeed to draw but if you’ve got a High Court where people of your intellectual ilk sit on those benches it’s not a very long bow to draw, is it?

The question of state autonomy is not just an academic question. The centralisation of power in a central government created the situation where the institutions that need to protect, that we need to protect, individuals from the arbitrary exercise of state power of the federal government is swept away. How did we see such draconian legislation being introduced, which stripped away us of rights and liberties that we’ve enjoyed for generations? The individual becomes hostage to the ideological vagaries of the central government that is able to exercise unrestrained power and the whole purpose of a federation is to put a break on the power that is exercised by a central government and give the individual the power to survive the arbitrary exercise of state power.
Today 106 years after the formation of federal of Australia both the intent and spirit of the Constitution have been sabotaged by a federal government who is willing to intervene in the most minute affairs of the state. We are talking about the federal government actually working out exact day-to-day syllabus used in state schools, this is what we are talking about. Through its behaviour the Howard government has indicated that it intends to centralise more and more power in Canberra while the leader of Her Majesties loyal opposition, very loyal opposition, the Rudd opposition, has indicated he will continue what is laughingly called the new federalism. Faced with the erosion of their powers, the domination of the citizens affairs by the federal government, state governments make the right noises about the centralisation of power in Canberra but do nothing to halt these assaults. State governments have the power to halt and reverse the shift of power by calling referendums that ask the people of the states whether they want to continue to remain a part of the Commonwealth or whether they want to succeed from the Commonwealth and regain control of their own affairs by forming a new independent nation. As we saw with the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union and the peaceful division of Checkeslovakia into the Check Republic and Slovakia, nothing is chiselled in granite. States come and go. We call for the formation of regional councils where people have the power to recall non-performing delegates. And where we have the opportunity to alter the Constitution through citizen-initiated referendums. We also call for the common wealth to be held in common and used for the common good. What at first may seem like a far-fetched idea is relatively easy to implement. In the 1930’s West Australian’s voted to succeed from the Commonwealth. Even if our attempts to succeed are unsuccessful the fact there is a growing band of citizens who are agitating to stop the centralisation of power in Canberra is enough to halt the current drift of power to Canberra. Ultimate political authority does not lie in the hands of the state, or the government of the day. It, as the Eureka miners so ably demonstrated, it lies in the hands of the people. The Victorian Succession League will be launched on the steps of Victoria State parliament Thursday the 30th of August at 10.30am. We encourage listeners in Victoria to come and join us. This League is formed to pressure the Victorian State government to hold a succession referendum to determine whether Victorians, for their own good, succeed from the Commonwealth. We call on all state and territory governments to hold succession referendum to determine what their people think. If these succession referendums are successful, we call for the formation of the new Australian federation based on direct democratic principles where the people who make the decisions elect or appoint delegates to carry out those decisions. Now you may think this is cloud coo-coo stuff. And it may be cloud coo-coo stuff. But the dilemma is for people, if you want to control your own affairs, and you’re faced with a central government which is becoming increasingly powerful, when you’ve lived in a nominal federation, it’s important to stop this delusion of powers. It’s important to create a decentralised society where there are checks and balances to protect communities and individuals from the arbitrary exercise of state power and the best way to do this in this country, in a peaceful manner, is through pressuring state governments to do something about what is happening by calling succession referendums to determine the future of us as a people.

You’ve been listening to the Anarchist World this Week, broadcast across Australia by the national community radio satellite. As I promised at the beginning of the program, we will give you all the little things we want to tell you about. If you want to download the Weekly, you can download it issue 753 from anarchistmedia.org you can email us at anarchistage@yahoo.com you can write to us at PO Box 20 Parkville 3052 you can telephone us at (03) 8508 9856. This program is being pod cast and you can download it at any time. It’s streaming live from 3cr.org.au you can sign the Sedition Charter at seditioncharter.org you can join Direct Democracy not Parliamentary Rule look at their website www.rulebythepeople.org you’ve been listening to the Anarchist World this Week broadcast through the national community radio satellite. This program is coming to you from the studios of 3cr in Melbourne. The program is pod cast so you and your friends can have a listen to it. But the important thing about change is activity. It’s all very well to have a debate, but we need to translate debate into action. Happy APEC week!