by Wayne Madsen
November 2, 2012 (TSR) – The United States has successfully installed two America-compliant leaders as the heads of government of Australia and New Zealand, Washington’s two most important Asia-Pacific regional allies. Both leaders, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard and New Zealand Prime Minister John Key, rose rapidly within their respective parties, a sure sign that they had outside support, likely from the Central Intelligence Agency, which has historically meddled in the domestic affairs of Australia and New Zealand.
Australia and New Zealand have seen the CIA interfere in their domestic politics before. In 1975, the CIA, working with Australian intelligence and pro-U.S. politicians, engineered a constitutional coup against Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam. The independent-minded Whitlam demanded a fuller explanation about the nature of U.S. intelligence bases at Pine Gap and Woomera, Australia. The Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency, alarmed by Whitlam’s demand for an accounting about the activities of the bases, used an old U.S. intelligence asset, Australian Governor General Sir John Kerr, to fire Whitlam’s government and install a pro-U.S. regime. Similarly, after New Zealand Labor Prime Minister David Lange began probing into the activities of the National Security Agency’s eavesdropping bases in New Zealand and banning visits by U.S. nuclear-armed or powered warships to New Zealand ports, he was unceremoniously ousted in a parliamentary backbenchers’ coup in 1989.
What happened to Whitlam would repeat itself in 2010 in Australia when Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who was generally supportive of the United States, was deposed in a backbenchers’ coup by the even more pro-American deputy prime minister Julia Gillard. Since coming to power, Gillard, who was born in Wales, has supported the United States and Israel in all matters, including inviting the United States to establish new naval, air, and troop bases in Australia.
A few of the leaked U.S. State Department cables identify the role that the U.S. embassy in Canberra played in ousting Rudd and replacing him with the more pro-American Gillard. Rudd’s Employment Participation Minister, Libyan-Australian Mark Arbib, was a frequent guest of the embassy where he passed along confidential information about the Cabinet in-fighting between the right-wing forces allied with Gillard and Rudd loyalists.
Senator Don Farrell, another right-wing Labor supporter of Gillard, met with a U.S. embassy official in June 2009, a year before the coup against Rudd, and informed the American about the plot to oust the Prime Minister. President Barack Obama apparently did nothing to warn Rudd of the plot against him and there is every indication that the Obama administration, particularly Mrs. Clinton, was in Gillard’s court. Farrell told the newspaper The Australian that he had more than one conversation with the U.S. embassy but said he couldn’t recall the exact details of the conversations.
An embassy cable dated June 23, 2008, indicates that Gillard was being groomed during the Bush administration even though she had a political past in which she described herself as a “socialist” and a “feminist”:
GILLARD THE PRO-AMERICAN
GILLARD has gone out of her way to assist the Embassy. She attended a breakfast hosted by the Ambassador for U/S [Undersecretary] Nick Burns who visited Canberra just days after the election. At our request, she agreed to meet a visiting member of the National Labor Relations Board, after prior entreaties by the board member’s Australian hosts had been rebuffed. GILLARD is now a regular attendee at the American Australian Leadership Dialogues (AALD), and will be the principal government representative to the AALD meeting in Washington at the end of June».
Gillard was «talent-spotted» by the CIA from the ranks of the left. Before becoming a staunch pro-American, Gillard served as Secretary of the Socialist Forum in Melbourne and she co-founded the Australian chapter of the women’s rights organization EMILY’s LIST.
In a speech to the AALD in 2008 in Washington, Gillard avidly supported the strengthening of the ANZUS military alliance between Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. Gillard, in a message to Labor Party leader Mark Latham, described the AALD as a “CIA re-education camp.” Latham also revealed that Gillard told him that he should stand by for “e-mails explaining George Bush is a great statesman, torture is justified in many circumstances and those Iraqi insurgents should just get over it.” Gillard has also called the United States «a civilizing global influence».
New Zealand Prime Minster John Key rose rapidly through the ranks of the National Party to become Prime Minister. Key was formerly an executive with the CIA-linked Bankers Trust. Key was also part of George Soros’s operation to attack several Asian-Pacific currencies, including the Thai baht and Malaysian ringgit, as well as the British pound and Russian ruble, in the late 80s and early 90s, to enable currency speculators like Soros to make billions in profits. In 1988, Key even bet against the New Zealand dollar. In 1995, Key was the head of foreign exchange operations for Merrill Lynch in Singapore. Key’s ruthless sacking of hundreds of his subordinates and co-workers at Merrill Lynch earned him the onerous nickname of the «smiling assassin». In 1999, Key became a member of the Foreign Exchange Committee of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and three years later he was sitting in the New Zealand Parliament. After only six years as an MP, Key became Prime Minister of New Zealand.
Key became Leader of the Opposition in 2006 after he succeeded Don Brash, who resigned after details of an extramarital affair and internal National Party documents became public.
There is a belief by some in New Zealand that Key’s work for Soros and the CIA – the two are not mutually exclusive – earned him the post of Prime Minister. Key has done much to undo Lange’s policies and New Zealand naval ships are, once again, welcome in U.S. ports after a ban that was imposed during Lange’s term. Key, whose mother, Ruth Lazar Key, was an Austrian Jewish immigrant, has also steered New Zealand’s foreign policy firmly into the pro-Israeli camp.
Key’s predecessor, Labor Prime Minister Helen Clark, incurred Israel’s and its Wellington Lobby’s wrath after she criticized Israeli intelligence’s ploy to forge New Zealand passports. Like Clark, Rudd, also infuriated Israel and its Canberra Lobby after criticizing Israel’s forging of Australian passports and deploring Israel’s interception and arrest of Gaza aid flotilla participants. Rudd had long been considered a staunch ally of Israel and was thought by the Israeli Lobby in Australia to be a «Christian Zionist». Gillard, who is a self-declared atheist, began plotting with Labor right-wingers and, very likely, the CIA Canberra station, weeks prior to her challenge to Rudd, even though she claims to have only decided to seek the prime minister position on the eve of the Labor Party parliamentary caucus in June 2010. Gillard’s staff began writing her victory speech two weeks prior to the caucus.
There is reason to believe that a shadowy Christian Zionist sect, some would call it a cult, known as the Exclusive Brethren, founded by Englishman John Nelson Darby as the Brethren Movement during the same 19th century period when Joseph Smith founded the Christian Zionist-oriented Church of Latter Day Saints – the Mormons – has exercised undue influence over Australian and New Zealand politics. Ousted National Party leader Brash, ousted Prime Minister Rudd, and former Australian Prime Minister John Howard have all been closely linked to the Exclusive Brethren. However, when these leaders served their purposes, the Brethren and their masters were more than happy to see them go. The Brethren appears to be a carbon copy of «The Fellowship,» an influential, pro-Israeli, and CIA-linked cult that sponsors the annual National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, DC that is attended by presidents and prime ministers.
The installation of Key and Gillard in their posts has ensured that the United States has a firm military anchor in the Asia-Pacific region from which to challenge China and other nations for control of the Pacific as a «zone of war».
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AUTHOR: Wayne Madsen
Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist, author and syndicated columnist. He has written for The Village Voice, The Progressive, Counterpunch, Online Journal, CorpWatch, Multinational Monitor, News Insider, In These Times, and The American Conservative. His columns have appeared in The Miami Herald, Houston Chronicle, Philadelphia Inquirer, Columbus Dispatch, Sacramento Bee, and Atlanta Journal-Constitution, among others. Madsen is the author of The Handbook of Personal Data Protection (London: Macmillan, 1992), an acclaimed reference book on international data protection law; Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa 1993-1999 (Edwin Mellen Press, 1999); co-author of America’s Nightmare: The Presidency of George Bush II (Dandelion, 2003); author of Jaded Tasks: Big Oil, Black Ops & Brass Plates and Overthrow a Fascist Regime on $15 a Day. Madsen is a regular contributor on Russia Today. He has been a frequent political and national security commentator on Fox News and has also appeared on ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, and MS-NBC. Madsen has taken on Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity on their television shows. He has been invited to testify as a witness before the US House of Representatives, the UN Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and an terrorism investigation panel of the French government. Madsen has some twenty years experience in security issues. As a U.S. Naval Officer, he managed one of the first computer security programs for the U.S. Navy. He subsequently worked for the National Security Agency, the Naval Data Automation Command, Department of State, RCA Corporation, and Computer Sciences Corporation. Madsen was a Senior Fellow for the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a privacy public advocacy organization. Madsen is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and the National Press Club.
