Isherwood: Only HBPB will avoid a million unemployed on the streets

Reports that the Commonwealth Treasury is now projecting one million unemployed by year’s end reinforce the urgent necessity for the Citizens Electoral Council’s Homeowners and Bank Protection Bill, said CEC leader Craig Isherwood today.

“We are already in a global depression—Australia can’t afford the massive social dislocation that will come from the wave of home foreclosures caused by rising unemployment,” Mr Isherwood said.

“Everywhere you turn now, you are confronted with more and more evidence supporting the need for the HBPB.”

On top of the expectation of a million unemployed, Mr Isherwood cited:

• The large numbers of people who have been caught out in financial scandals, including Storm Financial, BrisConnections, Opes Prime and Basis Capital, which were all an outcome of the deregulation of the financial system by successive governments, and therefore not entirely the investors’ fault, but which are set to cost many thousands of ordinary investors their homes.


• The wave of farm foreclosures across Australia, which is driving irreplaceable family farmers off their land, at a time when Australia, and the world, needs all of the food production it can get.


• The reality that house prices will plunge over the next year or two, forecast by ANU economist Professor Quentin Grafton to be as much as 20 per cent (The Age, 1st May 2009), which will saddle a large percentage of mortgagors, especially among the current wave of first homebuyers, with negative equity, i.e. unpayable debt.


• The belated reporting by Australia’s banks of their already enormous bad debts, set to increase sharply as the property market tumbles, added to their combined $14.2 trillion in off-balance-sheet exposure to the global $1.4 quadrillion derivatives bubble that has already destroyed some of Wall Street’s and Europe’s biggest financial institutions, like Lehman Brothers and AIG, which can only be sorted out through the bankruptcy reorganisation provisions of the HBPB.

“Lyndon LaRouche first proposed the HBPB in America in August 2007,” Mr Isherwood said. “If the U.S. Government had implemented it then, and if the Australian Government had implemented our Australian version of this legislation when we called for it back in 2007, we wouldn’t be in this economic breakdown crisis now.

“The opposition to the HBPB comes from the private bankers who’ve controlled our financial system since they paid Hawke and Keating to deregulate it in 1983,” Mr Isherwood charged.

“Even though they have totally destroyed it, they don’t want to lose their control, back to the government—the people’s representatives—which is what the HBPB would do.

“As long as the major political parties do not take these private bankers on, by passing the HBPB, it means they are continuing the Hawke-Keating-Howard tradition of serving their interests, and not the common good of the people.”

Mr Isherwood concluded, “We know the HBPB will fix this crisis, but it requires the lower 80 per cent income demographic of people, to realise it is up to all of us to lead it, and force our will on the government.

“Anybody who wants to do something, should join the CEC, and contact us to get involved in our latest street campaign for the Homeowners and Bank Protection Bill.”

ENDS