Skate-goats
Northern exposure

By Rowan Callick

What do the Queen, BHP, the World Bank, law firm Blake Dawson Waldron, Messrs Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch, former US President George Bush, the British SAS, the Church of England, the Corps of Commissionaires and The Australian Financial Review have in common?

The answer is well known to the followers of far right American identity Mr Lyndon LaRouche: all are involved in a coup conspiracy against Papua New Guinea. Beleaguered PNG Prime Minister Mr Bill Skate recently raised the profile of Australian LaRouche-ite arm the Citizens Electoral Council by referring, in a national television broadcast, to its claims about a "conspiracy to destabilise our Government."

The council's foray into the complex world of Papua New Guinea politics was marked by the recent publication of a report headlined "Queen Elizabeth runs a coup - the case of Papua New Guinea".

The document is "the work of an investigative team from Executive Intelligence Review, the weekly intelligence journal founded by US statesman and economist Lyndon LaRouche."

The report - "essential reading for anyone who is interested in the truth," the Melbourne-based Citizens Electoral Council states - "reveals" that "under cover of a manufactured corruption scandal about the hiring of mercenaries to train PNG's army, the Government of Sir Julius Chan was ousted in June, in order to open up the nation's vast raw materials wealth to unbridled looting by London-centred financial interests on the eve of the worst worldwide financial collapse in history."

The document "uncovers" a conspiracy against "the nationalist Chan" that embraces the most eclectic group of plotters ever imagined: members of the Privy Council top officials of the Commonwealth, the intelligence services and foreign affairs apparatus of Australia, "leading firms of Her Majesty's raw materials cartel, Rio Tinto and BHP", the anti-corruption group Transparency International which, "spawned" by Prince Philip and the World Bank, "mobilised the mobs to dump Chan", "assorted mercenary clones of the British SAS under the direction of Her Majesty's Corps of Commissionaires", Mr Kerry Packer, Mr Rupert Murdoch, and "sanctimonious evangelical-pentecostal churches and non-government organisations."

Mr Skate was elected Prime Minister by Parliament following an election during which his predecessor, Sir Julius Chan, lost his seat in the wake of the controversy over his hiring of mercenaries, via the Sandline organisation, to help end the Bougainville rebellion. Mr Skate has himself come under heavy fire over accusations of corruption. The LaRouche document states: "When you hear that such-and-such a government is corrupt, you may be quite sure - unless it be a government tied to that one man army of real corruption, George Bush - that the Empire has it in its crosshairs. The hordes of zombies, marching with shining eyes and outstretched arms, and chanting Transparency! are agents of Her Majesty." The other unleasher of anarchy is the Church of England, which also "deploys rabble-rousing mobs".

The report lambasts The Australian Financial Review - which, it says, "let the cat out of the bag as to what was really afoot" at the time of the Sandline affair, by stating in an editorial: "The PNG Government teeters on the brink of again elevating a spurious form of economic nationalism above rationalism."

Sir Anthony Siaguru, a former PNG Foreign Affairs head and Minister, is a prime target of the LaRouche conspiracy theory: the Transparency chairman in PNG, a former Commonwealth deputy head (thus linked to Her Majesty, whom LaRouche claims to be a leader in international drug dealing) and also "a member of the elite law firm Blake Dawson Waldron which handles the accounts for key multinationals in PNG".

Others involved in the conspiracy include World Bank head Mr James Wolfensohn, "one of a handful of bankers who in the 1960s founded the international drug-money laundromat known as the Eurodollar market" and "a long time business partner of Mr Packer", who owns PNG's EM TV station.

Just as Mr Skate has raised the LaRouche profile, so LaRouche elevates the "still-existing British Empire" to the status of "the single greatest financial and political power on this planet." And BHP, it says, is today "part of the Queen's world minerals cartel." But "though Her Majesty's minions ousted Chan, they have not yet achieved all they set out to."

Mr Skate has thus been warned. And he has responded by asking the longsuffering Australian high commission in Port Moresby to investigate. In PNG, of conspiracies and investigations there is no end. In LaRouche, it has thus met the perfect match.

Rowan Callick is a journalist with The Australian Financial Review.