This Once Great Country

Yuglamron · Guru

This Once Great Country

aussie_paul · Guru

There we go Trevor...

https://www.facebook.com/OVHRepro

Aussie Paul. smile

Yuglamron · Guru

Thank You Aussie Paul.

wazzawiseone · Veteran Member

Wow

All I can think of is that everyone take a little time out to read Dr Pascoe's open letter.

Also Alan Jones Audio of the situation : http://www.2gb.com/audioplayer/80496#kCg13BYbUvq0fK4P.01

Most of us have Grandchildren and what is scary is what legacy has been left for them.

I feel very saddened to read that 7.5 Million Dollars will be spent on New Years Fireworks in Sydney. Think how that much money could help the backbone of our Country.

Feel so helpless, it really bought me to tears.

For those that cannot access Facebook this is the text.

AUSTRALIA WE ARE BETTER THAN THIS!

THIS POST HAS NOW REACHED 1.1 MILLION HITS IN LESS THAN 24 HOURS

Politicians of Australia, the people are speaking - and you need to listen.
The team of people who are supporting David - who is flat out... working and operating on horses right now - took a call from one of Australia's most respected and best loved former political leaders this morning who said:
THIS LETTER HAS BECOME A DEFINING MOMENT IN OUR NATIONS HISTORY.."

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE AUSTRALIAN PEOPLE:

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 irreparable 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 enrage 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 doesnt 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 isnt 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 famers 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 Gods 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 its 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 heres 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 thats if the banks havent 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 1890s, 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 ****s 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 ****s 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 insidethe 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 dont 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 wed better realise that its now only two minutes to midnight so wed better move fast.

Regards

David

Please share this as widely as you can across Australia. You are now the only truthful means we have to spread the message.
Contact politicians, contact newspapers, radio and television stations. Demand that your voice is heard.

-- Edited by wazzawiseone on Tuesday 9th of December 2014 06:45:45 PM

-- Edited by wazzawiseone on Tuesday 9th of December 2014 06:56:27 PM

-- Edited by wazzawiseone on Tuesday 9th of December 2014 07:12:28 PM

Nelly · Guru

A Minister from western NSW said that some people in that area are so badly off that they can only afford noodles to live on - it is not only the farmers suffering but also the businesses in their small towns and their communities. I think it is so sad that our govt only come up with low interest loans (more debt is the last thing they want) when there are a lot of people getting the dole and don't deserve to - I know there are genuine ones but so are the farmers and those small businesses should be entitled to this surely - they (the farmers and business) don't want or expect handouts all the time but there comes a time when help is needed. I have experienced drought personally as no doubt there are some of you out there also - it really is so, so hard. I think govt should take a long hard look at themselves and help the people here at home not all this overseas aid all the time.
As for the fireworks in Sydney it is a disgrace - look where our hospitals, country roads etc. are up to. There seems to be new tunnels and/or roads in Sydney going ahead every other day. What about the stupid arch that the Sydney mayor wants - goodness me!!
Anyway I will now hop off the matchbox - that is my say for the day - thanks.

Cloak · Guru

From all accounts no-one gives a rats about Australian agriculture while we can negotiate a FTA with China.

This FTA is based on minerals and resources given to china and Chinese fruit and veg purchased by us.

There's the Coal extraction using Chinese workers and we get royalties "they" set.

Yep we've ironed out any chance of value add and exported a massive chunk of our economy to other countries.

Good ol USA has exported so much of it's economy to other places that their middle class is almost dead and that is 75% of their economy.

Maybe we are simply copying them.

Sheba · Guru

This has been going on for at least 45 years that I know of. No matter how many times we [the general public,] write Letters to the Editor, or complain to our local Pollies, no one listens or cares. All they care about, is lining their own pockets, and making the most of what they can get today.

They don't care about tomorrow, or next week, or month or year, or century.

So much for supposedly governing the country for the advantage of the Citizens.

It's a disgusting situation.

Cheers,

Sheba.

Ole_Grizzly · Senior Member

Fireworks...$7.5 million just for Sydney. Looks great, is exciting to hear and view, but what a damned waste all that money going into pollution.

How it would be one grand statement for Australians to stand firm and say NO to this waste. Let the world watch us make this statement, it will become news headlines around the globe. Imagine if this did happen all around the world.

The 'New Year' would and could be as such. A NEW YEAR, A NEW BEGINNING FOR MANKIND

And for every state capital and associated towns and communities also to say NO.

Combine this saving of monies into a transparent fund to assist any and all Australian citizens who are in need.

"Your Honour, I rest my case, thank you"

-- Edited by Ole_Grizzly on Tuesday 9th of December 2014 10:17:52 PM

delatite · Veteran Member

The trouble is that this is an "a political" situation. Is doesn't matter what government, Federal, State, Local, which politician. They just cannot see the grass for the trees, or lack of them in this case.
They re so wound up in making their own little empires to satisfy, their supposed achievements, they quite simply do not give a **** about anyone or anything apart from themselves, or what they can achieve for themselves.

Ole_Grizzly · Senior Member

Well, we as a "people" need to personally attend at our elected members office or ring, and voice this opinion.

Gosh! Our new members of this Australian society get "slam dunked' for voicing or taking a demonstration in public, so I am damned if I know why we sit back and not join together and make this statement.

grumble grumble..etc etc etc.

Ole_Grizzly · Senior Member

Sorry Cindy for inciting a Riot. But gosh! Wouldn't it make the (our elected) members of government stop in their tracks and think, "Heck! Is people out there who are genuinely concerned. OK, I can feel the approaching vibes. Not sure at this moment if 'for or against'.

Give it your best shot my friends...time we made our knees creak, body groan, and make ourselves known to them who control our daily existence...

I'll sit back and take all you can throw at me..lol.

meetoo · Guru

It Is a travesty that makes one almost ashamed to be Australian, in an otherwise lucky country!!!.

John

Cowboy7307 · Senior Member

Coming from one of the greatest little islands in the world ,the one i call home now, spend millions on sports people, but we cant put a bed in a hospital,
Companies could not pay farmers for their product ,but were able to send the head men round the world on fact finding missions,send managers on bonding weekends in the NT , wee have so many people in high places in Tasmania the buildings are starting to tilt, The western world as we know it is crumbling around us, same as the Roman empire around 400AD

kesue · Senior Member

I came to this country 23 years ago and thought it was the best place on earth,NOT NOW.This information is is most shocking but not surprising.all governments in the time that I have been here seem to be getting it more and more wrong.What is wrong with these people someone has to stand up and acknowledge that these terrible things are happening. Thank you so much for having the guts to inform everyone of this and maybe at the next election we can all show our disapproval by showing up at the voting stations but not filling in the ballot papers.What havoc that would cause SUE BRADFORD.

GaryKelly · Guru

Before criticizing the spending of $7.5m on fireworks for Sydney, consider what would happen if the money was withdrawn and used for something else. $20m or $30m revenue generated by tourism would be lost. Nothing is ever as simple as it seems, and I will continue to exercise an open mind on the matters raised in this thread.

Santa · Guru

This is blatant, emotive, political clap trap.

aussie_paul · Guru

GaryKelly wrote:
Before criticizing the spending of $7.5m on fireworks for Sydney, consider what would happen if the money was withdrawn and used for something else. $20m or $30m revenue generated by tourism would be lost. Nothing is ever as simple as it seems, and I will continue to exercise an open mind on the matters raised in this thread.

Gary and All, it is difficult to keep and open mind on these types of subjects when the media stories make one think of waste, I know I do until you think a bit deeper re flow ons etc.

Aussie Paul. smile

Webmaster · Guru

Hi all,
Thanks for your input. As most of you know, we do not allow political discussions on this forum as it often leads to bad feelings. I am closing this thread down now. Thanks for your understanding.

Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens.