Lord Halliburton Claims Australia.
The last time the US Vice President came to Australia was as the Leader Of Halliburton. Fresh from a stint as "Secretary of Defense" in which he'd outsourced a lot of military work to the private sector, Cheney was extending his scheming into the rest of the world. In the parlance that considers resources as something not yet turned into cash, there were many opportunities in Australia for "monetisation".
Getting access to defence work was easy, especially after the Australian head of his company was commissioned to reconfigure the local defence procurement system. Malcolm Kinnaird was the head of an Adelaide engineering firm, Kinhill, which Cheney acquired and turned into a wholly US owned subsidiary. The Adelaide office became not only the Asia-Pacific headquarters but also Global Headquarters for Infrastructure. While Kinnaird faded as the public face of the company, the Kinnaird Report was followed by Halliburton gaining no-bid contracts a-plenty. Cheney's Men "won" jobs providing everything from naval internet security to helicopter pilot training. When Australia announced it was building a contriubition to the US Misssile shield, a suddenly-former Halliburton Global Vice President was given control of the dockyard in which the ships are to be constructed. The dockyard is just downstream from the cement factory on whose board Malcom Kinnaird has spend a few years, and is a couple of miles, as the crow flies, from the Yacht Club where Kinnaird has manned the helm as Commodore. It seems that Kinnaird was not the Ship's Captain he pretended to be.
Then again, on his watch the State Premier allowed Halliburton's proposal to run Adelaide's water supply to be tendered hours after the others, then gave them the job. That State Premier is now Australia's consul general to New York. He shares apartments with Australia's ambassador to the UN, former Defence Minister and fellow South Australian Robert Hill. Hill once proclaimed on national television that Australia was safeguarded from companies like Halliburton by "the culture of the Australian beauraucracy".
Halliburton have proposed that a 100 kilometre diameter levee (with townhouses and a marina) be built in the middle of the country's largest expanse of fresh water, South Australia's Lake Alexandrina. The concept has had as its local champion the current SA Premier Mike Rann. Mr Rann has declared the state to be in a water crisis, while the engineer who introduced the lake plan has been building a nut farm on the banks of SA's main water supply, the River Murray. The farm was constructed as an opportunity for overseas investors. Halliburton have also built a desalination plant on Kangaroo Island, on which the State's original capital was abandoned due to lack of adequate water supply.
Officially the current Federal Government have only been supporting a large scale nuclear industry for around a year. When Halliburton built the railway from Adelaide to Darwin nothing was mentioned about carting uranium and nuclear waste. Years later the company would blame losses in incurred on the investment on mining delays and holdups in rebuilding the country's topmost port in Darwin.At the time, however, the bands and flag-waving heralded a new era in Australian tourism and trade. While Halliburton were calculating statistics for nuclear waste dumps they were building tracks for the third of the world's uranium that one South Australian mine holds to be sent to Darwin, and on to the rest of the world, while imported nuclear waste is cargo for the return journey. Halliburton has control of the railway for close to the next fifty years.
There was nothing in the Australian press, either as Halliburton CEO Dave Lesar took the inaugural ride north, of the massive oilfield reconstruction contracts he'd won in Iraq. This after all, was a celebration for Australia.
The railway turned out to be a godsend to increases in South Australian defence. Because transverse-Australia military rail transport was now an option, a training base was tripled in size and a new battalion was scheduled to move to the city. Adelaide also became a southern hemispheric command centre for Missile Shied radar monitoring, the necessary internet cable layout being disguised in the press as a boon for education facilities.
In the meantime the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade were pretending that Halliburton were a local company. Halliburton were championed by DFAT spin doctors as local boys made good in gaiing aid contracts. The same department dog-wagger was the protagonist for print propaganda supporting local Missile Shield Warship construction... from behind the desk of Rupert Murdoch's very first (and still owned) newspaper.
As the Occupation of Iraq passed it's third ammoversaru, Australian Prime Minister Howard made a surprise visit to Iraq to promise a prominent Australian role in aid for Iraq. During the same week Halliburton was advertising for someone to head their international aid efforts... from Adelaide.
In spite of attempted separation of the local view of Halliburton from that of the rest of the world, it will still be Cheney's company getting more non-US-taxable profit from Iraq. How much money has been concealed from the eyes of Congress by this method of international aid fund laundering will not be clear until the Prime Minister announces future Australian aid work in Iraq. Surely Vice President Cheney's visit won't be used for such a spin? It should also be noted that Ausaid, who are Foreign Affairs' aid-administering arm, admitted last year that they have no system in place to report corruption.
The Minister for Foreign Affairs, Alexander Downer, became President George W. Bush's proposed candidate for Director-Generalship of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Information Technology seems to have been easy. The head of the South Australian IT Council once told me that the tendering process for local contracts was weighted so that only companies such as Halliburton could win them. Eventually he won- late last year the State Government announced that the procedures had been changed to give local IT a chance. This could be interpreted as a State Government warning to the company that times were changing.
Conversely the urge of the Federal Government to appease Cheney is so great that when a protest organiser who had caused a lot of anti-Halliburton publicity in the US was discovered on Australian soil he was arrested and kicked out, no explanation being made available. Currently our spy agency is appealing a Federal Court decision that Scott Parkin learn why he was deported. ASIO has only today admitted it was wrong in its classification of one of Parkin's co-plaintiffs
In Canberra, Halliburton are in charge of the roadworks. In Sydney, amongst other things, they carry out naval contracts. In Melbourne they build the infrastructure for the Australian Grand Prix. In Adelaide they do the lot!
They also co-ordinate small business contracting for the Australian end of the Joint Strike Fighter project.
Mr Cheney will also be visiting US troops in Guam, who are currently using Northern Australia for long-range target practice.
All of this activity seems to have been iniated on Cheney's last visit Down Under. It makes you wonder what's going to happen after the next one. He says he's coming to discuss Asian security and the War On Terror. No doubt he will be inspecting the success of his private sector Australian army who, it would seem, are going to be busier than ever over the next few years.
