And Tibet

Where does the Jewish media tell me I should be directing my attention? Tibet, says they. Well, they would wouldn't they? Anywhere but Israel, AIPAC and central banking.


And in Tibet, the Chinese are villains. They invaded a country, occupied it for fifty years odd, encouraged the mass immigration of ethnic outsiders, and beat or shot any indigenes who complained. I'm not even going to bother commenting on the parallels. Regardless, the media has done a terrific job of making clear who's done what to whom in Tibet. They can do this if they choose to. But it's what they don't choose that counts.

And who knew what was not being chosen until the internet arrived? We can now compare what's chosen with what's not. The results are perfectly tangible. Is anyone confused about where the blame lies in Tibet? Are there any people out there thinking the Tibetans are terrorists? Are the Chinese given all the airtime they need to explain Tibetan villainy and Chinese victimhood? The media could do this if they wanted to do. They've done precisely that in Palestine for decades.

-For the record, the Chinese I talked to have variations of justifications. Before the Chinese arrived, Tibet was a very wicked place much given to serfdom. The Chinese dismiss ethnic questions - We're all ethnic minorities, they say. Beijing is full of people (like my friends) from Shandong, Xian, Hunan, etc, and they all speak a language that is not Mandarin and they all have their own distinctive cuisine and culture - just like the Tibetans. 'We're under this government, why shouldn't they be?'. This is self-serving, sure. The central government is Han and all of my friends are also Han. Tibet is not Han.


However, the media, if they chose to, could easily portray the Chinese as hard-done-by victims with the Tibetans as primitive, feudalistic, trouble-making untermenschen. It's easy enough. They need merely emulate their portrayal of the Palestinians under their spectacularly vicious ethnically alien occupier. The parallels with the Chinese in Tibet are spooky. But these comparisons will never be made. Not least because the Israelis blow the Chinese out of the water for racist brutality.

I'm way past pretending the media is the Pulitzer-hunting keep-the-bastards-honest truth machine they say they are. I also couldn't be shagged differentiating between print, television, and Hollywood. They all sing from the same song-sheet, they all follow the same narrative. The ability to imagine a narrative in a Hollywood flick is the same ability required to imagine the narrative we receive in the news. Cinema is to News what oils are to acrylics - a minor variation that the painter takes in his stride.

It's really simple. The central banks are the biggest game going. Bigger than the MIC, big oil, big pharma, agribusiness and every other industry - put together. The biggest most powerful single entity in the world receives zero coverage in the media. Think about that. And it was always this way. Wonder at Karl Marx completely breaking down capitalism and creating its opposition and never mentioning central banking - an impossibility. It's precisely as impossible as the utter absence of central banking in the media. The media (along with Marx) would have it that we view monetarism and central banking as an immutable law of nature, an Act Of God.

Best we look away. The media will direct us. Okay, so who would they have us believe the villains are? A five year old could spot it - movie after movie, drama after drama, news after news - those we must hate are: Arabs/Muslims, Russia, and China, in that order. Would I be right in thinking that the aforementioned three peoples are not subject to a central bank owned by the Rothschilds and their very good friends? It's a fair question.


Anyone who knows - feel free to fill me in. God knows we'll never find out in the media. Otherwise, as this same media screams that I direct my attention towards the Chinese, I grit my teeth and turn in the direction they bid me. And sure, I condemn those black-hearted Chinese villains. But then I turn back again. I'd rather keep my eye on the beast that bids me.

Chinese aspirations of immodesty, ha ha

There we were sitting around a table having eaten one of those stupendous Chinese meals. Amongst the debris of bowls and chopsticks, with everyone who smokes doing so, it's time to be clever and entertain the table. Apropos something or other, I say, 'I'm only so-so at most things. The only thing I really shine at, to which I can claim that I am the greatest in the world, is being modest. I am the Most Modest Man In The World!' It's a standard, recycled nobody gag. Anyway, I get a laugh out of the Laowai but the Chinese don't get it. As an ex-English teacher I should have known that 'modest' is outside most second-language speakers' vocab.

A dictionary, by way of a mobile phone (they can do that now), is consulted and brows are furrowed and a long discussion ensues wherein it's explained to me that this is not such a good meaning in Chinese. One finds this a lot, particularly in Asia. Words such as 'modest', which we all understand as being simple, ain't. They're actually quite complex. 'Love, honour and obey' for instance will have an entirely different complexion in another language and vice versa. And sometimes you get it and sometimes you don't.


Anyway, back at the table, Maya the mad artist, launches into a diatribe about what's wrong with Chinese people and how people who are good at things aren't capable of celebrating like Westerners. Like sports stars who score a goal or somesuch. "We see Western people being natural and celebrating and saying they are good but we can't do that. We have to behave in this 'modest' way." Her vibe is that 'modest' is a thing expected or forced upon you.

I'm off now because she’s touched on a pet subject. "You think that those sportsmen's celebrations are spontaneous, that it just pops into their head then and there?" I explain how I've seen soccer players who form a little tableau and one pretends he's polishing the other's shoes. God spare us. It's a contrived and calculated show-pony wank-fest. Like the Australian cricketers who all have their trademarked celebration. One has his weird ground-punching thing that most closely resembles a man trying to start a lawn-mower. I'm perfectly sure he practises it in a mirror. I'm guessing the lawn-mower thing never occurred to him (nor that he looks like a dickhead). Soccer players are the worst though. Putting your shirt over your head and running around like you're an aeroplane is... is... what the hell is that? Who does this in real life? Apart from drunken arseholes?


"And what, Maya, you want Chinese people to behave like that? Don't believe the hype. What you see on DVD is not a reflection of us. Fuck Jerry Maguire. It's bullshit. It's the product of a machine designed to turn us, and you, into bedazzled LA Galaxy shirt-buying idiots. If you think that whatever 'modesty' means here is oppressive, it could be worse. You could find yourself in a culture where there isn't any and everybody is impressed with themselves for no reason at all - A legion of Bart Simpsons expecting to get high-fived for cracking out a fart. If Chinese sportsmen and women can win and behave like normal people in a modest fashion, like laowai used to a few decades ago, I salute them. I just wish we could rediscover it."

Anyway I headed the conversation into absurdity territory by suggesting that we found a new sports competition and all the best teams of celebrators get together and compete in who has the best celebration. Players would form football-boot-wearing theatrical tableaus and recreate Armstrong on the moon, or Marie Curie discovering radium, or the signing of the treaty of Versailles. I'd win of course because my team would (idea-disappearing-up-its- own-arse style) recreate the meal at which the idea for the competition was first thought up. Brilliant. The crowd would go nuts and then to celebrate? We'd play an actual game of actual football. Ha!


Maya thinks this is great and I should do it for real as an art installation. Um, okay, sure, this and a thousand other idiot ideas. I crack out a fart. High five!

Chinese Teenagers

No need to fear. I am alive and well in the Northern capital of the Middle Kingdom, which is to say Beijing, China. The sky is blue, the food is good and the DVD's are a buck a throw. Around the Worker's Stadium Azure Magpies are building nests. And I have a lot of friends here, so it's good to be back. We go to Hohai and drink Yanjing beer for forty cents a bottle.


The internet has changed greatly since I first came here ten years ago. Currently it seems blogspot, wordpress and wikipedia are blocked (and Rense, curiously). However via an unblocked route I may post to, but not read, this blog. I can read the comments as they come in but not comment myself, ha ha.

And this is censorship, sure. But censorship is a funny thing. When done well censorship should more precisely be described as 'absence'. As ever, the absence of things is less noticeable than the presence of things. We all know what's absent in the Western media. Politically, there's no discussion beyond the agreed upon shadow play. Culturally there's almost nothing past a mad obsession with whatever is new and most worthless. Philosophically (not that the media likes that word) there's little other than an all-pervading, centrifugal individualism.

In attempting to discern the absences here, let's just say - China is intensely 'foreign'. It can overwhelm. Spotting the absences is both difficult and easy, ha ha. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll just focus on culture.


There is no Survivor or Big Brother here. There are no shows which pit individuals against each other in contrived trivial orgies of lying and cheating. There are no people voting each week for whom they hate the most. There are no dramas featuring serial killers who pretend to be normal. I have never seen sex or titillation on the TV here. Subsequently there is no Desperate Housewives or Dirt or anything even close. There are none of those tedious high-school snot-fests. Nor is there anything like Seinfeld here. Perhaps such depictions of worthless people spending their lives striving for, and arguing over nothing, strike the Chinese as idiotic. Who knows? Perhaps most crucially, the adulation of teenagers is completely absent.

But the results are easy to see, provided one can get past the shock of culture. On warmer evenings, people relax outdoors in an agreeable social fashion. Teenagers with unpretentious haircuts and clothes sit with the adults enjoying conversation. Once you twig to the fact that teenagers here do not have an attitude it's actually shocking. They do not argue with their parents. They do not go off to the mall and sulkily 'hang out'. They're far more likely to be whapping a shuttlecock around with their mother. No really! Flyovers and other places free of trees and powerlines are popular for kite-flying. In front of the Worker's Stadium every day I see people ballroom dancing, doing tai chi and other similar variations of the gentler martial arts. Tai chi is a martial art, you know. The main thing is that all of this can be summed up as ‘simple pleasures’. Chinese people broadly are not jaded. It's astounding how refreshing it is.


It's changing, of course. Kids here play computer games too. And every single thing produced by Hollywood (either for the big screen or small) is available here on pirate DVD. But they are viewed as foreign. The effect they have on the culture and the people are minimal. Chinese culture remains dominant. There is no chameleon-like sub-group here re-interpreting their culture for them. I’m entirely certain the government here exerts control to prevent shows such as this. Is this censorship? I expect so. But gee it's nice to see a culture that isn't driven by a perverse combination of angst and trivial self-obsession, that instead prizes family and harmony, and lacks snotty teenagers.

'What is Jewish?', says Chris.

I have a good buddy Miklos who's from Hungary. He's Jewish and has a star of David around his neck. And there we were, Miklos, another buddy Chris, and me down at the pub having a beer. And Miklos is telling us how Israel knocked back his application for citizenship and that's why he's in Oz. In Hungary after WWII his grandmother converted to Catholicism and he was raised Catholic. He had no idea he 'was Jewish' until he was in his mid-twenties. Chris and me - both astounded. Chris asks him if he goes to Synagogue and does all the religious stuff. He grins, raises his hands in a gesture of warding off and emphatically shakes his head. I sit watching Miklos and Chris is confused.
'So you're ethnic Jewish?', says Chris.
Miklos tilts his head, 'Well...'.
I pipe up, 'Your family isn't Middle Eastern surely? You'd be Ashkenazi, yeah?' Miklos nods. Chris asks and I explain - Khazar, eastern people in the Caucasus, 8th century, conversion to Judaism. Miklos nods. Perhaps he was surprised at what I knew. I have no idea. He didn't say anything.
Chris' brow is furrowed, 'I don't get it. You weren't raised Jewish, you're not religious and you're not descended from people who lived in Israel. So why are you Jewish?'
'I don't know', says Miklos with a vaguely startled expression and a variation of a shrug. I'm intrigued, but Chris is out-and-out flummoxed.
'What is Jewish?', says Chris.
'Um...', says Miklos.
'Ha! A state of mind', says I.
'Yeah, sure, maybe', says Miklos striking a European attitude that concedes the possible but doesn't pursue it. We tilt back in our seats and drink beer, the conversation having nowhere to go.

It had nowhere to go that was polite, that is. Like I'm going to say to my buddy Miklos, 'Mate, that 'state of mind' is little more than identifying oneself as being separate from those you live amongst. It's what's responsible for the hatred of the Ashkenazi Jews in almost every country they've lived in since the very beginning. It has led to, via banking, the uncaring impoverishment of the 'others', the suffering of whom is considered nothing by those who view themselves as superior. It's a circular hatefest with the us-and-them attitude creating hatred and the hatred reinforcing the us-and-them attitude. Really mate, the distinction should be shed and the hatred would, in three generations max, be as dead as a doornail. But really it's too good a gig to be let go of. There's a fortune in treasure and slaves to be had by its continuation. Not for you of course. You're poorer than I am, trapped under a mortgage. God spare us usury - it only suits the userer. But really mate, it'd be better for you and everyone else if you were to kiss this definition of yourself goodbye and just be another human.'

But like I'm going to say such a thing to person's face. A discussion of delusion such as this is beyond the pale. Friendships get broken over such things. And Miklos is a sweetheart guy. He just doesn't understand what it is he chooses to define himself as. I wonder if any Jewish people do, apart from the top dozen or so families. I'm given to thinking this tiny handful perfectly understands the nature of the delusion which enslaves the millions of expendable Jews. These being the people who live lives of fear as they run around shutting down conversations that might ultimately lay bare the twelve families. Not that the millions do it for this reason. They think it's about them, ha ha.



Jewish people, I address you - The delusion under which you define yourself is but a blink of an eye, a puff of smoke, a fictional contrivance to have you serve the interests of a mere dozen or so families who care not a whit for your wellbeing. Of course you are impressed with yourself and your culture. That's how it works. And yes, this construct is clever and in an inhuman way, genius. But the truth is, it's perfectly fucked. Forget what everyone tells you. Look at this thing clearly. It's a delusion - a mad nonsense that plugs into your understandable desire for flattery. And sure, its rejection is designed to be traumatic. If it was easy to give up it would have passed away long ago. The task ahead of you, the giving up of your us-and-them delusion, will be difficult. Me, I predict a nervous breakdown. But the rightness of it is undeniable. And if you can successfully achieve it, you will, in having saved your own life, help save the world. I wish you well.

no need to thank us

The main thing to remember with anything that goes on in East Timor, is that Australia are always the good guys. We are there to do good and help the Timorese. How could we not want to help the poorest nation on earth?


It's a pity East Timor missed out on those spectacular gas resources just offshore. It was nearly theirs but an imaginative Australian maritime border meant that it was actually ours. But never mind, what with being all-round good guys we're only too happy to develop the gas-fields, build the pipeline, and we might, if they behave themselves, even let the East Timorese have some of the money. But not too much. They might let it go to their heads and spend it on something crazy like roads or hospitals or schools. Really, what would they do with those if they had them? Smash 'em up, I expect.


And what craziness are those Timorese up to now? Lately, Alfredo Reinado the mad, bad and dangerous to know rebel (or patriot, depending on what day it is) has shot Jose Ramos Horta, the president, and shot and missed Xanana Gusmao, the new PM. Perhaps Reinado's long friendship with Gusmao (involving handshakes, hugs, congratulatory letters, friendly visits to Gusmao's house, and not forgetting declarations of allegiance) put a tear in Reinado's eye and caused him and his similarly tearful fellow-ambushers to miss. Who knows?


We in Australia like Gusmao. He's exactly the right sort of fellow. We also know that Reinado is a mad villain. We know that because he went crazy-ape bonkers and destabilised East Timor when the wicked dwarf Mari Alkatiri was PM. We never liked Alkatiri. He thought the gas belonged to Timor and wanted Australia and our kind-hearted gas developers to pay full-tote odds or fuck off. How dare he seek a deal with the Chinese?! What an ingrate. Not only is he ugly and short, and a Muslim(!), but I can't recall a single instance of him gushing about how great Australia is.


Not forgetting the Roman Catholic church in East Timor - they really hated Alkatiri! He rudely wanted to have a separation of church and state and to make religious education optional. The anti-christ in person! After the church (and their helpful Australian advisers) unsuccessfully tried to convince various East Timorese army regiments to bring a coup against Alkatiri, no one was surprised that Major Reinado did the right thing and started shooting the wicked army members that refused to join the church's uprising. Chaos. 'Alkatiri made me do it!', said Reinado astoundingly. Um... okay, sure, why not? That doesn't make a lick of sense but let's not spoil the party. Seeya Alkatiri, ya evil ingrate midget party-pooper! Thank God that fine fellow Gusmao was there to take the reins. He understands the rightness of us drilling the gas, which is ours.


Sensibly, none of us paid any attention when SBS journo John Martinkus, an old East Timor hand and johnny-on-the-spot, investigated Reinado's uprising and found that it was complete bullshit with the local cops and members of the military all as thick as thieves, and all gormlessly pointing fingers back at Gusmao. My favourite bit was when a local commander called up his boss and whilst firing in the air said that he was under attack. On camera! Those whacky foreigners!

Really, what was Martinkus on about? Bullshit obviously, since not a single media organisation paid any attention. Not apart from Rupert Murdoch's minions that is, who bravely attacked Martinkus as a mad, drug-taking, child-molester, or some such ad hominem. Quite right. Was Martinkus sacked? I certainly haven't seen him since. Serve him right if he was.

And Alkatiri? Those useless bloody Timorese lawyers must have screwed up because the wild charges against him involving massacres and mass graves (no really!) went up in smoke and he remains a free man. I expect the smoke was due to Alkatiri digging up the bodies and burning them before reburying them. Villains do that, you know.


And spare a thought for poor old Reinado, now declared an outlaw. He ran around in the jungle uttering mad gibberish about being betrayed and accusing everybody. He was chased hither and yon but lobbed up on the TV occasionally, variously being ferried about in Australian helicopters or at his home with Australian SAS soldiers as escorts. Australians are much given to modesty and the troops were not unreasonably shy in the media spotlight. Later when busybody Portuguese peacekeepers poked their nose in and arrested Reinado, all the Australian supervised guards went walkabout. And so did Reinado and fifty of his fellows. All this across the road from an Australian Army base. The devil! And then, there he was back in Australian choppers again. Sure, why not? We declare him the Scarlet Pimpernel reborn.


It's clear now that Reinado was not just murderous, but completely nuts, just as you'd expect from a foreign jibber-jabberer. Apparently he attempted to murder Pres. Ramos Horta as they walked out of a peace meeting at Ramos Horta's home. Now that's a first: he heads into the lion's den, has a chat, and as he heads out, he slips the wink to his waiting fellows and they start shooting. Genius. Why nobody ever thought of doing this before is a complete stumper. Perhaps because the only person who ended up dead* was Reinado? Oh well. We're not surprised. Foreigners always do things that make no sense.


Or was there a meeting at all? Now it seems it was an ambush-like event. But not an actual ambush because it would easily qualify as the most crap ambush in history. Rightly, the word 'ambush' is being scrupulously avoided in the media. Just recently Reinado spent a year at the Australian Defence Academy, doncha know. Did he learn ambushes there? Obviously not, or if he did, he learnt them very badly. But he is foreign, so what do you expect? To avoid casting an unwarranted slur on the ADA let's avoid mentioning it at all. Everyone seems to agree that 'coup attempt' is the appropriately vague expression.


Peace meeting treachery or non-ambush, either way it's a cold hard certainty that Reinado was not shot elsewhere, dumped outside Pres. Ramos Horta's house, with he being shot for realism (and educational purposes), further rounds fired in the air, and not forgetting a few slugs for PM Gusmao's 4WD just to complete the picture. We know this because the media has utterly avoided any possibility apart from the one involving Reinado as the worst coup-plotting assassin on the planet. That he failed to kill anyone except himself and succeeded in consolidating Gusmao in power is perfectly uninteresting, not to mention unspoken proof of the idiocy of foreigners.


Happily for the Timorese, Australia has sent another thousand troops along with members of Mick Keelty's muslim-hunting Feds. We have not seized control of East Timor. Perish the thought. The East Timorese, with Gusmao as satrap completely independent president, are still in power. They should feel free to run their own country. But they should also keep in mind that they are foreigners with almost no idea of how to do anything right. But they need not worry, Australians are selfless givers and international good guys. Under our sage stewardship they can look forward to (praise the day!) climbing from poorest nation on earth to second poorest. When that happens we'll even spring for Australian flags for them to wave. And Australia asks for nothing in return apart from the billions of dollars worth of gas and oil that are rightfully ours anyway.


People of East Timor! Three cheers for your Australian saviours!

Hip Hip...


---


*Two years later and I thought it would be amusing to illustrate this piece. In going through the process of finding and editing the various photos, something struck me about a hitherto unseen picture of Reinado's corpse I came across. It's above - go have a look. This is the picture that did not run in the Australian media. The picture that did run here showed his body from his feet and completely failed to show the wound in his head. Which was a shame because no one got to see what a perfect right-through-the-eye shot it was.

It seems that in spite of his seizing of the initiative/element of surprise, not only did Reinado fail to hit anything in any useful fashion at all, but astoundingly one of his taken-by-surprise "holy shit, are they shooting at us?!" ambush victims somehow managed to drill Reinado right through the eye with a single perfect shot. Wow.

Saying sorry is bullshit

Here in Oz, we're thick in a discussion about saying sorry to Aborigines. I shall confuse things initially by declaring that white people saying sorry to Aborigines is bullshit. Don't wig out yet, just keep reading.

'Sorry' is what you say when you bump into someone. For obvious, simple and accidental events such as this, one word will suffice. The saying of it implicitly acknowledges three things: the presence of the other; that a transgression has occurred; and the nature of the transgression, which in this case was nothing much.

It's the three acknowledgements which are important. The word 'sorry' is merely a polite shorthand to achieve them. In more complex events, a single word like sorry is insufficient. It might cover the first two aspects of the acknowledgement but the third is woefully unaddressed. And the third is the crucial pivot. Really it's the only bit that counts. If it is done correctly the first two are taken as read.

Just saying sorry is a piece of piss. Anyone can do it, even through gritted teeth. A teenager who has conducted a screaming match ruining a social occasion on account of not being allowed to go and hang out at the mall might, without too much difficulty, be able to say 'Sorry'. He or she might even be able to say, 'Sorry I ruined everyone's dinner'. Each of these steps is do-able without puncturing the teenager's delusional view of themself and the world. But imagine the teenager saying the following - 'Sorry I ruined everyone's dinner. I viewed my own petty needs as being more important than the harmony that existed here. I realise that all my life, things have been done for me and really the least I can do in return is to consider others and attempt to be pleasant.' It's an unlikely prospect isn't it? You can see how the word 'sorry' is almost superfluous now.

The reason one never hears such words is because it requires one to examine the nature of their delusion. Delusion defines the self - for everyone, that is, except Buddha (and Bodhisattvas, sure). But forget them - none of us is Buddha and delusion is who we are. A true discussion about a transgression against another is actually a discussion of who one is.

And that must be fought tooth and nail. Sure enough, here we are in Australia and everyone agrees that we should say 'sorry'. But instantly we're bogged down about what we're apologising for exactly. Should we include the phrase 'stolen generation'? What if we replace the word 'stolen' with 'taken'? How about 'mistaken'? How about 'accidentally misplaced'?


God spare us. Why don't we just tell those unappreciative, grog-soaked, bludging, black bastards to get off their arses and work. We made this country great and those fuckers think we owe them a living. And yeah, SORRY. Happy now?

Nobody says - self-impressed white people can go fuck themselves. People tell me I should be a teacher. Ha ha ha. No really. Okay then, cop this history -

In Fourteen Hundred and Ninety Two when Columbus sailed the ocean blue, the continents of North America, South America, Sub-Saharan Africa and Australia had no concept of private ownership. They didn't travel great distances and steal other people's shit. How would that profit a man, said they. Until we killed them that is. And yes, they were humans and fought their neighbours. But us imagining their savagery was worse than ours is laughable. Never mind Mel Gibson's bullshit Apocalypto slaughter-fest, we made these people look like a bunch of saints. Their philosophies, their social arrangements, their music, art and poetry, and even their science were nothing in the face of our murderous certainty of our own greatness.



So, might a good starting point for us acknowledging our transgression (which, since we're saying sorry, obviously exists) be the fact that Aborigines' lack of a 'deed' showing ownership of this country was not a failure on their part. (Like we'd have paid any attention anyway). And us showing them how it's done was not a testament to our superiority. It was merely one state of mind meeting another. One acquisitive, one not. And acquisitive is not a compliment. In this spirit of acquisitiveness, we would teach the aborigines that: flora is to be cut down; fauna is to be shot; the earth is to be dug up; and the rivers emptied. We would render their way of life impossible. (And ours too soon enough). That they choose not to embrace our societal arrangements does not condemn them.

Me, I view their distaste for impossibly complicated arrangements of ownership, paper money, credit cards, shares, mortgages, bills, ID's and Bundy clocks to be perfectly understandable. What do these things have to do with humans and the astounding world in which they live? I'd happily argue that they're a denial of that. And yes, they have problems with alcohol. 40,000 years without alcohol, forced into a world-view that makes no sense to them and we expect them to just say no, to face this madness sober? Shit. Anglo-Saxons wagging their collective finger at others' misuse of alcohol is the height of hypocrisy. We're the drinking-est people that ever lived.

So. How about that for a foundation on which to build a discussion of our transgression? Let's now progress to how harmony might be achieved between people who must necessarily live with each other. Between a truthful discussion of who we are and an angry 'sorry' hissed through gritted teeth, there's a lot of middle ground. It's not an either/or choice. It's a continuum. How honest we want to be with ourselves is up to us.

An open letter to Kevin Rudd

Dear Mr. Rudd,

With interest rates going up and further rises forecast, the Reserve Bank certainly seems to be in the news recently. We witness discussion after discussion circling the topic but we never quite get to the centre of it. I'm wondering if I might ask you to clear some things up for me.

In your campaign commercials you brought up the topic of the Reserve. You swore to uphold its independence. Why did you do this? Surely these commercials were dedicated to convincing voters that you would address their concerns and thus that they should vote for you. These concerns are expressed in party meetings, letters and phone calls from constituents, and polls and research. Given that your advertising dollar is limited the party selects the most important of these concerns and packages them into an ad. I imagine in thirty seconds one might sensibly address perhaps half a dozen topics. Money aside, to address too many topics dissipates the message and only serves to confuse.

One has to assume that you and your advisers were of the opinion that voters were particularly concerned about the Reserve Bank's independence. This is astounding. In my travels, I've never heard a single person express such a thought, nor anything like. Sure, they're concerned about interest rates but how does this translate to wanting the Reserve Bank to remain independent? Does anyone get the connection? If voters stopped and thought about it, wouldn't they merely be scratching their heads?

Independent? Under whom? The government doesn't control the Reserve? Why not? Given the sine qua non ability of the Reserve to control our economy through monetary policy why shouldn't we control it through our elected representatives? Do we not own it? Is it not ours? Whose is it? Who owns the Reserve Bank? Why are successive governments reduced to pleading with it? What is this independence? Whom does it serve? Why do we imagine that people acting in a perfectely opaque manner, free of censure, act in our interests?

The interest rate the Reserve charges is for the money it puts into our economy. Why do we pay interest on our money? Isn't it ours? To whom does the interest go? And why does it exist at all? If we wished to control inflation why wouldn't we control our own money supply and simply print less of it? Or withdraw some of it as it entered the banks? Or perhaps, most crucially, print less of it to begin with? Why do we leave it to an 'independent' body to print as much as they like and then control the resulting inflation cycle by making us pay more for it? What sort of crummy mechanism is this?

Just yesterday, you said you would do everything in your power to control inflation. Would I be right in thinking that addressing the sanctity of the Reserve Bank's position of primacy is not within your power? What am I as a voter to think of this? It seems that not only may you not do anything about it, but you may not even discuss it. Astounding! What is the purpose of Government if something as singularly crucial as our own currency is not under our control? Who controls whom, here? And who were you addressing when you said you would ensure the independence of the Reserve Bank? The voters? Or the people who control the Reserve Bank? In whose interests are you working?