Everything about The Citizens Electoral Council totally explained
The
Citizens Electoral Council of Australia (CEC) is a minor political party in
Australia affiliated with the international
LaRouche Movement, led by
American political activist and
conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche. It reported having 549 members in 2007.
History
The CEC was originally established as an electoral front for the
Australian League of Rights, an extreme right-wing group led by
Eric Butler. CEC candidate Trevor Perrett won the
Queensland State seat of
Barambah at a by-election, held after former Queensland Premier
Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen resigned from State Parliament in
1987. However, Perrett soon switched to the
National Party. The CEC was taken over in
1996 by supporters of LaRouche.
Ironically, League of Rights publications now regularly warn their readers to avoid the CEC.
The CEC leader is National Secretary and National Treasurer
Craig Isherwood of
Melbourne, who has been a CEC election candidate three times. Other members of the Isherwood family are also prominent in the CEC;
Noelene Isherwood is the party's National Chairman.
Platform
The CEC's platform has a variety of planks. Some, such as "the establishment of a National Bank and State Banks to provide loans at 2% or less to agriculture (family farms), industry and for infrastructure development" are traditional policies of the political left in Australia, now abandoned by the
Australian Labor Party. Others, such as "the repeal of all Federal and State anti-union legislation passed over the past several years, beginning with the Federal 1996 Workplace Relations Act," are shared with all parties of the left and centre. A prominent CEC policy sometimes associated with the right is a
zero tolerance criminal law enforcement approach to drug issues. The CEC also aligns itself with
global warming skeptics; CEC activists at a recent televised debate used questions from the audience to make statements comparing the theory of anthropogenic global warming to
eugenics and
Nazism, declaring it to be "Hitler-Nazi race science".
The official thirteen-point platform is as follows:
- The establishment of a "New Bretton Woods International Monetary System".
- The establishment of a National Bank and State Banks.
- The repeal of all federal and state anti-union legislation
- The repeal of recent laws, such as the Australian anti-terrorism legislation, 2004, which the CEC believes have "taken away the civil rights of Australians"
- An immediate halt to the privatisation of Commonwealth and State assets and regulatory bodies
- An immediate moratorium on foreclosures of family farms
- The immediate elimination of the National Competition Policy
- The elimination of the Goods and Services Tax
- The reassertion of national control over Australia's oil and gas and huge mineral resources
- A "dramatic expansion" of resources to all public health facilities
- A "dramatic upgrading" of federal and state infrastructure
- A "real war on drugs"
- The establishment of "generous immigration quotas"
In its campaign literature, the CEC claims to associate itself with "a tradition" including such Australian figures as the Rev
John Dunmore Lang,
King O'Malley,
William Guthrie Spence,
Frank Anstey,
Daniel Deniehy,
Jack Lang,
Ben Chifley and
John Curtin. The CEC also seeks to associate itself with a "bygone tradition" of the
Australian Labor Party, by which it appears to mean the social democratic and
protectionist policies abandoned by the ALP since the late
1970s.
The CEC's website declares the party's opposition to "
synarchists", which they define as "a name adopted during the Twentieth Century for an occult freemasonic sect, known as the Martinists, based on worship of the tradition of the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte...twentieth-Century and later fascist movements, like most terrorist movements, are all Synarchist creations."
Criticism
The Anti-Defamation Commission of the Australian branch of
B'nai B'rith (a body similar to the
Anti-Defamation League in the United States) has published a Briefing Paper with details of the CEC's alleged anti-Semitic, anti-gay, anti-Aboriginal and racist underpinnings. The document cites CEC publications which accuse the CEC's opponents of racism. The CEC in turn has published a detailed response to the ADC's accusations,
(External Link
) and described the ADC "as a front for Queen Elizabeth's Privy Council, the ruling body of the British Commonwealth." (The British
Privy Council is a purely ceremonial body which no longer has constitutional connection with Australia or the
Commonwealth of Nations.) This allegation, that there's a link between the ADC and the alleged power of the Privy Council, has been attributed to the fact that Sir
Zelman Cowen, a former
Governor-General of Australia and a member of the Privy Council, is an honorary patron of the ADC.
Electoral Results
At the
2001 federal election, CEC candidates polled extremely low totals; for example, in the
New South Wales Senate elections, the CEC ticket polled 2,370 votes out of 3.8 million votes cast.
The party fielded candidates for the Senate and most
House of Representatives seats at the
2004 federal election. In some seats it distributed glossy full-colour pamphlets, setting out its views, as well as billboards and television advertising in some areas, suggesting that the party has access to sources of finance greater than its small electoral base would suggest.
Australian Electoral Commission records indicate that the CEC has successfully raised several million dollars since 2001.
Despite this fundraising, the CEC polled extremely low totals again in 2004. The day after the election preliminary figures showed that the CEC had 34,177 votes, or 0.35 percent of the national vote, in the House of Representatives. Out of the 95 electorates in which they were represented, the CEC came last in 80 electorates.
Between September 2005 and January 2006
The Australian reported upon alleged infiltration by the CEC of the
National Civic Council (NCC), claiming the latter organisation's dismissal of its state executives over the Christmas 2005 period was an internal coup. CEC chairman Noelene Isherwood, while denying outright infiltration, was cited by
The Australian's reporter Greg Roberts on 17 September 2005 as saying: "We know that a lot of their [for examplethe NCC's] members are supporters of our ideas. That's good to see." It should be noted that writers such as
Hilaire Belloc,
G. K. Chesterton and other prominent Catholic apologists championed by the NCC's founder
B. A. Santamaria are condemned in LaRouchist literature as "pro-Nazi".
At the
2007 federal election, the CEC's previous form continued. The number of first preference votes in the lower house was 27,879 (0.22 percent), and 8,677 (0.07 percent) in the upper house, both results were 0.14 percent down from 2004. However, in the
Northern Territory Senate count where a quarter of their vote came from, the CEC received 2.01 percent of the vote, overtaking the
Australian Democrats. Territory candidates, however, require a much higher quota to gain election than candidates in the states.
Youth movement
The CEC also includes the
Australian LaRouche Youth Movement (ALYM), the Australian branch of the International
LaRouche Youth Movement. It was founded in August 2002, and focusses on the economic thought of Lyndon LaRouche and Australia's "republican tradition of figures such as
John Curtin and
King O'Malley" (neither of whom were in fact republicans).
The ALYM's responsibilities have included managing the groundwork in Federal campaigns, aiding State Campaign efforts, collecting signatures for petitions and mobilising the public and Parliament against anti-terror laws. Members are often found on the streets of Melbourne, home of the National CEC office.
In October 2003 the members of the ALYM, with the help of some members of the International Youth Movement, organised its first "Cadre School". The ALYM hopes to "organize the youth population of the country and harness the enthusiasm and optimism that they offer." The ALYM works for CEC candidates in election campaigns, distributes LaRouche literature and collects signatures for petitions.
The ALYM claims that its membership grew during the
2004 federal election campaign,) during which they worked for CEC candidates in three election campaigns in the Melbourne region, in
Maribyrnong,
Calwell and
Melbourne Ports, where they went door-to-door handing out copies of the election edition of the New Citizen, which featured articles on the fight for a National Bank in Australia and the founding of the Australian Liberal Party in the 1940s, and explaining the potential of "
LaRouche's New Bretton Woods" and the "dirty state of the Australian political scene".
Twelve ALYM members ran for the House of Representatives and for the Senate in
Victoria at the 2004 election. They also managed three flagship campaigns in the Melbourne Region, including the campaign of Aaron Isherwood, himself a member of the ALYM, standing against
Michael Danby (well known to be hostile to LaRouche) in the seat of
Melbourne Ports. All candidates polled very low votes.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Citizens Electoral Council'.
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