Real Labor would create a people’s bank, not a “Rudd Bank”

Media Release 27^th of January 2009

Craig Isherwood‚ National Secretary
PO Box 376‚ COBURG‚ VIC 3058
Phone: 03 9354 0544 Fax: 03 9354 0166
Email: cec@cecaust.com.au
Website: http://www.cecaust.com.au

Citizens Electoral Council leader Craig Isherwood has slammed Kevin Rudd’s proposal to make the Government the “lender of last resort” to Australian corporations, which this year face $75 billion worth of foreign loans falling due that they can’t repay.

“Australia desperately needs a new national bank, another ‘people’s bank’ like the original Commonwealth Bank,” Mr Isherwood declared, “It is what a real Labor Party government would do.

“This so-called Rudd Bank proposal is a continuation of the globalist policies adopted by Labor under Hawke and Keating, which systematically handed the public resources that old Labor had built up for decades, over to private financial interests.

“Now that those private interests are going broke, another Labor government is planning to step in with more public resources, and bail them out.”

NAB and Westpac have led Australia’s banks in lobbying Canberra for the “Rudd Bank” scheme, in which the Government would put up the lion’s share of a fund, raised through the sale of government bonds, which would be leveraged up to as much as $30 billion, and directed especially into the commercial property sector.

NAB chief Cameron Clyne told The Australian on Jan. 23, “I think this is the time when strong, functioning [sic], major banks look at partnership opportunities with the Government on a whole range of issues.” [Emphasis added]

Mr Isherwood continued: “It is time to come clean—in truth, our banks are busted, and the Government plans to bail them out.

“Prime Minister Rudd should heed my call last week for an Australian Pecora Commission, to investigate corruption and possible criminality in the financial system, especially the interface between private finance and the politicians who pass the policies to facilitate their corrupt practices.

“He should also return to real Labor values, and establish a new national bank, not to bail out corporates, but to direct public credit into an economic recovery program, centred on large-scale water, power and transport infrastructure projects that would both provide the basic economic infrastructure our industrial economy needs, and create millions of jobs, for those people who are losing their jobs every day as whole sectors of the speculative economy shut down.

“The issue is private benefit vs. the public good,” Mr Isherwood concluded, “and Australia will only survive this crisis if the Government pursues the public good.”

Click here to watch Craig Isherwood’s half-hour video elaborating his call for an Australian Pecora Commission, which gives background to Labor’s historical fight for a banking system in the public interest, and names the names of the rogues’ gallery of politicians who have destroyed our economy on behalf of private banks.