Feb 20, 2010 - counter the undesirable trend towards Australia becoming a âone-trick ponyâ resource exporting econom
Stephen Barber 13 Woodland Drive Peregian Beach, 4573, Qld 20 February 2010
Dear Introducing Myself Application for Endorsement as the LNP Candidate for Longman I would like to personally introduce myself to you regarding my application for endorsement as the LNP candidate for Longman at the next Federal election. By way of background, I’ve recently returned home to the Sunshine Coast in Queensland after 12 years living in the US and Canada, with the express intention of seeking to run for the Australian Parliament, as I believe the time is right to give voice to a resurgent conservative movement in Australia, focused on issues such as: •
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defeating the pro-global warming lobby and Rudd’s proposed ETS as an unnecessary tax that will cripple Australian business and destroy jobs and our economic competitiveness, fighting against the growth of big government and the ill-advised return to big spending, deficit-financed, Keynesian economics in the face of the global financial crisis (which is far from over) and emphasizing the importance of reducing government debt levels and cutting taxes, so as to reduce upward pressure on interest rates and to create solid long term jobs growth, eliminating the use of the tax system to provide politically-driven incentives, which merely distort normal business investment decisions and create a misallocation of capital to the wrong areas and encourage “rorting of the system” (eg., as evidenced by the current “home insulation scandal” and the associated massive budget blowout), the dangers of the Australian economy becoming too closely dominated by China, which exposes us to great downside in the event of the next cyclical global commodities downturn (which will come as part of the next leg of the global financial crisis),
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encouraging the re-establishment of domestic manufacturing industries to counter the undesirable trend towards Australia becoming a “one-trick pony” resource exporting economy dependent on the ups and downs of the global commodity cycles, the need for Australia to avoid the demographic problems that Europe is beginning to experience as a result of Islamic immigration, resuscitating the Coalition Government’s earlier policy of the Quadrilateral Alliance between Australia, USA, Japan and India, (which will help reduce our dependence on China), bolstering the country and regional areas of Australia (which have always been, and continue to be, vital to the nation’s prosperity), and emphasizing the importance of returning to old–fashioned values, especially ethics, respect, and politeness (which have been continually eroded by the “40 year social experiment” conducted under our noses on us by the TV, film and music industries), which has produced an education system which fails both the young and our society by graduating students who can’t spell, do basic maths, or understand history and our place in it, who value rude and violent behaviour and who take drugs and knives to school (as evidenced by recent events this past week in our Queensland schools regarding children carrying knives to school).
I’m 53 years old, and am a scientist, lawyer and business entrepreneur who has successfully started several businesses from scratch over the years and understands directly the ups and downs of running a business and the stresses of meeting payrolls. I have spent most of my adult life in the energy and natural resources field, either as a banker, lawyer, fund manager or private businessman, in Australia, the USA/Canada and Western Europe. For the last 25 years I have travelled extensively throughout the world on business and am extremely well versed on international issues particularly economic cycles and counter-terrorism, and have been actively involved in conservative politics in the USA for some time through the political group that I started over there in 2006, “NationalOne”, the website for which sets out clearly my political orientation and positions: http://www.nationalone.org/ and which I invite you to take a look at. In relation to the immediate matter of the requirement to continue to fight against the Labor Party’s iniquitous ETS and Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, I am a confirmed and knowledgeable global warming skeptic and am passionately concerned about the absolutely dire effects the ETS, CPRS and related measures will have on the Australian economy if it gets through (not to mention the downside of the highly economically inefficient push towards renewables and especially wind). Indeed, I have been active for the past 5 years or so in North America and Australia in the fight against the man-made global warming lobby. I’m also well connected regarding this issue in US conservative talkback radio (particularly Radio KFMB AM 760 in San Diego) and also am close to key US political figures including Republican Senator James Inhofe who has been leading the charge against the similar US Cap and Trade proposals for some time. In this connection, in 2005, I formed a company called WindRisk, http://www.windrisksolutions.com/ , the business of which is to fix the myriad of problems with wind power generation in the US, Canada and Western Europe, which
I view as one of the largest government-subsidized misallocations of capital in the Western world, so I am extremely well-versed on a first-hand basis on all the relevant pros and cons of wind power versus, for example, coal or nuclear power. On economic issues, I favour low flat taxes, small government, reduced regulation, and absolutely no politically-motivated, fiscal stimulus packages at any time. From my banking and fund management background, I am extremely well versed on the causes of the current and ongoing global financial crisis, and the implications that flow from it (it is far from over, and there are two further waves of the US mortgage crisis embedded in the financial system which will begin to be felt later this year through to 2012, carrying with it a clear risk of a prolonged global economic downturn, just at a time when governments, including the Rudd government, have taken on much too much debt). I’m also acutely aware of the dangers of the approximately $1 quadrillion of derivatives which are currently open in the world financial system. For example, I commenced my banking career in the mid-1980s at the birth of the, then new, foreign exchange and interest rate derivatives market, and at the time wrote several papers within the bank warning of the potential dangers of the growth of derivatives in enabling the real underlying risks to be ignored with catastrophic consequences, which has turned out to be just the case with the global financial crisis. To illustrate the real practical downside of the current stratospheric levels of Australian government debt, did you know that the Rudd stimulus package is in fact the third largest in the world after the US and China? And did you know that if you pay back the national debt at the rate of $1 every second, you will have paid back $1 million in twelve days, but it will take you 32 years to pay back $1 billion, and 31,000 years to pay back $1 trillion! As well, due to my conservative political activities in the US and some related close brushes with Islamic terrorism during my past energy-related business activities, I was the first Australian to study for a Masters of Arts in Diplomacy and International Relations, majoring in counter-terrorism, at the prestigious 190 year old US military college, Norwich University http://www.norwich.edu/ . This has given me a unique perspective and an excellent international contact base on these issues, especially in the context of international relations, political economics strategy, and counterterrorism and defence policy. My family has been in this country since the 1840s as farmers, graziers and in all three branches of the military, and for this reason, I have a “longer term perspective”, so to speak, about Australia, commodity cycles and its place in the world. I feel I can bring a dynamic international flavour to the LNP and to the seat of Longman, and would like to play a key role in shaping our future, particularly as my 12 years living in the USA and Canada have brought home to me the vital importance of the proposed Quadrilateral Alliance, reducing taxes and ending big government, resisting the global warming lobby, fighting global terrorism and islamo-fascism, and resisting the culturally debilitating effects of years of left-leaning policies, not to mention rampant political correctness, as characterized by the Labor Party in Australia and the Democrats in the US. Indeed, I feel strongly that in the face of these threats to our culture and survival, it’s
vital that we lead a return to the old 19th century Australian values on which the country was founded, and I’d like to be at the forefront of this process in the years to come. I will endeavour to contact you by telephone to chat with you directly before the preselection meeting on the 12th March, and look forward to talking with you then. In the meantime please feel free to contact me by telephone or email at the contact details below – I’d be delighted to hear from you. Kind regards, Stephen Barber Ph: 07 5448 2516 Mob: 0450 957 944 Email:
[email protected] 