Farmers and Rural Communities Must Fight Back!
We have seen in Griffith in recent months the national disaster in agriculture manifest itself via a grassroots debate. Many farmers have stepped forward, painting a picture of a rural area on the brink of collapse. Farmers have said they are furious over the water issue, foreign imports of agricultural products, indebtedness and more. Many have said that they will consider walking away from the National Party.
I say that nothing surrounding the crisis in country Australia is really accidental, it is deliberate. It is the result of the planning of the ‘rational economists’, of the banks, of government agencies, all to arrive at a certain – result. I have called this campaign a type of Joe Stalin styled capitalism which has an inbuilt intention.
It is to put farmers off the land. When you cannot pay the banks they will bankrupt you and foreclose; if you cannot manage around foreign imports, you will sell out; if you are tired of fighting the water restrictions, debt, the ever-increasing input costs and regulations and choose not to give up or suicide, you can quit your holdings and work for a ‘new’ boss – the mining companies.
Are our Riverina farmers becoming the new Kulaks, proclaimed enemies of the new model
of ‘progress’? I believe that this is so.
Given too that it is an open secret many small towns are being allowed to die through disinvestment, denial of services, refusal of bank loans and so on – I believe my general
observation is correct.
I believe there must be change. But what sort of change?
Our Limitations
Of course, nobody believes that any small party will be elected to parliament for the Riverina this time around. They would be in the land of dreams if they thought so.
Yet, even if a minority party person was elected, or as is more likely at this time, a mealy-mouthed representative of a major party will be reinstalled, we are very limited to what can be done to alleviate the crisis. It will continue and worsen.
Our mis-leaders will tell us that our problems are with the global ‘market’ and that we have to get with it. They can say they’ll ease the water restrictions a bit and so forth. They
can make false promises and sell dreams of a sustainable future and a future golden age.
They will call us ‘pie in the sky’ for our solutions, but they are just peddlers of false hopes or ostriches in the sand. They can change nothing because they are wedded to the policies that have brought the chaos in the first place. I say that because they are globalisers one and all.
I might say that real change does not depend on parliament. It depends upon us, the
people. After the election, watch and see who will still be around taking up the issues and
struggling alongside ordinary people.
Will it be the mainstream people and their parties and groups?
No! The only people still fighting will be the Australia First Party.
One elected person, even an Australia first Party representative, cannot do what a sustained and collective resistance of a whole community can and that is the only way to bring about any positive change – or simply endure survival. The community must work together in the short term to make sure that people survive and that our country towns and cities stay intact.
Those who are still reasonably well off in the community will realise the day will come when they too will end up as those already broken down and dispossessed. They too must fight back and do it now.
To counteract the impositions by the political system we need to be unified in our purpose. But the unity comes not all at once, but by some taking the lead and winning others over.
I believe that a community resistance movement is needed, a little like Rural Action Movement was years ago, like the Union of Farmers was too.
We must become activists in our own ways, banding together to dispense our own community organised welfare, give help to those who need it and provide legal help to those who are desperate, boycott foreign imports, occupy farms to resist the banks, employ from only amongst our own community and so forth.
We must shut not just our ‘gate’ as the anti coal seam gas protesters put it – but shut our towns as best we can to the terrorism of globalisation. And lastly, we must return to the old union days of shunning those who do the wrong thing, those who would conspire against us and those who would sell out to mining and its collaborators, who take their dirty money and sacrifice the community. If we are fighting to preserve our agricultural community and way of life, no sacrifice must be excluded.
Since the establishment politicians don’t advocate any of that, we must do it ourselves.
People’s action is determinative of success. In history, it is the people who are decisive.
All those Free Trade Agreements sold as creating a global level playing field brought us to this.
Free trade is not fair trade. It takes into account only dollars, not social costs.
Free trade may bring cheaper foodstuffs at the cost of murdering a social sector. We see the advent of globalism in the 1970’s with the Lima Agreement and then in the 1980’s we see the deregulation of banking under the Hawke Keating government; this was the means to strangle many Australian farmers with massive debt via spiralling interest rates.
Thousands were forced off the land.
Interestingly, I recall back then Wagga was the centre of real community resistance to a national problem – until the National Party and the National Federation of Farmers side-tracked everything and demobilized the resistance towards resignation or apathy.
All who wish to see can observe since the 1980’s that a spike in imported foods occurred side by side with declining farm ownership and rising farm debt and that this has then
continued on under consecutive governments to present day, be they Labor/Green or Lib/Nat. The trend continues regardless of which globalist party is in power.
The National Party will lie to you, knowing that what they say is not what they intend to do. Be extremely suspicious of any politicians “burning documents” (MDBA reports), tying documents to cement boots and throwing them in the river etc as Barnaby Joyce did in Mildura with the MDBP draft: they are lying criminal actors. They all know the global environmental treaty the RAMSAR Convention was used as the basis of the MDBP water restrictions and they decline to demand its repudiation.
Australia First Party has a harsh view of such game-players. We believe one happy
day in punishing the guilty, seizing their assets as a penalty for what their globalist
fantasy has done to Australian farmers.
The contempt for Australians has no limit. This globalist enemy would send Centerlink
representatives to put hard working people on the dole and offer suicide councillors
to towns that they have destroyed! We let it be known to them we do not intend to suicide, nor want their style of ‘welfare’. We intend to stand in solidarity with all those threatened by the bank and encourage all to fight and if necessary hang together, or we will surely hang separately.
The water buy backs are a fraud and we believe it hides another agenda. Is this the
future for the Riverina (once farming has been destroyed) to be a mining zone, given that over 70% of it is under mining claim?
We must resist this initiative!
Australia First Party knows it is far away from power that we can’t solve the problem in the immediate, but we can advocate and unite with all who wish to engage in a People’s
struggle in a new community resistance movement. However, we do propose a solution, long term and immediate:
Our Solutions: the long term
1. Revise the Bradfield Scheme to drought – proof the Riverina and Sunraysia food bowl and cleanse the Murray Darling system. Repudiate the RAMSAR Convention’s “intergovernmental treaty” which lies behind the water restrictions. We must rip up all international treaties and agreements.
2. All rural debt to be taken over by the State and effectively abolished, negotiated out of existence, via policy “tabula rasa” – clean slate.
3. Restrict foreign imports of agricultural products and re – impose a strong tariff system.
4. Orderly marketing system like in the 1950’s and 1960’s for all rural products – dairy, grain, fruit, produce etc.
5. Cheap fuel from an Australian fuel industry not governed by the world pricing system and tax incentives for Australian owned small business. Increase spending on infrastructure.
We could then add labour from the dole queues, to give people currently institution-alised on welfare a purpose and new opportunities, they would become nation re – builders instead of being written off and forgotten about on the scrapheap of society and we would make it easier too for young people (students and youth) to earn casual monies on the farms.
6. We do not believe in international speculation (gambling) in our currency; Australia should set its own price for the Aussie Dollar and have our own people’s bank as the original Commonwealth Bank was, to set low interest rates and to advance credit as required for productive Australian enterprise.
Our Solution: the short term
1. Extension of the Co-op System throughout the Riverina.
2. Marketing outside of the supermarket system as best we can – direct marketing and
boycott foreign imports dumping on Australia.
3. Farmers should hire only locals particularly unemployed, youth and students and never use labour hire companies, thereby keeping the money in our towns.
4. A community co-operative movement that pools welfare and other resources.
Australia must be a closed shop if we are to re-build; there is no other way. Yes, we can trade many things, but this globalist utopia is actually the death of us all. People must get over the ‘Stockholm Syndrome‘ whereby they continue to vote the same people back in to power, follow their community initiatives and their essential ideology – even though they are the very people destroying them.
It is time to revenge ourselves upon the political class!
Mrs Lorraine Sharp
Australia First Party committed to the people of The Riverina