Dear Men
and Women of Australia,
There are two photographs on this page, and while they might look
like father and daughter, they are separated by two nations, one ocean and some
seventy years.
Yet incredibly, they are both part of the same tragedy, the kind
that leaves deep and irrepairable scars on a nation and its people for a
lifetime.
The young woman who was born in 1907. The elderly man who was born
twenty years later in 1927.
The photograph of the woman was taken in the Great Depression of
1936 when the man was still only 9 years old.
Her name was Florence Owens Thompson and she was a 32 year old
mother of seven who was photographed sitting homeless in a tent. The image was
published across the newspapers of America and it managed to enraged the
nation, because people could not believe that Americans could be treated in
such a way.
It forced President Roosevelt to act, to step up and become a
leader for his times: he launched soup kitchens, work gangs, programs for the
homeless, dams and roads and railways were built – and he gave his people
hope.
John Steinbeck later wrote a book called The Grapes of Wrath which
became an American literary Icon. It was about a drought that made the farmers
penniless – and how the banks had forced them off their land so they could sell
it on to the big powerful corporations. What happened to the farmers of
Oklahoma ultimately carved a deep and shameful scar across the American
identity that was felt throughout the Twentieth Century.
The second photograph on this page is of Charlie Phillott, now 87,
an elderly farmer from the ruggedly beautiful Carisbrooke Station at Winton. He
has owned his station since 1960, nurtured it and loved it like a part of his
own flesh. He is a grand old gentleman, one of the much loved and honoured
fathers of his community.
Not so long ago, the ANZ bank came and drove him off his beloved
station because the drought had devalued his land and they told him he was
considered an unviable risk. Yet Charlie Phillott has never once missed a
single mortgage payment.
Today this dignified Grand Old Man of the West is living like some
hunted down refugee in Winton, shocked and humiliated and penniless. And most
of all, Charlie Phillott is ashamed, because as a member of the Great
Generation - those fine and decent and ethical men and women who built this
country – he believes that what happened to him was somehow his own fault. And
the ANZ Bank certainly wanted to make sure they made him feel like that.
Last Friday my wife Heather and I flew up with Alan Jones to
attend the Farmers Last Stand drought and debt meeting in Winton. And after
what I saw being done to our own people, I have never been more ashamed to be
Australian in my life.
What is happening out there is little more than corporate
terrorism: our own Australian people are being bullied, threatened and abused
by both banks and mining companies until they are forced off their own land.
So we must ask: is this simply to move the people off their land
and free up it up for mining by foreign mining companies or make suddenly newly
empty farms available for purchase by Chinese buyers? As outrageous as it might
seem, all the evidence flooding in seems to suggest that this is exactly what
is going on.
What is the role of Government in all of this? Why have both the
State and Federal Government stood back and allowed such a dreadful travesty to
happen to our own people? Where was Campbell Newman on this issue? Where was
Prime Minister Abbott? The answer is nowhere to be seen.
For the last few months, the Prime Minister has warned us against
the threats of terrorism to our nation. We have been alerted to ISIS and its
clear and present danger to the Australian people.
Abbott has despatched Australian military forces into the Middle
East in an effort to destroy this threat to our own safety and security. This
mobilization of our military forces has come at a massive and unbudgeted
expense to the average Australian taxpayer which the Prime Minister estimates
to be around half a billion dollars each year.
We are told that terrorism is dangerous not only because of the
threat to human life but also because it displaces populations and creates the
massive human cost of refugees.
Yet not one single newspaper or politician in this land has
exposed the fact that the worst form of terrorism that is happening right now
is going on inside the very heartland of our own nation as banks and foreign
mining companies are deliberately and cruelly forcing our own Australian
farmers off the land.
What we saw in the main hall of the Winton Shire Council on Friday
simply defied all description: a room filled with hundreds of broken and
battered refuges from our own country. It was a scene more tragic and traumatic
than a dozen desperate funerals all laced onto the one stage.
Right now, all over the inland of both Queensland and NSW, there
is nothing but social and financial carnage on a scale that has never before
been witnessed in this nation.
It was 41 degrees when we touched down at the Winton airport, and
when you fly in low over this landscape it is simply Apocalyptic: there has not
been a drop of rain in Winton for two years and there is not a sheep, a cow, a
kangaroo, an emu or a bird in sight. Even the trees in the very belly of the
creeks are dying.
There is little doubt that this is a natural disaster of
incredible magnitude – and yet nobody – neither state nor the federal
government - is willing to declare it as such.
The suicide rate has now reached such epic proportions right
across the inland: not just the farmer who takes the walk “up the paddock” and
does away with himself but also their children and their wives. Once again, it
has barely been covered by the media, a dreadful masquerade that has assisted
by the reticence and shame of honourable farming families caught in these
tragic situations.
My wife is one of the toughest women I know. Her family went into
North West of Queensland as pioneers one hundred years ago: this is her blood
country and these are her people . Yet when she stood up to speak to this crowd
on Friday she suddenly broke down: she told me later that when she looked into
the eyes of her own people, what she saw was enough to break her heart.
And yet not one of us knew it was this bad, this much of a
national tragedy. The truth is that these days, the Australian media basically
doesn’t give a damn. They have been muzzled and shut down by governments and
foreign mining companies to the extent that they are no longer willing to write
the real story. So the responsibility is now left to people like us, to social
media – and you, the Australian people.
And so the banks have been free to play their games and completely
terrorise these people at their leisure. The drought has devalued the land and
the banks have seen their opportunity to strike. It was exactly the excuse that
they needed to clean up and make a fortune, because once the rains come – as
they always do – this land will be worth four to ten times the price.
In fact, when farmers have asked for the payout figures, the banks
have been either deeply reluctant or not capable of providing the mortgage
trail because they have on-sold the mortgage - just like sub-prime agriculture.
This problem isn’t simply happening in Winton, but rather right
across the entire inland across Queensland and NSW. The banks have been
bringing in the police to evict Australian farmers and their families from their
farms, many of them multigenerational. One farmer matter of factly told us it
took “oh, about 7 police” to evict him from his first farm and “maybe about
twelve” to evict him from his second farm which had been in his family for many
generations. You think they are kidding you. Then you see the expression in their
eyes.
And there was something far worse in the room on Friday: the fear
of speaking out against the banks: when we asked people to tell us who had done
this to them, they would immediately start to shake and cry and look away: They
have been silenced to protect the good corporate image of their tormentors
called the banks. What in God’s name have the bastard banks been allowed to do
to our people?
This is a travesty against the rights and the human dignity of
every Australian
So it’s only fair that we start to name a few of major banks
involved: The ANZ is a major culprit (and they made $7 billion profit last
year). Then there is Rabo, which is now owned by Westpac (who paid CEO Gail
Kelly a yearly salary of some $12 million) According to all reports, the NAB
and Bank West are right in there at the trough as well – and all the rest of
them are equally guilty. For any that we have missed, rest assured they will be
publicly exposed as well.
But here’s the thing: when these people are forced off their farms,
they have nowhere to go. There are no refugee services waiting, such is the
case for those who attempt to enter the sovereign borders of this nation. The
farmers simply drive to the nearest town – that’s if the banks haven’t stripped
their cars off them as well - and they try and find somewhere to sleep. Some
are sleeping on the backs of trucks in swags. There is basically no home or
accommodation made available to take them. They camp out, shocked and broken
and penniless – and they are living on weet bix and noodles. If there is
someone that can lend a family enough money to buy food, they will: otherwise
they are left completely alone.
And consider this: not one of them has asked for help. Not one.
They just do the best they can, ashamed and broken and brainwashed by the banks
to believe that everything that has happened is completely their own fault.
There is not one single word of this from a politicians lips, with
the exception of the incredibly courageous father and son team of Bob and
Robbie Katter, who organised the Farmers Last Stand meeting. The Katter family
have been in the North since the 1890’s, and nobody who sat in that hall last
Friday could question their love and commitment to their own people.
There is barely a mention of any of this as well in the
newspapers, with the exception of as brief splash of publicity that followed
our visit.
The Minister for Agriculture Barnaby Joyce attended the meeting in
a bitter blue-funk kind of mood that saw him mostly hunched over and staring at
the floor. He had given $100 million of financial assistance in a lousy deal
where the Government will borrow at 2.75% and loan it back at 3.21%.
The last thing these people need is another loan: they need a
Redevelopment Bank to refinance their own loans: issuing a loan to pay off a
loan is nothing more than financial suicide.
The reality is that Joyce cannot get support from what he calls
“the shits in Cabinet” to create a desperately needed Redevelopment Bank so
that these farmers can get cheap loans to tide them through to the end of the
drought.
Our sources suggest that those “shits in Cabinet” include Malcolm
Turnbull – Minister for Communications and the uber-cool trendy city-centric
Liberal in the black leather jacket:, Andrew Robb – Minster for Trade and
Investment and the man behind the free trade deal, the man who suddenly
acquired three trendy Sydney restaurants almost overnight, the man who seems to
suddenly desperate to sell off our farms to China – and one Greg Hunt,
Environment Minister and the man who is instantly approving almost every single
mining project that is put in front of him.
At the conclusion of the meeting, we stood and met some of the
people in the crowd. My wife talked to women who would hug her for dear life,
and when they walked away people would suddenly murmur “oh, she was forced off
last week” or “they are being forced off tomorrow” . Not one of them mentioned
it to us. They had too much pride.
The Australian people need to be both informed and desperately
outraged about what is being done to our own people. This is about every right
that was once held dear to us: human rights, property rights, civil rights. And
most all, our right to freedom of speech. All of that has been taken away from
these people – and the rest of us need to understand that we are probably next.
In the last four weeks the Newman Government has removed all
farmers rights to protest to a mine and given mining companies the rights to
take all the water they want from the Great Artesian Basin – and at no cost to
them at all.
And all of this has happened under the watch of both Premier
Newman and Prime Minister Abbott.
Until Friday, we used to think of Winton as the home of Waltzing
Matilda: it was written at a local station and first performed in the North Gregory
Hotel. I think it was Don McLean who wrote, “something touched me deep
inside…the day the music died”… in his song American Pie, and for us, last
Friday was the day music died.
We will never be able to sing Waltzing Matilda again until we see
some justice for these people, and all the farmers of the inland.
This is no longer the Australia we once knew: no longer our
country, no longer our people, no longer the decent caring leaders we once
remembered.
Right now, the banks, the mining mates, the corrupt politicians
and all the ‘mongrels in suits’ have won – and the Australian people don’t have
a clue what has been done to them.
Like the American Depression and the iconic photograph of Florence
Owens Thompson, there is a terrible, gaping wound that has been carved across
the heartland of this nation.
We need to fully grasp that, and to understand that our people –
dignified, decent and honourable old men like Charlie Phillott - have been
deliberately terrorized, brutalised – and sold out.
In one sense, Charlie Phillott has become the symbol overnight of
every decent Australian: the simple right to live out our lives on the land we
love - and the land we are still free to call our own. At least until some
dangerously persuaded corrupted trendy liberal theorist decided to strip all
that away.
The truth is, no Australian was ever consulted about whether or
not they wanted to see their land mined into oblivion or see our precious water
poisoned and given away for free, whether they wanted to be driven off their
land by the greed of banking executives who saw the chance to make a profit by
wiping out the weakest and most vulnerable amongst us.
No Australian was ever consulted about whether or not we wanted to
see our beloved homeland sold on the cheap to greedy faceless foreigners just
because some slimy two-faced minister managed to convince a weakened prime
minster to meekly carry out his bidding.
Nobody has asked us. We the People. Not once.
So if we are ever going to do something, then we’d better realise
that its now only two minutes to midnight – so we’d better move fast.
Regards
Please share this as widely as you can across Australia. You are
now the only truthful means we have to spread the message.
