I have to admit, I always rather look forward to the Citizens Electoral Council, because you never know quite what will be on the policy list this time, but you can be sure there will be something magnificently grandiose and just a little bit mad.  I like that in a political party.

Also, the CEC are local – our Senate Candidate also runs in our local government elections sometimes, so I feel a certain neighbourly affection.  We have our very own Coburg crazies and now, we get to export them to the world!  Or at least, to the rest of Victoria.

Sadly, not too many of the major parties share my affectionate feelings for the CEC, so they don’t tend to get very far in the Senate.  If I’m being sensible, I have to acknowledge that this is probably a good thing.

So let’s see what the CEC thinks of everyone else on the Group Voting Ticket…

The CEC have a split ticket, but on each of them the first preference goes to the Family First Party, followed by the DLP, Wikileaks and Katter’s Australian Party.  This is alarmingly mainstream of them, but this affection is not reciprocated – Family First and Katter put them in the middle of the ticket, DLP put them a third of the way down, and Wikileaks put them dead last.  The ticket then wander through an apparently random selection of fairly right-wing parties, with One Nation coming in in the late 40s, but things diverge at 61 on their ballot, with one ticket going Democrats, Labor, Coalition, HEMP, Stable Population, Greens and Palmer United, and the other going Palmer, Coalition, Democrats, Labor Greens, and then HEMP and Stable Population.  The very bottom of the ticket is reserved for the Socialist Equality Party, with Drug Law Reform, the Sex Party and Animal Justice making up the rest of the bottom four.

Let’s have a look at their website, which is very busy looking, and immediately informs me that we must STOP the Bail-In, which is the British Crown’s Plot for Global Genocide.

Ah, CEC.  Don’t ever change.

The CEC’s about page is actually about CEC and LaRouche, and gives us the opportunity to read more about Lyndon LaRouche.  There is also a helpful link asking “Has your neighbour been brainwashed about Lyndon LaRouche?”, which inspires me to instantly go out onto the internet and be brainwashed, because my brain clearly needs to be cleaner, and besides, I want to know about the lizard people.

(Apparently, LaRouche has connections with David Icke, who is all about the world being run by alien lizard people, which may or may not be code for Jews, and suddenly the whole thing becomes far less amusing)

This website is actually really hard to read – so much text in bold and so many links to more pages full of links.

OK, I have found the History and Philosophy of the CEC, which is all about achieving peace through economic development, which sounds good so far as it goes.  They want ‘economic reconstruction, including debt moratoria for farmers and the re-establishment of a national bank’, because we are on the verge of a new Great Depression, “one which was caused by the insane policies of globalisation, privatisation, deregulation, etc., policies which, if not soon reversed, will plunge the world not merely into a depression, but into a New Dark Age beyond the imagination of most people alive today.”

London and Wall Street have done this deliberately, of course, and they “are terrified that Mr. LaRouche’s “New Bretton Woods” proposal to return to a system of sovereign, protectionist nation-states (as in the early postwar period) will bankrupt the power of the world financial oligarchy, paving the way for governments to pursue policies of the “general welfare” or “common good”, as opposed to enriching a tiny minority of individuals, at the expense of everyone else.”.

The CEC takes ‘the Judeo-Christian-Islamic view that all human beings are created in the living image of God”, which is nice, because Islam usually gets forgotten when we are going all Judeo-Christian heritage, and they should be part of the group, too.  Of course, this means that there “is only one race—the human race—contrary to the racist premises of multiculturalism.”

Multiculturalism is racist now?  Excellent.  And here’s my favourite bit.

A major contributing factor to the present economic collapse, is the anti-human, bestial policies represented by the rock-drug-sex counterculture which took off in the 1960s. The “me first”, “me only” policies championed by the counterculture, are precisely those also championed by the economic policies of globalisation, privatisation, etc.; indeed, the former has helped prepare the way for the latter. The CEC is committed, as is Mr. LaRouche, to urgently re-establishing a new Golden Renaissance, based upon the Classical tradition in art and philosophy, where the creative powers of each individual are fostered, to the benefit of both the individual, and of the entire society.

Is this where I mention that I’m currently listening to Rage in the background, and more particularly, the episode programmed by Julie Bishop, Adam Bandt and Tony Albanese?

Clearly, our entire political establishment has been corrupted by the rock-drug-sex counterculture.

I’m still hunting for proper policies, which is to say, I keep getting distracted by press releases with titles like “Those deadly, green Nazi solar panels”, “David Attenborough Again Demands: Depopulate the Planet” and “Carbon Trading is Hitler-style Genocide!”, not to mention “Rudd is Britain’s agent to turn Syria into WWIII”, “International Fascism: Microsoft will kill more youth than Hitler” (so glad I bought that iMac now) and “Federal MPs covering for planned theft of all bank deposits”.

I don’t think I want to live on whatever planet the CEC is living on.

There are so many links on this site.  It’s like falling down a conspiracy rabbit hole, and I can’t find my way out.  I think at this point, I’m just going to call what I’ve read so far ‘local colour’ and go to the ‘non-negotiable fighting platform’ to see what they actually say they want.  Though I should mention in passing that while their policies don’t mention the environment or global warming, they have plastered articles about it being a myth and a fascist conspiracy all over other sections of their site, not to mention the whole carbon-trading-is-genocide business, so I think we can take it that they don’t believe in climate change.

The local colour is important, though, as many of their policies are quite reasonable, and I wouldn’t want to you get the wrong idea about the CEC.

Unhelpfully, they have several policy pages which are separate from each other and if you find your way to one, the other one can’t be reached from there.  This is probably to protect them from Nazi solar panels.  (I’m feeling a bit bitter, because I just wrote up a whole bunch of policies and then discovered that they were superseded by a new set).

Many of the CEC’s policies revolve around banking and economics.  They want to establish a new Bretton Woods international monetary system, because they think that free trade is destroying our agriculture and industry.  They want tariff protections, fixed exchange rates, and support for agriculture and industry from the government, and if I’m understanding them correctly, they want to get currency back onto the gold standard.  But I’m not sure that I am understanding them correctly.  It does sound odd enough to be possible, though.  They also want to stop bailing out speculators.

In addition, the CEC wants a new National Bank and State Bank, which I believe are to be public banks, and would provide low interest loans for farmers, industry and infrastructure development. This policy has been doing the rounds on a few parties, and I think it’s probably a fairly good one.  They also want to stop foreclosures on farms, which is good, but they are now also excoriating Prime Minister John Howard, which suggests that they may not have looked at this policy for a while.

The CEC wants to stop privatising utilities and public assets, and they want a halt to deregulation by scrapping the National Competition Policy, and again, I agree with these policies.  Why isn’t the rest of their website this sane?

Oh dear, and they also don’t want John Howard to bring in the GST.  Those would be the old policies, then.  I’m going to keep what I’ve written above, however, as it seems to be in keeping with their more recent economic policies, which go into much more detail about how the proposed Commonwealth National Credit Bank will work.  The CEC also wants to separate investment banking from commercial banking, to protect the financial functions of banking that everyone needs from speculators.And, oh joy, oh rapture, I have found their blueprint for economic development and it has – but no. I shall save the best until last.
They have five major programs in mind here.  First up is the Australian Ring Rail proposal, which would put a railway all the way around the coast of Australia from Melbourne up through the east coast to Queensland, up to the Northern Territory and then to Broome and around to Perth.
Australia’s rail sector must be revolutionised, both for the sake of transport within our country, and also to tie Australia into the rest of the world, in particular into the world’s greatest population centres, at the eastern and south-eastern Asian terminals of the Eurasian Land-Bridge. This revolution will have two axes: Prof. Endersbee’s proposal for a Melbourne-Darwin Asian Express, and a vast upgrading and expansion of Australia’s rail network centring upon the new magnetic levitation (mag-lev) rail technology pioneered in Germany, and which is now being built in China.I’m sure magnetic levitation isn’t as magical as it sounds, but it still makes me happy.  The CEC points out that Australia’s rail system was largely built at the turn of the 20th century and needs upgrading. OK then.They want to create Great Water Projects, including using dams to develop irrigation  above the Great Sandy Desert, creating irrigation areas around the Ord and Victoria rivers in the Northern Territory, expanding the Murray Darling Basin, and pumping water from south from Queensland under the Great Division Range through a tunnel.  I can’t honestly say I follow how these projects work, aside from the fact that they seem to be making use of flood waters in the tropics, which doesn’t sound like a bad idea in itself, but even the CEC is talking about how hugely expensive these projects would be.  And I’m still a bit confused about where this water is magically coming from – I mean, yes, I understand that we have rivers that regularly flood, but presumably that water then evaporates or in some other fashion finds its way back into the weather and river systems.  We aren’t going to be creating new water here. But I really don’t know how this works, so maybe I’m missing something.Project three is nuclear power, which is apparently safe and the way of the future.  Also, it could solve the water crisis, because we could use it for desalination.  The CEC are also big on reforestation, and finally we get to find out why solar cells are evil. Or at least, we do in theory, because once again, I have difficulty following their argument.  I think the problem might be because they are trying to compare clorophyll and how good it is for the world when we have more plants with solar panels, and how bad they are for the world, though I don’t quite see how they relate – I keep looking for the part where they explain how clorophyll generates electricity, and it isn’t there…
Anyway, here’s the problem with solar cells:

Solar panels typically absorb about 20 percent of incident sunlight for conversion to electricity. They contribute nothing to moisture recycling, and obtain no benefit from precipitation. In fact, they are most effective with absolutely no clouds in the sky.

Whereas the biogenic migration of atoms is accelerated through the various biogeochemical cycles intersecting at photosynthesis, it is disrupted by the presence of solar panels. Further, unlike plants, solar cells produce, but do not consume, heat in their operation. That is, much of the sunlight that hits a solar cell is either reflected or absorbed as heat, without inducing an electrical current. This heat, as well as that produced in the movement of electricity through conducting wires, constitutes waste heat. In fact, solar cells work best at the frigid temperatures found in the vacuum of space.

We then have it pointed out that dust makes solar panels ineffective and also that dust is a major ecological threat, which may well be true, but solar panels do not actually cause dust, nor is the CEC saying that they do, they are just randomly connecting bad things to each other in a sentence which makes it really hard to follow their argument.

Anyway.  Solar panels also kill insects and could wipe out entire species, and photosynthesis is a much better thing, which again, it may well be, but it doesn’t actually produce electricity, which is what I thought the point of this whole business was.  Also, think of the firemen who die in fires caused by solar panels.  Look, I give up.  It may just be that I’m sleep deprived but I don’t think this makes any sense.  You read it if you want to, and tell me what you think.

The CEC wants Australia to become a world leader in high-speed shipping. I have no objection.

And now, ladies and gentleman, we reach my absolute favourite part of the entire CEC website, which is the part where they explain why Australia needs a space exploration program, and must go from the Moon and to Mars.

If Australians want a real economic recovery, don’t look for it in a rise in the stock market, or in housing prices to even more unaffordable levels—look for it in a resurgence in world-class scientific and industrial capacity, which developing our own space program will catalyse.

We have all of the ingredients for a successful space program: We have brilliant sites for space bases on Christmas Island and Cape York Peninsula, because of their proximity to the equator.

And we have hardy souls in our scientific community, including our own home-grown astronauts Andy Thomas and Paul Scully-Power, and cutting edge rocket scientists in our universities, who have toiled away with minimal support to develop new space technologies, but who could achieve spectacular results if they were charged to lead a national effort.

A space program isn’t a cost, but an investment, which will mobilise our engineering, manufacturing, construction and scientific capabilities, and generate spin-offs for the economy that create jobs and raise our living standard.

Of course.  What better way to stimulate economic recovery than to send a man to Mars?

Enough said.