God doesn’t need to save the Queen
Citizens Electoral Council of Australia
Media Release
4th of June 2009
God doesn’t need to save the Queen—she’s got Barnaby
As the June 15th deadline nears for the Australian Government’s decision to allow or disallow Chinalco to increase its stake in Rio Tinto, opposition to the move is playing out like a 19th century English comic opera, with Barnaby Joyce playing the “very model of a modern” toady of the Queen.
His crusade to protect Rio Tinto from the Chinese on the grounds of Australia’s national interest is high farce—it is a British company, owned by Her Majesty Queen Elisabeth herself.
The history of Rio Tinto is full of ironies with regards to the flap over Chinalco’s share bid:
It was
founded in 1873 by Hugh Matheson, of the Jardine Matheson
drug running firm, which wrested Hong Kong from China for
Queen Victoria in the Opium Wars.
Lord Alfred Milner,
who’s infamous British Round Table repackaged the British
Empire as the British “Commonwealth”, chaired the
company until 1925.
In World War II, the British-owned
Rio Tinto produced pyrite in Spain for the Nazi war
effort.
In 1962, it merged with the British-controlled
Collins House firm Consolidated Zinc, to form Rio Tinto-Zinc
(RTZ) and its Australian subsidiary Conzinc Rio Tinto
Australia (CRA); CRA’s founding chairman, Sir Maurice
Mawby, doubled as the chief fundraiser for Prince Philip’s
newly established Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF),
which spawned Australia’s entire “green”
movement.
When RTZ became embroiled in international
scandal in the 1970s, its chairman, Sir Mark Turner,
formerly a top official in the British Ministry of Economic
Warfare, expressed concern that, “You’re running into
problems of what the government is going to say about the
Queen’s involvement.” In 1977, it was revealed through a
question in the British parliament that the Bank of England
set up a special nominees company to hide investments of the
Queen’s portfolio.
In Australia, Rio Tinto, formerly
CRA, has played a central role in all of the major assaults
on Australia’s economic sovereignty in the past three
decades—the sacking of Whitlam; union-busting;
environmentalism and land rights; and the Hawke-Keating
economic “reforms” of free trade, privatisation, the
Hilmer Commission into National Competition Policy, and the
Productivity Commission.
Since 1983, the “reforms” of
Australia’s economy initiated by Hawke and Keating, and
fully supported, and continued, by the Howard Coalition,
have decimated Australia’s once-proud manufacturing sector
and family farms, and reduced the economy to little more
than a giant quarry of raw materials, for the globalised
world economy, of which the chief beneficiary has been Rio
Tinto.
Why is a Queensland Senator in Australia’s Commonwealth Parliament trying to protect this British looting operation, from the Chinese government?
Barnaby, stop kissing the Queen’s arse; if you seriously oppose foreign control of Australia’s resources, support the CEC’s call to nationalise all of Australia’s resources, so they can be developed for our national interest.
ends